Street Child. Berlie Doherty
you see her tomorrow. Good, mind! Know what good means?” The matron closed her ice-cold hand over his and bent down towards him, her black bonnet crinkling. Her teeth were as black and twisted as the railings in the yard.
She pulled Jim along the corridor and into a huge green room, where boys sat in silence, staring at each other and at the bare walls. They all watched Jim as he was led through the room and out into another yard.
“Joseph!” the matron called, and a bent man shuffled after her. His head hung below his shoulders like a stumpy bird’s. He helped her to strip off Jim’s clothes and to sluice him down with icy water from the pump. Then Jim was pulled into rough, itchy clothes, and his hair was tugged and jagged at with a blunt pair of scissors until his scalp felt as if it had been torn into pieces. He let it all happen to him. He was too frightened to resist. All he wanted was to be with his mother.
He was led back into a huge hall and told to join the queue of silent boys there. They stood with their heads bowed and with bowls in their hands. There were hundreds and hundreds of people in the room, all sitting at long tables, all eating in silence. The only sound was the scraping of the knives and forks and the noise of chewing and gulping. All the benches faced the same way. Mr Sissons stood on a raised box at the end of the room, watching everyone as they waited for their food.
Jim was given a ladle of broth and a corner of bread.
“I don’t want anything,” he started to say, and was pushed along in the queue. He followed the boy in front of him and he sat on one of the benches. He glanced round him, trying to catch someone’s eye, but none of the boys looked at him. They all ate with their heads bowed down, staring into their bowls. The boy next to him sneaked his hand across and grabbed Jim’s bread. Jim ate his broth in silence.
After the meal the man with the hanging head gave Jim a blanket and showed him a room full of shelves and long boxes where all the boys slept. He pointed to the box Jim was to sleep in. Jim climbed into it and found that he only just had enough room to turn over in it, small though he was. He tied Lizzie’s boots to his wrists in case anyone tried to steal them. The dormitory door was locked, and they lay in darkness.
During the night an old woman prowled up and down the room with a candle in her hand, holding it up to each boy’s face as she passed. Jim could hear boys crying, stifling their sobs as she came and went, little puffs of sound that were hardly there at all. He lay with his eyes closed, the candle light burning red against his eyelids as she approached and stopped by him. He could hear her snuffly breath, and the creak of her boots. He hardly dared to breathe. He lay awake all night, thinking about Emily and Lizzie and worrying about his mother. He longed to see her again. If she was better maybe she could ask Mr Sissons to let them go.
As soon as it was morning the door was unlocked. Old Marion’s place was taken by the bent man. He shouted at the boys to queue up in the yard for their wash.
“I’ve already broken the ice for you,” he told them. “So no thinking you can dodge it.”
Jim ran after him. The man was so stooped that the top half of his body was curved down like a walking stick, and when Jim spoke to him he swung his head round to look at the boy’s feet.
“Please, sir …” Jim said.
“I’m not sir,” the man said. “I’m only doing my turn, like the rest of them. I’m only Joseph, not sir.” He swung his head away from Jim’s feet and spat on the floor. “I hate sir, same as you.”
“Please, Joseph, tell me where the infirmary is.”
“Why should I tell you that?” Joseph asked, his eyes fixed on Jim’s feet again.
“Because my ma’s there, and I’ve been good,” Jim said. “Mrs Sissons said if I was good I could go and see Ma in the infirmary today.”
“So you was the boy as came in last night, and your ma was brought on a cart?”
“Yes,” said Jim. “Please tell me where the infirmary is.”
Joseph made a little chewing noise. “Well, it’s upstairs,” he said at last. He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and tilted his head sideways, squinting round at Jim. “Only the message I was given by Mrs Sissons is, don’t bother taking the boy up there, because his ma …” He stopped and shook his head and chewed again. “Your ma’s dead, son.”
Jim forced his fists deep in his pockets and turned his face away. There were boys all round him, shuffling out to the cold yard, and they blurred into smudges of grey. He screwed up his eyes against the terrible blinding white of the sky. He wouldn’t cry here. His lungs were bursting and he thought he would never be able to gasp for air again, but he couldn’t cry here. The only person he wanted to be with was Rosie. She would know what to do. She would tell Emily and Lizzie. But there was no chance of being with Rosie.
“I want to go home,” he said.
Joseph swung his head and spat. “Home?” he said. “What d’you mean, home? What’s this, if it ain’t home?”
So, Jim thought, this is my home now, this huge building with iron bars at the window and iron railings outside. His parents must be Mr and Mrs Sissons, as thin and waxy-pale as candles. And if they were his parents then his brothers and sisters were the shambling, skinny boys who slept and sobbed in the same room as him, and the scrawny girls who seemed to have forgotten how to smile.
“Can’t I see her, all the same?”
Joseph shook his head. “She was took into the dead-house in the night, and put on the paupers’ cart before light, son. Speedy despatch, paupers get. No money for bells nor nothing like that, eh?”
Jim went dumbly from room to room as he was told, from the sleeping-boxes to the yard, the refectory, the yard, and back to his box … It was like a slow dance, and the steps were always the same, repeated day after day after day.
Morning started with the six o’clock bell, when all the boys had to wash under the pump. Joseph watched them, swinging his head from side to side and bending his neck round like a hunched bird of prey. He kept flapping his arms across his bent chest to beat the cold away.
“Get yerselfs washed quick, boys,” he said. “Afore the wevver bites me bones off.”
Across the yard from the pump was the asylum. Mad people were locked up. They wailed and shrieked for hours on end. They stretched their hands out through the bars of their prison. “Give us some bread, boy!” they begged. “Let me out! Let me out!”
“Don’t take no notice of them,” a woolly-headed boy whispered to him one day. “They’re mad. They’re animals.” Jim was shocked. He stared again at the men and women and children who were all squashed up together. Their cage was too small to hold them all. Their wailings echoed round the yard all the time. “Animals, animals,” Jim said to himself, trying to drive their noises out of his head. He looked away from them, pretending they weren’t there.
“No, they’re not animals, Jim,” Joseph told him. “They’re people, they are. People, Jim. My ma’s in there.”
There was a shed at the other end of the yard. Boys gazed out at them through a small barred window. Their white faces were even more frightening than the wailings of the mad people. Joseph sidled over to Jim that first morning and swung his arm across the boy’s shoulder, bringing his head round to mutter down Jim’s ear. “Now, them’s the boys what tried to run away. They catch ’em and beat ’em and stick ’em in there till they’re good. Remember that.”
After the cold wash in the yard Jim had to help to clean it out with brooms twice as tall as he was. They had to sweep it till the ground was bare and clean, even if hundreds