Street Child (4 page)

‘Joseph,’ Jim asked the bent man one day out in the yard. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Been here?’ Joseph swung his head round and peered up at Jim. ‘Seems like I was born here. Don’t know nowhere else, son. And I don’t know all of this place, neither.’ He leaned against Jim so he could swing his head up to look at the long, high building with its rows of barred windows. ‘I’ve not been in the room where the women go, though long ago I must have been in the baby-room, I suppose, with my ma. I’ve been in the infirmary wards. But there’s all kinds of little twisty corridors and attics and places I’ve never been in, Jim, and I don’t want to, neither. It’s the whole world, this place is.’ He spread out his hands. ‘Whole world.’

‘It ain’t, Joseph,’ Jim told him. ‘There’s no shops here, and no carriages. And no trees.’ He closed his eyes, forcing himself to try and remember what it was like outside. ‘And there’s no river. There’s a great big river outside here.’

‘Is there, now?’ said Joseph. ‘I should like to see that river. Though to tell you truth, Jim, I don’t
know what a river is. Tell you something.’ He put his arm over Jim’s shoulder to draw his ear closer to his own mouth. ‘I don’t want to die in here. If someone will let me know what day I’m going to die, I’ll be grateful. I’ll climb over that wall first.’ He dropped his head down again and stared at his boots, whistling softly. ‘Yes. That’s what I’ll do.’

Tip spluttered and nudged Jim, but Jim was looking up at the high walls that surrounded the workhouse, and at the bleak sky above it.

‘How long have I been here, Tip?’ he asked

‘How should I know?’ Tip hugged his arms round himself. ‘Keep moving, Jim. It’s cold.’

It was impossible to tell one day from the next. They were all the same. School, sack-making, bed. The only thing that changed was the sky. Jim had seen the grey of snow clouds turning into the soft rain clouds of spring. He’d felt summmer scorching him in his heavy, itchy clothes. And now the sky was steely grey again. The pump had long beards of ice on its handle.

‘I’ve been here a year,’ Jim said.

It was then that the little secret promise that had nestled inside him began to flutter into life like a wild thing.

‘I’ve got to skip off,’ he let the mad thought rise up in him. ‘If I don’t, I’ll be like Joseph. One day I won’t remember whether I was born here or not. I won’t know anywhere but here.’

During lessons that day the old schoolmaster’s voice droned on in the dim schoolroom. The boys coughed and shuffled in their benches, hunching
themselves against the cold. Jim’s wild thoughts drummed inside him, so loud that he imagined everyone would hear them. He leaned over to Tip and whispered in his ear, ‘Tip, I’m going to run away today. Come with me?’

Tip sheered round, and put his hand to his mouth. Mr Barrack sprang down from his chair, his eyes alight with anger and joy.

‘You spoke!’ he said to Jim, triumphant. ‘It was you.’

Tip closed his eyes and held out his hand, but Jim stood up. He didn’t mind. He didn’t mind anything any more. The teacher hauled him off his stool and swung his rope round. It hummed as it sliced through the air.

‘I don’t mind,’ Jim tried to explain, but this made Mr Barrack angrier than ever. At last he had caught Jim out, and he was beating him now for every time he had tried and failed. He pulled a greasy handkerchief out of his pocket and wound it round Jim’s head, tying it tight under his chin.

‘Just in case you feels like hollering,’ he said. All the other boys stared in front of them. The rope stung Jim again and again, and the beating inside him was like a wild bird now, throbbing in his limbs and in his stomach, in his chest and in his head, so wild and loud that he felt it would lift him up and carry him away.

When the schoolmaster had finished with him he flung him like a bundle of rags across the desk. Jim lay in a shimmer of pain and thrumming wings. He wanted to sleep. The bell rang and the boys shuffled
out. Jim felt Tip’s hand on his shoulder. He flinched away.

‘That’s what they do to the boys who skip off, Jim,’ Tip whispered. ‘They thrash ’em like that every day until they’re good.’

Jim felt the wild thing fluttering again. ‘Only if they catch them.’

‘They always catch ’em. Bobbies catch ’em and bring ’em in, and they get thrashed and thrashed.’

Jim struggled to sit up. The stinging rolled down his body. ‘Won’t you come with me?’

‘I daresn’t. Honest, I daresn’t. Don’t go, Jim.’

Jim looked up at the great archways of the schoolroom. He knew the words off by heart. God is good. God is holy. God is just. God is love.

‘I’ve got to,’ he said. ‘And I’m going tonight, Tip.’

Jim knew that he would have to make his break before old Marion did her rounds for the night. He had no idea how he was going to do it. At suppertime he stuffed his cheese in his pocket, and Tip passed his own share along to him.

At the end of the meal Mr Sissons stood up on his dais. All the shuffling and whispering stopped. He moved his body slowly round, which was his way of fixing his eyes on everyone, freezing them like statues.

‘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.

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, brushing 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.