James Greenwood - The True History of a Little Ragamuffin

“Come here, my dear,” said she, gripping me by the arm and pulling me towards her, as she sat on her chair. “You recollect the divil’s prank you had it on your tongue’s tip to play me lasht night?” She spoke in allusion to the threatened sack exposure.

I made her no answer, but she could of course see that I well understood what she meant.

“You thought you might dare me becase ov yer father being prisint! You thought bekase of me winkin’ and coaxin’, and givin’ you sugar, that I was afeard you’d open your ugly mouth! Hould up your head, you sarpint, and look at me! Listen here, now. You’ve got the ould un in yer, and I mane to take it out of yer. I’m goin’ to be alwis wid you, to look afther and feed you; you’ll get nayther bite nor sup but when it’s plisant to me to give it you. So mind your behayvour. Dare so much as make a whisper to yer father of what I say or what I do, and I’ll make your shkin too hot to hould you.”

And seeing how hopeless it was to show fight against such a creature, I am sure I did mind my behaviour. I did her bidding in every particular, and fetched her little private errands, and kept her secrets faithfully; but she didn’t treat me at all well. If she didn’t make my skin too hot to hold me, it was not for want of trying. From breakfast time to within a few minutes of my father’s coming home, I was kept at it, drudge, drudge, drudge, as hard as any charwoman. Indeed, no charwoman would have engaged to perform the many various jobs that were put on me. The baby was my chief care. I was either lugging her about the alley, or sitting on my stool at the street door, or in the back yard, (Mrs. Burke could not bear to hear the baby cry,) hushing her to sleep; and when, after long and patient exertion, this was accomplished, and she was laid in her cradle, I was set to making waxed ends for Mrs. Burke’s sack-making, or fetching up coals, or sifting cinders, or slopping about with a house-flannel and scrubbing-brush. Of one sort and another, there was always employment found for me from the time little Polly went to sleep until she woke up again; and all without so much as a kind word or look even.

She was a wicked woman. She used to buy gin with the housekeeping money, and threaten me with all sorts of dreadful punishments if I did not promise to tell my father, should he ask me, what a beautiful dinner I had had. She was artful to that extent, that she would send me to the broken victual shop at Cowcross for a penny or a three-halfpenny bone, and this she would place in the cupboard, so that my father, when he came home, might see it, and believe that it was what was left from the nice little joint we had partaken of at dinner-time. She was always very particular in telling me to be sure and bring a small bone or bones, such as those of the loin of mutton, or a dainty spare-rib of pork, or a blade-bone of lamb—any bone, indeed, that might belong to a joint of meat of a sort that might be bought as a dinner for two persons. Once I recollect bringing back a single lean rib-bone of beef of at least twenty inches in length, which was, of course, ill-suited to her fraudulent designs, and so exasperated her that she banged me about the head with it, and then packed me off to the rag-shop to sell it for a halfpenny. I was terribly hungry at the time, and what little meat there was on the bone was very crisp, and brown, and tempting, and I begged leave to eat it; but she wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t want it herself. She would eat scarcely an ounce of meat from Monday till Saturday, liking gin so much better.

She would even go out of her way to do me an injury in the matter of food. There was always a bit of something hot got ready for my father’s supper, and when—as happened at least four days out of seven—I had no more than a crust of bread between breakfast and tea, I would contrive to make myself conspicuous, when he sat down to eat, in hopes of getting a bit. If Mrs. Burke’s back was turned, I was pretty sure to come in for a mouthful; but so sure as she caught my father in the act of helping me from his plate, she would instantly interfere.

“For the love of Hivin, man, hould your hand, unless you’d have him stretched on a bed of sickness wid over-ateing. He is a very dacent boy, Jim, but his gluttony at his meals is somethin’ awful. ’Twas ony this blissed dinner-time—and there he is, and can’t deny it—that he was helped three times to biled mutton, and each time enough for a man and his dog, as the sayin’ is.”

“And yet you comes a-prowlin’ round and a-showin’ your teeth at me as though you hadn’t tasted a bit for a week, you greedy young willin!” my father would observe, savagely. “You ’re better fed than taught—that’s what you are. Be off to bed, now, before you ketch a larruping.”

And to bed I would go, an empty-bellied and wretched little boy, not daring to utter a word in explanation.

One day. she served me an especially villainous trick, and one that is among the greenest of a hundred such in my memory. A woman called on Mrs. Burke one morning shortly after breakfast, and they drank gin between them until every farthing of the half-crown my father had left to buy our dinner and his supper was consumed. When the woman was gone, and she recovered from her half-fuddled condition, Mrs. Burke began to feel alarm. The money to buy my father’s supper must be raised somehow; but how? Her other gown—the flat-irons—the china butter-boat, even—were already at the “leaving shop,” and there was no one in the neighbourhood that would lend to her, or trust her with their goods without cash down. Presently she went out, and in a little while returned in a condition of sad distress, and took to rocking herself in a chair, and crying and moaning in a way that went to my heart to hear.

“Ow, what ’ll I do? what ’ll I do?” cried she.

“Your daddy ’ll be comin’ home by and by, Jimmy, dear, and there ’ll be no supper for him, and he’ll be beating me till I’m dead. Ow! what ’ll a poor lone craytur do widout a frind in the world to help her?”

I never could bear to see any one crying. Had Mrs. Burke intimated to me with tearless eyes and in her usual manner of talking, that there was danger of my father falling on her and beating her to death, whatever answer I might have made, I should undoubtedly have thought in my inmost mind that it was exactly what I wished; and I verily believe that I wouldn’t have given a button—certainly not a “livery” one—to have turned him from his purpose. But her moaning and weeping, and calling me Jimmy dear, was altogether more than I could bear; and approaching her, I tried to console her, and told her how willingly I would help her if I knew how.

“So you say, Jimmy; so you say; but you don’t mane it,” replied Mrs. Burke, wringing her hands in the extremity of her woe. “How can yer mane it, Jimmy, afther me bad tratement of you?—which I sore repint of, me little jewel, and sorra a bit will I ever raise a finger against you agin, Jimmy, while I’ve a ar-rm hanging to me body.”

“You only tell me how I can help you, and you shall see, ma’am,” said I, eagerly, and catching hold of her speckled hand, so carried away was I to see her so filled with remorse and penitence; “you only just tell me how, now!”

“Shure, and there is a way of helpin’ me, Jimmy, me little fellow, but it goes agin me to ask it of you. Still, you are a good boy for so kindly offerin’, and here’s three-ha’pence to spend and do just as you like wid.”

I suppose she must have borrowed the three-half-pence when she went out, as I know I took her last fourpence for the last quartern o’ gin I fetched. Her generosity completely astonished me: never before, since she had been my father’s housekeeper, had she given me so much as a single farthing. Now, more than ever, I pressed her to tell me in what way I could help her out of her scrape.