James Greenwood - The True History of a Little Ragamuffin

“But I haven’t got no boots nor stockings,” said I, “nor yet no cap.”

“Well, no more hain’t they—yet no shirts, half on ’em. I spose you expect to be togged up afore you goes out to get a livin’? P’r’aps you’d like a blue coat with basket buttons and a chimbly-pot hat?”

I said something about looking respectable.

“Yah!” exclaimed he, with disgust. “Don’t talk to me about ’spectability. Don’t you think that ’spectability will ever get you a livin’, cos, if you do, you ’re mistaken. The boys I’ m a-speaking of carries fish, and tater sieves, and minds carts and barrows; and don’t you know if you wore kid gloves and white chokers at that there sort of work you might get ’em spilte? A pretty feller you are to talk about what you will stand and what you won’t.”

And, with increasing disgust, he threw on his hairy cap, lit his short pipe, and walked off.

At the time I had this conversation with my father, Mrs. Burke had been my stepmother for about six months, and I was about seven years old. When I told him that I did not mean to put up with Mrs. Burke’s cruelty much longer, I meant it. Every day it grew more and more intolerable, especially since the night when my father came home and found her helplessly drunk, and lying in the middle of the room, and gave her a slap or so about the head by way of sobering her. Up to this time she had always kept up an appearance of a sort of decency before him; but now this all went by the board, and her treatment of me in his presence was little or nothing better than when he was away. Often, indeed, should I have gone hungry had it not been for the kindness of Mrs. Winkship, the person mentioned in the early part of this history. Mrs. Winkship had known my mother for many years, and invariably spoke of her as “as good a gal as ever wore shoe-leather. She was as much too good for your father, Jimmy,” she used to say, “as he is too good for the carneying two-faced Irish vagabond who fished for him and hooked him.” Her acquaintance with my stepmother was as of long standing as with my mother. I told Mrs. Winkship about the pair of handsome slippers she had given my father, telling him that they belonged to the dead Mr. Burke. I thought Mrs. Winkship would never have done laughing. “Slippers, indeed!” said she; “why, the poor fellow would even carry his Sunday coat about all the week in his tool basket, knowing that she would pawn it for gin if he left it at home. Jim will find her out one day, and then war-hawks to her.”

I used to tell all my troubles to Mrs. Winkship. She used to smuggle me into her back kitchen, and give me a tuck-out of anything which might have been left over from dinnertime. Many and many a time has she held my baby for an hour at a stretch while I went off for a game.

I asked Mrs. Winkship what a “barker” was, and she told me. I Was wrong in supposing that it was anything to do with sheep-driving. A barker, I was told, was a boy who went along with a barrowman, wheeling his barrow to market, minding it while his master was buying his goods, pushing up behind the load as it was wheeled home, and afterwards going with his master on his “rounds,” helping him to bawl out what he had to sell.

I didn’t like to let Mrs. Winkship into the secret that I had thoughts of going into the barking line, still I wanted to get out of her all she knew about it.

“Now, how little was the smallest barker you ever saw, ma’am?” I asked her.

“How little? Why, I’ve seen ’em so little that their heads would come no higher than your shoulder,” replied she; “but bless your innocent heart, what’s the size got to do with it? It’s the call—the voice, you know—that does the business. You might be as big as Goliar and as old as Methusalem, but if you didn’t have a proper sort of voice you’d never fetch your salt.”

And being in a chatty humour, as she generally was after dinner, and when about the third “brown” had been earned of her, she began to talk exactly as I wished her to. She told me that she had known many costermongers, good buyers and good sellers, and yet who were always kept in the background through having a hoarse, or a gruff, or a hollow voice.

“Of course,” said she, “there are things—common things, such as taters, and onions, and cabbages—which are sure to go in whatever voice they ’re called, if so be that a man has anything like a reg’lar round, because people knows his time and looks out for him; but with goods which comes promisc’ous, and which are only to be got off by forcin’, it’s different. Now, there’s fish. There may be fish to-morrow, and there mayn’t. Even the salesmen in the market can’t say for certain. And then, it may be cheap, or it may be dear. Say it’s cheap. Say it’s soles, and that you buy a lot of ’em. How many do you think you’ll sell if you go crawling along with ’em, growling out, ‘Here’s soles, good soles!’ in the same voice as does for turnips or taters? Why, you won’t take enough to buy fat to fry your own supper in. You must put your heart into it, and try and make yourself believe how wonderful cheap your soles are, till you get into quite a perspiration about ’em. You drive sudden and sharp round corners of streets, and at the same moment you pipe up, ‘Dover soles! lovely soles! splendid soles! Big as plaice, and all alive! all alive! all alive!’ and this you keep up, driving along brisk and keeping up the tune. Presently you set your eyes on your soles, and see a pair which is so large, and so lovely, that you really can’t help stopping, which you do as sudden as you turned the corner. ‘Oh, I say,’ says you, dropping the tune and taking to conversation, ‘here’s a pair of whackers! blowed if they don’t get finer the lower we get into the pad! Just look here, ladies—there’s a pair of soles for you!—three-pence!’

“That’s how to sell soles!” chuckled Mrs. Winkship, bringing her fat hands together with a hearty spank to illustrate the manner in which the “pair” should be joined at the very instant their price was disclosed. “It’s the same with fruit. Bless your soul, there’s a way of crying your fruit, so as to make everybody’s mouth water that hears you—specially stone-fruit Why, when I was a gal,” continued Mrs. Winkship, “I was wonderful good at greengages; as good at anything mind you as here and there one, but at ’gages I topped ’em all. It was only the voice, and knowing how to pick your words; ‘juicy greengage!’ ‘blooming greengage!’ ‘meller greengage for eating or preserving!’ Many a hot summer’s afternoon have I made a pretty pocket, with-only just a silk handkercher over my shoulders, and half a sieve of ’gages under my arm.”

Was mine a musical voice? I didn’t ask Mrs. Winkship at the time the above narrated conversation took place, but the subject remained pretty constantly in my mind. My stepmother was considered a pretty singer, and there were several of her tunes which I knew completely, and used to sing to the baby of nights; still because I knew and could follow, at least to my own satisfaction, every turn in “Young Riley” and the “Bould Soger Boy,” it was by no means certain that I had a voice for Dover soles or greengage plums.

Had I? Never had the question presented itself so forcibly to me as on the morning on which I had expressed to my father my determination to submit no longer to the pummelling of my stepmother. The worst of it was, my only chance of escape from it, as it appeared to me, was to become a barker, and that, according to Mrs. Winkship, on whom I placed every reliance, could never be unless my voice was suitable. It wasn’t easy to test it. I tried several calls under my breath with tolerable success, but was I justified in taking the important step I meditated on such inconclusive grounds? So all-engrossing was the subject as I sat on the doorstep with my sister Polly in my arms, that presently she made an unchecked spring, and went with a crash, and a squall, rolling over the stones.