A Possible Life (12 page)

Us boys went to the classroom to do lessons. The teacher was McInnes. He was the only man in the Union who wasn’t thin. He had a red angry face and he beat you with a stick on the hands. We had no slates to write on. There was a blackboard and
sometimes
McInnes wrote something on it. ‘What’s that?’ he said and you all looked down because you didn’t want to catch his eye. ‘It’s a four. Say after me. Two and two is?’ That was all we took away from the lesson because that was all he had to give. I never knew for sure if what he’d wrote on the board was a four or a two or anything else. Then he made us sit silent and if anyone said anything he’d get thrashed on the hand. Jimmy Wheeler got his bones broke like that.

In the afternoon we went to another room where there was piles of rope. You had to unthread the rope and some of it was tarred. It was called picking oakum. When it was in its strands you carried it to the end of the room and it was put in crates they took off each day to the dockyards where they used it to seal the gaps in the timbers of the ships. We did four hours every day and it made your eyes hurt because there wasn’t enough light and your fingers had to be strong. Some of the little boys was crying because it hurt them so much.

I close my eyes and I’m back in that place. I wasn’t alive, I was only breathing. At night in the bed in the floor I slept. I pulled the blanket right up over my head. I didn’t have thoughts. I didn’t know nothing to think about. And I didn’t dream neither.

No one came to see me. There was no word from my parents. I began to stop thinking about them so I could get through it.

I didn’t make friends because no one did much and I was one of the smallest so none of the other boys was interested in me. At dinner one day I saw a girl across the other side of the room, a yellow-haired girl in one of them funny caps they wore. She smiled at me and I didn’t know what to do. I looked out for her after that but we could hardly ever speak. Over the weeks I discovered little things about her. She said she’d never known her father but her mother had took in washing and had lived in a bad way in Poplar. There was too many other children and
Alice
had a half-sister called Nancy who was in the Union house too.

I’d been there about two years I think when I saw a strange thing one Sunday morning. We had different clothes on a Sunday. They gave us a black coat you put on over your uniform. I was walking with the other boys through what they called the airing court towards the chapel. I saw men paupers come out of their building which was on the other side. They was being pushed along two-by-two by the Master.

There was a pale-faced man who looked like he might fall down. I was turning away when I recognised him. It was my father. I called out to him and tried to run across but McInnes slapped me back into line.

My father saw me. I saw his white face against the grey brick of the airing court behind him. His eyes met mine across that yard but he looked down at his feet.

He didn’t want to hold my eye. He must have been ashamed of the boots he was wearing. Once he was a shoemaker and he had a good business. He said it was the Crimean War that done for him. When I first heard that word I thought he meant the war was a crime, it was certainly a Crime for us. He was apprentice to his own father before him and went out as a journeyman till he had twelve shillings to start up on his own. The shoes fetched two shillings a pair so he made a profit and he took on other men to work for him. That’s when he took the house in Mason Street, with five children and all. He bought leather on credit. He had twelve skilled men working out for him but they all got the war fever and sailed off to the Crimea to fight. Then the price of leather went up through the roof. I remember this when I was still at home. He was proper knocked over.

Sunday afternoon was different because the children could go into the women’s room if they had a mother in the Union.
There
was a reverend come to say grace before dinner which was bread and a slice of cheese and jugs of water. This was the best dinner. There wasn’t much of it but the cheese tasted good and it put you in mind of better things. The reverend went on talking and they just wanted to eat the bread and cheese and get over to the women’s room. One Sunday I persuaded Alice to smuggle me in with her when she went to see her ma. When dinner was over I asked the monitor to go to the privy, which was a cesspit out in the yard. But I hid behind a buttress and when the children went past for the women’s room I slipped in between Alice and Nancy and because I was small no one noticed.

The door opened on to the women’s room. The children went flying in. It was a madhouse. There were women crying, children cartwheeling, there was sobbing and laughing and jumping and kissing. I never seen Bedlam but it must have been like this. I lost Alice for a minute, then I saw her and ran over and she put her arm round me and whispered to her ma that she was my mother too if anyone asked. We gathered tight to her on the bench and Alice and Nancy rattled off their stories and told her all the things that had happened in the week. She had her arms round them and I held on to her sleeve.

It began to calm down a bit. The visit was half an hour and you could see the clock on the wall. With ten minutes to go it all changed. A lot of the children stopped talking and just stood with their heads on their mothers’ shoulders. They held on to them without speaking.

The bell came like a blow. Some of the children started to snivel and cry. The bigger ones took it bravely. You couldn’t hang about because the monitor was shouting at you. Alice and Nancy kissed their ma and turned to go. Their ma took me against her shoulder for a moment and kissed the top of my shaved head.

* * *

About once a month we were allowed to go for a walk outside the grounds of the Union house. They picked about twenty boys and twenty girls and you walked in what they called a crocodile. It sounded exciting but it just meant you walked in a line of twos and you weren’t meant to talk.

One time I got myself with Alice and we managed to say a few words. We came to a sort of park and there was a big clean house with gas lamps outside. We was told to wait outside then ten of us was told we could go indoors.

I pushed my way to the front and dragged Alice by the hand. I was mighty curious to see inside and I thought I might take something, a gold ornament or the like. I knew how to do it. Once we was inside I lost all thoughts of stealing. It was … I don’t know the word. It was light.

A lady in fine clothes was smiling at us. She was quite old and not pretty to look at, with grey hair piled up on her head, but she smiled and just kept on smiling. No one did that. She took us into a huge room with a wood floor so polished it was like a mirror and there was other children there, about ten of them in smart clothes. They looked suspicious. There was paper streamers on the walls and the mantel. We was sat down on the floor and the lady played on a piano. Then a maid with a white cap came in with trays of cake and drink.

She put the tray down next to me. I’d never seen cake like this, big pieces with chocolate, ginger and dried fruit. I passed the tray to Alice and she passed it on to Jimmy Wheeler and he passed it on to the children in the fine clothes and they took pieces of cake and they ate it and they edged away probably because we smelled of the Union.

The tray came back to me and I passed it on, so it did another circle. I was looking at the paintings up on the wall with a cow standing in a river and this thing hanging from the ceiling. It had candles stuck in bits of glass. Everything in the room was light.

Suddenly the lady stopped playing the piano and came over to where the children was sitting. She took a new tray from the maid with more cakes on it.

She knelt down and held it out to me. ‘Take some cake,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to do.

Alice could see. She spoke up and said, ‘We didn’t know we was to have any, Miss.’

The lady laughed. ‘Go on. Take some. And then take some ginger wine.’ She handed me a glass. I had never held a glass before.

We were in that place for more than an hour and when we got outside the others wanted to hear about it. I looked at Alice and she looked back at me. It was too much to tell.

A little time after this we were given stumps and bats and a ball to play in the yard of the Union house. I think they were given to us by the lady with the piano. They didn’t want us to play cricket too much in case it gave us an appetite but once a week we could have a game. I liked to do batting.

Some dinner times we had cheese and bread, sometimes meat and potatoes and sometimes what they called broth, which was the worst because it was not much more than warm water. But I grew big enough to go into the men’s section and this was frightening because of the talk and the way they carried on. Forty men in a room, some of them simple-minded with no shame. Then they coughed all night.

I didn’t do lessons now, I did work with the men. We did corn-grinding, which was four of us turning a capstan. It was attached to iron bars that went through the wall to a flour mill outside. Some men did their bit, some tried to get out of it. The young lads were made to do the most of course. It was better than stone-pounding. For this I was sent to a hut where a man called Bolton was in charge. We was all told to break a
hundredweight
of stones into powder that would go through a sieve. They give you an iron bar with square ends and you put the stones in a wooden box with an iron bottom. I never knew what we was doing it for. Perhaps it was to make spoil for mending roads. After an hour or so you’d get an odd feeling in your fingers from the bar. The stone was still there in the box just like you’d never touched it. Bolton said he’d have you sent to prison if you didn’t do your hundredweight. Some of the men was jabbering and looked all done in and some of them just give him the evil eye. Then white blisters would come up on your fingers, then they’d burst, so blood was running down the iron bar. It was better to work through it.

An old man told me he’d once been in a place where they used to grind bones for fertiliser. He liked it because bones wasn’t so hard as the stones, but some of them wasn’t boiled and they still had bits of gristle on them. There was a big fight one day in the bone-grinding hut because the men wanted to eat the flesh that was left on the bones.

I lived for each Sunday when I would see my father if I was lucky and I dreamt that I would one day make him recognise me. There came a Sunday when he wasn’t there and I feared the worst. He’d looked awful pale the week before.

The next day, when I was on my way to the corn-grinding shed, the Matron grabbed my arm and said, ‘Webb, come with me.’ I thought she’d found out I’d stolen some cheese, which I’d done two days earlier but I’d give it to Alice when I passed her in the yard the next day. You could easily get sent to the police and then you’d go to prison. I knew plenty of men who’d been there and come back to the workhouse and said you were better off in prison because you got more to eat. Some men who were starving in the streets got themselves arrested on purpose. But once you were a criminal you were done for, you were marked for life.

Matron took me to the Master’s office. ‘Webb,’ he said, mopping his head with his red rag, ‘your father has made an application for your removal. Being in employment he’s able to provide for you, at least for the time being. You will no longer be a burden on the parish. You leave on Sunday.’

‘I thought maybe my father was … dead. He didn’t look—’

‘No. An acquaintance has found him employment of some kind.’

After ten years in uniform I was given a jacket and trousers. They said they could lend me the workhouse boots but I had to sign a receipt for them.

The Master pushed the piece of paper over. ‘Sign here,’ he said.

I made a mark. Seven years in the schoolroom that was.

He looked down at the paper, but he didn’t meet my eye. He pretended to be busy with the fire. One day, I thought.

It was more of an alley than a street, with big uneven paving stones. Bailey Rents it was called. It was one of those streets you don’t go down if you don’t live there. There were no numbers on the doors. Some had a flag or a splash of paint or a shoe in the upstairs window so if you came in drunk you knew which was your house. There were half-naked children making mud pies by the standpipe. I asked round and found out which was my pa’s place and I waited for him.

As I stood there I thought about all the Master told us about a Sober and a Righteous life. All the stuff the preacher told us too. If you don’t have money those choices is just a thing you can’t afford.

My father came home when it was dark. There was a young lad with him who looked in a poor way. It was Arthur.

‘You’d better come up,’ said Pa.

We stepped over two men on the stairs. The banisters had gone for firewood but the room Pa and Arthur was in was not
so
bad. It had furniture from the landlord – a table and two chairs. The windowpane was broke and was covered over with paper but there was a fire and some coke for it. He was paying eightpence a night for the room, he said. There was a mattress in the corner that he slept on and Arthur and me would have to do the best we could.

‘Where’s Ma?’ I said.

‘She left me. She went with Meg and the baby. They went to her mother in Greenwich. Then a few years back I had a letter from Australia. Didn’t she write to you?’

‘No. I didn’t know she could write. What about John?’

‘He joined the merchant navy. You better get some work, Billy.’

My father was a wall worker, which meant taking an advertising board to a fence or part of a wall where it could be hung. The best places were next to busy roads. My father would get the boards in the morning from some place near the Jews’ Cemetery and put them up early. He had to take them in again at night. It was a lot of walking for a man his age but he got paid a shilling a week for each board and when things were good he had more than twenty so he got Arthur to help him. Arthur earned the odd sixpence running errands for other people so when I found them they were making about twenty-five shillings a week. The only trouble was that there was a long gap between putting up the last board and going to take down the first one in the evening and Pa spent most of it in the Turk’s Head in Green Street. Of his twenty-five bob a week he was spending more on beer than rent. But still that night we had potatoes, mutton, bread and butter and Pa sent Arthur out to the pub for a jug of beer. We also had hot tea with plenty of leaves in it.