London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics) (52 page)

‘Sometimes at night we goes down to Covent Garden, to where Hevans’s is, but not till all the plays is over, cause Hevans’s don’t shut afore two or three. When the people comes out we gets tumbling afore them. Some of the drunken gentlemens is shocking spiteful, and runs after a chap and gives us a cut with the cane; some of the others will give us money, and some will buy our broom off us for sixpence. Me and Jemmy sold the two of our brooms for a shilling to two drunken gentlemens, and they began kicking up a row, and going before other gentlemens and pretending to sweep, and taking off their hats begging, like a mocking of us. They danced about with the brooms, flourishing ’em in the air, and knocking off people’s hats; and at last they got into a cab, and chucked the brooms away. The drunken gentlemens is always either jolly or spiteful.

‘But I goes only to the Haymarket, and about Pall Mall, now. I used to be going up to Hevans’s every night, but I can’t take my money up there now. I stands at the top of the Haymarket by Windmill-street, and when I sees a lady and gentleman coming out of the Argyle, then I begs of them as they comes across. I says – “Can’t you give me a ha’penny, sir, poor little Jack? I’ll stand on my nose for a penny” – and then they laughs at that.

‘Goose can stand on his nose as well as me; we puts the face flat down on the ground, instead of standing on our heads. There’s Duckey Dunnovan, and the Stuttering Baboon, too, and two others as well, as can
do it; but the Stuttering Baboon’s getting too big and fat to do it well; he’s a very awkward tumbler. It don’t hurt, only at laming; cos you bears more on your hands than your nose.

‘Sometimes they says – “Well, let us see you do it,” and then p’raps they’ll search in their pockets, and say – “O, I haven’t got any coppers:” so then we’ll force ’em, and p’raps they’ll pull out their purse and gives us a little bit of silver.

‘Ah, we works hard for what we gets, and then there’s the policeman birching us. Some of ’em is so spiteful, they takes up their belt what they uses round the waist to keep their coat tight, and ’ll hit us with the buckle; but we generally gives ’em the lucky dodge and gets out of their way.

‘One night, two gentlemen, officers they was, was standing in the Haymarket, and a drunken man passed by. There was snow on the ground, and we’d been begging of ’em, and says one of them – “I’ll give you a shilling if you’ll knock than drunken man over.” We was three of us; so we set on him, and soon had him down. After he got up he went and told the policemen, but we all cut round different ways and got off, and then met again. We didn’t get the shilling, though, cos a boy crabbed us. He went up to the gentleman, and says he – “Give it me, sir, I’m the boy;” and then we says – “No, sir, it’s us.” So, says the officer – “I sharn’t give it to none of you,” and puts it back again in his pockets. We broke a broom over the boy as crabbed us, and then we cut down Waterloo-place, and afterwards we come up to the Haymarket again, and there we met the officers again. I did a caten-wheel, and then says I – “Then won’t you give me un now?” and they says – “Go and sweep some mud on that woman.” So I went and did it, and then they takes me in a pastry-shop at the corner, and they tells me to tumble on the tables in the shop. I nearly broke one of ’em, they were so delicate. They gived me a fourpenny meat-pie and two penny sponge-cakes, which I puts in my pocket, cos there was another sharing with me. The lady of the shop kept on screaming – “Go and fetch me a police – take the dirty boy out,” cos I was standing on the tables in my muddy-feet, and the officers was a bursting their sides with laughing; and says they, “No, he sharn’t stir.”

‘I was frightened, cos if the police had come they’d been safe and sure to have took me. They made me tumble from the door to the end of the shop, and back again, and then I turned ’em a caten-wheel, and was near knocking down all the things as was on the counter.

‘They didn’t give me no money, only pies; but I got a shilling another time for tumbling to some French ladies and gentlemen in a pastry-cook’s
shop under the Colonnade. I often goes into a shop like that; I’ve done it a good many times.

‘There was a gentleman once as belonged to a “suckus”, [circus] as wanted to take me with him abroad, and teach me tumbling. He had a little mustache, and used to belong to Drury-lane play-house, riding on horses. I went to his place, and stopped there some time. He taught me to put my leg round my neck, and I was just getting along nicely with the splits (going down on the ground with both legs extended), when I left him. They (the splits) used to hurt worst of all; very bad for the thighs. I used, too, to hang with my leg round his neck. When I did anythink he liked, he used to be clapping me on the back. He wasn’t so very stunning well off, for he never had what I calls a good dinner – grandmother used to have a better dinner than he, – perhaps only a bit of scrag of mutton between three of us. I don’t like meat nor butter, but I likes dripping, and they never had none there. The wife used to drink – ay, very much, on the sly. She used when he was out to send me round with a bottle and sixpence to get a quartern of gin for her, and she’d take it with three or four oysters. Grandmother didn’t like the notion of my going away, so she went down one day, and says she – “I wants my child;” and the wife says – “That’s according to the master’s likings;” and then grandmother says – “What, not my own child?” And then grandmother began talking, and at last, when the master come home, he says to me – “Which will you do, stop here, or go home with your grandmother?” So I come along with her.

‘I’ve been sweeping the crossings getting on for two years. Before that I used to go caten-wheeling after the busses. I don’t like the sweeping, and I don’t think there’s e’er a one of us wot likes it. In the winter we has to be out in the cold, and then in summer we have to sleep out all night, or go asleep on the church-steps, reg’lar tired out.

‘One of us’ll say at night – “Oh, I’m sleepy now, who’s game for a doss? I’m for a doss” – and when we go eight or ten of us into a doorway of the church, where they keep the dead in a kind of airy-like underneath, and there we go to sleep. The most of the boys has got no homes. Perhaps they’ve got the price of a lodging, but they’re hungry, and they eats the money, and then they must lay out. There’s some of ’em will stop out in the wet for perhaps the sake of a halfpenny, and get themselves sopping wet. I think all our chaps would like to get out of the work if they could; I’m sure Goose would, and so would I.

‘All the boys call me the King, because I tumbles so well, and some calls me “Pluck”, and some “Judy”. I’m called “Pluck”, cause I’m so plucked a going at the gentlemen! Tommy Dunnovan – “Tipperty Tight” – we calls

THE BOY CROSSING-SWEEPERS.

him, cos his trousers is so tight he can hardly move in them sometimes, – he was the first as called me “Judy”. Dunnovan once swallowed a pill for a shilling. A gentleman in the Haymarket says – “If you’ll swallow this here pill I’ll give you a shilling;” and Jimmy says, “All right, sir;” and he puts it in his mouth, and went to the water-pails near the cab-stand and swallowed it.

‘All the chaps in our gang likes me, and we all likes one another. We always shows what we gets given to us to eat.

‘Sometimes we gets one another up wild, and then that fetches up a fight, but that isn’t often. When two of us fights, the others stands round and sees fair play. There was a fight last night between “Broke his Bones” – as we calls Antony Hones – and Neddy Hall – the “Sparrow”, or “Spider”, we calls him – something about the root of a pineapple, as we was aiming with at one another, and that called up a fight. We all stood round and saw them at it, but neither of ’em licked, for they gived in for to-day, and they’re to finish it to-night. We makes ’em fight fair. We all of us likes to see a fight, but not to fight ourselves. Hones is sure to beat, as Spider is as thin as a wafer, and all bones. I can lick the Spider, though he’s twice my size.’

The Street Where the Boy Sweepers Lodged

[pp. 569–70] I was anxious to see the room in which the gang of boy crossing-sweepers lived, so that I might judge of their peculiar style of house-keeping, and form some notion of their principles of domestic economy.

I asked young Harry and ‘the Goose’ to conduct me to their lodgings, and they at once consented, ‘the Goose’ prefacing his compliance with the remark, that ‘it wern’t such as genilmen had been accustomed to, but then I must take ’em as they was.’

The boys led me in the direction of Drury-lane; and before entering one of the narrow streets which branch off like the side-bones of a fish’s spine from that long thoroughfare, they thought fit to caution me that I was not to be frightened, as nobody would touch me, for all was very civil.

The locality consisted of one of those narrow streets which, were it not for the paved cart-way in the centre would be called a court. Seated on the pavement at each side of the entrance was a costerwoman with her basket before her, and her legs tucked up mysteriously under her gown into a round ball, so that her figure resembled in shape the plaster tumblers sold by the Italians. These women remained as inanimate as if they had
been carved images, and it was only when a passenger went by that they gave signs of life, by calling out in a low voice, like talking to themselves, ‘Two for three haarpence – her-rens’ – ‘Fine hinguns.’

The street itself is like the description given of thoroughfares in the East. Opposite neighbours could not exactly shake hands out of window, but they could talk together very comfortably; and, indeed, as I passed along, I observed several women with their arms folded up like a cat’s paws on the sill, and chatting with their friends over the way.

Nearly all the inhabitants were costermongers, and, indeed, the narrow cartway seemed to have been made just wide enough for a truck to wheel down it. A beershop and a general store, together with a couple of sweeps – whose residences were distinguished by a broom over the door – formed the only exceptions to the street-selling class of inhabitants.

As I entered the place, it gave me the notion that it belonged to a distinct coster colony, and formed one large hawkers’ home; for everybody seemed to be doing just as he liked, and I was stared at as if considered an intruder. Women were seated on the pavement, knitting, and repairing their linen; the doorways were filled up with bonnetless girls, who wore their shawls over their head, as the Spanish women do their mantillas; and the youths in corduroy and brass buttons, who were chatting with them, leant against the walls as they smoked their pipes, and blocked up the pavement, as if they were the proprietors of the place. Little children formed a convenient bench out of the kerb-stone; and a party of four men were seated on the footway, playing with cards which had turned to the colour of brown paper from long usage, and marking the points with chalk upon the flags.

The parlour-windows of the houses had all of them wooden shutters, as thick and clumsy-looking as a kitchen flap-table, the paint of which had turned to the dull dirt-colour of an old slate. Some of these shutters were evidently never used as a security for the dwelling, but served only as tables on which to chalk the accounts of the day’s sales.

Before most of the doors were costermongers trucks – some standing ready to be wheeled off, and others stained and muddy with the day’s work. A few of the costers were dressing up their barrows, arranging the sieves of waxy-looking potatoes – and others taking the stiff herrings, browned like a meerschaum with the smoke they had been dried in, from the barrels beside them, and spacing them out in pennyworths on their trays.

You might guess what each costermonger had taken out that day by the heap of refuse swept into the street before the doors. One house had
a blue mound of mussel-shells in front of it – another, a pile of the outside leaves of broccoli and cabbages, turning yellow and slimy with bruises and moisture.

Hanging up beside some of the doors were bundles of old strawberry pottles, stained red with the fruit. Over the trap-doors to the cellars were piles of market-gardeners’ sieves, ruddled like a sheep’s back with big red letters. In fact, everything that met the eye seemed to be in some way connected with the coster’s trade.

From the windows poles stretched out, on which blankets, petticoats, and linen were drying; and so numerous were they, that they reminded me of the flags hung out at a Paris fete. Some of the sheets had patches as big as trap-doors let into their centres; and the blankets were – many of them – as full of holes as a pigeon-house.

As I entered the court, a ‘row’ was going on; and from a first-floor window a lady, whose hair sadly wanted brushing, was haranguing a crowd beneath, throwing her arms about like a drowning man, and in her excitement thrusting her body half out of her temporary rostrum as energetically as I have seen Punch lean over his theatre.

‘The willin dragged her,’ she shouted, ‘by the hair of her head, at least three yards into the court – the willin! and then he kicked her, and the blood was on his boot.’

It was a sweep who had been behaving in this cowardly manner; but still he had his defenders in the women around him. One with very shiny hair, and an Indian kerchief round her neck, answered the lady in the window, by calling her a ‘d—d old cat’; whilst the sweep’s wife rushed about, clapping her hands together as quickly as if she was applauding at a theatre, and styled somebody or other ‘an old wagabones as she wouldn’t dirty her hands to fight with’.