Shadows of the Workhouse (9 page)
Read Shadows of the Workhouse Online
Authors: Jennifer Worth
The night times were the worst for Frank. Alone in a small, hard bed, with darkness all around, he sobbed silently for his sweet mother, whom he had adored with all the passion of boyhood. He missed the warmth of her body, he missed the smell of her skin, the touch of her hand, the sound of her breathing. He would creep over to Peggy’s bed and get in beside her, where the smell of her hair would numb his pain, and they would sleep together till morning. This became their one comfort in the first months of their life in the workhouse.
A year passed. After breakfast one morning, Frank and two other boys were taken to the Matron’s office. She said abruptly, “You are big boys now that you are seven, and we are taking you to the boys’ section today. Wait in the hallway, and the van will come for you at nine o’clock.”
The boys did not know what she meant, and the three of them sat on the bench, engaged in mock fights and ribaldry.
At nine o’clock, a man entered the front door and enquired, “Are these three to go?”
They were taken outside to a green van and told to climb in the back. It was all very exciting. They had never been in a van before, so they clambered in willingly, ready for adventure. The van started with a jerk, and they were thrown off the bench onto the floor. They shrieked with laughter. This was going to be a good day. A ride in a van! You wait till we get back and tell the others. The van stopped twice, and other boys of their own age climbed in. Soon there were eight boys, all shouting and skidding around the floor of the van as they turned corners, or pressing against each other to see out of the small back window in order to wave at people as they passed. Everyone turned to look, because motorised transport was comparatively unusual in those days. The boys felt very privileged, and infinitely superior to the people walking or travelling in horse-drawn carts and wagons.
Eventually the van stopped and the back door opened. Frank saw a very large, grey-stone building in front of him, and he did not much like the look of it.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“This is the boys’ section. You come here when you are seven and stay until you are fourteen,” said a tough-looking man, who was a workhouse officer.
“And where’s Peggy?” he demanded.
“I don’t know who Peggy is, but she’s not here.”
“Peggy is my sister and I look after her. My dad told me to.”
The officer laughed. “Well, someone else will have to look after her. There’s no girls allowed in here.”
Still Frank did not understand. He was unsure, frightened, and he felt like crying, but he wasn’t going to let the other boys see him, so he squared his shoulders, clenched his fists and put on a swagger as they were taken to the Master’s office.
The interview was brief. They were told that they must obey the rules, obey the officers at all times, and that if they did not do so they would be punished. The Master then said, “You will be given your duties and lunch is at one o’clock. You will start school tomorrow.”
Frank had wanted to ask about Peggy, but the Master so terrified him that he did not dare speak. He followed the officer to the dining hall with a feeling of panic in his heart that he had not known since the night when he had awoken to find his mother’s side of the bed empty.
Lunch in a huge refectory with about a hundred and fifty other boys, some of them very big, was terrifying and he could hardly eat. He ate half a potato and drank some water, but it nearly choked him, and he could not stop his tears from falling. Some of the bigger boys pointed at him and sniggered. None of the male officers showed any sympathy. The three new boys who had come together were all considerably more sober now. The fun and high spirits of the van ride evaporated as the reality of the situation began to dawn upon them. They had left the small world and comparative kindness of the nursery, where there were women officers and nurses, for the harsh, often brutal world of the workhouse proper, where, for the next seven years, they would encounter only male officers.
Back in the nursery, after breakfast, Peggy looked around for Frank, but could not find him. She looked in the lavatory and the washroom, but he was not there. She looked in the classroom and under the stairs, but he was not in those places either. Bewildered and frightened, she stood on the bottom stair hugging the banister, and stamped her feet. An officer came up to her, but she screamed and stamped her little feet even faster.
“Poor little thing,” remarked the officer to a colleague, “she’s going to miss her brother, they were very close. She’ll just have to get over it in her own time. There’s nothing we can do.”
Peggy was three years old and Frank had been with her all her life. She had not noticed the loss of her father, when she was eighteen months old, and had only the vaguest memory of her mother. But Frank was her world, her life, her security and she was utterly devastated. All day she stood on the bottom step, hugging the smooth, round balustrades, sometimes silent, sometimes sobbing. Sometimes she kicked the stairs and hurt her toe. Twice she wet herself, but still she wouldn’t move. Jane tried to talk to her, but Peggy shook her shoulders and screamed, “Go away.”
“Leave her alone,” said an officer to Jane, “she’ll get over it in a day or two.”
Towards evening Peggy started to bang her head on the balustrade. It hurt, but she wanted it to. Perhaps Frank would come when he knew she had hurt herself. When he didn’t come, she sobbed uncontrollably, then slipped down onto the stairs in a deep sleep. A nurse picked her up, carried her to the dormitory and put her to bed.
For the next three months, Peggy hunted for Frank every day. She always expected to find him, but never did. She asked everyone: “Where’s Frank?” and was told that he had been transferred to the big boys’ section, but she did not understand. She developed the habit of sitting alone in a corner and rocking herself. A nurse, who knew that this was a particularly frightening development in a lonely, insecure child, tried to comfort her. But Peggy would not be comforted. Each lonely night, she sucked her thumb and rocked herself and cried for Frank to come to her. But he didn’t come.
As time passed, she stopped looking for Frank and asked for him less, until eventually she stopped asking. It was assumed that she had forgotten all about him.
It was to be nine years before brother and sister saw each other again, and by that time they did not recognise each other.
BILLINGSGATE
At the age of seven, Frank had entered an all-male world of petty rules, upheld by harsh, uncompromising discipline and gratuitous tyranny. Many of the workhouse officers were men who had been brought up in a workhouse themselves during the nineteenth century, when conditions for paupers were simply appalling. A child had to have a very strong constitution to survive the brutality, the work, the cold, and near-starvation. These men knew of no other way of life, and to them it was only natural to impose the same sort of regime on the boys in their charge.
Frank was immediately set to work on one of the numerous tasks assigned to paupers: cleaning potatoes, cutting cabbage, scrubbing out the huge cooking vats (only the smallest boys could get inside them), burnishing the stoves, cleaning the brass, and hosing down the vast stone floors of the kitchen – and woe betide any boy who got himself wet! The list was endless and the day long, starting as it did at 6 a.m. The boys also went to the local council school, so the work had to be done before or after school. Frank found that if his tasks were not finished before he went to school, he got a beating from the officer in charge, and if he stayed behind to finish the job, he got a beating from the schoolmaster for being late!
Small boys quickly learned to hide their tears. They knew that any sign of weakness would be seized upon by a bigger boy and mercilessly exploited. Bullying, constant intimidation and jeering were the only response a smaller boy would gain from tears.
Once, and once only, Frank asked an officer where Peggy was. The man must have told one of the older boys, perhaps maliciously, knowing what would happen. The same day, in the washroom, a chorus went up. “Peggy, Peggy, who’s Peggy?”
“Peggy’s his tart. What a fart!”
“Peg, Peg, peg your nose, what a pong!”
“Peggy’s a stink.”
“He has to put a clothes peg on his nose ’afore he can touch ’er.”
Frank burst into tears, and a big boy came and pushed him over onto the slippery floor.
“Garn, you ain’t got no tart, yer titch,” said the boy, squeezing Frank’s testicles so hard that he screamed with pain.
The officer came in and the big boy swiftly merged into the crowd, looking innocent.
The officer looked round and asked no questions. “Get up,” he said curtly to Frank, “get washed and go to the dormitory.”
Frank crept into bed and cried, as he did every night, for his mother and his sister. He had learned to make no sound when crying, so as not to attract attention, and to keep very still, so that he seemed to be asleep. But he often lay awake for hours, his heart bursting.
During these wakeful hours he often – nearly always, in fact – heard movements and soft footsteps, grunting and puffing and cursing sounds, as iron bedsteads rattled and straw mattresses squeaked. Each dormitory had an officer in charge who had himself once been a workhouse boy. The officer slept in a closed cubicle at the end of rows of beds, and each night a boy would slip quietly out of bed and go into the cubicle.
What can one expect if a crowd of boys are thrown together, with no escape and no female influence? All the boys were lonely. All of them were motherless. They had only each other in whom to find comfort and, let us hope, a little happiness because for them life would be short. From 1914 to 1918 the older boys in Frank’s dormitory – those born in the 1890s – were destined to be sent straight from the workhouses of England to the trenches of France, to die as cannon-fodder in defence of King and Country.
It was September 1914. A costermonger by the name of Tip called at the workhouse and asked to speak to the Master. The Master was prim and pompous; the coster flashy and talkative. He explained, in a husky voice inclined to sudden squeaks, that his lad had gone off to the war, and he had been left without a boy, and a coster must ’ave a boy, how else was he goin’ to do his trade, like, an’ what he was lookin’ for was a sharp little lad of about eleven or twelve, eleven being the preferential age, seeing as how they learns quickest, a boy who was a good worker, an’ quick, an’ it didn’t matter about no book learning, because he never could see no use for that in the fish trade, and them as ’ad book learning never seemed to get on spectackiler in the trade, but he, Tip, would edicate the boy himself an’ make a right sharp coster out of him, as how he could earn his living honest-like, an’ keep his head up with the best, an’ he would supply his lodgins an’ his victuals, least as to say his doxy would, an’ ’ad the Master got such a boy, who was hard-workin’ an’ willin’?
The coster delivered all this in a curious voice that growled and gurgled sometimes, and squeaked and whistled at others. The Master paused to think, and the coster, who never paused and could not conceive of anyone else doing so, started again, “An’ he’s gotta be strong, ’cause its no place for a wimpish lad, an the doxy’ll feed him well an’ keep his strength up, an’—”
The Master held up his hand to silence the man. “Just wait here, will you?” he said, as he left the office.
Workhouse masters were encouraged to off-load inmates in order to reduce expenses, but they were not allowed to turn them out onto the streets unless provision for their maintenance was assured. The apprentice system was the answer.
The Master thought carefully about the coster’s request, and his mind fixed on Frank – he was eleven, he was strong, he was hard-working, he was obedient, and he was, according to his school reports, one of the “has ability but must try harder” type – the despair of every honest schoolmaster.
The boys were at tea, and Frank was called out.
“Now stand up straight, look lively and don’t answer back,” said the Master as he cuffed him round the ear. “There’s a man here wants to see you.”
They entered the office, where the coster was whistling. He had a beautiful, mellow whistle that seemed a most unlikely adjunct to his peculiar speaking voice.
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