James Greenwood: The True History of a Little Ragamuffin

Mrs. Winkship.

The difficulties of her business, however, offered no material hindrance to her enjoying herself in the ways of eating and drinking. In wet weather she sat in the passage; but while it remained fine overhead, neither breakfast, dinner, nor tea would drive her from the nosebag. She had no other lodger but a niece—a lanky, pock-marked young woman, who wore her hair much strained in a backward direction, and there secured in a great bunch. The frightful disease that had so seared her face had also robbed her of an eye, so that altogether she could not be called handsome; but, like her aunt, she was a good-hearted creature, and helped me to a meal many and many a time. She kept the key of the barrow-shed in Dog and Stile Yard, and undertook the house-cleaning for her aunt, and prepared her meals.

They were meals! Since that memorable time it has been my good fortune to partake of many dinners that might fairly be called excellent; but not one of them ever came up to those Mrs. Winkship used to partake of. At breakfast or at tea she was nothing very great; but at dinner she was splendid. The coke-measure, being of the half-bushel size, was of a convenient height for sitting on before a bottom-up apple-sieve. The apple-sieve was the dining-table; and certain as stroke of one o’clock, you might see Mrs. Winkship shift her coke-measure from the doorway to under the parlour-window, and hear her call out, “Ready, Martha, when you are!” and then Martha would raise the parlour-window, and arrange on the window-sill the salt and the vinegar, and the pepper and the mustard; then she would bring out the apple-sieve, already spread with a cloth as white as bran-new calico; and then she would bustle back into the parlour again, and hand the dinner out at the window to Mrs. Winkship.

It was always something with plenty of gravy in it—rich to look at, luscious, and smoking hot; but the most wonderful feature of Mrs. Winkship’s dinners was their smell. There are meats by nature delicious-smelling—roast pork, for instance; but—and how Martha managed it I could never, from that day to this, imagine—she seemed to possess the power of conferring an odour of baked crackling on the tamest meats; to conjure out of them a fragrance that seemed to cry aloud with a voice that could be heard from one end of the alley to the other. Certainly, fancy may have had a great deal to do with it; or that smelling being our share, we made the most of it; or it may possibly have happened that Mrs. Winkship’s dinner and its odour being altogether without competition, its virtues appeared more forcibly. Whether either of the above conjectures explains the fact, I can’t say; I only know that exactly as I have never seen such dinners, so have I never smelt any such. It was a common remark amongst us boys and girls, that it seemed to be always Sunday with Mrs. Winkship. After dinner she drank rum and water—hot, invariably. In the depth of winter, when the snow was on the ground, and she sat on the coke-measure wearing a hairy cap with ear-lappets, and wrapped in a coachman’s box-coat, she would drink it; in the summer time, when the cobble-stones of the alley were hot to naked feet, and the gutters too warm for a refreshing dabble in them, she drank it hot and strong as ever.

Did we respect Mrs. Winkship the less on account of this weakness? Did we despise her, and taunt her, and make fun of her? We did not. How could we, when we saw how jolly it made her, and considered what a profitable weakness it was to us? We used to fetch it for her, three pen’orth at the time. We used to lurk in the shadow of doorways, and peep from window-blinds, keeping a sharp eye on her till the arrival of the moment for action—the moment when she waddled back from the parlour window to the doorway with her seat, and sat herself down thereon, with her fat arms contentedly folded on her lap. We used to take it in turns. The way was to stroll from your lurking-place and saunter towards her in the most undesigning manner possible, and when you approached close enough to address her innocently, and as though the thought had that moment popped into your head, asking if she happened to want anything fetched. Her way, then, was to look up in an astonished manner, and as though she thought you had made a mistake,—taken her for somebody else, possibly.

“Did you speak to me, boy?”

“Yes ’m. I’m going into Tummel Street to fetch some treacle, in a minute, for my mother; I thought perhaps you might want some tea, or something’m.”

“No thanky, boy; my tea I’ve got, and my milk will be here presently. I don’t think I stand in need of anything.”

When it came to this, the way of the boy was to thank her very civilly, and to look perfectly satisfied, and as though he well knew that since Mrs. Winkship was all right in the matters of tea and milk, she could not by any earthly possibility require anything else. If, on the contrary, the boy acted differently; if he winked, or looked knowing merely, and grinned as much as to say, “Why, what’s the use of carrying on with all this jolly nonsense? You know what you always have and what you want, and I know what you always have and what you want; give me the halfpence, and say no more about it.” I say if he said, or even looked, anything of this sort, he would have been sent about his business in a twinkling, and scratched out of the lady’s good books for no end of time; but if he managed the business neatly, and turned away promptly and respectfully when he had got Mrs. Winkship’s answer, it was next to a certainty that she would exclaim presently—

“Oh, ah! now you are here, boy, you may as well run round to Mr. Piggot’s for me. You know Piggot’s?”

“Piggot’s! Piggot’s! Oh, yes, I know now. Sign of the ‘Dog and Stile,’ I think it is, mum.”

“That’s it. Go you there and ask for three-pen’orth of best rum, hot, with a bit of lemon; and there’s a brown for yourself.”

After the ice was thus broken, the business to be transacted during the remainder of the afternoon was comparatively easy, and consisted in keeping a watchful eye on her liquor, and, almost before she had recovered her breath from the finishing gulp, which was invariably a large one, to be seen hovering in her vicinity. I have earned as much as twopence-halfpenny in this way in a single afternoon.

This certainly was more than the average daily earnings of Mrs. Winkship’s messengers—more, indeed, than I sometimes took of her in the course of an entire week, because I nearly always had the baby in my arms. But I was always a bit of a favourite with her; and the good afternoon I speak of was once when I was quite free, in consequence of my stepmother going out to a tea-meeting and taking little Polly with her.

Still I can declare, and with a clear conscience, that it was not on any such mercenary grounds as how much I should be out of pocket that Mrs. Winkship’s ‘probable death troubled me. My concern was what would they do with her, supposing she should die? Next to burying her at the water-butt end of the alley, where the rent-collector lived, and which was consequently much the quietest and best-behaved end, the only way out of the difficulty, as it appeared to me, was to fix a tall crane and sling her over the house-tops into Turnmill Street—a notion no doubt put into my head by what I had observed of the crane and its action amongst the wharves and bacon-warehouses in Thames Street, and elsewhere in the neighbourhood of Billingsgate.

I am glad to be able to state, however, that I was spared the spectacle of Mrs. Winkship’s removal out of Fryingpan Alley, whatever was its nature. On the memorable morning of my flight from my birthplace, as I ran out of the alley in such a tremendous fright, I passed her enthroned on the coke-measure, humming as was her wont, and looking as hale and hearty as her best friend could wish. As I darted out of the archway, I nearly ran foul of a boy bearing in his hand threepen’orth of hot rum. But she has gone somehow. When, but a few months since, filled with the hope of meeting at least one or two of my very limited number of friends of past times, I went to have a peep at the old place, my first glance up the alley was for the familiar coke-measure; but it was not. My inquiries were vain. Nobody could tell me what had become of the kind old barrow-woman; indeed, as well as I could make out, no one living there at the present day had ever seen or heard of such a person. She was before their time. Nor was this very surprising, after all. Death was never for long a stranger in our alley. His seeds were sown broadcast on that fruitful bit of ground, and the grim reaper often came a-mowing there. Nineteen years is a long time.