Bone Street/Chapter 1
BONE STREET
CHAPTER ONE
BONE STREET
IN the past years, a Street Improvements Committee, and a Health Committee, have in their own way made history, and effected some small difference in Beckton.
The town has been straightened out a little, a few of the main streets broadened, and here and there the slums have been nibbled at.
Built and paved in the famous Yorkshire building stone, and black as a tar barrel from the continuous sootfall from the countless factory chimneys, the show parts of the town have a certain dignity and even elegance—like a young lady in black. Even Bone Street does not (to the Northern eye) offend so much in shabbiness and squalor as the brick-built slums of neighbouring towns.
Down Bone Street, gently sloping, you might walk years ago as to-day, and mark the doorsteps and window-sills glaring with yellow scouring stone, and catch the cheerful wink of the fire playing on a kitchen range, the housewife’s pride. Within some dwellings you would note the gaudy pot-vase of imitation flowers, or even an attempt at a conservatory of window plants. These are the front houses, costing sixpence a week more, and conferring a dignity and status on their occupiers. At every sixth house, a tunnel three feet wide goes through to what you would imagine to be the back doors, but you would be wrong. The street is built of back-to-back houses, and the tunnel opens into a court of these back houses, the exact counterpart of those in the front. The court is paved with stone flags, badly laid in the first place, and, sunken and warped by time, trip the unwary foot in the dark. Where constant wear does not cleanse them, the surface is greasy black, and the interstices are filled with ashes and grease. Down one side of the court is a row of privvy middens, common to all the houses back and front, and the space of about six feet from the doors of the back house to the middens is the playground for the children; so the court, the street, and even the air, seemed perpetually impregnated with filth, which with the hot stink from the woolcombing sheds, hung round the district like a plague.
On a doorstep in such a back court at ten o’clock one Saturday evening in August, many years ago, John Newcome Bradley, the child of the Beckton back streets, nine years and eleven months old, sat there waiting for his father, and as he waited he read Ivanhoe.
The book on his knees, and the rapt, eager huddle of his body over it, was a rare enough sight in Bone Street to attract notice, though to the casual observer the boy had little else to distinguish him from his mates. He might have been a little more ragged than they, though there was, perhaps, a gleam of intelligence and fineness in his eye. Certainly the glow of his hair gave him the title of “redhead” among his mates, by whom fancy shades such as auburn were disregarded.
Although the book absorbed him, Jack, with the divided mind of a child, had a subconscious thought for his father. It was Saturday night. He might come home drunk. If so, he would be morose, and Jack had best be off to bed the minute he heard him enter the passage. On the other hand, it was worth while to risk staying up till the last minute, for if he should only be tipsy he would perhaps talk to the lad. At such times there was companionship between the two, and Jack would hunt for words to fit the unformed thought in his mind and speak it with almost the confidence of a grown-up man. But it was a clipped pleasure: sleepiness would intervene, and nothing came of these intimate passages.
Except at week-ends, Jack saw little of his father, for he worked on the night turn, and Bradley spent his week-ends partly at the Crown and Anchor, and partly in gloomy lounging.
No one could imagine what the nights meant to this wee boy, or indeed the day for that matter, for usually his father finished work at six in the morning. Walking home, and breakfast, took him until seven-thirty, and as they occupied the same bed, this of course wakened up the boy, who would get up, wash, and prepare his own breakfast, perhaps read a little, and then get off to school for nine o’clock. At noon he would again get a meal ready, a piece of fried fish, an egg, or a pennyworth of corned or potted meat, another few hours at school, home at four-thirty, when he and his father would have their tea together, and the elder man would be off to commence work at fivefifteen. This left the lad to his own devices until time to go to bed. Of course he had his mates, but there were many long lonely hours for him before bedtime, and that tended to make him introspective, for loneliness is not good for grown-ups, much less a child. Fortunately, he had his books, for, young as he was, he had been introduced to the Free Libraries, where a veritable treasure trove was his for the taking. But night was really the worst, especially going to bed alone. He heard noises, saw strange indistinct figures on the wall; sometimes his dream would awaken him, and an indescribable loneliness would overcome him, but he never reasoned these things out, for of course he was too young. He just felt them.
Footsteps passed in the street, with the eerie quality of footsteps which echo on hard pavements as night approaches, tapped on, echoed loudly down the tunnelway, and died in the street. Already the lamp in the court was lit, turning the day into night, and setting its clean yellow against a sky whose colour had turned into a nameless blue, when the familiar step came through the passage.
“Noan drunk,” said Jack, and then, “I’d happen better get him some tea,” and he darted into the dusky cavern behind.
It was the usual type of the “one-up and one-down” style (one room upstairs and one room downstairs). The floor like the court outside was in stone slabs, ill laid and ill fitting, and innocent of covering.
By the window stood a rickety sofa and about the room at haphazard a kitchen arm-chair, a small chair, and a rough wooden stool. A cheap alarm clock ticked on the shelf, and in the centre of all, a three-legged table, grey with grime. On this was spread a sheet of newspaper, bearing a knife and a plate or two, a can, two pint mugs, and part of a loaf.
Here was no house pride, there was no half-starved plant in the window or fancy pots on the mantelshelf. Squalor of the most abject wrote itself on every object. Over the mantelpiece, and the glass dimmed with dust, was a framed tinted enlargement of a photograph of a woman—Jack’s mother. Even through the stiffness of a bad portrait the eye of sincerity and trustfulness could be discerned.
Three years ago the room had been habitable, the doorstep glowed with yellow, and the kitchen range glinted with blacklead and brass, there had been curtains at the window, and coco-nut matting on the floor, but gradually these things had disappeared and were but a faint memory, faint as the memory of the face that looked down on him from above the mantelpiece. Since her death, his father, the house, and all, had gradually deteriorated, and Jack, though he saw the higher standards of his neighbours, and occasionally shamed for his own, still accepted his present standard.
Jack laid his book on the table, and took the can off the gas as his father entered. He was neither drunk nor tipsy, but had drunk enough to make him talkative.
“Been reading again?” he asked in his East Riding accent, differing in vowel and phrase from the speech of his neighbours. “Tha’s a lucky lad to be able to read—I wish I could, I’d happen drink less if I could read a bit. What’s t’book?”
“Ivanhoe,” replied the lad, intent on tea making, “and it’s grand.”
“What’s it aboot?” said his father.
“Oh, knights, and serfs, an’ swine-herd called Gurth. I’ve just started, and it’s extra. Mun I read you a bit?”
“Aye, read a bit, lad,” was the reply. “Thi mother would oft read to me a bit afore her eyes got bad. It wor a fair treat to hear her.”
With almost painful delight Jack realised that this was to be an intimate evening, and in good fellowship they sat down to their supper.
After supper, Jack brought forth his Library book, and the reading began, but he knew nothing of skipping dull passages, and the hard words which are usually taken as read by a small boy, who reading to himself devours a romance, now insisted on being tackled in detail. The flattery of his father’s interest kept him at it, but soon weariness and sleepiness were winning. His voice was getting uncertain when his father said:
“I’ll tell thi what, lad.”
“Aye,” said Jack with a revulsion of relief and comfort.
“That’s t’best bit I’ve heard for a long time. Sithee, if tha likes we’ll tak’ t’book first thing in t’morning and summat to eat wi’ us, and go and read it on t’moors, what says ta?”
The lad was quivering with interest.
“Aye,” he said.
“But happen we’d better wait till t’trams start running after dinner,” continued his father.
“No, first thing, dad, first thing. We can ride back.”
“Reight, let’s go to bed, and we’ll start first thing.”
And Jack went off to bed to the sound sleep of tired youth, his father to new visions. It was worth while talking to the lad like a pal, and give him a bit of a treat. Perhaps it would be worth while to give more than occasional confidence and treats. The lad knew the worst in him, yet without knowing it, loved the best in him.
And through the vague thoughts the vision of the other person who had seen the best of him flashed with sudden pain. Things had been better when Mary was alive: then there was someone to make an effort for.
“I wonder,” said Bradley, “can we pull up?” and with his hand on the tap to turn off the yellow gas jet, he looked up at the portrait, and a steady gleam came into his eyes. “We’ll try. Good night, lass.”