Birdcage Walk (2 page)

George Woolfe had deliberately taken the long way back from work. The light was clearer than it had been for weeks and, while it was still too warm for anything but shirtsleeves, he could sense a freshening in the air, as if the reluctant autumn approached at last. As he strolled idly along, the sun sank lazily towards the jagged city skyline, its rays illuminating the scanty clouds in gaudy shades of lilac and rose.

The streets were busy at this hour, crowded with men like George, trudging home after a long shift at the factories. Their eyes, blank with exhaustion, were lowered to the ground in front of them while the sunset blazed on, ignored. Carriages occasionally rolled by at a stately pace, the horses spared in the heat. Most were travelling from the north, from days out in the countryside, and they seemed to bring some vestige of it back with them. Only ten miles away their wheels would have brushed the cowslip and baby’s breath that grew amongst the ancient hedgerows, where the smell of clean, warmed earth would have risen up as the horses’ hooves clattered down.

George stopped and stared as one slowly approached, a large open barouche occupied by an elderly, but upright gentleman and three ladies who, with their pale dresses and coils of dark hair, he supposed were a trio of sisters. Although the sun was no longer strong, one of them still held a white parasol aloft. As her carriage passed, just a few feet from where George stood, she looked directly at him. He expected her to look down demurely as their eyes met but she didn’t, she held his gaze, even turning her head slightly as she went by. Long after they’d gone George stayed rooted to the spot, his eyes fixed on the wheel ruts the carriage had made in the dusty surface of the road. As he ruminated, someone jostled him from behind.

“Sorry, mate,” a voice called.

George didn’t turn to acknowledge the apology. A noisy gang of men, really just boys, continued on their way, laughing and shoving each other. The crowds were beginning to thin now and the shadows had perceptibly lengthened. After noticing the sun for the first time, now teetering fatly on the rooftops, George put his head down and fell into step with the remaining workers around him. He had half a mile to walk yet and the meal would already have been started.

After the soft caress of the late summer air, the Woolfes’ cramped lodgings were thick with smoke and noisy with the spit and roll of hot fat in the pan. Years of congealed grease had turned the iron black, particles of which were transferred as a carbon speckle to any food cooked in it. George’s father had drawn a stool up to the range and was moving a couple of sausages about the pan in a listless way, his eyes hooded and staring unseeing into the heat.

“Alright dad?” George asked, pulling out a chair and sitting wearily down at the square table. “Been busy today?”

“Ah, you know,” replied his father, as he did almost every day. He had always been a quiet man, happier listening and rolling his chewing tobacco around his mouth while George’s mother had chattered on. Now that she was gone, dead of cancer two days before the new century dawned, his reticence was oppressive rather than soothing, and George couldn’t resist filling the voids with banal comments and questions. Sometimes the futility of it got too much and his careful questioning became belligerent. It didn’t matter; his father remained oblivious to it all, caged in his private thoughts. It couldn’t be said that he was miserable because that implied some effort at emotion; in reality he was simply absent.

It hadn’t always been this way between father and son. ‘Thick as thieves, the pair of ‘em,’ was what George’s mother had said irritably to neighbours, when George was still a boy who preferred his dad’s company to anyone’s. When she was feeling more kindly disposed she might say, with something closer to fondness, ‘Oh, here they come, the organ grinder and his cheeky little monkey’.

On Saturdays George and his father would go on what they had come to call their ‘jaunts,’ just the two of them, and usually to the marshes. George had felt safe with his father as they wound their way home through the streets after dusk had fallen, when the gloom between the tenements had grown deep and accommodating to the bad men George imagined might lurk there. Although he never voiced his worries of what might lurk in the places where the twisted roads tapered, and the buildings crowded towards each other like rotten teeth in a cramped mouth, his dad seemed to know and would take his hand. Once at their own door, intact and unmolested, Mr.Woolfe never dropped the smaller hand without first squeezing it gently in silent acknowledgment.

It was rare when Saturdays didn’t take them to the marshes, occasionally those at Hackney but more usually Tottenham, where the birds were more numerous. Sometimes they went to watch, but more often they were there to trap, so that George’s father could put a bird in each of his cages and fetch an extra shilling or two for it. There seemed no sense in buying them at the market on Sclater Street when they could trap them for free on the marsh.

On a fine day, like those George remembered, with crisp blue skies and clean air he gulped down, there were plenty of birds there for the taking. Canaries sold for more, but that meant buying a breeder bird so in the main it was goldfinches, chaffinches, and linnets the two Woolfe men were after. On those happy days, when things went right, there seemed to be scores of birds hopping about and chirping, their heads jerking and starting at every noise, eyes bead-bright.

“Best way to trap is like with like,” George’s father would repeat each time, and so, before setting off in the morning, he would take down one of the display cages at the window and, with a careful hand, take out a finch and put it in a small wooden cage, which was lighter for carrying. The bird never stirred as it was moved—its brown wings folded and its head still.

George attempted the transfer himself on one occasion, after begging his father to let him have a go. He wanted to feel the soft feathers and the meagre breast meat below; to know he had the power to crush the toothpick bones but not. In the event, the clockwork whirr of the bird’s heart made him panic. He believed that if he didn’t release the bird at once then he would be unable to resist squeezing it to a pulp of bloody brown feathers and snapped bones. It took them so long to catch the escaped bird and return it to its cage, George’s mother watching sulky-mouthed with her hands on her hips as they darted about after it, that the trip to the marshes was abandoned that week.

When they did go, George’s job was to carry the wicker trap while his father took the cage. The trap was basic but effective, using nothing more complex than a morsel of food, a wooden stick and a length of twine. Once the trap was set, they drew some distance away and lay down in the rough rye grass, low on their bellies, the man’s hand on the boy’s back to remind him to stay down. Soon enough, the tiny bird in the cage placed next to the trap would start to trill, simply glad to be out under the huge sky, or so George had always imagined.

“You wait now,” his father would say under his breath, his lips hardly moving. “You’ll see ‘em come now he’s singing.”

In twos and threes they soon arrived, homing haphazardly in towards the trap, and the hand on George’s back would press down a little harder. A ‘decent haul’ was a pair; a ‘fine day’s catching’ was three or four birds, and once the catch on the trap was safely closed they would eat the mutton pies they had bought on the way in quiet celebration, throwing crumbs of pastry to the new captives.

The birds were chiefly for selling along with the cages, but in those days George’s father was fond of a pint at the Southgate Arms, which he preferred to its more boisterous neighbour, the Rosemary Branch. The Southgate held songbird competitions early on Saturday evenings, with money prizes given for the best singers. Further east, the weavers of Spitalfields had traditionally played their birds in a betting game with a candle. Two birds faced each other over the lit tallow and whichever bird jerked the most in the time it took until the flame stuttered out was the victor.

In Hoxton, they preferred their birds to sing, and it was the cock bird that possessed the finest voice. On the marsh visits that saw them catch a male, the brightly-daubed chaffinch or the linnet with his proud cap and breast of scarlet, George would get a ha’penny for sweets as a reward. For him, the twilight journeys home to Hoxton on such days, one hand in his father’s, the other turning over his new coin, seemed the apogee of excitement; his fear of the darkening city heightening his anticipation of reaching the sweet shop and its warm, sherbet-dusted air.

The whole family would go down to the pub for the songbird contest, even Cissy, who still tottered unsteadily on tiny feet then. George would ask to carry the cage, like a conjuror’s prop with a black cloth draped over it, so that the bird might sleep instead of being disturbed by the crowds in the pub.

“We don’t want ‘im all sung out before his time, do we?” his father would ask.

George was the one who could write his letters best and so he would spell out their name in large script on a piece of cardboard and his mother would pin it to the cage. Nevertheless, once they had taken up their usual position close to the high windows in the pub, George would never shift his gaze from the cage, mindful of rogues who might swap their bird for an inferior singer.

These days it felt like a lifetime since his father had gone to the pub for anything. George had left school and now worked at Carlisle & Clegg’s Printworks, while his father remained almost constantly in their two rooms backing onto the canal, painstakingly fashioning his birdcages out of slender strips of metal. His hands were stiffer and slower than they had been, but of the half-dozen younger birdcage makers working out of Hoxton’s streets, none was as skilful as him. He could manipulate and shape the bands of metal into miniature aviaries as if he was twisting ribbons, though the finished cages were as sturdy as they appeared delicate.

But while the fruits of his talent still shone, his enthusiasm for the work had dimmed. When George’s mother was still alive, they had kept up to a dozen small brown songbirds, each with a cage of its own, despite her complaints about the racket. The cages were strung along the curtain rail, high up at the open window so that people might hear their music as they passed and buy a bird along with its pretty cage. Now, the few cages that hadn’t yet been taken by Cissy to sell at the market lay empty next to the skirting, with nothing inside but a thick rime of dust. Underneath the window, a scattering of hard, black pellets from birds long sold remained unswept.

On this evening, George noticed that the one cage that had still hung at the window was missing. It was the special one that even his mother had admired, and the most complex his father had ever worked. Perhaps Cissy had taken it and sold it—she was still out, even though the dusk was now gathering in earnest. He looked from the bare window to his father, still hunched on his stool, and felt almost too tired to ask after it. But for all her faults, the memory of his mother, coaxing a scrap of conversation out into the room, spurred him on.

“What’s happened to the best cage, then, dad?” he asked. “Did Cissy take it to the market?”

There was a pause, so long that George braced himself to repeat the question, but then his father began speaking, so quietly and in the direction of the pan that his words were almost smothered by the sound of spitting fat.

“A gentleman come round and bought it,” he said. “Cissy’s wrapped it up and put it under the bed for safekeeping. You’re to deliver it in a few weeks. Address is writ down for you over there.” He pointed to a scrap of paper weighted down by a pair of wire-cutters. “It’s up Highbury way and there’ll be another couple of shillings if you’re not late. He’s given fifteen bob for it already. Your mother would have been pleased enough to get that much for a cage.”

It was the longest statement George had heard his father make for a long time. He wanted to ask him if he had been sorry to see it go, who the gentleman had been, and if he’d appreciated how fine the cage was, but everything about his father’s defiant stance, bent over the pan once more, stayed George’s tongue. Instead, the two men, both as dark and slight as the other, resumed their habitual silence as they waited for Cissy to return, the only sound the cheap meat swelling and bursting in the pan.

By the time she did arrive, Cissy’s portion of the meal was cold and sitting in half an inch of white lard at the base of the pan. She hung up her shawl and, having placed a cursory kiss on her father’s head, went straight to the range. Spearing the remaining food with a fork she remained standing as she ate hurriedly, barely chewing before she swallowed the pieces.

“Did dad tell you about selling the cage?” she asked George between mouthfuls, her eyes still bright from the earlier excitement. “You’ve got to take it to a birthday party for his goddaughter on the 25th of next month and not be late.”

“Who was he, this fellow? Why was he here if he’s got money to burn?” asked George, irritated by Cissy’s enthusiasm.

“He was with Constable Ryeland,” she replied impatiently. “He’s writing a book on London, and so he’s going round all the streets, making notes. I saw him after he left, looking up at the windows and pointing at things. I can’t think there’s anything much of interest round here, mind. His name’s Charles Booth and his goddaughter who’s getting the cage is called Clemency.” She drew the unfamiliar word out over her tongue, over-enunciating each syllable.

“I didn’t think that cage was for selling,” George said, directing his words at his father, who didn’t respond. “I said, I didn’t think you’d ever sell that cage, dad. Ma said it was your calling card for when you were going to start selling to the shops up west, and making better money.”

“We needed that money,” said his sister softly. “Dad got a good price for it, and there’s more where that came from if you deliver it right too. And I’ll need that extra off you when you get it, George. It won’t be yours to spend down the pub. Where are you going now?”