Street Child (11 page)

Next morning, early, he waited for the coffee woman to bring her cart. When he saw her dragging it up through the mud he ran to meet her.

‘He’s worse,’ he panted. ‘Can you come to him?’

‘I can’t leave my stall,’ she told him. ‘If I don’t give breakfast to the early workers I’ve lost my best trade.’

‘If you tell me where that school is, I’ll go there.’

‘It’s round about. Over there somewhere. Somewhere round Ernest Street.’ The woman waved her arm vaguely. She was sorry enough for the boy, but there were plenty more where he came from. Skinny, helpless sparrows. The streets were full of them. If she helped one, they’d all be round for help, and she had her own children to feed. If she didn’t earn enough to keep her rent paid, they’d all be out in the streets. All in the same state as Jim. It didn’t bear thinking about. She had to keep going.

Jim ran off. Some of the street boys shouted after him, ‘How’s Shrimps?’ but Jim didn’t even bother to tell them. No child could help Shrimps now.

‘Know where the Ragged School is?’ he asked one
of them, a crippled boy called Davey, who was older than most of them. Davey shook his head.

‘I’ve heard of it,’ he said. ‘There was a man with a donkey used to come round wanting boys to go to his school. We used to chuck tomatoes at him, though. School!’ He spat out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Don’t trust them places, I don’t.’

Jim managed to coax some milk from a dairy woman and he ran back to Shrimps with it, moistening the boy’s lips. His hair was dark with sweat, but he was cold.

‘Please let them take you to the hospital, Shrimps,’ he said, but Shrimps shook his head.

‘I’m all right here. Proper little palace, this crate.’

Davey and some of the younger boys came to see Shrimps, and Jim left him to them and went off again. At last, when it was nearly dark, he came across a group of children, brothers and sisters they must have been, they were so alike. They were coming up a back alleyway together, and some of them were clutching slates. They were dressed in rags but they obviously had a home to go to.

‘Have you been to the Ragged School?’ Jim asked them.

One of them nodded.

‘Is there a doctor there?’

The children looked at each other. ‘That Barnie bloke said he was a doctor, didn’t he?’

‘That’s right. Only ’e don’t give us medicine, ’e gives us hymns!’

One of the children started singing and the others giggled.

‘Where is it?’

The older child ran back with Jim and pointed out a long, shed-like building. ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘And there’s that Barnie bloke, just coming out now.’

Jim raced down the street. The man locked the door of the shed and began to move quickly in the other direction.

‘Doctor Barnie!’ Jim shouted out, but his voice was drowned out by the rumble of carriage wheels. He pressed himself against the wall to let the carriage pass. The doctor raised his hand as the carriage approached and the driver reined in his horse. Jim started running again. ‘Doctor!’ he shouted.

But the man hadn’t heard him. He climbed up into the carriage and was away before Jim reached it. Mud spattered up into Jim’s face.

When he got back to the crates behind the market the other boys had gone. Someone had placed a small candle in a bowl, and its soft light was some kind of comfort in the dark. Jim crawled in beside Shrimps.

‘It’s going to be all right now,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve found a doctor, and he’s coming to see you tomorrow.’

But even as he spoke, the words were like stones in his throat. He reached out and felt for the boy’s hand. It was cold.

Old Samuel, the night-watchman, took Shrimps’ body into his hut. He set candles round it, and as the street boys heard of his death they came to have a look at him. They came in groups and stood in a huddle in the doorway, not daring to come in, and soon ran off again.

Jim sat with his head in his hands all day. Samuel shook him by his shoulder.

‘Reckon you’ll have to go, Skippin’ Jim,’ he told him. ‘They’ll be bringing the pauper’s cart for Shrimps here soon, an’ if they sees you here you knows where they’ll take you.’

Jim didn’t care. He almost felt it would be good to be back in the workhouse. He would see Joseph again, and Tip. His life would be ordered and regular, there’d be food at mealtimes and sleep at bedtimes. He wouldn’t have to run away from anyone, or hide, or steal food. But then he thought of the mad people wailing, and the runaway boys in their cage, and the children crying in the night, the long, echoing, dark corridors, and the sound of keys turning in locks. Shrimps had died rather than go back there. Well. So would he.

Samuel went out to call six o’clock at the street corners. Jim took a last look round the quiet hut with its dim candles, and at the figure wrapped in a sack. He took his boots out of his pockets. They were in shreds.

‘’Bye, bruvver,’ he said. He put the boots next to the sack, and slipped away.

He had no idea where to go now. He knew he couldn’t live in the crates again, not without Shrimps. He shivered in a shop doorway until he saw policemen coming, then darted across the road. It was easy to hide in the darkness between the lamps, but he couldn’t stay there all night. It was too cold to stand still, and too muddy to sit down. For the first time he wondered where all the other street boys slept. He remembered what one of the boys had said:

‘He ain’t got the strength to climb up with us, so we brought him here.’

Climb? Jim thought. Climb where?

He wandered round the back of the crates, round behind the market stalls. Nothing. Nothing to see. Yet he thought he could hear a slight burst of chattering, like the whistlings of starlings. He stood still. The sound was coming from over his head. Then he heard a slight scuffing. He glanced round. No one in sight. He ran to the support wall of the market and heaved himself up, hand over fist, and at last hauled himself on to the roof. He stood up slowly, gazing across at the looped tarpaulin. Everywhere he looked there were black bundles, like little heaps of rags, but as he stood still and let his eyes grow used to the
new darkness he could see that those bundles were boys, huddled up for the night on their rooftop home.

There was no comfort there. At night the wind seemed to crack round the boys like a whip. When it rained they would wake up soaked to the skin. It would be days before they dried off, sometimes. Jim used to lie huddled up, looking at the stars and listening to the boys’ breathing. ‘This ain’t home,’ he said to himself.

When morning came with its sooty mist the boys would roll down the wall to be on the alert before the police were about, trying to earn a few pennies to buy themselves a night in a lodging house. They ate what they could, grabbing a bit of cheese here or a crust of pie there, and if they were caught they were hauled off before a magistrate and sent to the workhouse. Jim wasn’t as fast as the other boys because of his bad leg, and the only job he could think of doing was skipping for the theatre queues, which made a few people smile, anyway. The other boys worked in gangs when they were stealing, passing the scarf or purse from one to the other so rapidly that it was impossible to tell what was happening. To Jim they were like a big family helping each
other. But he wasn’t one of them. They tended to leave him on his own.

One day, when he woke up drenched to the skin again, coughing and shaking with cold, he knew he’d had enough.

‘If you go on like this, Jim, you’ll be where Shrimps is,’ he told himself. ‘There must be summat else, bruvver.’

It was then that he remembered the Ragged School. He thought of the long shed that the school was held in.

‘Somewhere to keep warm,’ he thought. ‘And that Barnie bloke looked all right. He won’t hit you, he won’t.’

He decided to give it a try, just for a day. He wandered round until he found the shed again. Children were crowding round the door when he arrived, waiting to be let in. The shed was a big room with boards laid on top of soil for a floor. The walls and rafters had been painted a dingy white, and there were bars across the windows. There was a good fire burning in a grate. Jim sidled up to it. There must have been over a hundred children there. They sat in rows, but there were so many of them that some of them were on the floor.

Jim gazed round him, listening to their chatter, and to the way it faded down when the teacher stood up to talk to them in his gentle, lilting voice. He was a tall, slim man with straight brown hair and fluffy side whiskers and spectacles. Jim recognized him straight away as the man Lame Betsy had taken him to listen to in the back alley. He remembered shouting
out at him, and how some of the boys had chucked mud balls at him. And he remembered the man’s sad eyes. He ducked his head down, worried now in case he would be recognized and thrown out into the cold.

Yet he could see that the children weren’t afraid of the man. They didn’t flinch away from him as if they expected him to hit them at any minute. They called him ‘Teacher’, and they seemed to be happy to do whatever he told them, though they murmured and giggled among themselves as if they couldn’t concentrate for very long. The teacher man didn’t seem to mind. Occasionally he looked at Jim, but always Jim put his head down or glanced quickly away.

At the end of the day the man asked all the children to stand up and pray with him, and again Jim looked away. He was the only child still sitting, but the man didn’t seem to mind. They finished off the day with a hymn, which all the children yelled out cheerfully before they were sent off home.

Still Jim sat by the fire, hoping not to be noticed. The Barnie man finished straightening up the benches and wiping the board, and at last he came over to Jim. Jim clenched his hands together, staring down at them, ready to run if the man hit him. But he didn’t. Instead, he sat down next to Jim and warmed his hands by the fire.

‘It’s time for me to blow the lights out,’ he said, in his soft voice.

Jim didn’t move.

‘Come on, my lad,’ the Barnie man said. ‘It’s time to go home now.’

Jim clenched and unclenched his fists. The gentleness in the man’s voice made his throat ache.

The man stood up. ‘Come on now. You’d better go home at once.’

Jim tried to make his voice come. ‘Please, sir. Let me stay.’

‘Stay?’ The man stared down at him. ‘What for? I’m going to put the lights out and lock the door. It’s quite time for a young boy like you to go home and get to bed. What do you want to stop for?’

‘Please, sir,’ said Jim, not looking at the man but at the flames in the fire, which made his eyes smart and blurry.

‘You ought to go home at once,’ Barnie insisted. ‘Your mother will know the other boys have gone. She’ll wonder what kept you so late.’

‘I ain’t got no mother.’

‘Your father, then.’

‘I ain’t got no father.’

Barnie was getting impatient, Jim could see that. It was almost as if he didn’t believe him. ‘Where are your friends, then? Where do you live?’

‘Ain’t got no friends. Don’t live nowhere.’

Barnie stared at him. He walked away from the fire and back to it again, then went to the desk. He sat down on his chair and stayed with his fingers drumming across the flat of the desk-top, like the patter of rain on a roof. Jim wondered if he was angry with him.

‘It’s the truth, sir,’ he said anxiously, ‘I ain’t telling you no lies.’ He spoke in the whiney voice the other street boys used to adults.

‘Tell me,’ the man said at last. ‘How many boys are there like you? Sleeping out in the streets?’

‘Heaps,’ said Jim. ‘More than I can count.’

It was Barnie’s turn now to stare into the fire, as if there were secrets in its flames, or answers to great puzzles. He was as still and quiet as if he had gone to sleep, and Jim kept still too, afraid to break into the man’s thinking. The only sound was the spitting of the logs, and outside, the bleak voice of the wind.

‘Now,’ the man said, very slowly, like someone creeping up on a bird in case they frightened it away. ‘If I am willing to give you some hot coffee and a place to sleep in, will you take me to where some of these other boys are?’

Jim looked sideways at him. ‘You wouldn’t tell the police?’

‘No,’ said Barnie. ‘I wouldn’t tell the police.’

‘All right,’ said Jim. ‘I’ll take you.’

It was some time later that they arrived at the high wall of the market. Jim stopped, afraid again. What if Barnie told the police about them, and sent all the boys to the workhouse? But if he didn’t show Barnie, he wouldn’t get the hot meal and the shelter to sleep in. He didn’t know what to do. Barnie seemed to understand and just stood waiting and watching while Jim glanced from side to side, afraid to be seen by anyone in the man’s company. He had almost made up his mind to run away and leave him standing there when the man said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Jim, sir.’ Out it came, and it sounded such a special thing. ‘That’s it now,’ Jim thought to himself. ‘That’s the last thing I’ve got, and I’ve just give it away.’

‘Where are they, Jim?’

‘Up there, sir.’ Jim pointed to the roof of the market shed.

‘There? And how am I to get up there?’

‘I’ll show you.’ Jim made light work of it. There were well-worn marks on the bricks where the mortar had fallen or been picked away. Jim shinned up quickly and then leaned over the edge, holding down a stick. Barnie grabbed it and heaved himself up, and stood shakily, brushing his clothes and his grazed hands. He held up his lantern.

And there, all round him, lay the boys, curled up in their rags of clothes, sleeping like dogs.