by John Boyne
We got to Spithead within the hour and didn’t they both take great pleasure in opening the carriage doors and wrenching me out by the arms, as if I was a baby who didn’t want to take leave of his mother at birth-time. I swear the bones nearly popped out of their sockets and I don’t want to think what might have happened to me then.
‘Come on, lad,’ said the first blue, the one who took me in the first place, ignoring my protests at their dirty violence. ‘Enough of your lip now. In we go.’
The courthouse at Spithead was nowhere near as grand as the one in Portsmouth and the magistrates who worked there were a bitter lot. Every one of them wanted to come to the county capital to try the cases, as every fool knows that you get a much better class of criminal in a capital than you do in a town. In Spithead there was never much to listen to except a few cases of drunkenness or a bit of petty larceny. A year before there’d been a lot of noise about a man who’d taken a girl against her will, but the magistrate had let him go on account of him having twenty hectares and her only being from common stock. She should have been grateful for the privilege of his familiarity, the magistrate had told her, and this hadn’t gone down well with her people at all and a week later, what happened, only the magistrate himself turned up dead in a ditch with a hole the size of a brick in his head (and the brick itself settled peacefully by the roadside). Everyone knew who’d done it but nothing was said and him as had the twenty hectares moved immediately to London before the same could be done to him and he sold the land to a gypsy family who could read the cards and grow potatoes in the shape of livestock.
The blue dragged me down a long corridor, one that I remembered only too well from my previous visitation, and we charged along at such a pace that I thought on several occasions I might take a fall and that would be the end of me, as the floor below was solid granite and wouldn’t stand for a soft head like mine thumping against it. My feet were fairly dancing along the floor behind me as he hauled me along.
‘Slow the pace,’ I cried out. ‘We’re in no hurry, are we?’
‘Slow the pace, he said,’ muttered the blue, laughing and talking to himself, I supposed. ‘Slow the pace! Did you ever hear the like?’
Abruptly he took a right turn and opened a door and so taken by surprise was I at the sudden change in direction that I finally lost my footing on the ground beneath and toppled over, tripping arse over teakettle as I spilled into the courtroom, disgracing myself in the process. And before I could right myself, the whole place fell to a hush and every head and wig in the place turned to stare in my direction.
‘Make quiet that boy!’ roared the magistrate on the bench – and who was it, only old Mr Henderson again, that grizzly creature, but who was so ancient, with forty or forty-five years on him, if he had a day, that he was sure to have the influenza of the mind and wouldn’t remember me from the time before. I’d only been there once after all. They could hardly take me for a career criminal.
‘Apologies, your honour,’ said the blue, taking a seat and forcing me down on to the bench beside him. ‘A late case, I’m afraid. Portsmouth is closed.’
‘I am aware of that,’ said Mr Henderson, making a face as if he’d just taken a bite out of an infected ferret and swallowed it whole. ‘It appears that the courts there are more interested in the collection of accolades and baubles than in the proper dispensation of justice, I fear. Not like here in Spithead.’
‘No, indeed,’ said the blue, nodding his head in agreement so hard that I thought it might fall off entirely and his decapitation could afford me an opportunity for escape. Security at the doors, I noticed with a deal of pleasure, was not what it might have been.
‘Now, to return to the case in hand,’ said Mr Henderson, turning away from us and looking towards the man who was standing in front of him and who appeared very low, very low indeed; his cap was held between his hands and a look of total dismay was collected about his horse-like features. ‘You, Mr Wilberforce, are a discredit to the community and I find that it would serve us all for the better if you were removed from it for a period of time.’ He made sure that every word was loaded with disgust and superiority, the scut.
‘Your honour, if it pleases you,’ said the fellow in question, piping up and attempting to straighten himself, but perhaps his back was giving him the tractions because he appeared unable to present himself in a vertical manner. ‘I was not of my true mind when the incident occurred and that’s the truth of it. My dear sainted mama, her as was taken from me only a few short weeks before my error of judgement, appeared to me in a vision and told me that—’
‘Enough of this nonsense!’ roared Mr Henderson, banging his mallet on the bench before him. ‘I swear by almighty God that if I hear another word about your dear sainted mama I shall sentence you to join her forthwith. Don’t think I won’t do it either!’
‘For shame!’ called one woman and the magistrate stared out at the collective, one eye closed, the other opened so wide that I felt sure that a clap on the back would result in the eyeball popping from its socket and rolling along the floor like a marble.
‘Who said that?’ he roared and even the blue beside me gave a start at the sound of it. ‘Who said it? I asked,’ he repeated, even louder this time but answer came there none and he simply shook his head and looked at all of us with the appearance of a man who had recently been bled by leeches and enjoyed the experience. ‘Bailiff,’ said he to a terrified-looking blue standing guard beside him. ‘Another word from any of these people’ – and here he uttered the word like they were the lowest of the low, which they may well have been, but all the same it’s a damned discourtesy – ‘another word from any of them and they are all to be charged individually with contempt. Is that understood?’
‘It is,’ said the bailiff, nodding quickly. ‘It surely is.’
‘And as for you,’ continued the magistrate, looking at the poor unfortunate godforsaken shadow of a man wilting in the dock before him: ‘three months in the gaol for you – and may you learn a lesson there that you won’t forget in a hurry.’
To his credit, the man found his dignity then and nodded as if the sentence was one he was wholly in approval with, and he was taken down immediately, where he was almost squeezed to death by a woman I guessed to be his wife, before the bailiff peeled her off him. I watched her from a distance and wouldn’t have minded the squeezing myself, for she was bonny as could be, even with the tears streaking her face, and despite the seriousness of what lay ahead for me she still gave me the motions.
‘Now, Bailiff,’ said the magistrate, gathering his robes together and making to stand up. ‘Is that it for today?’
‘It was due to be,’ came the reply, a nervous one, as if the bailiff was worried that he’d be sent off to the gaol himself if he detained his superior any longer, ‘but for the lad that just came in, that is.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the magistrate, recalling me now. He sat down again and looked in my direction. ‘Come up here, boy,’ he said quietly, looking as if he was pleased that he hadn’t finished doling out the misery yet. ‘Into the dock with you where you belong.’
I stood up and stepped away from the blue and another took me to the dock by pinching his fingers round the bone in my arm and placed me where old Henderson, the scut, could see me better. I looked at him too and thought that his mole had grown since our last interview.
‘I know you, don’t I?’ said he quietly, but before I could answer, the blue – my blue, that is – was on his feet and coughing for attention and blast me if every face in the room didn’t turn to look at him. I swear the man missed his calling and he should have tried out for the theatre, the nance.
‘May it please the court . . .’ he began, using the posh voice again that was fooling nobody. ‘May it please the court that on this very morning I apprehended the miserable creature you see standing before you in the act of feloniously and illegally taking a timepiece which was not any of his business or belongings and whose owner
ship was in the deed of another.’
‘Stealing it, you mean?’ asked the magistrate, cutting through the cornfield with a scythe.
‘As you say, Your Honour,’ said the blue, a little downcast by the summary.
‘Well?’ Mr Henderson asked then, leaning forward and glaring at me. ‘What say you, lad? Did you do it? Are you guilty of the abominable crime?’
‘It’s all a terrible misunderstanding,’ I said, appealing to him. ‘I had too much sugar for my breakfast, that’s the fault of it.’
‘Sugar?’ asked the magistrate, confused now. ‘Bailiff, did the boy say he was the victim of a surfeit of sugar?’
‘I believe he did, Your Honour,’ said the bailiff.
‘Well, it’s an honest answer if nothing else,’ said he then, scratching his hair so that a drizzle of powder fell from his follicles to his robe, speckling them with snow. ‘Sugar has no business in a boy. It gives them ideas.’
‘My feelings exactly, Your Wisdomness,’ said I. ‘I mean to avoid it in the future and suck on a lolly of honey when the mood takes me.’
‘A lolly of honey?’ he cried, looking at me as if I had suggested taking a whip to the Prince of Wales to relieve the boredom of the hour. ‘My boy, that’s even worse. Porridge is what you need. Porridge will be the makings of you. Porridge has been the makings of many a boy turned to the wrong.’
Porridge indeed! I would have quite gladly enjoyed a bowl of porridge for my breakfast every morning if he had given me the tuppence I would have needed for it. Porridge! Magistrates like him are in ignorance of the world of people like me, if you want to know the truth. And yet they sit in judgement on us. However, no politics—
‘Then porridge I will eat from now on,’ I promised, bowing my head a little. ‘For breakfast, lunch and supper, if I can scuttle the pennies.’
He leaned forward again and repeated an earlier question that I hoped he might have forgotten. ‘I know you, don’t I?’ said he.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, holding back my shoulders from a shrug, for the magistrates do hate it when you do that. They say it implies inferior breeding. ‘Do you?’
‘What’s your name, boy?’
I considered giving a falsehood but the blues knew me so I told the truth, as a lie would only have damned me further. ‘Turnstile,’ said I. ‘John Jacob Turnstile. An Englishman, late of Portsmouth.’
‘Ha!’ he cried, spitting on the ground, a great gob into the sawdust, the filthy swine. ‘Portsmouth be damned!’
‘It will be, Your Magnificence,’ said I to please him. ‘On the day of judgement. I have no doubt of it.’
‘How old are you, boy?’
‘Fourteen, sir.’
He licked his lips for a moment and I was sure that I could see some of those hideous black teeth moving around that dark canyon of a mouth, threatening to loosen themselves from their holding-gums in a bid for escape. ‘You stood before me a year ago,’ said he, pointing a waxy finger at me, the type you might see on an exhumed corpse. ‘I recall it now. Another act of larceny, I think it was.’
‘A misunderstanding,’ I suggested. ‘A prank gone wrong, nothing more.’
‘You were birched for it, were you not? I never forget a face from my courtroom or a rump from my whipping room. Tell me the truth now and God might spare you.’
I thought about it. There’s a world of meaning in the word ‘might’ and little of it was of use to me. But there was no advantage to be taken in lying for the records could be consulted in a trice. ‘You remember correctly,’ I said. ‘I was chastened with twelve lashes.’
‘And not one of them excessive,’ said he, looking down and making a note on a sheaf of papers before him. ‘I find you guilty, John Jacob Turnstile, of the malicious act,’ he said then in a quieter voice, a voice that suggested he had lost interest in me altogether then and wanted his dinner. ‘Guilty as charged, you naughty boy. Take him down, Bailiff. To the gaol for a twelvemonth.’
My eyes opened wide and, I confess, my heart made a jump of horror within me. The gaol for a twelvemonth? I wouldn’t emerge the boy I was when I entered it, I knew that much. I turned to the blue, my blue, and, praise on him, he looked at me too with a frown that suggested he was regretting taking me there at all, for there was no one in the courtroom who would have thought it a fitting punishment. A birching should have been the measure of it.
‘Your Honour—’ said the blue, my blue, but Mr Henderson was gone now, stormed off to his private chambers, no doubt to receive his instructions from the lords of the underworld, and the bailiff had his hands on me and was dragging me away.
‘What’s done is done,’ he said regretfully. ‘You must be brave, lad. You must remain staunch.’
‘Brave?’ said I with a cry of disbelief. ‘Staunch? In the gaol for a twelvemonth?’
There’s a time for bravery and a time for handing a fellow a loaded pistol and allowing him to depart the world in honour, and such a time was this. My legs gave from under me and before I knew it I was being taken through the doors, to what? To a year of torment and violation? Starvation and cruelty? I hardly dared to think about it.
4
WHAT A TIME OF IT, though! I don’t mind admitting that I descended the steps from the courtroom to the cells below ground with a heavy heart and low expectations. The day had begun brightly enough but had taken on such a dark complexion in only a matter of hours that I couldn’t help but wonder what further torment fate had in store for me. I had managed to enjoy a breakfast of half a kipper and the yolk of an egg at Mr Lewis’s establishment and had wandered to the marketplace without a care in the world. The conversation with the French gentleman had been of the intellectual variety, and I am one as likes a little intellectual discourse from time to time. And that pocket-watch of his, which came into my possession so effortlessly, might easily have been the making of me, for it was a fine piece with a solid band and a healthy hue and must have cost him a few pounds at the jeweller’s; had I retained possession, I would have brought it to a one-eyed man I knew whose business is the trade of stolen items and won half a crown for it. But all was lost now. I was away to the gaol and preparing my soul for the sufferance of who-knew-how-many indignities and scourges.
Am I too proud to recall the tears that were forming in my eyes even as I sat there and waited? I am not.
The bailiff had brought me downstairs to await my transport to Hades and I found myself confined to a cold room with only the stone floor to sit upon. The blue had thrown me inside without a word of apology or excuse and who was I expected to share with, only Mr Wilberforce, him as was sentenced before me. When I entered first, the great brute was positioned on the pot, his movements creating an otherworldly stench that made me back as far away from him as possible, but the door was slammed shut behind me and I had little choice but to confront his noxiousness with fortitude. For all I knew, he might be my companion for the time hence.
‘The old bastard sent you down too, did he?’ he asked me, grinning away, as misery prefers company. In response, I sought out the furthest corner of the cell and sat there, my knees bent up beneath my chin, my arms surrounding them. A fortress around me. I looked down at my feet and wondered how long the shoes I was wearing would remain my own once I was transported to my new home. And I thought of Mr Lewis, and the trouble I would be in with him when he discovered what had happened to me; I had seen him beat boys half to death for less.
‘He did,’ I admitted. ‘And unjustly too.’
‘What did he have you for, then?’
‘I stole a watch,’ I said, unable to look at him now, for he had stood up and was examining the contents of the pot like a medic or an old apothecary. ‘But him as I stole it from retrieved it, so no harm was done. Where’s the crime then, I ask you?’
‘You told the old bastard that, did you?’ asked Mr Wilberforce, and I shook my head. ‘How long did you get?’ he followed with.
‘A twelvemonth,’ said I.
; He whistled through his teeth and shook his head. ‘That’s a stretch,’ he said. ‘Oh me, oh my, that’s a stretch and no two ways about it. How many years have you, lad, anyway?’
‘Fourteen,’ said I.
‘You’ll be older than your years when you emerge a year from now,’ he told me with a deal of pleasure – a wonderful piece of positive news for me to be getting on with. ‘I were in there myself when I were no more than a year or two older than you are now and I don’t want to tell you the things that happened to me. You wouldn’t sleep if I did.’
‘Then, don’t,’ I said, glaring across at him. ‘Keep your counsel and mind your business, you old sot.’
He stared at me then and curled his lip. If we were to be transported together and housed together, I knew that I must begin our acquaintance with a surly attitude in order to have him appraised of the fact that I was not one of those boys who would be made a servant of on account of my tender years.
‘Call me a drunk, will you, you wee scut?’ he asked, standing up and placing his hands on his hips as if he was posing for a statue of himself to be placed in Pall Mall. ‘That’s a slander if ever I heard one.’
‘I heard old Henderson say much the same thing,’ I told him then, warming to my topic. ‘He sent you to the gaol for three months on account of it. And her as was outside, crying her eyes out, your wife, was she?’
‘Aye, my wife,’ said he, his eyes narrowing as I took her name in vain. ‘What of her?’
‘Cosying up to another lad, she was, when I was being taken down. Cooing in his ear enough to turn your stomach and giving him the eyes that let him know that she wasn’t about to go wanting even if you were.’
‘Why, you little bastard,’ said he, advancing on me then, and I took a notion that I might have made a mistake in provoking him, for as he came closer I could see that he was a bigger man than I took him for originally and those hams of his had curled into fists and looked ready to do me a serious mischief. Luckily for me, just as he reached down and pulled me from my place of rest upon the stony floor, a key was turned in the door and it was wrenched open and who was back to see us, only the bailiff. He took a quick look at the pair of us in our unfortunate positions, me being held off the ground by my throat, my feet dangling an inch or two from the ground, while the man’s fist stood poised to strike me down.