Читать книгу Street Child - Berlie Doherty - Страница 6

Why You’ll Love This Book By Julia Golding

It could’ve been you – that might be the slogan on the movie poster if this story of an ordinary boy up against impossible odds was put on to the big screen. Street Child does something quite extraordinary. It dissolves the gap between just reading about the poverty in Victorian London and makes you live it. This is no dry history lesson, but an adventure into the dark underbelly of those times. Within these pages, you will find monsters and heroes, comedy and tragedy, all set against the backdrop of the scary docklands of London. As I read Berlie Doherty’s brilliant and moving book, I was constantly challenged. How would I have fared if I had been left an orphan with no money or friends to help me? Where would I have gone for love and help? What would you have done?

This is the crushing fate that the main character, Jim Jarvis, faces when his mother dies. He journeys through the horrors of the workhouse, finds brief happiness in a fragile existence helping a street seller and comes to a state close to slavery working on a coal boat where he is treated worse than his master’s dog. The book is full of vivid characters, some of whom could be plucked from a horror novel: Grimy Nick and his dog Snipe, Shrimps, the boy named for the toes showing through the end of his boots, the glittering but treacherous Juglini circus troupe. Acts of kindness – a hug from a woman in the workhouse, Rosie’s care for Jim, Josh on the Newcastle collier ship, the boys tending to a dying friend – these are rare moments that shine out from the darkness like diamonds in a shovel of coal.

But what really works is that you can’t help but fall in behind Jim, rooting for him to find a way out of the traps continually sprung on him. He’s not sweet – don’t expect an angelic Oliver Twist waiting for rescue. He’s a child of the streets with all the savvy that goes with that hard life. But you’ll feel for his overwhelming loneliness and when finally – thankfully – someone listens to his story, you’ll want to cheer.

Jim’s story makes you want to go out and change things so others don’t have to go through the same experience, therefore it comes as a shock to realise that he did exist. Maybe not this exact version of Jim, as Berlie Doherty admits, but it is true that Dr Barnado listened to a street child who sketched out a similar tale and then went on to set up the Barnado’s homes that offered such children a refuge.

Over a hundred years later, the homes still exist. But so does Jim. Maybe close to where you live in the stairwell of a housing estate, or further off in a slum in a developing country, there are millions of Jims and his sisters living today. I felt it was important to listen to Jim’s tale, but it did also make me wonder how many untold stories there are out there and what we can do about it. What do you think?

Julia Golding

Julia Golding is the author of over 13 novels for young people, including The Diamond of Drury Lane, a historical novel about a feisty orphan called Cat Royal, living in an Eighteenth century London theatre, which won the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize and the Nestlé Smarties Gold Medal in 2006. Before becoming a writer, she worked as a diplomat in Poland and later became a policy adviser for Oxfam, somehow fitting in a doctorate at Oxford and three children along the way.