The Edge of the Crowd

‘She beseeched my father to do something. Had he no friends in the city and what about his relations in Northumberland? It seemed that something might still be done for him but the trouble, as even I could see, lay with my father. Once behind a turned key he had no cares nor responsibilities, no need to hide from dunning bailiffs and creditors. You could say that being in prison freed him – all he needed were a few pennies for a glass of grog and he was a happy man.

‘He appeared not to care that his family were now in poor straits and there was never enough on the table to feed me and my sister Margaret. My mother ate less as she drank more. We sold everything. Best clothes, second best. Shoes, coats, cooking pots, knives and forks. My mother was the pawnbroker’s best customer. One day she went to pop the kitchen chairs and didn’t come back.

‘I never told no one she was gone. For one thing, I always thought she would come back, but also I was fearful we might be sent to the workhouse, where Mo would go to one place and me to another. So I kept quiet and took it upon myself to bring my sister up. For a half year or so we got by. I fell in with a band of street arabs who scavenged Covent Garden when the costers were setting up their stalls and garden produce was falling from the wagons. We were always chased and sometimes beaten but I generally came home with a cabbage for the pot. Other days Mo and I took potato sacks and went foraging for fuel on the dust heaps. In all this time I never visited my father. I couldn’t gauge what he might do – he might report us for our own good. We left the house when the quarterly rent became due and for a while we had a decent enough crib in the basement of a collapsed warehouse. The cellar itself was still sound and it was dry if it wasn’t warm.

‘However, someone found us out and moved us on. We spent the next few nights under the arches and sleeping in doorways. Mo come down with the ’flu and out of desperation, I resolved to visit my father and to find out the true state of his case. If there was indeed no hope of his release then I would have to set about something more than stealing cabbages.

‘I found him in the prison snuggery, drunkenly regaling the inmates with song. He would have made a fine street patterer because he could talk and sing well enough to keep himself in lush, even in prison. On that first visit his mind was dulled to everything but the promise of another glass of rum. I went again and this time I took with me little Mo, hoping that the sight of his youngest child might stir him to his senses, but he quickly disabused me of this hope.

‘It was clear he neither expected to be quickly released nor could be counted on for aid. However, as on the last occasion of our visit, he found us a little something to eat and a place by the fire. The company may have been disreputable but it was convivial. There were coiners and embezzlers and men who had never even considered pursuing an honest occupation but there were also those who, like my father, had found themselves in gaol by their own ineptitude. We sat among them as they toasted bread on the fire and passed about a tin jug of rum and water.

‘With nourishment and warmth Mo recovered quite quickly. The Marshalsea came to mean food and company and we were regular visitors, well known among the prisoners. The prison was also the source of a scanty income. I earned first one penny and then another running errands for the prisoners. Some of the turnkeys took small bribes and others liked me well enough to turn a blind eye when I slipped out to the cookshop for pies and plum-dough or to the taproom for a quartern of gin, or ran with messages to attorneys and creditors. I began to feel at home in prison and so we came to be oftener inside than out. I believe we might have grown up there had not fate taken a hand. My father, whose health had been frail ever since he had once taken a severe chill in his damp room, now became ill and within a few weeks had got worse and finally died.

‘I was fourteen years old and still without proper employment. I could no longer go to the prison and make my living running errands. Instead I had to cast about for other employ. For a while I returned to stealing potatoes and cabbages, but they were wise to us now and those boys still working the Market were being taken up daily. That first summer, Mo and I walked to Kent with the hoppers. That was well for as long as it lasted but when the season was over we were back in London, facing a winter on the streets. Little Mo was rising eleven when we saved a few bob and I bought her a tray of things to sell in the street – laces and ribbons and buttons mainly. We found her a pitch on the Strand and she might come home after standing there all day with only five or six pence to show for it.

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