I cannot help being struck, in my wanderings through Povertyopolis, with the extraordinary resemblance which Caesar bore to Pompey—especially Pompey. One room in this district is very like the other. The family likeness of the chairs and tables is truly remarkable, especially in the matter of legs. Most chairs are born with four legs, but the chairs one meets with here are a two-legged race—a four-legged chair is a rara avis, and when found should be made a note of. The tables, too, are of a type indigenous to the spot. The survival of the fittest does not obtain in these districts in the matter of tables. The most positively unfit are common, very common objects. What has become of the fittest I hesitate to conjecture. Possibly they have run away. I am quite sure that a table with legs would make use of them to escape from such surroundings.
As to the bedsteads, they are wretched, broken-down old things of wood and iron that look as though they had been rescued a little late from a fire, then used for a barricade, afterwards buried in volcanic eruption, and finally dug out of a dust-heap that had concealed them for a century. The bedding, a respectable coal-sack would blush to acknowledge even as a poor relation.
I have enumerated chairs, tables, and beds, not because they are found in every poor home—there are several rented rooms which can boast of nothing but four walls, a ceiling, and a floor—but because these articles placed in one of these dens constitute what are euphemistically called 'furnished apartments,' a species of accommodation with which all very poor neighbourhoods abound.
The 'furnished apartments' fetch as much as tenpence a day, and are sometimes occupied by three or four different tenants during a week.
The 'deputy' comes for the money every day, and it is pay or go with the occupants. If the man who has taken one of these furnished rooms for his 'home, sweet home,' does not get enough during the day to pay his rent, out he goes into the street with his wife and children, and enter another family forthwith.
The tenants have not, as a rule, much to be flung after them in the shape of goods and chattels. The clothes they stand upright in, a battered kettle, and, perhaps, a bundle, make up the catalogue of their worldly possessions.
This kind of rough-and-ready lodging is the resource of thousands of industrious people earning precarious livelihoods, and they rarely rise above it to the dignity of taking a room by the week. The great struggle is to get over Saturday, and thank God for Sunday. Sunday is a free day, and no deputy comes to disturb its peaceful calm. The Saturday's rent, according to the custom of the country, makes the tenant free of the apartments until Monday.
It is the custom to denounce the poor as thriftless, and that they are so I grant. The temptation to trust to luck and let every day take care of itself is, it must be remembered, great. Life with them is always a toss-up, a daily battle, an hourly struggle. Thousands of them can never hope to be five shillings ahead of the world if they keep honest. The utmost limit of their wage is reached when they have paid their rent, kept themselves and their horribly large families from starvation, and bought the few rags which keep their limbs decently covered. With them the object of life is attained when the night's rent is paid, and they do not have to hesitate between the workhouse or a corner of the staircase in some doorless house.
There is a legend in one street I know of—a man who once saved half a crown, and lost it through a hole in his pocket. The moral of that legend may have impressed itself upon the whole population and discouraged thrift for evermore; but be that as it may, the general rule is, 'what you make in a day spend in a day.' It is needless to add that this precept brings its practisers perpetually within measurable distance of absolute pennilessness. They live and die on the confines of it. I am wrong; they invariably die on the wrong side of the border, and are buried at somebody else's expense.
Drink is the curse of these communities; but how is it to be wondered at? The gin-palaces flourish in the slums, and fortunes are made out of men and women who seldom know where to-morrow's meal is coming from.
Can you wonder that the gaudy gin-palaces, with their light and their glitter, are crowded? Drink is sustenance to these people; drink gives them the Dutch courage necessary to go on living; drink dulls their senses and reduces them to the level of the brutes they must be to live in such sties.
The gin-palace is heaven to them compared to the hell of their pestilent homes. A copper or two, often obtained by pawning the last rag that covers the shivering children on the bare floor at home, will buy enough vitriol-madness to send a woman home so besotted that the wretchedness, the anguish, the degradation that await her there have lost their grip. To be drunk with these people means to be happy. Sober—God help them!—how could they be aught but wretched?
There is not only temptation to drink wrought by the fearful surroundings of the poor; a positive craving for it is engendered by the foul and foetid atmosphere they continually breathe. I have often wondered that the advocates of temperance, with the immense resources of wealth and organization they command, have not given more attention to the overcrowding and the unsanitary condition of the dwellings of the poor, as one of the great causes of the abuse of stimulants.
It is not only that crime and vice and disorder flourish luxuriantly in these colonies, through the dirt and discomfort bred of intemperance of the inhabitants, but the effect upon the children is terrible. The offspring of drunken fathers and mothers inherit not only a tendency to vice, but they come into the world physically and mentally unfit to conquer in life's battle. The wretched, stunted, misshapen child-object one comes upon in these localities is the most painful part of our explorers' experience. The county asylums are crowded with pauper idiots and lunatics, who owe their wretched condition to the sin of the parents, and the rates are heavily burthened with the maintenance of the idiot offspring of drunkenness.
The drink dulls every sense of shame, takes the sharp edge from sorrow, and leaves the drinker for awhile in a fools' paradise. Here is the home of the most notorious 'drunkardess'—if I may coin a work—in the neighbourhood. Mrs. O'Flannigan's room is easily entered, for it is on the street-level, and one step brings us into the presence of the lady herself. She is in bed, a dirty red flannel rag is wrapped about her shoulders, and her one arm is in a sling. She sits up in bed at the sight of visitors, and greets us in a gin and fog voice, slightly mellowed with the Irish brogue. Biddy has been charged at the police-courts seventy-five times with being drunk, and she is therefore a celebrated character. She is hardly sober now, though she has evidently had a shaking which would have sobered most people for a month. Her face is a mass of bruises and cuts, and every now and then a groan and a cry to certain Saints in her calendar tell of aches and pains in the limbs concealed under the dirty blanket that covers the bed.
'I'm a pretty sight now, ain't I, gintlemen dear?' she says, with a foolish laugh. 'Shure and I got blind drunk again last Saturday, and they run me in. The inspector let me out o' Sunday; God bless him for a rale gintleman! They carried me on a stretcher, bless yer hearts! and I kicked. Ha! ha! ha!'
The hag positively yelled with laughter as she thought of the scene she caused, and the trouble she gave the police.
Suddenly she looks round as if in search of something.
'Molly, ye young varmint, where are ye?' she shouts, and presently from under the bed, where the child lay crouching in fear, she drags a wretched little girl of seven or eight, with her face and head covered with sores, that make one shudder to look at them.
'There, Molly, ye young varmint, show yourself to their honours, will ye?'
The child begins to snivel. One of our number is the Board School officer of the district, and Molly has not been to school lately.
Mrs. O'Flannigan explains.
'Ye see, I can't use my limbs just yet, yer honour, and Molly—Lord love her!—she's just the only thing I got to look afther me. I might be burned in my blessed bed, yer honour, and not able to move.'
'You should give up getting drunk,' I ventured to suggest; 'then you wouldn't want a nurse.'
'You're right, your honour. It's the drink. Yer see, I can't help it. I ain't been sober for five years—ha! ha! ha!—and it's all thro' the trouble as come to me. My boy got into bad company and got lagged and put away for ten years, and I've never been the same since, and it broke my heart, and I took to the drink. And now my old man's took to drink thro' aggravation o' me, and he gets drunk every night of his blessed life. Ha! ha! ha!'
The woman's story is practically true. Before her trouble she and her husband were costermongers and hawkers of fruit. The first of the evils of the foul slums, where honest workers are forced to live, fell upon them in the ruin of the boy reared in a criminal atmosphere. The vicious surroundings were too strong for him, and he became a thief and paid the penalty.
The mother sees her son—idolized in her rough way—taken from her; the den of a home becomes doubly wretched, and the cursed drink-fiend is invoked to charm the sorrow away. That is the first step, 'to drown sorrow.' The steps after that are easy to count. The woman becomes an habitual drunkard, the rooms they live in get dirtier and smaller and fouler, and at last the husband drowns his sorrow too. 'Aggravation' and a constant association with a drunken woman turn the poor fellow to evil ways; himself and a whole family are wrecked, that under better circumstances might have been good and useful citizens. Had these people been able to get a decent room among decent people, the first misfortune that sent them wrong might never have happened. Their case is the case of hundreds.
Of drinking-shops there are plenty in these places; of eating-houses, or shops for the sale of food, very few. So rare are the latter that when we come to one in a dirty, tumble-down street, we stop and examine the contents of the window. I don't know whether to call it a tart-shop, a baker's, or a dripping emporium. There seems to be a little bit of each about it, and half a rice pudding, and a ham-bone, on which a bluebottle has gone to sleep—tired out, perhaps, with looking for the meat—give it the faintest suspicion of being an eating-house. There is also in the window a dilapidated bloater which looks as though it had been run over by an omnibus many years ago.
It is while taking notes of the contents of this tempting emporium of luxuries that we become aware of a very powerful perfume. It seems to rise from beneath where we are standing, and used as we are by this time to the bouquets of the East, we involuntarily step back and contort the muscles of our faces.
Then we see that we have been standing on a grating. Peering down, we can just see into a gloomy little room. To the opened window presently there comes a man in his shirt-sleeves, and looks up at us. His face is deadly white, the eyes are sunken, the cheek-bones hollow, and there is a look in his face that says more plainly than the big ticket of the blind impostor, 'I am starving.' Starving down below there, with only a thin floor between himself and the ham-bone, the ancient herring, the rice pudding, and the treacle tarts.
As the noisome effluvia rises and steams through the grating we begin to appreciate the situation. This food shop is directly over the cellar which gives the odour forth. Pleasant for the customers, certainly. We determine to push our investigation still further, and presently we are down in the cellar below.
The man in his shirt-sleeves—we can guess where the coat is—receives us courteously. His wife apologizes for the wretched condition of the room. Both of them speak with that unmistakable timbre of voice which betokens a smattering of education. In the corner of the room is a heap of rags. That is the bed. There are two children, a boy and a girl, sitting on a bare hearth, and gazing into the fast-dying embers of a wretched fire. Furniture the room has absolutely none, but a stool roughly constructed of three pieces of unplaned wood nailed together.
Four shillings a week is the rent of the cellar below the pie-shop; the foul smell arises from the gradual decay of the basement, and the utter neglect of all sanitary precautions.
The man (who has only one arm) is out of work this week, he tells us, but he is promised a job next. To tide over till then is a work of some difficulty, but the 'sticks' and the 'wardrobe' of the family have paid the rent up to now. As to meals—well, they hain't got much appetite. The stench in which they live effectually destroys that. In this instance even bad drainage has its advantages, you see.
Before the man lost his arm he was a clerk; without a right hand he is not much good as a penman in a competitive market. So he goes on as timekeeper in a builder's yard, as a messenger, or as anything by which he can get a few shillings for a living.
The children have not been to school. 'Why?' asks the officer who accompanies us. 'Because they've no boots, and they are both ill now.' It is true. The children, pale, emaciated little things, cough a hard, rasping cough from time to time. To show us how bad they are they set up a perfect paroxysm of coughing until the mother fetches them a smack, and inquires 'how they expect the gentleman to hear himself speak if they kick up that row?'
The children's boots have gone with the father's coat, and at present it does seem hard to say that the parents must be fined unless the children come barefooted through the sloppy streets to school.
Such, however, is the rule, and this boot question is an all-important one in the compulsory education of the children of the slums. How to get the boots for Tommy and Sarah to go their daily journey to the Board School is a problem which one or two unhappy fathers have settled by hanging themselves behind the domestic door.
The difficulties which the poor have in complying with the demands of the Education Act are quite unsuspected by the general public. They are so numerous, and the histories revealed by their investigation are so strange, that I propose in the next chapter to ask the reader to accompany me to a meeting at which the parental excuses for non-attendance are made. This is a meeting at which the parents who have been 'noticed' for the non-attendance of their children adduce what reasons they can why they should not be summoned before a magistrate.
I will let the mothers and fathers tell their own tale, and give a few statistics which I fancy will be a revelation to many who are at present in sublime ignorance of how the poor live.
In the remote age when I was a good little boy I remember being induced to join a Dorcas meeting. Don't imagine that I ever so far forgot the dignity of my sex as to sew or make little flannel petticoats and baby-linen for the poor of the parish. The young ladies did that, and we—myself and about ten other good little boys—were inveigled into joining on the plea that while our sisters plied needle and thread we could stick scraps into books and colour them, make toys, and perform various other little feats of usefulness which would eventually benefit the benighted Hottentots.
I know that when I had consented to join I was in agonies till the first day of meeting arrived, and wondered to what I had committed myself; and I remember to this day how very red I blushed when I arrived late and found fifty other good little boys and girls assembled, all of whom looked up and eyed me as though I was a natural curiosity, when the good lady who directed the society said, 'This is little Master So-and-so, who has come to help us in our good work.'
How I got past all those little girls I don't know, but I kept my eyes fixed modestly on the ground, and at last found myself seated at a table with about a dozen young gentlemen of my own age.
The elderly, good-hearted spinster who presided instantly deposited in front of me a huge pot of paste, an empty book, and some old illustrated papers. I guessed what she intended me to do, and I made wild efforts to do it. I was informed that this book, when I had completed it, would be sold at a bazaar for the benefit of the heathen.
I never ascertained what that book did fetch, but I know that it never paid expenses. The mess that I got into with that paste, the way it would get all over my fingers and on to my coat-sleeve, and all down me and all over me—why, I wrecked a whole suit, which in my vanity I put on new, at a single sitting. That was my first introduction to scissors and paste, and I took an intense dislike to them..
I quote the reminiscence because this article is to be all about a 'B' meeting; and when I first heard of a 'B' meeting I made sure it must be something like a Dorcas meeting, where everybody was a busy bee, and did work for the poor.
I had not had a very long experience before I found out that it was something not half so pleasant as the scrap-book and flannel petticoat society of my youth.
A 'B' meeting is held under the auspices of the School Board, to hear the reasons parents may have to give why they should not be summoned to appear before a magistrate for neglecting to send their children to school.
Here is an exact reproduction of the Notice B left with the parents, which brings them to the meeting I am about to describe:
[By-laws.] [Form No. 13.]
The Elementary Education Acts, 1870, 1873, and 1876.
Notice to attend before Divisional Committee.
...........Division.
May 30, 1883.
To Mr. Bridge, 2, Smith's Court.
Take Notice, that you have been guilty of a breach of the law in that your child Robert has not duly attended school, and you are hereby invited to attend at George Street School on Wednesday, the 6th day of June, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon precisely, to state any excuse you may have, and to show cause why you should not be summoned before a magistrate and fined.
Dated this 31st day of May, 1883.
(Signed)...............
Officer of the School Board for London.
Few persons who have not actual experience of the lives of the poorest classes can have any conception of the serious import to them of the Education Act. Compulsory education is a national benefit. I am one of its stoutest defenders, but it is idle to deny that it is an Act which has gravely increased the burthens of the poor earning precarious livelihoods; and as self-preservation is the first law of nature, there is small wonder that every dodge that craft and cunning can suggest is practised to evade it.
In many cases the payment of the fees is a most serious difficulty. Twopence or a penny a week for each of four children is not much, you may say; but where the difference between the weekly income and the rent is only a couple of shillings or so, I assure you the coppers represent so many meals. The Board now allows the members to remit fees in cases of absolute inability to pay them, and the remission of fees is one of the principal items of business at a 'B' meeting.
Again, many of the children who are of school age are of a wage-earning age also, and their enforced 'idleness,' as their parents call it, means a very serious blow to the family exchequer. Many a lad whose thick skull keeps him from passing the standard which would leave him free to go to work, has a deft hand, strong arms, and a broad back—three things which fetch a fair price in the labour market. As I will show you presently, from the actual cases which come before the 'B' meeting, the hardship of making boys and girls stop at school who might be earning good money towards their support is terrible. Often these children are the sole bread-winners, and then the position is indeed a hard nut for the kind-hearted official to crack.
After the children have passed a certain standard the officials have the power of granting 'half-time'; that is to say, the boys and girls can earn money so many days a week, and come to school for the remainder. 'The halftime grant' is another feature of the 'B' meeting.
The worst duty of the official who presides is to authorize the summoning before a magistrate of the parents who cannot or will not send their children regularly. The law leaves him no option. All children must come unless illness or some equally potent excuse can be urged, and if they don't the parent must appear before a magistrate, who, if the case is made out, is bound by the law to impose a fine. I will endeavour to show you, as the meeting progresses, a few of the parents who thoroughly deserve the penalty.
A 'B' meeting is held in the upstairs room of one of the Board Schools. The summoned parents wait in a huge crowd outside. They come in one by one to be disposed of. The president of the meeting sits with the book before him, in which the cases to be heard are fully entered up. Beside him sits the Board official, the inspector of officers, who advises him on little points of School Board law, and who marks the papers which are to be returned to the School Board officer 'in charge of the case' to be acted upon.
Standing round the room are the School Board officers of the different divisions in the district. They are familiar with the history and circumstances of every one who comes into the little room, and they supply confirmation or contradiction as the necessity arises.
Somewhere or other in the scene my friend and I stand. We are accepted by the parents who come and go as part and parcel of the 'Inquisition,' and some care is necessary in executing our descriptive task, for this class is very great on the rights of property; and more than one energetic dame, if she knew she was being 'noted' by an unauthorized interloper, would return the compliment with interest.
'The short and simple annals of the poor, here related in their own words, will induct the reader into the mysteries of 'How they live' far more thoroughly than I could do did I fill pages with my own composition; so, silence, pray, and let the 'B' meeting commence.
Here is a lady who very much objects to being summoned.
'What bizerness 'as he to summings me,' she says, pointing to the officer, 'just cus my boy ain't bin fur a week? He's 'arsh and harbitury, that's what he is.'Arsh and harbitury! D'ye think I ain't got anything to do without a-trapesin' down here a-losin' my work? I tell ye what it is——'
The chairman mildly interposes: 'My good lady——'
'Don't good lady me. I ain't a lady. If I was you daren't treat me like it, you daren't; it's only because I'm——'
'My good woman, will you allow me to say one word?'
'Oh—yes—certainly—if you've got anything to say—go on.'
Thus encouraged, the chairman points out to the voluble lady that her son has not been to school for a fortnight.
'Well, it's all through the boots.'
'Boots!' says the chairman; 'why, that was what you said last time, and we gave you an order on a shoemaker for a pair.'
The woman acknowledges this is so. Some charitable people have started a fund to let a few bad cases have boots, and this truant has been one of the first recipients.
'I know you was kind enough to do that,' says the mother, 'but they 'urt him, and he can't wear 'em.'
Here the officer who has brought the lady up before the Board tells his story.
'The boy had a decent pair of boots supplied him, sir; but Mrs. Dash went back to the shop with him, and said they weren't good enough—she wanted a pair of the best the man had in stock, and made such a noise she had to be put out.'
'Which, beggin' your pardon,' strikes in the angry lady, 'it's like your imperence to say so. They 'urt the boy, they 'did, and he haves tender feet, through his father, as is dead, being a shoemaker hisself.'
The officer chimes in again, 'If he can play about the streets all day in the boots, Mrs. Dash, they can't hurt him very much.'
'My boy play about the streets! Well, of all the oudacious things as ever I' erd! And as to his comin' to school, he's a beautiful little scholard now, and he ain't got no more to learn.'
Eventually the 'beautiful little scholard,' who was waiting outside, was sent for.
He confessed that the boots didn't hurt him, and Mrs. Dash was informed that if he didn't forthwith attend she would be summoned.
With much difficulty Mrs. Dash was induced to retire, and her place was taken by a burly man covered with grime from a forge, or something of the sort, who looked the personification of fierceness and stony-heartedness. His daughter had not been to school lately, and he was asked to account for her absence.
There was a moment's pause. We expected an oath or a volley of abuse. Instead of that the man's lips trembled a moment, then his eyes filled with tears, and one rolled slowly down each grimy cheek.
In a choking voice he gasped out, 'I am very sorry, sir, but I've had a little trouble.'
'Dear me!' says the chairman, slightly staggered at the unusual display of emotion; 'I am sorry for that. What sort of trouble?'
'Well, sir, it ain't a pleasant thing to talk about'—sob—'but my wife'—sob—'she's left me, sir'—sob—'gone away with another man.'
Here the poor fellow broke down utterly and sobbed like a child. Then he drew a dirty rag from his pocket, and rubbed and rubbed it round his eyes till there was a white ring about them that looked like a pair of spectacles.
The effect was ludicrous, but no one smiled. The audience, as they say in theatrical notices, was visibly affected.
The man stammered out his tale bit by bit. His wife had left him with four little children. He had to go out to work, and his daughter he had to keep away from school to look after them. She had to be 'little mother' in the deserted home.
I wondered what the woman was like, and if she had any idea of the genuine love for her that welled up in this honest fellow's heart. As I watched the tears flow down his grimy face, I couldn't help thinking how many a noble dame would like to know that her absence from the domestic hearth would cause grief as genuine as this.
Under the painful circumstances the excuse was accepted; the 'little mother' was allowed a short holiday till the betrayed husband had time to make other arrangements, and he left the room murmuring his thanks and mopping his eyes.
'Mrs. Smith,' calls out the Board official, taking the next case down on the list for hearing, and a young girl of about fifteen, with a baby in her arms and a child of five clinging to her skirts, enters the room and seats herself nervously on the extreme edge of the chair.
'You're not Mrs. Smith, my dear,' says the chairman, with a smile.
'No, sir; that's mother.'
'Oh, you've come for her, eh? These boys, Thomas and Charles, who have been absent for three weeks, are your brothers, I suppose?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Well, my dear, they ought to come, you know. What's the reason?'
'Please, sir, they're at work.'
'But they've not passed the Fourth Standard.'
'I know, sir; but they've got a job, and it's four shillings a week each, and that's all I've got to keep us.'
'All you've got, my dear? Where's your father?'
The girl colours a little and hesitates. The School Board officer steps forward to the table and helps her.
'It's a very painful case, sir,' he says. 'The father's been living with another woman—left his family. A fortnight ago the mother met him and asked him for some money. He knocked her down, and she fell and cut her head open. She's in St. Thomas's Hospital—not expected to live. The man was taken up, and he's under remand now, and this girl has to look after the entire family.'
'I see,' says the chairman; 'and Thomas and Charles are giving you their money, eh? and that's all you've got?'
'Yes, sir. I can't work myself, because I've got the baby and the others to look after.'
'Well, my dear,' says the chairman, 'I am very sorry for you, but your brothers can only have half-time or come back to school.'
The girl says nothing, she is only fifteen, and can't argue it out with the gentleman—so she curtseys and is ushered out. I wonder, if the mother dies and the father gets a long term of imprisonment, what the fate of the family will be?
I have said that the hardships entailed upon the poor by the Education Act are numerous. Let me quote a few statistics gleaned from the papers which I turn over on the chairman's desk by his kind permission.
They are cases in which the parents apply to have the fees remitted because they cannot afford to pay them.
1. Mrs. Walker. 7 children of school age; fee 2d. a week each. Total earnings of entire family, 10s. Rent, 5s. 6d. Husband once good mechanic, lost employment through illness and deafness. Parish relief none. Character good. Is now a hawker—sells oranges and fish. Children half-starved. When an orange is too bad to sell they have it for breakfast, with a piece of bread.
2. Mr. Thompson. 5 children of school age. Out of work. No income but pawning clothes and goods. Rent, 4s. Wife drinks surreptitiously. Husband, good character.
3. Mrs.——-. 5 children of school age; widow. Earnings, 6s. Rent, 3s. Her husband when alive was a Drury Lane clown. Respectable woman; feels her poverty very keenly.
4. Mr. Garrard. 8 children of school age; two always under doctor. No income. Pawning last rags. Rent, 5s. 6d. No parish relief. Starving. Declines to go into workhouse.
I could multiply such instances by hundreds. These, however, will suffice to show how serious a burden is added to the lives of the very poor by the enforced payment of school fees. As a rule they are remitted for very good and sufficient reasons.
How these people live is a mystery. It is a wonder that they are not found dead in their wretched dens, for which they pay a rent out of all proportion to their value, by dozens daily. But they live on, and the starving children come day after day to school with feeble frames and bloodless bodies, and the law expects them to learn as readily as well-fed, healthy children, and to attain the same standard of proficiency in a given time.
It is these starving children who are not allowed to earn money towards their support until they are thirteen, and in many cases fourteen. Less necessitous children, as a rule, pass out of school earlier, for reasons which will be obvious to anyone who reflects for a moment upon the relationship of a healthy brain to a healthy body.
In another chapter we shall hear a few more personal narrations at a 'B' meeting. I will conclude this one with a story of a young gentleman whose excuse for non-attendance is at least dramatic. He has been absent for six weeks, and his mother explains, 'It's all along of 'is aven a reg'lar engagement at the Surrey Pantermine, and there hev been so many matynees.'
'He's on the Surrey, is he?' says the chairman.
'Perhaps that's the reason he can't pass the Standard!'
We see the joke and chuckle, but the boy doesn't. Evidently his pantomime training has been thrown away upon him.
The ladies and gentlemen whom I had the pleasure of introducing to you in the last chapter had, most of them, some good and sufficient excuse for the non-attendance of their children at school. Before the 'B' meeting at which we assisted was over, more than one case was examined which left the official no option but to take out a summons and run the risk of one of those amiable lectures which unthinking magistrates now and again see fit to bestow upon the luckless officer of the Board who has done what the law compels him to do, and no more.
The parents summoned are in many instances dissolute or careless people, who utterly neglect their offspring, and take no pains to ensure their attending school, or they are crafty, cunning wretches, who see in the law a means of attaining a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Here is a woman who, when asked why her boy of nine has not been to school for a month, declares that he plays truant, and that he is quite beyond her control. Now, the result of such a complaint is, that the young gentleman will, if the parent reiterates in court her statement, be sent to a reformatory for five years.
That is just what the good lady wants. Her story is one that may be instructive if not edifying.
Two years ago her husband got ten years' penal servitude for a heavy fracture of his country's laws, leaving her with three children, two boys and a girl. There is a custom in such districts as that of which I write which shortens the period of mourning for a lost mate very considerably: Directly husband 'No. 1' gets forcibly removed from the domestic hearth, his place is almost invariably taken by another gentleman, who is 'master of the situation,' and locum tenons with full family honours.
I cannot resist telling a little story apropos of this domestic phase of slum life, which illustrates it rather forcibly. A little girl of eight at one of the schools near the Mint came one morning with a pair of boots on her little feet. This was the first pair of boots she had ever been seen in, and the unwonted magnificence naturally attracted attention.
'Why, Annie, you've got a pair of boots at last, then!' exclaimed the governess.
'Yes, mistress,' the child replied, glancing proudly at the battered, second-hand shoes, three times too large for her.
'And where did you get them?'
'One of my fathers gave 'em to me, mistress—the one what's at home this week.'
This 'father' was evidently a better fellow than most of the nomadic husbands who wander about from family circle to family circle, ready to replace its absent head at a moment's notice. He must have been more generous to another man's child than the 'husband' of the lady whose history I have so unceremoniously interrupted, and who wants her boy put away in a reformatory.
Husband 'No. 2,' I gather from one who knows the history of the case, is a young fellow who objects to 'brats,' and the 'brats' are being got out of the way one by one. The eldest boy was put to thieving, and he is being kept now by the State; the girl took to something worse, and a benevolent society relieved the mother of any future liability on her behalf. And now the good lady comes to the 'B' meeting and declares the youngest boy is incorrigible, and hints as broadly as she dare that she should be glad to have him put away as well. She will have her wish, and the boy, whom in all probability she has wilfully kept away and encouraged in his incorrigibleness, will be sent to a reformatory within a fortnight.
Thus you see a wholesale clearance has been made of one family, and the room they took up at home will soon be utilized by new-comers, in the shape of family number two.
A more charming and ingenious way of disposing of incumbrances it is difficult to imagine. It is not, however, by any means uncommon.
Marriage, as an institution, is not fashionable in these districts. Yet so long as cohabitation is possible—that is to say, so long as neither the hospital, the prison, nor the churchyard effects a separation—the couples are fairly faithful, and look upon themselves as man and wife, with the usual marital obligations.
Both parties to the arrangement exhibit great reluctance to 'break' of their own free will, and it is marvellous to see the tenacity with which a decent hard-working woman will cling to a ruffian who spends her earnings and blackens her eye, as regularly as Saturday night comes round, although he has not the slightest legal claim on her allegiance.
If you ask the couples who live happily together why they don't get married, some will tell you frankly that they never gave it a thought, others that it's a lot of trouble and they haven't had time. A clergyman's wife who took intense interest in a young couple living together in a room in the Mint determined to make them get married. The young fellow earned fair wages, and was sober and steady; the girl kept her room and her two little children clean and decent, and was always civil-spoken and pleasant. The good lady who had the entrée of the place talked to the young man whenever she saw him, and he admitted at last that, perhaps, the union might as well be made a legal one: 'Not that me and Sall 'ull get on any better, you know, mum—we couldn't; but since you've been on at her she seems to have a bit o' fancy like for to have the marridge lines, and if you'll tell us how, we'll get it done and over, missis.'
Delighted with the promise, the lady set to work and prepared everything. She gave the bride a new gown to be married in, and made frocks for the two little ones to come and see their father married; she arranged with her husband to perform the ceremony; and last, but most important, she got the young man a day's holiday without loss of pay from his employers.
The eventful day arrived; the good soul beaming and elated, waited, with a few friends invited to see the interesting ceremony, at the church. The clergyman stood with his book at the altar, but no young couple. Twelve o'clock struck, the clergyman went into the vestry, and put his coat on; and bitterly disappointed at the failure of her little scheme, the good lady sat on for an hour, thinking some delay might have occurred; but after awhile she gave it up as a bad job, and departed also.
That evening, in as towering a rage as a clergyman's wife could decently be, she marched off to the Mint, and tackled the delinquents at once.
What did they mean by it?
The young man was very civil and very apologetic.
'He didn't mean to be rude, but the fact was, a mate hearin' he'd got a day off offered him a job at carting as was worth five bob; and, you know, mum, I couldn't lose five bob just for the sake o' getting married.'
I am happy to say that the energetic lady set to work again, got another holiday for the man a week after, and this time 'personally conducted' the wedding-party to the church, which they did not leave till the young woman was the proud possessor of that by no means common property in the locality—a marriage certificate.
But to return to the 'B' meeting. The lady who wants her little boy put away having been disposed of, a decent-looking woman takes her place. She is nursing a baby, and by her side stands a small boy, with staring eyes that seem fixed upon nothing in particular—a strange, uncanny, big-headed child, who attracts attention directly.
Mrs. Jones, the mother, is called upon to say why this lad's sister, aged ten, has been absent three weeks.
'Well, I'm very sorry, gen'lemen, but I've had to keep her at home. Ye see, gen'lemen, I haves ruematics, which takes me all of a nunplush in the joints o' the knees and the ankles of the feet, and then I can't move.'
'Yes, but that needn't keep the girl at home. You can nurse the baby even if you have rheumatics.'
'Yes, sir, I know; but it's that boy as is the trouble. Ye see, sir, he can't be lef' not a minnit without somebody as can get after him quick. He 's allers settin' hisself afire. He gets the matches wherever we 'ides 'em, and he lights anything he sees—the bed, the baby, hisself. Bless you, gen'lemen, it's orful; he can't be off settin' somethin' alight not five minnits together. He ain't right in 'is 'ed, sir.'
The idiot incendiary paid not the slightest attention; his wild, strange eyes were wandering about the room, probably for a box of matches with which to set us alight, and make one big blaze of the 'B' meeting, chairman, officers, himself, and all.
'And that ain't all, sir. My 'usband's dead, sir; and all we've got for a livin's a little shop, sir, where we sells drippin', and matches, and candles, and odds and ends; and I can't run in and out when I'm so queer, and the gal's all I've got to do things. I wish you would give her half-time, sir.' The poor woman certainly had her work cut out, with the rheumatics, the baby, the shop, and the idiot incendiary; and the chairman, after a little consultation with the officer, finding the case was a deserving one, granted the half-time; and the woman left evidently considerably relieved, dragging the young gentleman with a tendency to commit hourly arson after her.
The next to put in an appearance was a lady with a wretched-looking face, and a shabby, draggled, out-all-night and drunk-in-the-morning appearance generally. Her profession was stated with official bluntness in the paper handed to the chairman. It is generally translated 'street-walker' in family circles.
But, whatever she might be, she had children, and the law required them to come to school. Instead of making their attendances, learning to read and write, the children were street Arabs. The woman was meek and quiet enough. She promised 'she'd see to it,' and was reminded that she had made the same promise before. This time it was not accepted, and the woman was informed that she would have to appear before a magistrate.
Meekly and quietly she said, 'Thank you, sir,' as if the chairman had presented her with a medal or a pound of tea, and went out.
The women poured in one after the other—-there were very few men, most of them, I suppose, being 'at work,' whatever that term might imply in their particular case—and they were of all sizes, sorts and conditions. There were respectable, decent, motherly-looking souls, drunken outcasts, slatternly trollops, half-starved and sickly-looking women, and fat, overwhelming women, who came not to be crushed, but to crush.
One gaunt, fierce-looking lady, with the voice of a man and the fist of a prize-fighter, gave the company a bit of her mind. 'Her "gal" warn't a-coming to be worrited with a lot o' stuff. She was delikit, her gal was, and the School Board was murderin' of her.'
'What's the matter with her?' asked the chairman.
'Well, it's nervis system, and her teeth growin' out.'
'Where's the doctor's certificate that she's too ill to attend?'
'Sitifkit? d'ye think I've got time to go a-gettin' sitifkits—not me—ain't my word good ernuff?'
The School Board officer knows this lady's circumstances, and he whispers something to the chairman. The girl's 'nervis system' and dental eccentricities have not prevented her affectionate mother from sending her out hawking every day while she stops at home and drinks.
'Where's your husband?' asked the officer. 'I haven't seen him lately. He'll have to be summoned, you know, as you can't get a certificate.'
The officer in question has good reason to ask affectionately after the husband. Last year the worthy gentleman got a month for playfully tossing the officer down a flight of stairs on to his head.
'Where's my husband? Ah!' says she, purple with passion, 'you want to summon him, do you? Well, then, you jolly well carn't. Gord's got him.'
'Dead?' asked the chairman.
'Yes—didn't I say so?'
'Then you will be summoned instead.'
The lady didn't retire—she had to be diplomatically crowded out, and the last sounds that reached the room as she receded along the corridor, under gentle pressure, were wishes that the chairman and all concerned might go where—at least, if her estimate of his whereabouts was correct—they would not have the pleasure of meeting her late lamented consort.
There are some rough customers to deal with in this district—so rough that it is a wonder the Act works so smoothly as it does. The fiercest and most reckless of the lawless classes have to be bearded in their dens by the devoted, ill-paid officers, who ferret out the children and insist upon their coming to school. Up to the topmost garret and down to the lowest cellar, in dens and hovels given over to thieves and wantons, I have accompanied a School Board officer on his rounds, and I frankly confess that I have passed a few bad quarters of an hour.
There are dozens of these places where the blow follows the word in a moment, where life is held of the least account, and where assaults are so common that the victims would as soon think of asking the police to notice their broken windows as to take cognizance of their broken heads.
There is a legend that in one of these cellars in the Mint—it fetches three shillings a week rent, by-the-bye—a man killed a woman and left her; and that nobody took any notice until the body got unpleasant, and then they threw it out into the street.
The ''appy dossers' are the wretched people who roam about the street houseless, and creep in to sleep on the stairs, in the passages and untenanted cellars of the lodging-houses, with the doors open night and day. No policeman's lantern is ever turned on them, and they crowd together in their rags and make a jolly night of it. Sometimes in among them creeps a starving woman, to die from want and exposure, and she dies while the foul oath and the ribald jests go on; and the 'dossers' who are well enough to be ''appy' make such a noise that a lodger, disturbed in his legitimate rest for which he has paid, comes out and lays about him vigorously at the 'varmints,' and kicks them downstairs, if he can.
Thus not only are many of the licensed lodging-houses and homes of the poor breeding-houses in themselves for crime, disease, and filth, but they are, for lack of supervision, receptacles for that which has already been bred elsewhere, and which is deposited gratis, to swell the collection.
A ''appy dosser' can make himself comfortable anywhere. I heard of one who used to crawl into the dust-bin, and pull the lid down; but I know that to be an untruth, from the simple fact that none of the dust-bins on this class of property have a lid. The contents are left, too, for months to decompose, not only under the eyes of the authorities, but under the noses of the inhabitants. The sanitary inspection of these houses is a farce, and in many cases the vestrymen, who ought to put the law in motion, are themselves the owners of the murder-traps.
How foul, how awful some of these places, where the poor have found their last refuge from Artisans' Dwelling Acts and Metropolitan improvements, are, I dare not tell you. I have been told that the readers of a shilling book don't care to know, and the difficulties of dealing with this subject are increased by my knowledge of the fact that in a truthful account of 'How the Poor Live' there can be but little to attract those who read for pleasure only. Rags—that is to say, the rags of our cold, sunless clime—are never picturesque; squalor and misery can only be made tolerable by the touch of the romancist—and here I dare not romance.
Bad, however, as things are, shocking as is the condition in which thousands and thousands of our fellow-citizens live from the cradle to the grave, it is not an unmixed evil if out of its very repulsiveness grows a remedy for it.
It has got now into a condition in which it cannot be left. For very shame England must do something—nay, for self-preservation, which is the most powerful of all human motives. This mighty mob of famished, diseased, and filthy helots is getting dangerous, physically, morally, politically dangerous. The barriers that have kept it back are rotten and giving way, and it may do the State a mischief if it be not looked to in time. Its fevers and its filth may spread to the homes of the wealthy; its lawless armies may sally forth and give us a taste of the lesson the mob has tried to teach now and again in Paris, when long years of neglect have done their work.
Happily, there is a brighter side. Education—compulsory education—has done much. The new generation is learning at least to be clean if not to be honest. The young mothers of the slums—the girls who have been at the Board Schools—have far tidier homes already than their elders. The old people born and bred in filth won't live out of it. If you gave some of the slumites Buckingham Palace they would make it a pigsty in a fortnight. These people are irreclaimable, but they will die out, and the new race can be worked for with hope and with a certainty of success. Hard as are some of the evils of the Education Act, they are outbalanced by the good, and it is that Act above all others which will eventually bring about the new order of things so long desired.
So important a bearing on the home question has the schooling of the children who are to be the rent-payers of the next generation, that I propose to devote the next chapter to some sketches of School Board life and character; and I will take it in one of the worst districts in London, where the parents are sunk in a state of misery almost beyond belief.
I will show you the children at school who come daily to their work from the foulest and dirtiest dens in London—that awful network of hovels which lie about the Borough and the Mint.