Street Child

by Berlie Doherty

  ‘I’m looking for some big boys,’ he said. ‘To help the carpet-beaters.’ He waited in the silence, but nobody moved.

  ‘Just as I would expect. A rush to help, when there is sickess in the wards.’ A cold sigh seemed to ripple through the room. Mr Sissons laughed into it in his dry, hissing way. ‘It might be cholera, my dears. That’s what I hear. I’ve two thousand mouths to feed here, and someone has to earn the money, cholera or not. Somebody has to buy the medicines. Somebody has to pay for the burials.’ He moved his body round in its slow, watchful circle again. ‘Plenty of big strong boys here, eating every crumb I give them, and never a word of thanks.’ He stepped down from his dais and walked along the rows, cuffing boys on the backs of their heads as he passed them. ‘I want you all up in the women’s wards straight after supper, and you don’t come down again till all the carpets are done.’

  ‘What’s carpets?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Dunno,’ Tip whispered. ‘They come from the rich houses, and the women here beat ’em, and then they send them home.’

  ‘I’m going with them,’ Jim said suddenly, standing up as soon as the older boys did.

  ‘A daft boy, you are,’ said Tip. ‘He asked for big boys.’

  ‘You coming or not?’ Jim darted off after the big boys, and Tip ran after him.

  They were taken into one of the infirmary wards. As soon as he saw the people in their beds Jim thought again about his mother. Was this the room she had been taken into, the night they arrived? He wondered whether anyone would have remembered her coming, whether anyone had spoken to her.

  The air was thick with dust and heavy with a rhythmic thudding sound. Lines had been strung from one end of the ward to the other, and carpets flung across them. Women and big boys with their sleeves rolled up were hitting the carpets with flattened sticks, and at every stroke the dust shivered in the air like clouds of flies. In their beds the sick people gasped and coughed and begged for water, and the old nurse shuffled from patient to patient and moaned with them and told them off in turns.

  The woman in charge of the carpet-beaters came down the row and stood with her hands on her hips watching Tip and Jim. The boys stood on their toes trying to reach the middle of the carpets with their sticks. Jim was still so stiff from his beating that he could hardly flex his shoulders.

  ‘Now who sent you two along!’ the woman laughed. ‘Might as well get a pair of spiders to come and do the job!’

  Jim staggered back, exhausted, and let the beating-stick drop. ‘We’re really strong, though,’ he said. ‘Look!’ and he bent his arm back, squeezing his fist to try to make a muscle bulge. ‘And we’d do anything to help Mr Sissons, wouldn’t we, Tip?’

  ‘You’re supposed to thrash the carpets, not tickle them.’ The woman bent down suddenly and scooped Jim up in her arms. ‘Oh, you’re a big boy, you are!’ She pressed him to her. ‘Not too big for a cuddle?’

  Jim struggled to get himself free again, and the woman laughed and lowered him down.

  ‘Need a ma, you do,’ she said, smoothing her apron. ‘Like I need a little boy. Lost mine. Soon as I came in here, lost my little boy. But who’d want to bring up a child in here, eh?’

  ‘Come on, Jim,’ said Tip, embarrassed. ‘We could go back to the sewing room and do our sacks.’

  ‘But we want to help,’ Jim said. ‘We’re good at carrying, ain’t we, Tip?’

  ‘Are you, now?’ the woman said. ‘Well then, before you go, you can just help me carry this carpet out to the yard. The man’s out there waiting with his cart.’

  She hoisted up a long, rolled-up carpet by the middle and nodded to Jim and Tip to take each end. Between them they managed to get it past the beds and the beaters and down a winding staircase. At the end of the corridor the matron sat by the doorway, knitting a black shawl. Without looking at them, she unlocked the door and sank back into the dim pool of her candlelight to carry on with her knitting.

  And outside the door were the railings and the gate.

  Jim knew it was the gate he had come in by, all those months ago. He could smell air, miles and miles of air. He could hear the voices of ordinary people in the street outside. He could hear the cries of the city.

  A man stood just inside the gate with a cart, and when the carpet woman called out to him he came towards them to help, calling something out to her that made her laugh.

  ‘Now, you can run back in, boys,’ the woman said, pushing her hair under her cap. ‘And straight back to your sack-making, mind. No more carpet-beating for you, little spiders, till you’re twice your size. Don’t you think so, Thomas?’

  Her voice was light and laughing, but the boys could see by the way she turned her smiling face up towards the man that he was a friend of hers and that she was far more interested in him than she was in them. When she followed him to the shadows under the wall they knew that she had forgotten all about them.

  And Jim’s wild thing was thudding in his chest.

  ‘Tip …’ he whispered. There was the gate, wide open, with the cart half-way inside it. There was the road, and the gleam of lamplights, and the clopping of horses’ hooves. He felt a rearing of fear and excitement inside him. This was the moment. He felt for his friend’s hand and gripped it tight.

  ‘I daresn’t. I daresn’t,’ Tip whispered back. ‘Don’t forget me, Jim.’

  His hand slipped away. Far away in the back of his mind Jim heard the scuff of boots on the snow and knew that Tip had run back into the house.

  Jim crept forward, invisible in the deep shadows, and stood hardly breathing just inside the gate. He heard the carpet woman laughing quietly, and at that moment he took his chance. He slinked himself like a cat into a thin, small shape, and glided out of the gate. He tiptoed along the other side of the railings and stood with his breath in his mouth till a cart rumbled past. He darted out behind it and ran alongside it until he was well past the workhouse, till his breath was bursting out of him. At last he fell, weak and panting, into the black well of a side alley.

  He was free.

  9

  The Jaw of the Iron Dog

  Jim knew one thing for sure: he must keep away from policemen. ‘If they see me, they’ll send me back,’ he thought. He remembered the white-faced boys in the yard. ‘But I’ll run away again as soon as I get a chance.’

  Somewhere in his head was the thought of finding Rosie again. She had been his mother’s friend. Maybe, if he found her, he would find Emily and Lizzie too. But London was a huge, throbbing, noisy place. He had no idea which way to go. The shops were still open and busy, and the streets were full of traders carrying trays of fish and fruit, shouting out their wares. A woman was selling coffee from a handcart. The smell of it reminded him of that morning in the kitchen of the big house, when Rosie had given his mother some of his lordship’s coffee to drink.

  The night noises of the street baffled Jim – he had grown used to the drowning quiet of the workhouse, and the distant midnight wails of the mad people. It seemed as if no one here wanted to sleep. He reckoned he was probably safer where there were many people around. Lots of boys of about his age were dodging about from one side of the street to the other, in and out of the light of the lamps. It was easy to pretend to be one of them. Soon he stopped to rest against a shop wall, leaning next to another boy. He slid his hand into his pocket for a bit of his supper cheese. The boy looked at him and Jim stuffed the cheese into his mouth before he had a chance to grab it.

  ‘You from the workhouse?’ the boy asked him.

  Jim shook his head.

  ‘Bet you are. Them’s workhouse clothes, ain’t they?’

  The boy was dressed in tattered trousers and a torn, thin jacket but the cap on his head was the same as Jim’s. Before Jim could speak to him the boy snatched up a broom that was propped beside him and darted out to stand beside a man in a top hat and long coat.

  ‘Clear the road for you, sir?’ he said, and when the man nodded the boy stepped out in front of him, brush
ing a pathway through the slush. The man tossed him a coin without looking at him. Jim ran after the boy.

  ‘Give us your clothes, and you can have mine,’ he offered.

  The boy laughed at him. ‘Not likely!’ He darted off with his broom across his shoulders.

  There was a sudden cackle of voices behind Jim. A woman selling pickled salmon was being shouted at by another woman with a tray of eels round her waist. Onlookers were joining in, and bearing down on them, their tall hats visible over all the heads, were two policemen. Jim put his head down and ran.

  Soon he realized that he was out of the busy area, and that he was running through quiet streets without shops. The roads were wider here, and the houses grand. They began to look familiar, and yet it was impossible to tell one from another. He came to a dark square that was full of skinny trees. In the middle of it was a fountain, and, as if he had looked through a window into his memory, he knew that he had been here before.

  He sat down on the fountain steps. He had sat here on that last journey when his mother had stopped to drink. He had trailed his hands in the water. A bit further back, he thought, there should be a statue of a man on a horse. He made himself stand up, hardly daring to look. There it was. The very statue. They had stopped there, too. She had leaned against the statue, and he had seen the fountain and helped her across to it. She had been so weak then she could have been a little child. He remembered how helpless and frightened he had felt. And that had been over a year ago. He could hardly believe that it was a whole year since his mother had died. Emily and Lizzie didn’t even know. All these things were just as they had been then, the man on the horse and the fountain and the big houses. Only this time, his mother wasn’t there.

  He walked slowly up to the statue. Three streets led away from it, three long, tree-lined streets, and one of them was the street where Rosie worked. If he found Rosie, he would find Emily and Lizzie again. He began to run.

  The houses all looked the same. They all had black railings and a little flight of steps going up to the main door, and a little flight leading down to the servants’ quarters. Must he knock on every door in every street until he found the right one? He ran up the first street, then came back and tried the second. A sound caught his attention, and he looked round. Hanging from the window of one of the kitchens was a tiny cage. A finch with just enough room to move hopped from stand to floor and stand again, whistling out loud for a companion. Jim had heard that before. He was in the right street, and somewhere, a long way up it, was the house he was searching for.

  By the time he stopped again he knew exactly what to look out for. He remembered, when his mother had sunk down on the steps, and Lizzie had looked up at the grand house and asked if that was where they were going to live, he had seen something that had made him hope it wasn’t. On the side of the step there had been a metal bootscraper in the shape of a dog’s head, with a wide, vicious mouth. He remembered thinking then that if he had put his foot inside the mouth the metal teeth would have come clashing together and pinned him there for good. He ran from side to side of the street looking for it, and at last, there it was. He had found it.

  The house upstairs was in darkness, but down in the basement window was the soft glow of a candle. He tumbled down the steps, tripping himself up in his big boots, and fell against the door.

  ‘Emily! Emily!’ he shouted out. Before he could raise his fist to hammer on the door it was pulled open, and he staggered against a girl.

  10

  Lame Betsy

  ‘We don’t give to beggars,’ the girl said, trying to edge him out of the door again with her knee.

  ‘I’m looking for Emily.’

  ‘Emily? There’s no Emily here.’

  ‘Emily Jarvis. She helps Rosie out in the kitchen.’

  ‘Rosie? Who’s she?’ The girl was laughing down at him through her loose hair.

  ‘Rosie,’ Jim said. ‘You must know Rosie. She’s got big arms. And she don’t like making bread.’

  The girl burst out laughing and looked over her shoulder at a woman who was sewing by the table.

  ‘Hear that?’ she said. ‘There’s no one here who doesn’t like making bread, is there?’ She laughed again, and the other woman laughed back in a mocking sort of way.

  Jim peered past the girl. Surely it was the right kitchen. It had to be.

  ‘You’ll have to go, sonny,’ the girl said. ‘You’ve snooped round for long enough, I reckon.’

  ‘There was a lady with a black crinkly dress,’ Jim said. ‘Called Judd. She’ll remember.’

  ‘Judd!’ the other woman said. She put her sewing down. ‘She was the last housekeeper. She was sent away. And there was another woman, too, the cook. I got her job. They were found hiding some street children in the kitchen, and his lordship dismissed them.’

  ‘They were my sisters,’ said Jim. The drumming in his head was so loud that he could hardly hear his own voice. ‘Emily and Lizzie. Please, miss, where are they? Where’s Rosie?’

  The cook stood up and came to the doorway. She stood with her arms folded, frowning out at Jim. Her face softened when she saw him in the light.

  ‘Are they workhouse clothes?’ she asked.

  ‘Please don’t send me back there,’ Jim begged.

  ‘I wouldn’t send my worst enemy there,’ the cook said. ‘You go off to bed,’ she said to the girl. ‘I’ll put him on his way.’

  The girl, who seemed to think it was all a fine joke, tweaked Jim’s cap over his eye and took her candle up the side stairs that led to the servants’ quarters. The cook drew Jim in and told him to sit by the fire.

  ‘Lucky for you,’ she said. ‘His lordship’s away for the night. If he was here you wouldn’t set foot over this doorstep, or we’d all be off to the workhouse. And lucky for you I’ve decided to stay up and get this sewing done. And don’t think you can pinch anything.’

  Jim shook his head, afraid to speak.

  ‘Don’t you dare move from that spot.’ She put her glasses on the end of her nose and glared at Jim as he squirmed in the chair. The heat from the kitchen made him drowsy. He slid his hand in his pocket and felt for the last of his cheese. It had gone, and he knew that the boy sweeping the road had pinched it. He tipped the last few breadcrumbs into the palm of one hand. Without saying anything the woman put down her sewing and ladled some stew from the big pot on the hearth. She pushed the bowlful in front of him and winked without smiling, and Jim did his best to wink back. He ate in silence, and she sewed in silence, frowning at her needle as she rethreaded it, glancing at Jim over the tops of her glasses from time to time.

  Gradually he sank asleep. Sometimes during the night he woke up and heard a little soft purring sound, and knew that the cook was snoring into her pile of sewing, but then she would wake up with a snort and Jim would drift away again. And at last they were both startled out of their sleep by a sharp rapping on the glass, and a voice calling out, ‘Half past five, time to be alive!’ and there was the knocker-upper hobbling past the window on his morning rounds, and Jim and the cook were awake for good.

  She sent him out to the back yard to fetch in water and sticks, and got the fire going and a pot of water boiling on the hearth. The girl came downstairs, yawning like a cat, and scratched Jim’s head as she passed him.

  ‘You still here?’

  ‘He’s going any minute,’ the cook said. ‘Soon as the dairywoman comes he’s on her cart and away, and he’s never coming back. That right?’

  Jim nodded. He wished they would ask him to stay. He liked the warm kitchen and the winking cook, and most of all he liked her warm, sweet-smelling bread. If only Emily and Lizzie were here too, this would be a fine place to stay.

  They heard a bell ringing out in the street and the cook picked up a couple of jugs. ‘Here’s Lame Betsy now.’

  Jim followed her out to the road and up the steps. Lame Betsy was leading a knock-kneed horse from house to house, selling milk from a slopping churn on the cart
.

  ‘This boy,’ said the cook, pushing Jim forward, ‘is looking for Rosie, and if I’m right she’s a friend of yours, Betsy.’

  The dairywoman grunted and pushed her hair under her cap. She ladled milk into the cook’s jugs, her breath coming thick and slow.

  ‘She’s gone down in the world, Rosie Trilling has,’ she said. ‘Nice job she had here, and now she’s selling whelks for her grandfather. All because of a couple of street kids.’

  ‘This boy’s sisters, they were,’ the cook put in, and Betsy set down the jugs and pushed her hair in her cap again.

  ‘Were they now? Doesn’t seem right, does it?’ she went on. ‘Just for helping people out like that. Your sisters, were they? Didn’t look like street kids to me.’ Her hair floated free again as she shook her head, thick grey strands of it dipping into the milk as she ladled it out of its churn. ‘She was a fine woman, your ma, or so Rosie said.’

  Jim couldn’t look at her. He reached up to pat the horse’s bony head and it snorted and pulled back its lips, scaring him. ‘What happened to Emily and Lizzie?’ He couldn’t bring himself to look at Lame Betsy. He was frightened of what her answer might be.

  She shifted her weight from one leg to the other. ‘Don’t ask me that, because I don’t know the answer,’ she said. ‘If you wants to climb on the cart I’ll take you to your Rosie. But where the girls is, I don’t know, and that’s the truth.’

  Jim scrambled up on to the cart, slippery and sour-smelling with milk. The cook said something to the kitchen girl lounging against the railings, and she ran down the steps into the kitchen. She came back up again with a small loaf in her hands. She passed it to Jim, laughing up at his surprise. It was still warm. He tried to thank the cook with a wink but she turned away.

  ‘Don’t you dare come back,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing we can do for you.’ Her voice had gone thick in her throat. ‘God bless you, child. I hope He takes care of you.’ And she hurried away without looking back at him.