Street Child (3 page)

Jim forced his fists deep in his pockets and turned his face away. There were boys all round him, shuffling out to the cold yard, and they blurred into smudges of grey. He screwed up his eyes against the terrible blinding white of the sky. He wouldn’t cry here. His lungs were bursting and he thought he would never be able to gasp for air again, but he couldn’t cry here. The only person he wanted to be with was Rosie. She would know what to do. She would tell Emily and Lizzie. But there was no chance of being with Rosie.

‘I want to go home,’ he said.

Joseph swung his head and spat. ‘Home?’ he said. ‘What d’you mean, home? What’s this, if it ain’t home?’

So, Jim thought, this is my home now, this huge building with iron bars at the window and iron railings outside. His parents must be Mr and Mrs Sissons, as thin and waxy-pale as candles. And if they were his parents then his brothers and sisters were the shambling, skinny boys who slept and sobbed in the same room as him, and the scrawny girls who seemed to have forgotten how to smile.

‘Can’t I see her, all the same?’

Joseph shook his head. ‘She was took into the dead-house in the night, and put on the paupers’ cart before light, son. Speedy despatch, paupers get. No money for bells nor nothing like that, eh?’

Jim went dumbly from room to room as he was told, from the sleeping-boxes to the yard, the refectory, the yard, and back to his box … It was like a slow dance, and the steps were always the same, repeated day after day after day.

Morning started with the six o’clock bell, when all the boys had to wash under the pump. Joseph watched them, swinging his head from side to side and bending his neck round like a hunched bird of prey. He kept flapping his arms across his bent chest to beat the cold away.

‘Get yerselfs washed quick, boys,’ he said. ‘Afore the wevver bites me bones off.’

Across the yard from the pump was the asylum. Mad people were locked up. They wailed and shrieked for hours on end. They stretched their hands out through the bars of their prison. ‘Give us some bread, boy!’ they begged. ‘Let me out! Let me out!’

‘Don’t take no notice of them,’ a woolly-headed boy whispered to him one day. ‘They’re mad. They’re animals.’ Jim was shocked. He stared again at the men and women and children who were all squashed up together. Their cage was too small to hold them all. Their wailings echoed round the yard all the time. ‘Animals, animals,’ Jim said to himself, trying to drive their noises out of his head. He looked away from them, pretending they weren’t there.

‘No, they’re not animals, Jim,’ Joseph told him. ‘They’re people, they are. People, Jim. My ma’s in there.’

There was a shed at the other end of the yard. Boys gazed out at them through a small barred window. Their white faces were even more frightening than the wailings of the mad people. Joseph sidled over to Jim that first morning and swung his arm across the boy’s shoulder, bringing his head round to mutter down Jim’s ear. ‘Now, them’s the boys what tried to run away. They catch ’em and beat ’em and stick ’em in there till they’re good. Remember that.’

After the cold wash in the yard Jim had to help to clean it out with brooms twice as tall as he was. They had to sweep it till the ground was bare and clean, even if hundreds of leaves had fallen in the night and come drifting over the high walls. At breakfast the boys queued up with their bowls in their hands for bread and tea. The bread was meant to last for every meal, but if Jim tried to save it he soon had it stolen by one of the older boys. He learnt to gulp his food down as quickly as they did; boiled meat at dinner time, cheese at night, all swallowed rapidly and in silence.

Sometimes Mr Sissons read to them while they were eating, always Bible stories, and his whistly voice would glide round the echoing room over the clatter of knives and forks. Jim never listened to him. All he wanted to do was to think about his mother and Emily and Lizzie.

But every now and then Mr Sissons stopped
reading and lowered his book. He stared round the room, his eyes like round, glassy balls and his fingers cracking together. Jim stopped eating, afraid that he had done something wrong. He sat with his spoon held somewhere between his mouth and his bowl, until the boy next to him nudged him into action again. Mr Sissons put down his book and jumped off his dais. He came gliding down the aisles between the long tables like a thin black shadow. Jim could just see him out of the corner of his eye. He daren’t for the life of him look up.

The master lunged out at one of the boys at random, pulling him away from his bench by the back of his collar and sending his bowl flying and the contents spattering across the faces and clothes of the other boys.

‘Misbehaving, were you?’ he said, his voice as dry as a hissing swan’s. ‘Eating like a pig? Get to the trough, animal!’ And the boy crouched on his hands and knees in front of a pig’s trough that was always there, and had to eat his food from that, without a fork or spoon. Sometimes there were half a dozen people troughing, usually just for Mr Sisson’s amusement.

‘Please don’t let it be me. Please don’t let it be me,’ Jim said deep inside himself as Mr Sissons glided past, and the air turned as cold as ice around him.

Jim had no idea how long he had been at the workhouse when he first thought of trying to escape. At first it seemed an impossible idea, as impossible as making the pump in the yard turn into a tree and
blaze out with leaves and blossoms. He remembered the runaway boys locked up in the shed in the yard for everyone to see. Even so, he had to try. One day, he promised himself, he would go. He would watch out every moment, sharp as a bird, for a chance to fly. And when he did he would never be caught.

He was almost too afraid to allow himself to think about it, in case Mr Sissons pounced inside his thoughts and strapped him to a chair and beat him as he beat other reckless boys.

It was only at night that he let himself imagine escaping, and it was as though he was opening up a box of secret treasure in the dark. Old Marion crept and wheezed her candle-path around the room where the boys lay in their boxes pretending to sleep, and Jim let his thoughts wander then. He would escape. He would run and run through the streets of London until he was a long, long way from the workhouse. He would find a place that was safe. And he would call it home.

At first Jim couldn’t tell one boy from another. They all had the same sallow, thin faces and dark sunken eyes, and they all wore the same scratchy grey clothes and caps. They had their hair cropped and combed in exactly the same way, except for the boy who had spoken to him in the yard. His hair had a wild way of its own. He found himself following this boy round because he was the only one he could recognize, but it was a long time before he spoke to him. It was a long time before Jim felt like talking to anyone. He was numb, and wrapped up inside himself; but it was one morning in the schoolroom that Tip spoke to him and became the nearest thing to a friend that Jim could ever hope to have.

The schoolroom where the boys spent every morning was a long, dim room with candles set into every other desk. The little window had been painted over so they couldn’t look out. There was a fireplace at one end with sheets steaming round it. Old women sometimes wandered in to see to the sheets, putting wet ones up and taking down the dry ones to be packed off back to the big houses. These were the
washerwomen, and this was their workhouse job, washing the clothes of the rich. The women would sit by the fire from time to time, mumbling to each other in low drones during the lessons, sometimes cackling out remarks to the boys or shouting out the wrong answers to the deaf old schoolmaster’s questions.

There were four big arches across the ceiling with letters on them, and Mr Barrack would begin every day by pointing at the arches and then by asking one of the boys to read out the words on them. ‘God is good, God is holy, God is just, God is love,’ the women would chant out before the boys had a chance, sometimes in the wrong order just for fun, and they would nudge each other and screech with laughter. One morning when it was Tip’s turn to answer the question he turned to the women and held out his hand for them to speak. They shook their heads and pursed their lips, shaking with silent laughter, and Tip, taken by surprise, laughed out loud. Mr Barrack shook him by the back of his jacket, half lifting him off the floor.

‘There’s nothing to laugh at here,’ he shouted.

‘No sir, there ain’t,’ agreed Tip, and was given another shaking. The women loved this.

For most of the rest of the morning Mr Barrack read out loud to the boys, pacing up and down the room as he did so, so the candle flames fluttered in his wake and his black shadow danced on the walls. Curled in his hand was the end of a knotted rope, which he swung as he walked, striking it across a desk from time to time to make the boys jump
awake. Every now and then he stopped and pointed at a boy, who had to stand up and recite the sentence he’d just heard. If he got it wrong Mr Barrack swung the knotted end of the rope across the boy’s hand.

As a change from reading out loud, Mr Barrack would shout at one of the boys to fetch him his shabby old copy of Dr Mavor’s Spelling Primer. He would pounce on any boy. ‘Spell “chimbley”!’ he would shout, swinging his rope in readiness.

One morning the boys were given chalks and slates to use. A visitor had brought them in as a present. They sat on the desks through the morning, and the boys all watched them lovingly, longing to have a go.

‘Now you can write!’ Mr Barrack told them at last, easing himself onto the high stool of his desk and grunting with the effort. Tip put up his hand.

‘Please, sir. What should we write?’

‘Speak up!’

‘What should we write?’ Tip roared.

Mr Barrack roared back. ‘What should you write? The Lord’s Prayer, if you please!’

Jim risked a look round at the boys as they bent to their task, their breath smoking from them into the cold air. He put his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands. He was bleak inside himself, lonely and bewildered and afraid. Beside him Tip squeaked his chalk across his slate, scratching out scrawly shapes. His tongue poked out between his lips as he worked. He glanced sideways at Jim.

‘Why aincha writing?’ he whispered.

‘’Cos I can’t,’ Jim whispered back. ‘I never knew how to write.’

‘Cor, it’s easy!’ Tip’s eyebrows shot up and disappeared into the tangle of his hair. ‘Just wiggle your chalk across the slate like this.’ His chalk scraped and laboured. ‘There!’ He leaned back in triumph and blew chalk dust off his slate. He showed it to Jim.

‘That’s good,’ Jim agreed. ‘What does it say, though?’

Tip’s amazed eyebrows shot up into his hair again. ‘I don’t know! I can’t read!’

Jim spluttered into his hands, and Mr Barrack jerked awake. He hobbled down the aisle towards Jim.

‘Did you laugh then?’

Jim felt as if he had frozen into his seat. His lips stuck together as if ice had formed between them.

‘No, he didn’t. It was me.’ Tip jumped up as the schoolmaster swung his rope in readiness and swished it down across the boy’s outstretched hand. The women folding up the sheets by the fire cackled. The other boys sat in total silence while this was happening, staring straight in front of them, their arms folded.

Mr Barrack towered over Jim. ‘What did he say to you?’

Jim forced himself to stand up, his legs trembling like reeds in the wind.

‘He said he can’t read, sir,’ he whispered, and had to shout it out a few times more until Mr Barrack could hear him.

‘Can’t read!’ the teacher bellowed. ‘Can’t read! I’ll say he can’t read. What’s the use of teaching boys
like him to read? What do any of you want with reading or writing, miserable sinners that you are?’ He pulled Tip’s hand towards him again and lashed the rope across it.

Jim glanced at Tip, afraid to speak. He could see that the boy’s eyes were wet, and that he was nursing his hand under his armpit.

‘Write!’ Mr Barrack barked, and Jim picked up his chalk and scribbled furiously with it, just as Tip had done.

At the end of that morning Mr Barrack told the boys to get out their instruments, and with a great shoving of desks and scuffle of boots they ran to the big cupboards at the end of the room, only to be shouted at and made to do it all again in silence.

‘I’d have got hit anyway,’ Tip muttered to Jim under the noise. His eyes were still wet.

‘Did it hurt?’ Jim asked him.

Tip shook his head. ‘Once Barrack starts hitting you, Barrack always hits you,’ he said. He blew his hand and stuck it back under his armpit. ‘Every day if he can. Just don’t let him have a chance to start. Tell Barrack Tip did it, if he blames you for anything. Tip’ll get hit anyway, so you might as well.’

A drum was placed on the desk for them to share, and Tip stood up and reached out for a stick. At a wave of the schoolmaster’s hand the hymn tune started, such a thumping and wailing that the washerwomen ran out with their hands over their ears. It was like nothing Jim had ever heard before. Tip poked him with a drumstick and mouthed at him over the row to bang the other side of the drum with
it. Jim just tapped it at first. He watched Tip to try to work out some kind of rhythm in the mess of noise, and he saw that all the boys seemed to be chanting something, the little black holes of their mouths opening and closing into the thunder of drums and whistles, while the candle flames flattened and danced like tiny white devils.

‘What’re you saying?’ Jim shouted, as close to Tip’s ear as he could get. Tip turned towards him.

‘I hate this place!’ Jim could hear Tip’s voice, faint and wailing over the beating of his drum. He had his eyes shut. He thumped the drum in time to every word. ‘I
hate
this place! Bang
bang
bang bang.’

‘So do I,’ said Jim. ‘Bang bang bang.’ He closed his eyes and put his head back. He shouted into the darkness, opening up his throat to let all the tightness out. ‘I want Dad. I want Ma. Bang bang bang. I want Emily. Bang bang bang. I want Liz. Bang bang bang-bang
bang
! I want to go
home.
’

Mr Barrack raised his hand and the sound stopped as if it had been torn away in shreds. Silence, utter, swirling, hugging silence. Jim felt his thoughts tumbling into it and then settling into calm. He felt better.