The Wicked Boy (2 page)

Robert and Nattie paid a few pennies apiece to gain admittance to the ground and made for the low, roped-off stands to either side of the pitch. The more affluent spectators took their places in the tiered pavilion reserved for members of the Marylebone Cricket Club.

It was a clear, hot day, tempered by soft breezes. Just after noon the bell rang and the Gentlemen strode out from the pavilion in their whites to take their places as fielders on the huge swathe of green. The Players' first batting pair emerged from their shabbier dressing room through a side entrance by the stands, which were partly covered with a white awning and backed by a belt of trees.

The Players had won the toss and elected to bat. They expected to score well on a pitch hardened by three months of drought, but the wicket proved far more volatile than anticipated, and their batsmen performed disappointingly. By 4.40 p.m. they were all out for 231.

Twenty minutes later, W. G. Grace and Andrew Stoddart opened the innings for the Gentlemen. Grace lumbered onto the field in his whites, a tiny red and yellow cap on his big, bearded head. It was thirty years almost to the day since he had played in his first Gentlemen v Players match at Lord's. His partner, Stoddy, was another cricketing hero: a graceful, spirited batsman, with a magnificent moustache, he had led the English side to victory in the last test series in Australia, and had been honoured with a wax statue at Madame Tussaud's museum in Baker Street.

Despite some excellent bowling from the Players, Grace and Stoddart were still at the crease two hours later, having notched up 137 runs between them. The stumps were pulled at 7 p.m. The two batsmen would continue their innings the next day.

The Coombes boys left St John's Wood at dusk and got back to West Ham after dark. At about 9 p.m., Robert called on Mr Robertson. He went to the front door of number 37 while Nattie waited outside the gate.

‘I have come back for the change,' said Robert. ‘Is the house all right?'

‘I expect so,' Mr Robertson replied. ‘I haven't seen anything.' He gave Robert the rent book and three shillings in change – the rent for each house in Cave Road was seven shillings a week,
about average for the area
but a sum that would secure only a large room in the centre of London.

Once inside their house, the boys did not go to the bedrooms upstairs. Instead, they bedded down in the back parlour – Robert took the sofa and Nattie the armchair. They fell asleep in their clothes.

The next morning Robert and Nattie set out for Lord's again. Their mother's friend Amelia England, who lived at number 33, saw them in the street and asked where they were going. Robert replied that they were visiting an aunt in St John's Wood. He added that their mother was out of town but he had just received a letter from her, in which she had enclosed some money. ‘Very likely she will be home tomorrow evening,' he said.

The crowd was even bigger at Lord's on Tuesday and the weather just as fine. For half an hour before play commenced, the fans streamed out of the trains, cabs and omnibuses.

The Gentlemen resumed their innings at 11.30 a.m. Within fifteen minutes Stoddart was bowled out for 71, but Grace kept going. As he neared his hundred the crowd grew excited and when he made the century a storm of applause was raised by the spectators and the players alike. It was Grace's seventh century of the season in a first-class game. His achievement that morning was all the greater because the bowling had been exceptional.

At 1.40 p.m., Grace's innings ended with a catch at the wicket. Eight of his ten team mates had also been dismissed by the time they broke for lunch at two and, despite Grace's century, the Gentlemen had only 252 runs for nine wickets.

The Coombes brothers had brought provisions to the match. They ate their food in the shade of a shed in the grounds.

When play continued after lunch, the Gentlemen were all out in ten minutes, having scored only seven more runs. The Players came on for a second innings and by the time the stumps were pulled at 7 p.m. they had scored 269 runs and lost just six wickets. They were well ahead.

Robert and Nattie made their way back again to East London, but instead of going straight home they headed for the new Theatre Royal in Stratford, two miles north-west of Cave Road. The play they watched that evening,
Light Ahead
, told the story of a man framed for murder by a shipyard employee who had turned forger, bigamist and killer. The theatrical newspaper
The Era
observed that the show would appeal to ‘the pit and gallery', a working-class audience such as that found in Stratford, but pronounced it ‘a straggling, uneven piece' that ‘proceeds on its course for a considerable time with no light ahead whatever as to how it is to turn and in what manner it will end'. The highlights of the production were a specially constructed lifeboat, which was hoisted onto the stage for the finale; a ‘winning and womanly' heroine; and an audacious villain, whose gleeful malignancy excited the admiration even of the
Era
's critic.

In the back parlour of 35 Cave Road, where Robert and Nattie again slept that night, Robert kept his collection of ‘penny dreadfuls' – or ‘penny bloods'. These were melodramatic adventures in the same vein as
Light Ahead
, published weekly as magazines. They were set all over the world: on the high seas, in the crime-ridden streets of London and New York, the jungles of Africa, on the plains of the Wild West and the islands of the Far East. Some took place in a fantastical future of electrical stagecoaches and flying machines, others in a blood-soaked past of noble crusaders and haunted knights.

Among Robert's most recent purchases
was
Jack Wright and the Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea
, part of an American series loosely inspired by the novels of Jules Verne. Jack is an orphan inventor – a ‘manly-looking boy' with a ‘fine, athletic figure'– who travels the globe in ingenious vessels of his own making, fighting rogues and tracking down treasure. In his Red Sea adventure, published in the first week of July, Jack sails across the Atlantic from America to Africa. His submarine, the
Meteor
, is a slender pod of plate glass and steel, its compact cabins washed with silvery light, flashing with instruments, gleaming with levers, wires and electro-magnets. After much danger and derring-do – storms of rain and sand, the rescue of a drowning maiden, fights with Arab pearl divers and Yankee bank robbers – he reaches his quarry: a cache of treasure at the bottom of the Red Sea, guarded by a twenty-foot-long winged lizard. To vanquish the dragon and lay claim to the loot, Jack dons a submarine suit and dives through a blood-red sea to the creature's cave. Once he is inside the grotto, a hunk of coral rolls over the entrance. ‘He was entombed alive!'

The giant lizard springs at Jack and sinks its double row of curved black teeth into the boy's flesh. Jack wriggles free, aims his pistol and shoots, but the creature only briefly recoils. ‘The beast was floating high over his head near the ceiling, squirming its long, slender body like a snake, and glaring down at him with its enormous, fiery eyes.' It darts towards him again, ‘its huge red mouth gaping'.

‘If it reaches me,' thinks Jack, ‘I have no doubt that it will tear me to pieces, goaded as it is to the height of its fury.' When the creature surges forward and curls its body around his, Jack drops his pistol and draws a dagger. ‘Plunging it into the beast's head, he buried the blade up to the hilt, and a convulsive throe of pain seemed to dart through it, and it sank to the ground.' The monster lets go of Jack as it falls. Upon seeing the ‘repulsive object' stretched out dead in front of him, the boy breathes a sigh of relief and rises to his feet. ‘Cruel, savage, spiteful!' he mutters. ‘I never before encountered a beast so fearless and bloodthirsty.' The rubies and sapphires on the seabed are now his for the taking. Jack gathers them up, and digs his way out of the cave to freedom.

On Wednesday, another fiercely hot day, Robert took a key from the top of the clock on the mantelpiece in the back parlour and went upstairs with his brother. He unlocked the door to his mother's room, at the front of the house, and both boys went in to raise the window blinds, which had been down since Sunday night.

The boys' funds were running low and neither of them had a job. Nattie was playing truant from Cave Road school, a hulking three-storey block for 1,570 students built opposite their house the previous summer. Robert had left the school in May, having completed his eighth and last year of state-funded education. He had then found work in a shipyard by the docks, but after a fortnight had jacked it in. The brothers decided to head for the docks now to look for a man called John Fox, who a few years earlier had been an assistant steward to their father. Fox made his home on the ships lying at anchor: he slept in the galleys and ran errands for the officers and crew. Robert thought that he might help them to raise some money.

The horse-drawn trams
and buses to the nearest dock gate ran south-west along the Barking Road, the thoroughfare at the end of Robert and Nattie's street.
The route was busy with shops
: grocers, butchers, fried-fish sellers, tailors, hatters, post offices, a bicycle seller, a marine supplier, a cheesemonger, chemists, coal merchants, confectioners, bakers. The closest church was just past the tobacconist at 500 Barking Road, the Coombes family's doctor at number 480, the police station at 386. At number 110 was
a new public hall
and free library, which in February had become the first building in West Ham to be equipped with electricity.

A mile and a half down the Barking Road, the boys passed the crowded lanes of Canning Town, a darker, more desperate district than their own. The casual labourers from these rickety terraces pressed at the dock gates each morning, hungry for work.
Over the previous two decades
the docks, factories and railways had drawn a multitude of people to West Ham, swelling the population from 12,000 in 1870 to close to 200,000 by 1895. ‘
London over the Border
', as it was known, was the industrial hub of the empire and a new metropolis of the poor. This was both the city and the city's shadow, its furthest dirty reach.

The streets by the Thames teemed with British and Irish labourers, and with sailors from all over the world –
Malays, Lascars, Swedes, Chinamen
. ‘
There is no seaport in the country
,' said the novelist Walter Besant, ‘which is so charged with the atmosphere of ocean and the suggestion of things far off.' The noise was tremendous: the clatter of trains and trams, the blasts of ship horns, the grinding of chains, the whine of winches, the thunder and crash of the machines at the Thames Ironworks Shipbuilding Company, where Robert had briefly worked in June.

Robert and Nattie were admitted to the Royal Victoria Dock through a giant gate by the hydraulic coal cranes. John Fox was usually to be found on one of the vessels owned by the National Line, for which the boys' father worked, so Robert and Nattie went first to the National's steamer
Spain
. The ship stank of animal flesh, urine and excrement, the main trade of the National Line vessels being the carriage of live cattle from New York to London. Robert asked an officer on the
Spain
whether Fox was on board.

‘I don't know,' said Charles Pearson, chief officer of the National steamship
Queen
. ‘Go and look. Whose boy are you?'

Robert replied that he was Mr Coombes's son. Pearson knew the older Robert Coombes, having sailed with him on the SS
Holland
out of Liverpool. He asked Robert who wanted Fox.

‘The man at the gate,' said Robert.

Pearson turned to Nattie: ‘I suppose you are one of Mr Coombes's boys too?' Nattie said that he was.

The brothers went aft in search of Fox. As they could not find him, they decided to try the SS
America
, the only other National Line vessel then moored in London.

The
America
was in the Royal Albert Dock, which lay immediately east of the Royal Victoria, but the scale of the docks was such that it took the boys more than two hours to tramp round one and then the other, past the metal sheds and the pungent tobacco warehouses and the skeletal cranes, round the dockers loading and unloading the cargos. The river alongside was
low and sluggish
, glittering in the sun.

Many noxious industries that were banned from the centre of London had established themselves on this stretch of the Thames, and a haze of coal dust and smoke hung over the docks.
The sour, urinous scent
of the Bryant & May match works mingled with the musty caramel of the Tate and the Lyle sugar refineries; with the smells of rotting cow carcasses in the John Knight soap factory; of simmering oranges and strawberries in James Keiller's marmalade and jam works; of boiling bones and offal in Odam's chemical manure works; of bird-droppings at the Guano Works; and with the acrid, stinging chemical vapours of the factories making rubber, caustic soda, sulphuric acid, telegraph wire, dyes, creosote, disinfectant, cables, explosives, poisons and varnish. For weeks there had been no rain to rinse the air.

The boys could not find Fox on the
America
, so they went back to the Victoria Dock to try the
Spain
again. This time Nattie waited outside the gate while Robert approached the dock constable on duty.

‘I want to go to the National Line steamer lying just alongside there to see John Fox,' Robert told William Gradley. ‘I have an important message to deliver to him, having come from Plaistow.'

Gradley let him through.

‘I shall not be long,' said Robert.

At last Robert found Fox on the
Spain
. A short man of forty-five, with a thin moustache and a straggly beard, Fox was wearing a dark, threadbare suit and a peaked sailor's cap. Robert asked him to come to stay with them in Cave Road: their mother had gone suddenly to Liverpool to visit her family, he said, and had left word that she wanted Fox to look after the boys and the house. Robert told Fox that when Emily Coombes returned she would pay him half a crown for each day that he spent at Cave Road – half a crown was 2/6d (an eighth of £1), a decent daily rate for unskilled work. Fox agreed to come. The pair crossed the bridge out of the docks.