The Baker's Tale. Thomas Hauser
was a glow about her. Had she been wrapped in a blanket, it would have been impossible for the haughtiest stranger to differentiate between her and a child of the highest rank in society. As for her smile, a blessing from the Archbishop of Canterbury would have done no more to warm my heart.
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“In no place long,” Christopher responded.
“And the child’s parents?”
“Her mother, my sister, was a good woman. She died of fever a year ago. The father was there only on the night of conception.”
“Are there only two of you?”
“Only two.”
As we conversed, Ruby’s eyes rested upon mine with an expression of wondering thoughtfulness that is seen sometimes in young children.
Christopher did not eat his bread. I know when a man is hungry. I can see it in his eyes.
“Eat. I will give you more for Ruby to take home.”
The bread that I had given to him was quickly gone.
“I would like to work for what we have eaten,” he said.
“Not today. But you have come at the right time. Perhaps it is fate. Be here tomorrow at ten o’clock in the morning. There may be a job and more for you.”
I gave Christopher the rest of the loaf of bread to take home. He and Ruby left. I knew the world they were retreating to. The streets are mean and close. Poverty and misfortune fester. Hunger and want had surrounded Ruby Spriggs from the first dawning of her reason.
That night, she would not leave my thoughts. I was anxious for her return.
I was born in London in 1801. King George III sat upon the throne. The French still owned a portion of America as vast as the original colonies. Lord Nelson’s victory over the French and Spanish fleets was in the future. A practical steamship had yet to be built.
My father was a British seaman who married a beautiful Italian woman and brought her back to England. Unfortunately, I inherited my father’s looks. When I was five years old, my mother fled England with an Italian nobleman. I never saw her again. If she had been the wife of a king, war would have followed. But since she was only my father’s wife, the affairs of state went on uninterrupted.
The schools in England are for people of means, which I was not. It was expected that I would live my life as a labourer, unable to read or write. Then, in my eighteenth year, I met a man named Octavius Joy.
Mr. Joy made a great deal of money in honest finance. He was a brilliant man of scrupulous veracity with regard to numbers. Once he had earned his fortune, he set out to spend it.
“People are anxious to be employed and fairly paid for their labour,” Mr. Joy said. “Those who work hard and are able to provide for their families through fairly paid labour are likely to be content. I have seen men whose lives were lived under the worst privation and suffering become happy and at peace when they were given work to do and were fairly compensated.”
In keeping with this belief, Mr. Joy put common men and women in situations where they learned the skills necessary to run a business. When their skills were sufficient, he placed them in a business of their own. “I seek to leave them,” he explained, “not with resources that can be easily spent but with skills that place them beyond the reach of poverty forever.”
It was also important to Mr. Joy that people learn to read and write. He expressed this view with the declaration, “Reading is a passageway to knowledge. All men and women should be able to read, write, and perform simple arithmetic. They should be able to keep accounts. That is, they should be able to put down in words and figures the cost of what they need to live and how much money they have to spend. I hope for a day when all children in England regardless of their class are taught to read and write. Reading and writing, knowledge of the world, the spread of ideas. That is the key to everything.”
In keeping with this philosophy, Mr. Joy established a learning center in London. Common men and women and their children were welcome to attend free classes in reading that were taught six days a week from eight o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night.
I was a labourer in Covent Garden market when Mr. Joy took me off the streets. At his direction, I apprenticed in a bakery. I learned the trade and, at his insistence, I also learned to read and write. Then Mr. Joy placed me in a bakery of my own.
“You are to follow four principles in the operation of your business,” he instructed. “One: good quality food is to be prepared and sold. Two: each person you employ is to be fairly paid. Three: all bills for purchases by the bakery are to be paid weekly. Four: every person who walks through the bakery door is to be treated with dignity and respect.”
Remarkably, Mr. Joy refused any profit from the businesses that he helped establish.
“I am rich,” he said. “I take no pleasure in hoarding and have more than enough to ensure comfort for the rest of my life. I would be ashamed to touch what has been earned through the hard labour of another man.”
“What is your motive in this?” he was once asked.
“Always fishing for motives when they are right on the surface,” Mr. Joy responded. “The motive is plain. To make people useful and happy. It brings me great pleasure to see people who are achieving the most that they can out of their natural abilities. I do not believe in the Bible as the absolute word of God, and I am particularly suspicious of those who seek to impose their own interpretation of the Bible upon us. But I do believe that we should do unto others as we would wish them to do unto us were we in their shoes.”
Christopher and Ruby returned to the bakery at ten o’clock on the day after we met.
“Good morning, little one,” I addressed the child. “You look fresher today than a spring flower.”
She smiled. No view in England was as enticing.
I gave them bread, coffee, and milk, as I had done the day before.
At eleven o’clock, Octavius Joy arrived. He was a man of sixty, portly with a round, good-humoured, benevolent face that was full of life and radiated an almost innocent happiness that would have been delightful in a child and was particularly appealing in a man his age. His cheeks were rosy, a colour occasioned in part by the cold. His hair was a silvered grey. Looking at him, one might have forgotten for a moment that there was such a thing as a sour mind or a crabbed countenance in the world.
We sat at the table in back. Mr. Joy looked at Ruby through gold-rimmed spectacles and patted her on the head.
“What is your name, my dear?”
“Ruby.”
“A very pretty name.” Then he turned in my direction. “Perhaps Ruby would like another piece of bread and some strawberry jam.”
I excused myself from the table and returned with the offering. Ruby’s eyes took on a questioning look.
“When one is starving, jam is a luxury beyond reach,” Christopher said. “She has never seen jam before.”
“Eat,” he told Ruby. “You will like it.”
Ruby cautiously took a bite . . . Tasted the jam on her tongue . . . And her face lit up.
This was a child who, for her entire life, had eaten only to survive. Mother’s milk in her first year. Then bread, gruel, and an occasional potato, green leaf, or piece of cheese. Now, for the first time, she was experiencing food as pleasure rather than just for sustenance.
“Good!”