'Wot d'you want?' she demanded of me.
'Nothing. I heard a scraping noise and wondered where it was coming from. How long have you been living in this cupboard?'
'Wot's it to you?' she said and pulled the door to.
I went back to my sewing, intrigued at the thought that Adam and I had neighbours who lived practically in our room. More in a sense of fun than anything else, I knocked three times on the wall that was the back of their cupboard. In less than a minute there was a knock on our door.
'Come in,' I shouted.
The door swung open and there she stood, bristling with indignation. 'Wot the 'ell d'yer want now?' she asked, prepared to do battle with me.
She was completely disarmed when I took two apples from our fruit sack and offered them to her. Viewing the apples with a stark, hungry look she licked her lips and slowly moved towards them. When she was within reaching distance she grabbed the apples and stepped backwards and took a bite out of one of them. Munching away she looked at me doubtfully. 'Wot's yer name?' she asked through a mouth full of apple.
'Dara-what's yours?'
'Polly Barnes.'
And your brother?' I asked.
'Peter. You frightened 'im when you came on 'im suddenly like that. You're a bit of a nosey parker, ain't yer?'
I laughed. 'Bring him in here and I will give him an apple.'
She banged on the wall and shouted, 'Peter, come in 'ere.'
When he appeared in the doorway I offered him an apple and asked what he was doing with the bits and pieces he had in his basket.
'Sortin' 'em aht,' he mumbled as he chewed on the apple.
'We're “mud larks",' said Polly in the way of an explanation.
'What the hell is a “mud lark”?' I asked.
'Cor. Where've you been? Mean ter say yer never 'eard of mud larks?' I shook my head. Alright, tell me what you do when you are mudlarking.'
'Well! Everyday we search in the mud by the riverside for coppah, nails, coal, old iron, bones-anyfink that we can get a penny or two for. Las' week Peter fahnd a shillin' an' I pulled aht a baby's shawl. We got thrupence for it-it was a good 'un-that's arter I'd washed it.'
As the weeks went by we became good friends. On the nights that Adam was out I would often sit in their cupboard helping to sort out and clean the pieces of copper and iron. Everyday they were down by the river banks, up to their knees in mud and floating scum, searching the dregs of the tide.
They had previously lived with their mother and her man in the room now occupied by Adam and me. When their mother died the man just got up and walked out on them. They had no money for rent so they sought sanctuary in the landing cupboard and since then had made a precarious living as mud larks. I took them under my wing, giving them what I could in the way of fruit and vegetables and occasionally buying them meat pies. They always looked lean and hungry even with the extra food I gave them.
Polly was always trying to sell various little items to the people in the house. She knew them all and was brutally frank in her descriptions of the characters who slept and fed in this dingy warren of a place. First she warned me about the man in the attic above us.
“E's a thievin' bastard,' she said. 'Nothin's safe when 'e's arahnd. 'E'd take the pennies off a dead man's eyes, 'e would.'
In the room below us lived a 'tosher' with a wife and six children. A tosher's work was extremely dangerous. They were often bitten on the hands and face by rats as they scavenged with seven foot long poles for anything of value in the sewers that flowed into the Thames. Some of them suffocated in the poisonous vapours that arose from the foul sewage. The risk of being crushed by the roof of a sewer falling on them was always there and so was the danger of being sucked down in the perilous quagmires of mud and sewerage where the floor had collapsed. There were terrible stories of toshers' skeletons being found picked clean of skin and flesh.
Upstairs there was a married couple not yet fifteen, who Polly said had just moved in. At that time there was a well-known dubious church in the East End which married youngsters for sevenpence and no questions asked, provided both partners were over fourteen-years-old.
According to Polly, a drunken Irishman rented the basement cellar and charged beggars, prostitutes, thieving vagabonds and the like, twopence for a night's rest on the stone floor. Most of the other rooms were occupied by large families sleeping as many as ten in a room. Of them all, the worst was a dirty old cadger in filthy rags, who slept on the landing or wherever he could find a place to lie down. His melancholy face was pitted with smallpox marks. Even the corners of his eyebrows seemed eaten away by the awful disease. He was forever getting into trouble for groping one of the dozen or so little girls that swarmed all over the buildings. He would lie and wait in dark corners on the stairs and jump on them, getting his hands on their private parts before they had time to scream. Then he scuttled down the stairs and into the busy street before anybody had time to catch him.
It was about this time I began to notice that Adam seemed very flushed with money, spending it freely on clothes and amusements. He became very bumptious and overbearing when he donned his new 'togs', strutting and swaggering like a proud peacock.
Puzzled as to where all this money was coming from, I would ask him how he came by it only to be told to mind my own business when my questions became too pressing for his peace of mind. Of course, life became a lot easier for me. We only worked weekends when we were in Mart Street market. The rest of the week we were free to do as we wished. As we strolled at our leisure through the busy streets, frequently stopping to chat with his costermonger cronies, he would show off by giving me some money to spend on whatever took my fancy.
They were balmy days and nights. We became regular visitors to the theatres that catered for the lower orders and I was often taken to such sports as cock-fighting, the savaging of hordes of rats by terriers in private rooms at the rear of some tavern and bare-fisted fights between burly women who were compelled to grasp a coin in their hands as they were likely to scratch each other's faces with their finger nails. The first woman to drop a coin being accounted the loser.
Our favourite theatre was the Queens in Tottenham Street, London's most disreputable playhouse and consequently nicknamed the 'Dust Hole'. At the Queens we were entertained by melodrama, comic songs, acrobats, jugglers and dancing girls singing lewd songs.
Friday nights were reserved for 'The Half Moon' tavern where the dwarf was constantly catching me off my guard while I was talking to someone. On the night of the new year when we were celebrating the end of 1860 and the beginning of 1861, he was nowhere in sight as we entered the tavern and I settled down happy that he was absent from our revelries.
You could never predict what would happen next when he was around and I would sit, knees tight together in an agony of apprehension, waiting for a sly assault on my private parts by the lecherous little monster. I couldn't understand why Adam was so genial with him. Every time the dwarf looked at me I could plainly see the hatred and lust that lurked behind that fixed grin on his face.
I was leaning back in my chair, legs astride, laughing at something Adam had said when I felt a finger sliding into my giny. For a moment I couldn't believe my senses and was too stunned to move. Somehow the dwarf had come into the tavern and had got beneath our table without me seeing him. The revulsion and shock I felt at that moment cannot be described. Speechless with raging emotions, I ran behind the bar to stand beside Florrie.