“Don’t talk about it; let him have it, the greedy warmint,” my father would cry out, as he lay hearing all the threatening, and none of the spanking. “You lets him off too easy, and that’s where he takes advantage of you.”
“It’s little more timpting I can bear before I’ll do it,” she would answer; “so take care, my fine fellow.” And then, when she returned to her own room, she would say, “It’s very well to talk of bating him, Jim; but it’s best left alone, you may depind. If we can’t rule him by kindness, we can’t rule him at all. You may bate and bate; but two divils ’ll come in at the gate you bate one out of.”
Strangely enough, soon as ever I had taken my whacking and Mrs. Burke had betaken herself to her own apartment, Polly would cuddle down and be as good as gold, and compose herself to sleep, as though nothing was the matter. Of course, there was nothing objectionable in this as far as it went; the worst of it was, that it really looked as though I could keep her quiet if I liked. Indeed, when at last I mustered courage enough to complain to my father, he told me so.
“I ain’t got no pity for you,” said he; “an obstinate little beggar like wot you are deserves all he gets and a good deal more.”
“Well,” I answered, (this was on a morning following a whacking which made my ribs feel as though the skin was all grazed off them,) “she ain’t a-goin’ to knock me about much longer.”
“Ain’t she, though?” was my father’s scornful reply. “Why ain’t she?”
“When I grow a bit bigger I’ll show her,” I vengefully replied.
My father stared at me, and then laughed.
“If I was big enough,” continued I, encouraged by the laugh, “I’d punch her nose! I’d kick her legs till she didn’t have a bit to stand on. I hate her.”
My father laughed again, and appeared to have some little trouble in composing his countenance to a proper expression of sternness.
“Come, don’t you jaw me in that way, so I tell you; because it ain’t my place to stand and hear it,” said he.
“She tells you lies—dozens of lies,” I further continued; and it coming into my mind what he had said about the hardships of carrying a child about, I thought I might make capital of it. “I never gets no play,” said I. “I’m at work from the time I get up till I go to bed, and yet she won’t leave me alone.”
“How d’ye mean at work?”
“Why, nursing Polly and”—
“Well, and what if you do mind the kid?” interrupted he. “The kid can’t mind itself, can she, you hard-hearted young wagabone? Do you want to loll about and live on me and yer mother? Why, I’d be ashamed on it if I was as big as you.”
“I wish I could get a job of work to go to,” said I, earnestly.
“You wish!” sneered he. “Jobs of work don’t come a-knocking at people’s doors and a-asking to be done. If you wanted a job of work you’d go and look arter it.”
“Where, father?” I asked eagerly.
“Where? why, anywhere,” replied he, warming with the subject. “Hain’t there the markets? Why, when I goes to the ’gate (Billingsgate) or the garden (Covent Garden) as early as four and five o’clock, when you are snoring in bed, I sees boys which, in pint o’ size you’d make two of, dodgin’ about ’bliged to yearn a penny before they can get a cup of coffee to warm ’em.”
“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.”