James Greenwood: The True History of a Little Ragamuffin

In every harvest-field, however, there is always an odd nook or corner, be it never so small a one, that the scythe passes by, leaving a few stalks standing. In one such corner in the neighbourhood of Fryingpan Alley still stood and flourished the shop of the bird-fancying barber who has shaved my father hundreds of times. I, too, had had some dealings with him, though not of a character to invoke the use of the tools of his proper trade. The transactions that had taken place between us were of a purely commercial sort. Once I bought a guinea-pig of him for fivepence; and on another occasion a pigeon, his property, flew in at our window, and was captured by me and returned to the barber on payment of fourpence—the pigeon ransom as fixed by Act of Parliament.

Mr. Slaney, however, had no recollection of me. My brown face, more than half-covered by an Australian-grown beard, passed with him as a perfectly strange face. When I asked him what had become of Mrs. Winkship, he replied that no such a name was known in that locality. I pursued the subject, however, and urged him to rouse his memory, telling him that I was actuated by something more than idle curiosity, (as indeed I was,) and hinted that I should consider the smallest scrap of information cheap at half-a-crown; when it suddenly flashed to Mr. Slaney’s mind that he knew Mrs. Winkship and what had become of her. Thirteen years ago that very month, my informant assured me—and old Wagstaff, the basket-maker on the opposite side of the way, could have corroborated his statement if he hadn’t died last August—Mrs. W. was arrested for shop-lifting, and the case being very clear against her, she was convicted and transported beyond the seas for the term of fifteen years. I paid the unscrupulous story-teller the half-crown; but neither at the time, nor since, could I bring myself to believe a word that he told me. The bare notion of that great, fat, tender-hearted creature “lifting” or carrying away anything from a shop (unless by sheer weight she had carried away the flooring) was too ridiculous to be seriously thought of for a single moment

In other respects, however, and as before stated, the alley was in pretty much the same condition as when I had left it. From beside this window hung the rope of onions; from the next, the slabs of dried cod; and from the next, several spits of fresh herrings undergoing the process of conversion to “Yarmouth bloaters.” As in the old times, too, it was “washing day” with several of the inhabitants; and likewise, as of old, there were the tattered counterpanes, and scraps of orange-coloured blanketing, and the patched shirts, and the flannel jackets, drying on lines stretched out from the upper window-sills by means of regular clothes-props, or make-shift broomsticks.

As of old, too, there at the upper end of the alley was the great leaky water-butt, and it being nine o’clock in the morning, the water was “on,” and the old-fashioned pushing, and driving, and skirmishing for water, was also “on” at full blast. Nineteen years had not improved the water supply in Fryingpan Alley. Three-quarters of an hour was the time during which the precious fluid was kept flowing from the main, and in order to make the most of it, the tap at the bottom of the butt was wholly withdrawn, and the water made to spout out in a tremendous way.

The rush about the butt was the rush of old, or as like it as peas in one pod. There were the big, bony, slatternly women slipshod, and with their hair uproarious, each grasping the handle of her pail as though she would lief use the water vessel as a weapon of war, against anyone who should have the hardihood to insinuate that hers was not the next turn. There was the big hulking Irish boy, with his saucepan to be filled, pushing and elbowing amongst the little girls with their pots and kettles, and treading with his cruel hob-nailed boots on their poor naked toes, to make them get out of the way; and once again, here comes the great bully costermonger, with his oily side locks, and his yellow silk neckerchief big as a bolster, and his short pipe cocked insolently at the comer of his mouth, hauling along a great sack full of oysters. He doesn’t hurry himself in the least He comes along leisurely, making straight for the water-butt; and seeing him coming—hearing the clatter of his clout boots on the stones—the hulking Irish boy, the little drudges with their naked feet, even the bony pail-grasping shrews fall back, away from the water-spout; or, if the boldest of them ventures on another potful, she leans over for it smirking cringingly at the approaching beast with the oyster-bag. How can they do otherwise? The approaching beast is “Flash Jack.” He has the strength of a horse, and the ferocity of a bull-dog. Nothing less than three policemen ever took Jack to the station-house; there is not a man in the alley that Flash Jack cannot lift by the hips, and throw him over his shoulder as easy as he can break a tobacco pipe. If you don’t like his “goings on,” you are free to take it out of him—any two of you! He has been known to send four moderately able men flying, but then he used his feet, and bit a great deal. Now, who will dispute flash Jack’s right to monopolise the water-spout just so long as it pleases him? Who will peril his pan or pail by leaving it in Jack’s way? No one. They are mum as mice. Stay a little while, my friend. If you live long enough you will be growing older by and by, and there are growing up in the alley other Flash Jacks, who one day will then fall on you and give you just such a horrible beating as I suppose you gave the Flash Jack that I used to know, and ever afterwards you will shuffle in and out of the alley, afraid almost to assert that your life is your own. You will be glad to stand aside with your few whelks or winkles in your little basket, and wait until every one is served, even down to the hulking Irish boy. And serve you right, Jack. I’d give sixpence to be there and see it.

Just as it used to be, all this, and among my earliest recollections. Are they the very earliest? Up the alley, and down the alley, I search for something that may suggest earlier, but am unsuccessful, until I begin to scan the houses from top to bottom—until my eyes light on the third-floor windows of Number Nineteen, and it is like returning to the port from which I made sail for my first voyage. The windows are exactly the same. There may be a brown paper patch or so the less, or a rag plug or two the more, than in the old days; but brown paper and old rags are the same all the world over, and as I look up, they are so much the self-same windows, that at that moment were the sash to be lifted, and an uproarious red head protruded therefrom, and there was to proceed from it a shrill hoarse voice, screaming—“Jimmy! Jimmy, ye shpalpeen! I ’ll have the blood of ye if ye don’t git off that shtep this minnut, and walk about wid her and shtop her owlin!” I should not be very much astonished. I have been cajoled, and counselled, and abused from those windows many a score of times. In the room to which they belong, my sister Polly was born, when I was little more than five years old. In that room with the paper-patched windows my mother died, shutting her eyes on the world and its troubles within about fifteen minutes after my sister Polly opened hers.

Let me, however, hasten to disabuse the mind of the reader who imagines that the red-haired woman with the shrill voice was my mother. She was my step-mother. Of the kind of woman that my mother was, I retain but a half-and-half sort of remembrance. As I look up at the tattered windows, another face besides the hateful face just alluded to, appears there; dim, however, as though seen through a curtain of gauze. It is the face of a woman, with dark hair and eyes certainly, and a pale face; but whether she is pretty, or ugly as sin, is more than I can say. That is what I mean when I say that I don’t recollect what sort of woman she was. As to the sort of mother she was to me, the feeling of love I still cherish toward her, taken in consideration with the short time I knew her, is sufficient to settle that. One thing, however, I never could make out. If she was the good and worthy woman I am ready to vouch, how was it that my father was so continually rowing with her, and calling her evil names? Why did he beat her, and make her cry so? One name in particular he took to calling her some months before Polly was born, and that was “Judas.” He would shake his great fist in her face and grind his teeth, and call her “Judas! Judas!” as though she were a rat, and he would like to stamp her to death as one. He would curse her eyes and limbs, and throw his boots, and cups and saucers at her, and spank her about the head till her long black hair fell all about her face, and roar out—