Again, it was a matter of selecting poor dustbin finding locations near his office and waiting until Lobster Tail or Prawn or whomever he put watch over us was away. And it also meant sacrificing some of my own day’s findings to Grimmins to allay suspicions that I was not working my share for him on “his” days.
Months went by in this matter. I had passed my eighth birthday and was quickly approaching my ninth when I finally had it all in hand.
Now, to do it carefully. Crustacean and Dungeness were the best finders, and consequently the two most often and most thoroughly stolen from, so they must be approached first. I got them together on a ruse during one Tower Sunday afternoon outing, and told them the facts. I then read them what their finds had actually earned to Grimmins, compared to what they were paid for them.
They were as astonished by my reading skills as by the thoroughness of the theft perpetrated upon them, but still I needed proof, and the Cridley sisters provided that. The word spread that night, and once we were all back in our construction site sleeping den, a sort of general council of all the Lads was held. There I read aloud each boy’s finds and Grimmins’s most obscene profiting off it. Lobster Tail, the oldest, one of the least sinned against since Grimmins paid more the older and wiser you got—but also the most conservative of the Lads, cautioned us and enjoined silence and patience. But Crustacean and others were far more vexed and wanted blood.
A compromise plan of sorts was at last worked out. The next day was Monday, and several of the elder boys would draw Grimmins away from the office. I would then go get the two ledgers and hide them. When he realized they were gone, we were to deny to a Lad knowing anything. I would then begin dropping single sheets of the copies I had made of his accounts from the ledgers upon the path between the outer door and his office. This would enlighten him to what exactly was known, as well as who knew it.
I’m not exactly certain what we expected. All the Lads save myself and maybe Crustacean wished to continue to do business unmolested with A.M. Grimmins, revealed crook though he may be, because that was what we knew and what we did for our living. Somehow, there was a general belief he would laugh, recognize that he was caught, and immediately change his ways. And we would all go on as before, except that he would now pay us properly. Did I mention that we were all boys between the ages of six and twelve?
Anyway, that was how our plan began to manifest. Began. For it quickly became clear to a few of us that in addition to extreme cleanliness, A.M. Grimmins also displayed to a fault that other Christian virtue, extreme guilt. Once the account papers copies were dropped, he became as a hunted animal. He darted out of his office every few minutes. He became nervous and looked about himself all the time. He was brief with us to the point of enigmatic laconity. Still, a page floated in front of his office door. He exited—we posted a spy to report it—snatched it up before anyone else could see it, and darted back into his office.
Next day a new tactic: nailing the account pages to his office door. And when this also failed to bring about the result we sought, nailing it to the door of the outside loo. According to Little Tarpon, whose “line” that day was closest to the office, Grimmins emerged from what had evidently been a particularly satisfactory bout of defecation only to see the account copy on the loo door and he began screaming, then screeching, all but foaming at the mouth.
When Little Tarp stepped forward to impel some admission from Grimmins, the cleanest man in London grabbed him about the throat and began to strangle him. We had to beat A.M. off the boy with sticks and whatever other implements were to hand.
He let go of Tarpon and turned to face his Lads, his creations, after all. He was all but snarling. “Who?” he demanded. “Who is putting those up?”
“I am,” said I, standing forward.
“I am,” said Crustacean.
“Me too,” said Lobster Tail, until it was clear we all knew what was going on, and all the Lads came forward.
Grimmins looked at us as though we were he-devils from Hades.
“No,” Grimmins said, and we didn’t have to ask what he was referring to as he repeated it. “No,” meant he would not capitulate.
“If no, then,” said Lobster Tail, our leader, “we go. We go and we warn any other lad from coming here ever again. End of the business.”
“Noooooooo!” Grimmins howled. “Noooooooooooooo!”
In his voice was all the persecuted perplexity of a wounded wild creature caught in a man-trap.
“There is another way,” said I.
“How it will happen from now on, is that one of us,” Lobster Tail went on, “will account alongside yerself.”
This was an even more intolerable future, and Grimmins was all but frothing at the mouth until he realized what Lobs had said.
“Which one of you?”
I knew this was a trap to catch me out, and I immediately countered it. “We shall take turns.”
“Noooooooooooooooooo!” Grimmins saw no possible way of saving face now, and he began charging first at me, blocked by two boys, then at Lobster, blocked by two more, then at Crustacean. He headed for Little Tarpon but dashed right past him and out of our circle.
We watched him in great amazement as he rushed toward the highest and most unsteady of the newly arrived dust piles. He simply bolted up its side, scrambling and tumbling about like a set-on-fire alley cat.
Where did he think he was going? Or was he even thinking by then?
Grimmins had obtained some thirty yards’ height before he stopped running, perhaps realizing exactly where it was that he had run to. He hung there a longish while, before his weight was suddenly felt. We first saw him shift position as though to get a bit more comfortable, before his hands went down on either side as though he were grasping at security. There was no security, however. Only seventy feet of loose paper, and he simply dropped out of view.
Driven by our own fear, we all rushed helter-skelter up the dust pile and sought to find him by brushing aside various sub-lines to peer into the depths. At last, Prawn found one such line going deep, and we could just make out the very top of Grimmins’s well shampooed and beautifully combed-over head, a mere dot very far away in the depths of the dust pile below. Then he raised up his hands, his beautiful, clean hands, now covered with filth and stained by ink before that line and all around it collapsed into itself, and we had to quickly scramble to get away or else also fall into the morass below.
After about an hour of stunned silence, it was made clear Andrew Marvell Grimmins was buried over forever. Crustacean and I located the office safe box and managed to get it open, but there was no more than twenty pounds inside, mostly in smaller change. We distributed it equally until it was all gone. That night, Lobster Tail sat on the dray’s box, took up the reins, and drove us to the construction site. We ate better than usual that evening and slept at our usual spots, but very next morning, we all knew we must go our own ways. Just at dawn, Prawn awakened me.
“We’re off, then.”
“Where to?” I asked.
“Who knows?”
I slept in until roused by the construction workmen’s hammers. Then I gathered myself up, with my total Dustbin earnings from a year and a half plus the final distribution, totalling fifteen pounds. I located myself a horse fountain spigot and hose and washed myself as clean as I could get before I was chased off the construction site. The next nine months, I would lounge about London, travelling, seeing the sights, and enjoying life.
So did the other Lads. At least those who didn’t all spend their pelf on sweets in a few swoops.
I would occasionally come upon one or another Lad in my travels.
And later on, too, although far less frequently. I did once chance on Crustacean sweeping out a greengrocer’s shop several years later up in Camden Town. I recognized him more by his voice and mispronunciation of certain words than by his very clean and neat clerking apparel and demeanour.
“A parse-snip, yer see, is a moost delicate
cretoor,” he said, stroking it phallically at a comely kitchen maid. “Let me shoow you how to han’le it.”
Another Grimmins Lad, Dungeness, some years later invited me to a steak pie and ale in a low Southwark tavern on Mint Street when I was extremely down in cash a time later. He and Little Tarpon—now named Big Tarpon—had joined a gang of young men, the Hell Boys of St. Mary Overy’s Dock. And it was another Grimmins Lad who would find me my occupation even later on, inside Tiger Jukes’s house.
✥ ✥ ✥
I had become a child vagabond. Were I some German author, I would refer to these months after my dealings as a Grimmins Lad as my Wanderjahre, although I wandered less than a full year, running out of money despite husbanding it quite carefully.
Sunsets fascinated me, and I began to follow them. I wandered more westerly with each day to catch more of the sun setting. It had been summer when I decamped from the Dustbins for good. I contrived my way through a charming autumn and a despicable winter, and still I wandered.
The constabular phenomenon known as “bobbies,” our version of urban gendarmes, had just begun then in force, and although they were not as popular as they have since become, they were sufficient and seemed to have little purpose but to move on young stalwarts such as myself with no visible means of support. Finding places to sleep in became more difficult, thus my wandering toward the bright newly built or rebuilt city areas like Westminster and St. Martins in the Square.
I had easily survived winter and early spring when I was of a sudden felled by an ague in mid-Spring of my tenth year. I remember roaming indecisively, wrapping my rags about myself continually: now too hot, now too cold, and at last finding myself lost in a great colonnaded plaza not far from the Strand. Here were ample doorways to accoucher myself, but many others filled them. I was too ill to find a berth using any force, so I crawled beneath some upended wooden crates, where I collapsed utterly. There I shivered myself into a febrile sleep, despite a makeshift blanket of grizzled ramps and torn chard leaves.
I awoke to find myself in Paradise. Or so it at first seemed. I must have slept most of the day unmolested beneath my cartons, for when I opened my eyes, they were sealed by sleep phlegm. Once opened, all was a blur, but I could still smell. And what I smelled were all the perfumes of the Indies, all the attars of the Promised Land, all the sachets of Heaven.
Angels were speaking, albeit in Cockney accents. After a while I could decipher one called Thalia saying I was damp feverish. Another named Zoe averred with some authority that I was about to perish. Both assured some elderly Seraph that I must be warmed and fed broth instantly. Thus I was lifted from my iced stone mattress of cobblestones and put into some kind of blanket-filled crèche.
Once there, I found myself so warm that I was soon deeply asleep again. I awakened after nightfall and made out many flickering fires within tin firepots circling my crib, which I now discerned was a rucksack-blanketed wooden slat crate in which large swedes are commonly packed for sale. Still, the lovely young girls before me were angels, and they fed me warm broth and carolled to me until I slept again, surrounded by the loveliest aromas in the world.
When I awakened fully, very early next morning, the aromas were still there, the angels barely visible, wrapped and sleeping in their makeshift beds. Their Aged Uriel was, in fact, a fellow named Theogones Herbert Newholl, “Florist Extraordinaire,” according to the sign on his horse-drawn floral cart, which lay, hitches down, nag missing, upon the stones of the great square. He was no more than five-and-thirty years of age. I withdrew from my bed and unsteadily stood, seeing and hearing more approaching horse-drawn caravans like his, and realized I had stumbled not into the Afterlife, but rather into the Covent Garden, the fresh produce and especially fresh-cut flower market of London supreme. Lilies, roses, daisies, mums, anemones, dahlias, straw flowers, and portias surrounded me, cut and moist in their shaved wrappings or water tins. Next to them pansies, francescas, peonies, and violets glowed within their clover-lined baskets.
Theo-Herbert sighted me first. “His Grace commences his levee,” he announced portentously.
“I could eat your foot,” said I, for it was days since I’d last eaten solid food, and his appendage looked particularly toothsome in its wrapped coloured stocking.
“Porridge might be had instead,” said he. “Tepid or hot. Only a ha’penny for four bowls full. Just there, hark, where the steam and sweet wheat musk rises. But alas, I see Your Grace lacks a wallet. Doubtless you left it with your valet in a moment of forgetfulness.” The two girls in the dray had awakened to our soft converse and giggled at his last words. “Might I have the honour, sir, of treating you this morn? Certain as I am that your repayment will be double, nay, treble, soon enough.”
He was good enough to seat me in his wickerwork chair and to have a small lad fetch the gruel, which tasted like the most wonderful chop in the world. By then Thalia and Zoe were out of their bed in the little caravan where all three slept and were also hungry. No sooner had I fed myself than I was sleeping again, and so was lifted into one of their still warm, recently vacated sleeping places, where I passed most of that day.
Indeed, it was only the following morning that I was fully awake and able to assess my three saviours and their neighbourhood. What most amazed me was how soundly I had slept, for the din was colossal by day and only slightly less loud by evening. Unquestionably the several hundred people who gathered within the open-to-the-air elegant stone confines of “the Garden,” as its familiars and I came to call it, at any single moment, accounted for it: speaking, shouting, laughing, brawling, seducing, cajoling, denying, affirming, despairing, elating, bargaining, refusing, imagining, and failing to imagine.
But ’twas the music that accounted for so much of it. I mean not the caterwauling in solfeggio practice of the tenors and soubrettes from the top open windows of the opera house ateliers that crowned the northeast external corner of the square, though those ariettas certainly added to the clamour. I mean the music of the flower and fruit sellers, the song of advertisement, the incantation of sale. Every seller had his or her own tune, volume, aphorism they each one sang out, all of their airs soon to be familiar to me.
My own newly adopted family—for the girls would not let Theo-Herbert toss me out—fit me in with their specifically Hellenic interests and even nomenclature. I was first nicknamed Somnus, after that Deity of Sleep, for what Theo-Herbert termed my “astonishing feats and adventures in the continent of slumber.” But later, on when my arithmetical skills were noticed, I earned the far better name of Archimedes, or Archy, for short.
At first, as Somnus, I was put to work as soon as I could do so without feeling faint. Alongside the others I helped unlade from giant drays and sometimes even railroad cars stopped several streets away, the many, many trays of flowers, still deep in earth, sent to the market, purveyed thence directly from specific farmers and flower growers surrounding the city of London. These required one adult or two children to lift, but soon enough I showed off my strength by picking up and transporting at least the lighter ones all by myself. In this way, Newholl would get into the Garden faster than many of his colleagues. He was able to set up his stall first or second in his area, and thus attract sales from early customers out before breakfast to hopefully buy up large volumes of blooms for their picky mistresses in Marylebone or for their prickly, aging maters in Mayfair.
Some days there was more than one delivery made to the Newholls’ dray site, and here I came in most handy, as I was able to assist Theo while his daughters stayed at our stall. As a rule, however, the girls were sent out to drum up sales on the very edges of the Garden, or into the northern and eastern thoroughfares outside it. Never too far, since Theogones was most fond of his offspring, and overanxious they remain safely unmolested, meaning he must be able to see them every few minutes, if only from a distance.
What had happened to their mother, his wife—referred to as Andromeda at odd moments—I couldn’t at first quite pe
netrate through the facetious barrage of his Hellenified conversation, which spewed, leapt, gambolled, frolicked, and sparkled from his jolly, mutton-chop-fringed face. She must have been lovely as her namesake, since the girls were undoubted lookers.
Thalia, the older, was raven haired with porcelain skin and a grown-up woman’s voice. Zoe, her junior by but one year, was rather more auburn and her complexion was more olive than not. Both girls bore their father’s intelligent eyes and, though decorous, would, in a moment, break out into jokes and laughter, sounding for all the world like ale-wives. For this, too, I came to admire them.
And I admired them equally. Almost equally did I delight in their father. He never ceased to expatiate upon his instantly decided upon fiction that I was a fallen godlet or young baronet in disguise who had chosen, for his own amusing reasons best never too far delved into, to remain amongst them and the other hoi polloi, despite the obvious inconveniences entailed.
Theo-Herbert dealt with me as though with the most rational creature on earth. It amazed me and won me over. Of my general dirtiness when found, he assured me that “such a masquerade is no longer necessary.” When I tried to wash myself in a horse trough, he laughingly plucked me by my filthy scruff and walked me to a public bathhouse, an invention of the Greeks, of course, he made it known, wherein he dropped me and had me soaped until clean. My rags, “a clever camouflage, though over-utilised, I fear,” said Theo-Herbert, were burned. Cleaner, albeit possibly equally old, clothing from his own inventory of wear replaced it all. In some cases, barter at “the Garden” took place, swap after swap, until trousers of appropriately small waist were recovered. “Your Grace ought dine more often,” Theo suggested mildly, adding, “This affectation toward extreme slenderness is no longer the fashion at Court.”
I ate all that I could and all that I might, thanks to the money I was soon earning at the Newholls’ flower stall. And how I spent it all was proof enough for Theo-Herbert that I was a born nabob since “only an heir apparent would not save a ha’pence, but eat sweets so regularly.” Although the clincher for him in my fictional standing was when I could no longer hide the fact that I was able to read and write. “Here’s a fine one,” he assured his daughters. “Keeping his light under a bushel of parsnips.”
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