The Baker's Tale. Thomas Hauser
2015
In the winter of 1836, I held an infant in my arms. The child, a girl eight months of age, was living under the most deplorable conditions that existed in London at that time. Since then, I have often wondered what happened to the child.
CHARLES DICKENS
Written at sea while returning home to England from America
April 1868
The night passed. The stars grew pale. The day broke, and the winter sun rose over London on a cold day in January in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and thirty-nine.
A white frost lay upon the ground. The sun looked down upon the ice that it was too weak to melt and hid behind a veil of clouds. Trees shuddered as blasts of wind howled and shook their bare branches. It was harsh, sharp, piercing, bitter, cutting, biting, cold.
I am not a well educated man, but I am wiser than some people take me for. I have an interest in many things and have taught myself what I can. I am a plain man and a practical man. That is my way.
I am a baker by trade. My labour in the bakery starts in the dark hours of morning. I rise early and breakfast by candlelight. The bakery is in a fashionable part of London. Servants come early and wait for the first bread and rolls to come out of the oven.
Bread is the best of all foods and one of the oldest foods known to man. It is spoken of hundreds of times in the Bible, twenty-three times in the Book of Genesis alone. It is the first thing asked for in the Lord’s Prayer taught by Jesus to his disciples.
In London, as in much of the world, there is a harrowing disparity between rich and poor. Wealth and poverty, repletion and starvation, exist side by side.
At times, the classes are intertwined. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death borne by rats killed one of every three people in London. Three hundred years later, again borne by rats, the Great Plague came. Thousands of corpses were carried in death carts and buried together in huge unmarked graves. In 1666, much of London was destroyed by the Great Fire, one of several times that flames have brought the city to its knees.
But among the poor, ignorance is a greater curse than plague or fire. There the divide between the classes looms large. The absence of learning and want of knowledge is a constant cause of misery among the downtrodden. Ignorance is the reason the poor live—that is to say, they have not yet died—in ruinous places on dangerous streets that are avoided by all but those who live there. On winter days when the sun shines, their hovels are colder than the outdoors.
Others among the poor are without shelter of any kind. They wander through long weary nights, counting the chimes of church clocks from hour to hour. They listen to the rain and crouch for warmth in doorways and beneath old bridges. They watch lights twinkling in chamber windows, thinking of the children coiled there in beds and the comfort that these children enjoy.
Their lives are unlightened by any ray of hope. Every aspiration blights and withers before it can grow. They were poor before. They are poor now. They will be old and poor before they know it. From birth to grave, their path is narrow.
Their life of poverty knows no change and no goal but that of struggling in toil for bread. A poor man labours to gain food for himself and for his family from day to day. His children cry with hunger. They plead for bread. Not the daily bread of the Lord’s Prayer as prayed for in London’s richest congregations where it is understood to include half the luxuries of the world. They plead for as much food as will support life, a crust of dry hard bread that is often just beyond their reach.
The wind was blowing harder now. Men and the few women who were on the streets bent down their heads to defend against its stinging arrows. A light snow began to fall and joined with the frozen crust upon the ground.
Then I saw a man and child standing outside the bakery.
The man was attired in coarse rough clothes. His coat was of a size that had not been made for him and had come to such a state that it was impossible to know its original colour. It was ragged at the edges and seemed too thin to keep him warm. His eyes spoke of long hard endurance and dreadful hunger.
The child was a girl between the ages of three and four. Like the man, she was wearing common clothes. Her coat was patched with rag and her shoes with straw. A shawl had been wrapped around her shoulders and chest in an effort to keep her warm.
It was the child that captured my attention. Such hardness as I might summon up to sustain me against the miseries of adults fails when I look at children. I see how young and defenseless they are against the injustices of the world.
Several of the child’s fingers pushed through holes in her mittens. The young endure these things better than the old. But like the man, the child was shivering. She clung tightly to his bare hand and kept close to him.
Man and child gazed with hungry eyes at the bread behind the window. Bread guarded by a sheet of glass that was a brick wall to them. Then the man came to the door.
As a rule of business, I do not give to beggars. But the strong affection between the man and child touched my emotions. I allowed him in.
“Begging your pardon, sir. Could I do labour for you in exchange for a loaf of bread?”
My answer was slow in coming.
“Please, sir. The child is hungry, and it is wrong that she should suffer. I will do anything for bread for the child.”
There is a table in the rear of the bakery where I sometimes sit and engage in conversation. The apprentice boy was on duty in the front, which gave me the freedom to converse. Had it been otherwise, everything would have happened differently and I would not have this tale to tell.
I led the man and child past loaves of bread, rolls, pastries, and other goods of my trade. The smell of coffee and freshly baked bread filled the air.
There was a warm fireplace by the table in back. Sometimes we are hungry. Sometimes we are frightened. But cold is often hardest upon us.
The man sat by the fire and opened his hands to receive its warmth. The child took off her mittens and did the same.
He was of average height, well made with intelligent eyes and a muscular frame grown thin.
“What is your name?”
“Spriggs, sir. Christopher Spriggs.”
“And the child?”
“Ruby.”
“She is your daughter?”
“No, sir. My niece.”
“And her parents?”
“She has none.”
I extended my hand.
“My name is Antonio.”
I put two mugs on the table. One with coffee from a pot above the fire, the other with milk for the child. Then I cut two thick slices of bread, one for Christopher, the other for Ruby.
His eyes met hers with a reassuring look.
Ruby took the bread, clenched it in her little hand, and ate as though nothing else in the world mattered. Not ravenously. She chewed and swallowed each bite. But after each swallow, she immediately