Читать книгу People - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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GENERALLY speaking, there is no mystery about birth, even in the least creditable circumstances. The most mysterious thing that can happen to any man is not to be born at all. Less mystery why, swathed (one presumes) in voluminous shawls, one should be carried from Ashburnham Road to a little court hard by the Deptford Creek which separates the Royal Town of Greenwich from the unsalubrious purlieus of Deptford.

I was adopted at the age of nine days. Otherwise there might have been for me a romantic upbringing in Greenwich Workhouse or one of those institutions whither motherless and fatherless persons of nine days old and having no visible means of support are brought to maturity. Happily, there was a philanthropist who heard of my plight, and having for the workhouse the loathing which is the proper possession of the proud poor, he dispatched Clara to fetch me,

"She's adopted", said Mr. Freeman, an autocrat in his way.

Nor when he discovered that he had been mistaken as to my sex did he vary his humane decision.

In name and fact he was Freeman—a liveryman of the Haberdashers' Company; a Freeman of the City of London—he could trace his ancestry back for five hundred years through family and city records. And he was a fish porter at Billingsgate Market. A stocky, big-featured man, with a powerful nose and a chin beard such as Abraham Lincoln wore.

I never saw him write anything but his name. I never saw him read anything but the New Testament—a big, calf-bound volume with leaves that were yellow from age. He used to "break out" about twice a year and drink brandy. Then was the Testament laid reverently aside, and he would fight any man of any size and beat him. Once he fought for two hours, perilously, on the edge of a deep cutting.

He had the strength of an ox; balanced on the flat leather hat he wore in business hours, he could carry heavy cases of fish, and they were no more to him than such chaplets as the patricians wore.

He never did a crooked thing in his life. His wife was the gentlest mother that ever lived. She could not write, but she could read. Mostly she read aloud the murders in the Sunday newspapers, and we discussed historic criminals—Peace, Palmer (whose trial she remembered) and such moderns as Mrs. Maybrick. I loved them and they loved me. They are dead, and I am the poorer for it.

I remember dimly the sinking of the Princess Alice. Greenwich had a maritime flavour in those days. It was a town of blue-jerseyed men, and in every other house in our neighbourhood was the model of a full-rigged ship. And over most parlour mantelpieces hung a collection of brightly coloured china rolling-pins, the exact significance of which I have never understood, except that they had to do with foreign travel.

My first vivid recollection in life is one of a sort of possessive pride in prison vans. The gloomy "Black Maria" that rumbled up the Greenwich Road every afternoon. I recollect giving the infants' class at St. Peter's School a miss and toddling up Trafalgar Street to see the gloomy tumbril pass in the rain, with a shiny warder sitting on a little knifeboard behind and a top-hatted driver under the tarpaulin apron in front.

I think Young Harry was in the van on his way to Wandsworth. And Young Harry was my adopted "brother." All his life he hated policemen and he had a passion for fighting them. Later, Tom took up this hobby, and they were both in Wandsworth together when, as a very small boy, I walked all the way to Wandsworth Prison to see it with my own eyes. I had a very proud feeling about Wandsworth Prison—I felt that it belonged to me; just as one feels towards the handsome residences which are occupied by rich relations.

Neither Tom nor Harry did anything much worse than assault the constabulary—but they did this so consistently that they were scarcely ever at home. Harry, lean of body and face, with a pair of deep-set dark eyes; Tom, fair and handsome: they have passed over. Drink killed them in the lifetime of their father.

"Young Dick", Harry used to say to me in all solemnity (one of my names is "Richard"), "if you don't eat up your pudden, how d'you expect to hit coppers?"

George Freeman heard of the discreditable exploits of his sons with scarcely a ruffle.

"Father, Harry's got three months."

He would look up from his large-print Testament. "Do him good", was his invariable comment—he was a loud conversationalist; in such moments as these he shouted.

Queer that he and his gentle wife should rear such children as they had. He lived a Christian life, was just to all men, fearless—he could not lie.

At three o'clock every morning, winter and summer, he left his house for Billingsgate Market. When I was old enough I sometimes accompanied him. Our way led through the street along which runs the boundary wall of Guy's. At exactly the same spot every morning he stopped, took off his hat (I must do the same) whilst he prayed shortly for all those who suffered in those long wards. He was an inmate once and brought away the legend of an infallible ointment which cured everything. I went through the early part of my boyhood smeared with it, for he believed that the cure of such inevitable trials as measles, scarlet fever, and indeed any disease, lay in the treatment of the symptoms. There are many earnest and learned social reformers who enjoy the same delusion.

Down Love Lane, off Eastcheap, was a dimly-lit coffee-shop, redolent of fish. Here a man, and even a boy, could feast royally for threepence—wonderful coffee in cone-shaped mugs, and new bread and country butter. How often, wedged between the porters, have I sat, my jaws working, my ears cocked for that flow of language which is Billingsgate's pride. And I heard nothing, for I was a child and your labouring man is a gentleman. I suspect that they choked back many lurid illustrations and comments—I have seen warning glances flash from man to man. And when once a large red-faced porter forgot himself: "There's a child present!" said half a dozen voices in chorus.

How those men worked! Their hobnailed boots rattling over the slippery pavement of the market—along the planks that spanned between wharf and the G.I.C. boats that lay alongside. I have stood on the quay hour after hour in the glory of a summer morning. In the chill of winter, watching the boats. Ice-rimed boats from Grimsby, tubby eelboats from Holland, big ship and little ship. "Collectors" that had come rolling from the Dogger Bank with their holds packed with silvery fish that was officially "alive."

Mrs. Freeman hated the market that she had never seen. She hated it for the toll it had taken of her sons. It was to her a Fagin's kitchen of iniquity.

"Never work in the market, Dick", she warned me.

My career was mapped out. I was to be properly educated—which meant that I was not to leave school at the age of ten, as the others had done.

Billingsgate has for me only one unhappy memory. George Freeman had a weakness for hats. There used to be an old Jewish pedlar—one supposes he died in Park Lane worth his million—who carried hundreds of second-hand hats of all sizes except mine. Old George favoured a Derby hat with a high crown such as Mr. Churchill made unpopular. It was something between a top-hat and a billycock. He used to pay as much as threepence for them. How often have I, with a sinking heart, watched him approach with a look of triumph on his rugged, handsome face, and a newly acquired hat in his hand! How often have I sat in the dimly-lit coffee-shop in Love Lane whilst a committee of porters have folded strips of newspaper to stuff inside the lining that my small head might not be altogether extinguished! Mrs. Freeman invariably thought there was one layer of paper packing too many for my comfort, and took it out.

A new hat meant chapel. With a plaid scarf round my neck and the atrocious dark tower supported on my ears, I must accompany him to the Wesleyan kirk, there to be bored for one hour and forty minutes by a superman I could not hear, probing into mysteries which I could not understand.

Church is a terrible experience for children—a cruel experience. A lecture on Chinese metaphysics or Arch-Masonry, or Einstein's Theory of Relativity, is as intelligible. How bewilderingly painted, enamelled, covered with mystic signs and obscured by smoky vapours, is the simple Jesus to the average poor child who hears of Him through the medium of the grown-up's pulpit!

I slept in the next room to "father" and "mother", and every night brought the inevitable exchange:

"Night, Dick."

"Night, father."

"Said yer prayers?"

"Yes, father."

Pause.

"You'll go to hell if you don't."

"Yes, father."

A longer pause.

"I don't know that you will."

School and the promised education came at the age of six. I learnt to sign my name "Dick Freeman." George gave me a penny and carried the scrawl to the market for the admiration of his friends.

School. A big yellow barracks of a place, built (or rumour lied) on an old rubbish-pit into which the building was gradually sinking. We used to put chalk marks on the wall near the ground to check the subsidence. And every morning when I turned the corner of Reddin's Road, Peckham, and saw the Board School still standing where it did, I was filled with a helpless sense of disappointment. And the fires that were never lit, and the evil blackboard where godlike teachers, whose caligraphy is still my envy, wrote words of fearful length. The drone of the class-rooms, the humourless lessons, the agonies of mental arithmetic and the seeming impossibilities of the written variety. There were golden days—poetry days. We learnt the "Inchcape Rock", of that Sir Ralph the Rover who sailed away

"And scoured the seas for many a day.

At last grown rich with plunder's store,

He steered his course for Scotland's shore."

And Casabianca, and Brave Horatius, and so by degrees to the Master. I learnt whole scenes of Macbeth and Julius Caesar and Hamlet, and could—and did—recite them with gusto on every and any excuse.

There was one very bright day indeed. Mr. Newton, the class master, initiated a practice which I hope is still a feature of elementary education: he read to us—and chose the "Arabian Nights." The colour and beauty of the East stole through the foggy windows of Reddin's Road School. Here was a magic carpet indeed that transported forty none too cleanly little boys into the palace of the Caliphs, through the spicy bazaars of Bagdad, hand in hand with the king of kings.

Out of school, life ran normally. Up before breakfast, and with a mat bag ranging the Old Kent Road for the day's provisions. (I did most of the shopping.) A pound of sixpenny "pieces" from Mills the butcher, two-penn'orth of potatoes from the greengrocer's, a parsnip and a penn'orth of carrots—I came to have a violent antipathy to Irish stew. "Pieces" are those odds and ends of meat, the by-products of the butchering business. I was something of a connoisseur in pieces; could tell at a glance the tainted "end", guessed unerringly the depth of fat in a scraggy nob of mutton. One could buy fourpenny pieces, but only the very poor touched these. They were almost low, and one lost caste if detected buying them.

The clean, decent poor! Their women are more wonderful than the daughters of kings. I've shopped with them; stood at their front doors talking to them—they seldom asked you inside for fear you saw their makeshifts. Their lace curtains white as snow, the perennial geraniums behind the polished glass of their front windows, their chicken-houses and pigeon-lofts in the back yard above which on Tuesdays and Wednesdays waved and fluttered the spotless banners of their decency.

You saw their women hanging out the washing: stout women dying of cancer and smiling through it. Gripping their clothes-pegs in their teeth, propping up lines, arresting their labours to wipe wet foreheads with wetter arms and exchange a jest with the woman next door. Working, bearing and dying. The insurance man calls once a week that they may make provision for a decorous burying—their very ambitions are headed towards the grave.