A Possible Life Read online

  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.

  I had no training, the Union had taught me nothing but how to steal food so I had to try casual work. I got up before dawn. I ate some bread and drank some tea before I set off for the docks. I thought I’d be the first to arrive but when I got to the riverside there were hundreds of men waiting in the darkness. Some of them were smoking pipes or talking to each other, most of them were just looking at the gates.

  It was past dawn when the bell went off and there was a rush for the entrance. Men you’d thought was dead on their feet was suddenly fighting one another to get through. What we were all aiming at was the hirers but they’d got themselves into wooden stalls or sometimes behind railings like a cage inside the dock. We were running up and down looking for one who looked more like he’d take you on, trying to catch his eye. I got to one man who was behind a wooden bar and as I reached to grab his ticket I was pushed on to the ground by a big man behind me. I got up and punched him and then I ran off to another pitch because I thought they wouldn’t want to hire a fighter. The last cage on the dock was run by a man with two chained dogs. Most of the hirers looked frightened of the mob but this man took his time. There were maybe two hundred men and he was taking twenty for the day. Men were climbing over one another’s shoulders to get at him. When he’d got the ones he wanted he threw the last five tickets out and let us fight for them. It was a test. I got one of them, though I had to half throttle another man to get it off him. I was wrong. They did like fighters.

  You got fivepence an hour and sometimes there was only two hours for you to do. I went back every day for a year but I never thought the game was worth the candle. I saw men broken in half for a few pennies. I saw one man collapse and die at the pay box at the end of the day for three shillings and sixpence.

  The man with the dogs was called Mr Riley and after about six months of casual he took me to one side and told me I could have regular work.

  ‘Can you read?’ he said.

  I thought I would be found out if I lied. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You’re from out the gutter, in’t you, Webb? You understand them men out there. They’re animals, ain’t they?’

  ‘Takes one to know one,’ I said. I didn’t care.

  He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘That’s what I like about you, you little bastard.’

  He used me as an errand boy and a spy. As well as being paid a penny extra, sixpence an
hour, to labour, I had to bring reports on all the workers, just give them to him by word of mouth and he gave me a tanner a time. I never asked what he did with the information but I think it was so he could pay them less. He took the ones who were strong in body and weak in mind and worked them half to death.

  I’d got a taste for beer and because I was bringing in money I could buy it in the pub. In the Turk’s Head one day I met the man my father worked for putting up boards. He was talking about men he knew who did bill-pasting which was better paid because there was a skill to it and I said I’d like to try it.

  He laughed. ‘You need to be able to read, you mug. Else you put the wrong bill up.’

  I thought about hitting him but I saw my father’s eye just in time. I finished my beer and went out into the street. I badly wanted this job and I had to think of a way. So I went down to Leggett’s cook-shop in Houndsditch and talked to the proprietor, Sam Leggett, who was a know-all and a villain.

  Leggett had some story of being the son of a gentleman the wrong side of the blanket, he was certainly a bastard. His cook-shop served convicts and ticket-of-leave men who were desperate to pick up some labour so they didn’t go back to thieving. He said he’d been a policeman for a time and got free lodging by going into houses that was unoccupied. He knew the ropes. Once he was put to lodge in this cook-shop while it was having repairs and then the owner died so he took over.

  I had to buy a bowl of his leg-of-beef soup to get his ear. I gave it to one of the convicts he lodges while they’re on their ticket of leave from prison.

  ‘Sam,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Leggett to you,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Leggett,’ I said, biting my lip, ‘I need to learn how to read.’

  When he’d had his laugh of me with all the men in his foul cook-shop he gave me the name of someone he thought could help.

  ‘Shall I write it down on a piece of paper for you, Billy?’ he said, wiping his fat greasy hands down the front of his apron. ‘Oh, no, silly me.’

  All the convicts laughed again and I had a mind to kick his shin and to hell with the reading.

  He gave me directions. ‘It’s right next door to the House of Accommodation,’ he said. ‘So if you sees nice ladies make sure you can afford it, young man.’

  The thing about Sam Leggett is that he did know everyone. Even the police used to come ask his advice, so I don’t know why the convicts trusted him. Somehow he kept the two groups apart. He told me there was a teacher fallen on hard times who would help me read if I could catch him sober.

  This teacher was a Mr Stevens who lived in a place called Eagle Court off Old Ford Road. It was low buildings round a yard where children were scrapping in the dirt. They had a cat tied up by its legs to a rail. I tracked him down to a front room on the first floor of one of the filthier houses. Knowing his taste from old Leggett, I’d took along a bottle of beer from the Turk’s Head. He was wearing a smart coat that had come undone along the seams and a waistcoat under. From the smell of him you could tell he hadn’t washed for a long time. He told me he was doing odd jobs at night and I asked him how much he made. He was getting twelve shillings a week and that was mostly going on drink. I’d saved up five pounds from my work at the docks and I said I’d pay him a shilling a night to stop in and teach me how to read. We shook hands on it but I had to bring a jug of beer every time too.

  My father and Arthur had moved to a house in Crow Street. There was another room there that came free when the old lady died. I went to see the rent collector who was called Worthington and told him I’d take it. I gave him four weeks in advance and it saved him a lot of trouble. It was a top floor and you had to go down to a privy in the yard at the back by the wash house but it wasn’t so bad. Where did I get all this money? Same as everyone else. I worked in the docks, took the extras that come along, and what I was short of I found ways of laying my hands on. I didn’t like to take watches and the like because then you had to go to a fence like old Abe Brown in Shadwell. I didn’t take money either, like a dip, it was more if there was something left lying around. Sometimes I took food instead. Those years in the Union taught me to watch and wait your time. When big numbers of people are being fed, that’s your best chance. No one can keep a watch on that much stuff coming in and out. So I’d go to an hospital. Or once I took a whole truckle of cheese from a cart round the back of St Joseph-in-the-West. I enjoyed that and it meant I could save my wages.

  Next time I went back there was to tell them I could provide for Alice Smith, and I fetched her back to my room in Crow Street.

  Alice was nineteen years old now and she wanted to make a home. For the first time in all those years we talked to each other good and proper and I heard about her life before she went into the Union. It was worse than mine because she had never had a father and the mother could never make ends meet taking in washing and then doing out-work for tailors and cigarette-makers and that. But in the Union the girls had had a teacher who knew something more than McInnes, so Alice knew how to read at least and she could help me after my lessons with Stevens. Together we used to practise writing. We used chalk on the walls of our room in Crow Street so when my pa came up one day for some tea he said, ‘It looks like you two’s living inside the covers of a book.’

  Alice and me had been living together for a year when I went back to the Turk’s Head and told the man I’d met there that now I could read and I would like to get a job as a bill-sticker. I had to pay five shillings for the introduction, but I met the supervisor, who was called Sidney Mitchell and lived in a tidy house by the canal in New North Road. I was taken on straight off for twenty-four shillings a week, which was enough to live on. There was a knack to getting a bill nice and smooth on a bumpy board but it wasn’t too hard and I was quick about it. The tricky thing was doing it up a ladder so’s you had to balance your paste and brush and bills in a wind and not fall off and break your ruddy neck. Some of the old chaps didn’t fancy it so I got to be a ladder man and by the end of the year I was making nearly two pounds a week, working twelve hours a day.

  Me and Alice got the back room as well and we had a sink for washing in, and after another year we got Alice’s ma out of the Union and put her in the back room. She was good as gold, brought in a bit with some sewing and that, kept the place tidy and you could say we were all sailing along pretty well.

  Alice was a lovely girl with her yellow hair and her plump bosom. We curled up in bed at night for warmth as much as anything, but it soon led to other things. She was always soft on me saying I was her hero because I rescued her from a life of misery but I told her she could have walked out any time, she didn’t have to wait for me. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I had no money and no home. What was I going to do – sleep under the arches of the Great Eastern?’

  I felt a lot of love for Alice Smith. She’d known me when I was dead out on my luck, just living through a minute at a time. But she was a right funny thing. She worked hard and she kept the rooms looking nice and she didn’t drink much, but she had a temper and when she lost it she was like another person. She could say rotten cruel things. She was like a cat in a corner and she just lashed out at whoever came near. It didn’t matter if it was me she loved most in the world, I’d still get it full in the face. Instead of calling me ‘Billybones’ or one of her pet names she’d start to call me William which was not a name anyone ever called me.

  Before long she was expecting and we were married in the church on Mare Street. She had a little girl called Liza and not long after that I got made supervisor even though I was only about twenty-three. So now I was making two pounds ten shillings a week and then we got Alice’s sister Nancy out of the Union too.

  I think we were happy. I never had the time to ask. Three years after Liza, Alice had another baby girl and we called her May. By the age of thirty I had all the rooms in the house in Crow Street, I could read and write properly and I let old Stevens have one of the rooms downstairs for a song. Arthur and me bu
ilt an extension on to the yard at the back, so we had a kitchen for the whole building next to the wash house. It was backing into the same thing on Grove Street and the man who lived there said could we put a door through between the two extensions, so when the police came he could run straight through our house. I said I’d agree to it if he paid me the cost of all my bricks and he coughed up seven pounds.

  Alice was looking after the girls and teaching Liza to read. My father had shown her how to make slippers and he could get offcuts of leather cheap so Alice had a little business going and our Liza could soon give her a hand.

  Then one day I came back about eight o’clock in the evening from Wanstead and Alice had been took very ill. She was sat in her favourite chair by the window but she couldn’t speak and one side of her body seemed to have froze up. The girls had been waiting for me to come home. They’d been down to ask old Stevens but he was dead drunk.

  To cut a long story short, we got her to the sick asylum which was really just another part of the old workhouse where they put them as was too worn out or ill to do anything more. When I took Nancy to see Alice there, she said, ‘We’re back where we started, aren’t we, Billy? In the workhouse.’

  Well, I wasn’t having this. I’d heard of a place that had started at the workhouse in Carshalton but they’d made it into a proper hospital and moved it to Putney. It was called the Hospital for Incurables and me and Nancy went over to have a look at it. We had a good talk with the doctors there and they said they would go and have a look at Alice in the sick asylum and then they would write and tell me what they thought.

  ‘Can you read, sir?’ said the doctor.

  ‘Of course I can read,’ I said. ‘What do you take me for?’ I’d dressed up in my best clothes.

  The doctor stammered a bit and said he was sure he could help.