BY
ORDER
OF
THE
BOARD
OF
HEALTH
All kinds of Putrid matter, decayed Vegetables,
Filth of every Description should be
REMOVED
.
Walls of Houses and Passages should be Washed with
hot
LIME
and all Persons Bathed daily.
Dirty Hands and dirty Faces breed
THE
CHOLERA
MORBUS
The git who smacks this bill over Whilky’s boarded-up, tax-free window gets a sharp rap on the head for his pains. Away with you, toady! And with your wheelbarrowload of lime dumped in front of my door! Whilky kicks the white mound left by the minions of the Board of Health. Whitewash the damn streets if you like but you’ll not invade the house of a free man.
Mike peeks his narrow head out of Whilky’s breast pocket at the disturbance. Look at ‘em, Mike. Pious men and do-goody women marching up and down our back lanes. Hawking their moth-eaten blankets and donated stockings, darned six times at the toe until a man feels like he is eternally treading upon a pebble. But we’re not fooled, are we, Mike? They’d rather see every one of us dead than give us the Right to Vote. Funny, isn’t it, how this cholera morbus business only came up after the Reform Riots in October? Funny, too, how all the Reform meetings had to be canceled for fear of the contagion. And while you and I have tenants to spare, Mike, them that lodged in the workingman’s pockets and the workingman’s belly; by which I mean the staples of cash and food, Mike, have all up and fled in the face of this contrived Quarantine. A poor man is so busy contemplating those cruel desertions, so busy scheming how to lure cash and bread home again, that he has no time left to even think on Reform. Look there, Mike. Some of our weak-minded neighbors open their doors to these government patsies. But not us. Against our better judgment, we let the government inside this summer so that we might be “counted,” and look what it’s got us. Green toads and a coming plague that, conveniently enough, kills only the poor.
Whilky hesitates at the end of the lane. Maybe he ought to go back and wait them out. Pink, moronic git that she is, might open the door, and God
only knows what they’ll plant inside. But Whilky wants his newspaper and a tall glass of beer. And besides, John Robinson claimed a bricklayer came into the Labour in Vain last night with a Border collie rumoured to have killed sixty rats in ten minutes. Pink knows what he’ll do to her if she undoes that latch. She’s daft, but she’s not that dumb.
Whilky ducks under the low arch and lumbers out onto the wide expanse of High Street, blissfully unaware that behind him, exactly nine houses in, a tidy blonde woman loaded down with charity is stepping over his uncovered midden (that overflows with decayed Vegetables and All kinds of Putrid matter) onto his privately owned stoop and is, even now, rapping sharply upon the sanctity of his door. His republican daughter Pink, resisting tyranny for the time it takes to set down the baby and scamper over, asks cheerfully through the wood, “Who’s there?”
“Audrey Place. With the Indigent Sick Society,” comes the answer.
“Right,” says Pink and opens the door.
Why, we know this Audrey. She’s lived on Fawcett Street all her life. Her mother is good Dr. Clanny’s wife’s best friend, just as Henry’s mother is sister to the selfsame wife. We understand Audrey’s engagement is a much-needed distraction at the Fawcett Street household; it’s been so sombre with her father away, captain of a ship stuck in Riga, on the other side of Quarantine. Take a peek at her, there in the doorway, before she enters the gloom of Whilky’s establishment. Isn’t she pretty? Isn’t her boot neat and her red-gold hair attractively but not showily dressed? There is a certain determination about her green eyes that sits uncomfortably in the softness of her face, but it is a well-formed face, somewhat too apple-cheeked and dimpled for elegance, but pleasing and kind. Though only seventeen, Miss Place for many years has extended her hands to the poor; and to her credit, she is more proud of her magnanimity than her manicure. Once, when she was but twelve, we witnessed her surrender her only umbrella so that a poor woman might not go without one. And the head cold she suffered in consequence, she wore like a badge of honor.
It takes a moment for Audrey’s eyes to adjust to the untaxed twilight of 9 Mill Street, but slowly the room begins to take shape. Low ceiling, stiflingly hot fire, empty of furnishings save for a table, some stools, and a gigantean Wearmouth Bridge framed like a Rembrandt. She is a little short—sighted and squints down at the little girl who comes only waist-high, dressed in a grown woman’s gown of faded pink gingham. The sleeves are rolled to her elbows and a deep hem has been taken in around the knees. It is still too long and the little girl trips as she backs up to let the lady in.
“Is your mother or father at home?” asks Audrey Place of the Indigent Sick Society.
“Dead,” says Pink. “And Out to get a Pint.”
Audrey looks around and catches sight of an old woman in the corner. She sits beneath an incongruous blue dress that hangs from two pegs on the wall, watching Audrey fixedly. “Is this your grandmother then?” she asks sweetly.
“Eek!” says Pink. “That’s the Eye.”
“The Eye?” Audrey wonders. “Then who might you be?” “Pink.”
“What is your real name?” “Don’t know, I’ve always been called Pink.”
It never fails to amaze Audrey, no matter how many times she comes down here, that the children of the East End don’t know their own names. They are all called Crank or Tough or Flotsam or Pink from the time they kick their way out of the womb. How can one expect them not to behave like animals if they are all named like dogs? Audrey sets her blankets and stockings down on the table and wanders the room. It has the standard close sweat and fried herring smell of most lodging houses, but is a good deal less filthy. True, its walls and ceiling are a bit fuliginous and like every other house in the East End, this family keeps a sloshing crock of urine in the corner. She has urged others to get rid of it, but they use it to wash their clothes; nothing gets grease out so well, they tell her. They save their ordure, too, in the reeking unemptied middens fouling the lane. Once every eight or ten weeks, farmers come up from the country and buy it for fertilizer. In the meantime it breeds typhus and scarletina and cholera. Or at least that’ s what Henry says. “Would you like coffee?” asks Pink in her talking-to-boarders voice. This lady looks a little like Gustine except that her dress is not nearly so pretty, being gray and without any ribbons on it. She is plumper too than Gustine and her voice is lower like a dog’s where Gustine’s is higher like a ferret’s. The lady nods yes to coffee, so Pink picks up Mike’s cup and refills it from the pot on the hearth. It’s not so hot anymore, which is how she likes it. The lady says thank you.
“Do you go to school… Pink?” asks Audrey, sipping the ice -cold coffee. “Neeak,” says Pink, shyly. “Do you go to work?” “Neeak,” she piggies.
“Neak? Does that mean no?”
“Eeeak.”
“Let me guess.” Audrey smiles into the spindly girl’s red-rimmed eyes.
“Are vou a mouse?”
Oh the shame of it.
From the woeful expression on the girl’s face, Audrey realizes immediately she’s said the wrong thing. Quickly she switches topics.
“Pink,” she says, “I am here from the Sick Society to care for those in need. We are looking out for the cholera.”
“Da does not believe in the cholera,” says Pink raising her chin defiantly. “He says it’s the Government’s way of murdering the poor.”
Audrey is taken aback by the girl’s answer. How can a rational man not believe in a disease that’s killed millions?
“I’m afraid your Da is mistaken,” she says gently. “The cholera has been coming from around the world. We’ve been reading about it for months in the newspapers.”
“Da says other Governments are also killing their poor. It’s where our Government got the idea.”
“Sweetheart,” Audrey says, shaking her head. “Your government doesn’t want you dead. They’ve established a Quarantine to keep you safe.”
“Da says the Quarantine is to starve us so that their Cholera Morbus can kill us the quicker.”
Audrey would like to wring Pink’s Da’s neck for all the lies he’s telling this poor child. Instead she tries a different tactic.
“Well, I have some lovely blankets and stockings here I would certainly love to give away,” she says. “I would love to give a lovely blanket to you, Pink. But first I must see if anyone sick needs them. Is anyone sick in your house?”
“Only Eos,” Pink answers, looking longingly at Audrey’s stack. “We call her Fos because she has the Fossy Jaw.”
“May I see her?” Audrey asks, gathering up her blankets and stockings.
Pink lights a tallow candle in the fireplace and dully leads the way to the stairs. She gives a quick glance over her shoulder to Mrs. Eyeball, just to make sure she is doing the right thing taking this charity lady up to see Fos. The Eye watches them mount the stairs but does not stir from beneath the dress.
Twelve creaking steps take them up to the low room where the boarders sleep, a room in far worse shape than Audrey might have imagined judging by the fairly tidy first floor. It is noon outside, but midnight here, or 4 A.M. or 6 for all she can tell. The windows are boarded up, allowing in no light or fresh air. The walls are grimed brown and scattershot with the blood of crushed bugs. When she moves, Audrey’s neat boots crunch infested hay underfoot, the mattresses of Whilky Robinson’s thirty boarders, though some, unable to afford the 4 d. he charges per pitchforkful, sleep only on their spread-out coats. From experience Audrey knows that men and women lie indiscriminately up here, head to foot and back to back. The pregnancy rate among female lodgers tells you what sort of night’s sleep they get.
“You can see her better without this,” says Pink. With a quick puff, the little girl blows out the candle. An oppressive darkness swallows the room, hot and close and reeking offish-infused urine. Something scurries over Audrey’s foot and she stifles a scream.
“Over there,” says Pink.
In the far corner of the room, low to the ground, Audrey can make out a faint glow. At first she thinks she is imagining it, but no, there is a green tinge to the darkness in the corner, like the faraway lights of the aurora borealis.
“That’s Fos,” Pink tells her proudly, “She glows in the dark.”
Audrey quickly makes her way over to the effulgent creature in the corner, and reaches into her pocket for the packet of friction matches she keeps there. By the light of the match, she sees lying upon a bale of straw a narrow-faced woman, breathing shallowly, her eyes screwed up against the pain of even that dim flame, The right side of her face around her mouth is strangely sunken, as if she had just sucked the sourest lemon and couldn’t quite release the pucker.
“Fos paints phosphorus on matchsticks,” Pink explains. “Now she’s got the Fossy Jaw. Da says soon it will be eaten clean away.”
My God, thinks Audrey. And they call this poor woman by the disease that is killing her? She takes a blanket from her stack and lays it over the suffering matchstick painter.
“Friend,” says Audrey, refusing to use the horrid name. “Friend, can you hear me?”
Matchstick painter, dear friend from Saturday night, are you truly so sick you cannot answer this helpful lady? We would never have deserted you to your solitary chats savants had we known you were so gravely ill. Yes, we had a story to tell, yes, an engagement to keep, but we are not heartless. We might have seen you home and safely tucked into your bed of hay. Might have sent around the corner for a hot lemon gin to settle the burning pain in your stomach. How were we to know, dear matchstick painter, dear friend Fos, when we chose to follow Gustine’s gaudy blue thread that your dun brown one was near to being severed?
“I don’t think she hears you,” says Pink,
Rouse yourself, Fos. Give a word of comfort to this lady who seeks to comfort you. Give comfort to us who are shocked at this sudden and frightening change in you.
“We should send for a doctor,” says Audrey grimly. “My fiance will come.
Audrey tucks the edges of the blanket under the poor woman’s legs to keep them off the scratchy hay, rises, and leads Pink back down the stairs. The stale air of the first floor is a welcome relief from the thoroughly fetid atmosphere above. How do they live? Audrey wonders for perhaps the thousandth time in her charitable career.
“I am going to send for Dr. Chiver,” Audrey announces, making herself ready to go. She has said good-bye to Pink and left her with a cheerless olive wool blanket, when without warning, the woman in the corner suddenly starts up. She has her one gray eye fixed on something in the corner, piercing it to the ground like a pin through a butterfly. As if raised by her gaze, a tremendous squall issues from the coal bin.
“Oh no.” gasps Pink. “The baby!”
The baby cries like Pink wants to at always being such a miserable failure. She can’t believe she went and forgot the baby, left it over behind the coal bin, and now when she runs over, pushing Eye out of the way, she sees, though she remembered not to set it on its chest, though she did everything else right, a frog sitting on the one place you should never ever jokingly poke!
“Bloody shit!” shrieks Pink.
Audrey rushes over and Eye steps back. Pink is pointing to the frog hunkering on the baby’s chest and mutely screaming. Mike would never have let this happen. He would have dragged the baby to safety or bit the frog into a million pieces or some smarter combination, but he would never let Gustine’s baby die. The lady plucks the frog off with two long fingers and flings it into the fireplace,where it sizzles and then in a second pops. She is picking the baby off the floor with her hands not her teeth and walking with it over to the table. Support the head and bum, Pink finds the voice to say.
Eye sits back down on her stool beneath the dress.
“Whose baby is this?” Audrey demands, color stinging her cheeks. These people, she swears, these people are simply not fit to have children,