A Possible Life (13 page)

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 built 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.

I said, ‘You’d better help, doctor, because she’s the kind of poor patient you should be having.’

The long and the short of it was they come over and took one look at her and said, Yes, that’s one for us – and me and Nancy packed up some clothes for her and we took her on the omnibus along the riverside. I don’t know if my Alice knew what was going on at all. Her eyes were staring straight ahead
and
she hardly ever seemed to blink. She needed help being fed and dressed.

Nancy said we was happy to keep her at home and she thought Alice would prefer that, but the doctor said they might be able to do something for her in the hospital and anyway Alice didn’t know what was going on. I wondered why they thought they could cure her in a hospital for Incurables, but I was glad she would be looked after and kept warm. They said to leave her for a month to settle in before we went again to visit.

We gave it five weeks, then the three of us – me and Nancy and her and Alice’s ma, who was getting on a bit by now – set off again for Putney.

Well, the hospital still looked pretty new and the corridors had just been distempered. The gas jets were all working and the stone steps were clean. I wouldn’t deny that it was gloomy – it was a big old place, like they expected a lot of people in London to have Incurable illness. But the fact of the matter was that this hospital was a better place than any of us Smiths or Webbs had ever lived in before. The patients were common people like us but the food was uncommon plentiful. The nurses had clean clothes and starched headdresses. The doctors wore dark suits and neckties. Nancy’s mouth was hanging open as she looked it all up and down.