Solomon Gursky Was Here (44 page)

Mindful of dippers and
ganefs,
moving on smartly whenever he saw a peeler, Ephraim finally reached Whitechapel. Two sodden sailors lay in a pool of their own piss outside a gin mill. One of them had a purply eye swollen shut, the other a broken bloodied nose. And suddenly there were stalls, stalls everywhere.

The stalls of Petticoat Lane offered apples and oysters, cheap jewellery, boots, toys, whelks, herring and cutlery and firewood. Ephraim pressed on as far as the Earl of Effingham Theatre, joining the rambunctious mob inside. Jenny O'Hara, wrapped in gauze twinkly with sequins, her enormous rouged bubbies all but plopping free of her corset, settled on a swing and sang:

Bet Mild she was a servant maid,

And she a place had got,

To wait upon two ladies fair

These ladies' names was Scott.

Now Bet a certain talent had,

For she anything could handle,

And for these ladies, every night,

She used a large thick candle.

Hopping off her swing, approaching the front of the stage with mincing little steps, Jenny continued:

Now Betty had a sweetheart got,

It was their footman Ned,

Who slipped into their room one night,

And crept beneath the bed;

And there he saw them at the fun,

And he his tool did dandle.

Says he, “I'll give them a thing

Much better than a candle.”

The sum Ephraim was offered for his candlesticks in the first pawnbroker's shop he entered did not tempt him; he also declined the
pittance proffered in the second jerryshop he visited. Unfortunately, coming out of yet another shop, he was nabbed by a peeler.

Shedding hot tears, Ephraim fell to the gutter, kicking his legs, hoping to attract the sympathy of passersby. He protested that he was an orphan, driven by hunger to pawning his beloved granny's candlesticks, but his story wouldn't wash. Ephraim spent his first night in London incarcerated in the gassy bowels of a rotting hulk on the lower Thames and within a week he was sentenced to six months in the notorious “Steel” (so-called after the Bastille) in Coldbath Fields.

On arrival, the lags sized him up and assumed that once Sergeant Walsh had wearied of him, he would be sequestered in the harem until things sorted themselves out and he found a protector. But the obdurate Ephraim refused to lower his trousers for Sergeant Walsh. As a consequence, he was obliged to ride the cockchafer every morning, treading down a wheel of twenty-four steps that sank away from him at an infuriating fixed rate in stifling heat. When that failed to do the trick Sergeant Walsh sentenced him to a week of shot-drill on the square. For this exercise he joined other offenders in a row, the men posted three yards apart. On a shouted order from Sergeant Walsh each man picked up a twenty-four-pound cannon-ball, lugged it as far as his neighbour's position and hurried back to his own place, where another cannon-ball left there by his other neighbour was waiting for him. The drill usually lasted an hour, sometimes longer, depending on how urgently Sergeant Walsh needed a beer. When Ephraim still resisted the sergeant's advances, he earned himself some time on the crank. This required him to turn a sand-filled drum with a crank handle, the drum's revolutions recorded by a clock mechanism. He was birched again and again. Then one morning Sergeant Walsh was found squatting in an outhouse, his throat slashed from ear to ear. Detectives descended on the Steel, questioning all the lags, putting everybody on short ration, flogging indiscriminately, but the culprit was never discovered. Ephraim, a prime suspect, was vouched for by Izzy Garber, who swore that the boy, troubled by a fever, had slept by his side all through the night.

The impudent, astonishingly resourceful Izzy Garber, a hirsute, barrel-chested master of magic, was a born scrounger for whom
nothing was impossible, even within the bleak confines of the Steel. At the right moment Izzy's loosely worn shirt would yield salamis, coils of stuffed derma, roasted chickens or rounds of cheese acquired who knows where, God knows how. He also never lacked for tobacco and gin and Indian hemp and soothing salves to heal the lacery of cuts burnt into Ephraim's back. The other prisoners, even the turnkeys, treated Izzy with deference, calling upon him again and again to extract teeth, set broken bones, or stitch knife wounds, no questions asked. Izzy, never without his
yarmulke,
embossed with the inscription, “Honour the Sabbath, To keep it Holy,” was the most triumphantly Jewish man Ephraim had ever met. “Look at their God, or son of, as those sods would have it. Turn the other cheek. The meek shall inherit the earth. Codswallop. Nancyboy horseshit. But our God is truly vengeful,” Izzy once said, thrusting his
siddur
at Ephraim. “So say your evening prayers, because it doesn't pay to mess with Jehovah, that old Jew tucker.”

Izzy aside, Ephraim's sojourn in the Steel proved an invaluable learning experience. From coiners who normally operated in the Holy Land rookery of St. Giles he learned how to take a counterfeit with an unmilled edge and work it into acceptable coin. Practising with pickpockets of his own age he was soon adjudged sufficiently adroit to become a dipper, although he had no intention of putting himself in the hands of a kidsman when he got out.

“Nischt fur dich,”
Izzy Garber said.

From a member of the swell mob out of Seven Dials Ephraim absorbed all he needed to know about garroting. But Izzy proved Ephraim's most beneficial teacher. One night he told him how he had used to work village greens as a prater, or bogus preacher, raising funds for a mission to the savages of the Gold Coast. “‘Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.'” Another night Izzy recalled his days as a professional beggar. He told Ephraim how, posted outside a church, waiting for the Christians to emerge, he would promptly fall to the ground, simulating convulsions: foam, produced by soap shavings under his tongue, bubbling pathetically to his lips. Then, as soon as
sympathetic members of the congregation had flocked around, he would whip out his letter.

THIS IS TO CERTIFY, to all whom it may concern, that the EXEMPLAR, Captain Staines, was returning to Liverpool Dock, from the Canadas, laden with beaver pelts from Rupert's Land, and that said vessel encountering a prodigious GALE and ICEBERGS off the banks of Newfoundland, and was dismasted and finally wrecked on the ice. That the above-mentioned vessel foundered and only the second mate and three of the crew, the bearers of these certificates, escaped a watery grave. These survivors were humanely picked up by the brig GLORIANA, Capt. Wescott, and landed at Tilbury Dock. That we, the Masters of Customs, and one of Her Majesty's Justices of the Peace for the said dock, do hereby grant and afford to said ISRAEL GRANT this vouchment of the truth of the said wreck and do empower him to present and use this certificate for twenty-eight days from the date thereof, to enable him to acquire such temporal aid as may be essential to reaching his wife and children in the Outer Hebrides. And this certificate further sheweth that he may not be interrupted in the said journey by any constabulary or other official authority, provided that no breach of the peace or other cognizable offence be committed by the said Petitioner.

As witness to our hands,

Magnus McCarthy, M.C.     £1-0-0

Archibald Burton, J.P.         £ 1-0-0

Given at Liverpool Dock, this 27th day of January 1831.

GOD SAVE THE KING

Given his skill in penmanship and Latin, and the connections he had made in the Steel, Ephraim envisaged setting himself up as a screever once his sentence was done. Izzy was pleased with his protégé. “It wouldn't be nice for a Yiddisher boy to be a footpad or a dragsman. Remember,
tsatskeleh,
we are the People of the Book.”

“How will I find you after I get out?”

“Don't worry,” Izzy said. “I'll find you.”

On his release, Ephraim dug his money out of its hiding place in Hyde Park, acquired the necessary quills and inks and parchments,
and moved into a lodging house in Whitechapel. Within months he was prospering. After dark he drifted from gin-shop, through bordello to gaming-house, seeking Izzy Garber, unavailingly. But during the day he was hard at it. He wrote letters for ruined clergymen. “Milady—I held the rank of Captain in the Peninsular War. I have struggled exceedingly hard, after being discharged from the service on account of my crippling wounds, but unhappily.…” Keeping a sharp eye on the death notices in the
Times,
he would send an appropriately dressed dollymop, a pillow bound to her belly, to the fashionable home of the newly bereaved family of a gentleman. She would carry a letter saying that the bearer had been seduced by the deceased and was now with child but utterly without means, cast off by her own family, and though she did not wish to publicize the affair.…

His letters, the penmanship exquisite, were signed with the names of sea captains, rectors, major generals, and lords of the realm; and they were garnished with heart-rending appeals, nicely turned Latin phrases and suitable biblical quotations.

Such was the demand for Ephraim's inventive pen that he soon acquired an opera hat, a white waistcoat, an elegant snuff box and a silk handkerchief. He was brought to the attention of a theatrical producer, who offered him a position in his combine of brothels. Ephraim declined, but he did accompany him to a boxing match and saw Ikey Pig, a Jew, badly mauled. However, one taste of the fancy was enough to make him a victim of boximania. He was with the producer again when an American Negro, an escaped slave, had the effrontery to challenge for the enviable title of Champion of England. As Pierce Egan wrote of this match, “that a FOREIGNER should have the temerity to put in a claim,
even
for the mere contention of tearing the CHAMPION'S CAP from the British brow, much more the honour of wearing it, or bearing it away from GREAT BRITAIN, such an idea however distant, never intruded itself into the breasts of an Englishman.”

Ephraim, despairing of ever finding Izzy, became a regular at Laurent's Dancing Academy in Windmill Street, the Argyll Rooms, and of course Kate Hamilton's night house, flourishing there as a favourite of Thelma Coyne, whom he considered establishing in a flat in Holborn as his very own
poule-de-luxe
.

Wandering through Piccadilly one night he was drawn into his first, admittedly spurious, acquaintance with Canada through a theatrical poster.

EGYPTIAN HALL

Piccadilly

JUST ARRIVED

Canadian North American

INDIANS!

Will perform at the above hall, at 2 o'Clock in the afternoon, & 8 o'Clock in the Evening

A Grand Indian Council

In front of the Wigwam, when the whole Party will appear in FULL NATIVE COSTUME,

Displaying all the Implements of War.

THE CHIEF

Will Shoot An Apple Off A Boy's Head!

A Facsimile of Scalping!

Never before attempted in this country

THE WAR DANCE

In which the Indians will give a true Specimen of the FURIOUS RAGE with which feelings are aroused against their adversary at an approaching conflict.

BURYING THE HATCHET, AND SMOKING

THE CALUMET (OR PIPE) OF PEACE.

A slash glued to the poster announced:

Entirely due to
Sacred
ABORIGINAL RITES

There will be no Performances,

Wednesday, Oct. 8 or Thursday, Oct. 9.

Thrilled by the events in Egyptian Hall, but naggingly suspicious of the chief, Ephraim slipped backstage after the performance. Voices were raised in the chief's dressing room.

“Paskudnyak! Mamzer!”

“Hok mir nit kayn tchynik.”

“Ver derharget!”

His doubts happily confirmed, Ephraim kicked open the door. The hirsute, barrel-chested chief instantly dived behind a screen. His plump raging wife scooped up a hatchet.

“Izzy, come on out of there.”

“Ephraim!”

The two old lags embraced. “I told you I'd find you,” Izzy said, and then turning to his wife he added, “This lad here can set bones almost as well as I can. You can't teach these things. You've got to have the touch.”

They repaired through greasy fog to a garlicky, smoke-filled basement kitchen in Soho that kept open late to cater to the troupe as well as other dubious night people. Buxom waitresses in stained lowcut blouses sailed through the jostling crowd, hoisting tankards of ale even as they slapped probing hands, their curses drowned in a cacophony of Yiddish, Greek, and Italian. In a gas-lit corner, an old jeweller, one eye sprouting a magnifying glass, bargained with a solemn moustachioed Sikh. At Izzy's table, platters of chopped liver and shmaltz herring were followed by steaming trays of stuffed derma, boiled
flanken, kasha
drenched in chicken fat and potato
kreplach
. Shouting over the din, Ephraim congratulated Izzy on the full house at the Egyptian Hall and then asked why there would be no performances on the Wednesday and Thursday of the following week.

Affronted, Izzy replied, “I think it would be most inappropriate for us to perform the war dance on Yom Kippur.”

“Gottzedank,”
Mrs. Garber said.

What finally brought Ephraim down, as it would many times in the future, was a dangerous admixture of vanity, lust, and recklessness. Many a night he entertained two particularly pert Irish girls, the Sullivan sisters, in his attic rooms. The obliging sisters, who lived in the same lodging house as he did, thrived as palmers by day, prostitutes by night. On occasion Ephraim, in a mood to go on the randy, would treat the two of them to an evening at the Eagle, splurging on a box. Not for the small profit involved, but because he enjoyed the
sport of it, there were nights when Ephraim would go out bug-hunting with them. The sisters, posted under a gas lamp, would lure a likely, prosperous-looking drunk, preferably a country bumpkin, into buying them a tot in a gin-shop where Ephraim waited. Jammed tight against the crowded bar, Dotty would stroke him, lick his ear, and sing softly: