BY
ANDREW WAREHAM
Digital edition published in 2016 by
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Hungry Harry
An Orphan in the Ranks
Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Wareham
All Rights Reserved
Contents:
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Endnote
By the Same Author
Introduction
Hungry Harry: An Orphan in the Ranks. Born in a home for fallen women, at the age of eight the barefooted and waiflike Harry is sent out to work. After years of unpaid toil and hunger, he runs away and is cajoled into believing that the Army is his only option. He joins a battalion that is sent to Africa’s Slave Coast where disease is the biggest killer of men. When the much-thinned battalion returns to England and is disbanded, he drifts into smuggling in order to survive. All goes well until he is betrayed and forced back on the run. Leaving the West Country behind, he enlists in a Sussex regiment which is sent to quell rioting in the north where he faces danger from the angry Mob, and from the rage of a sadistic young ensign who is out for Harry’s blood.
Author’s Note: I have written and punctuated Hungry Harry in a style reflecting English usage in novels of the period, when typically, sentences were much longer than they are in modern English. Editor’s Note: Andrew’s book was written, produced and edited in the UK where some of the spellings and word usage vary slightly from U.S. English.
Chapter One
The wicket-door beside the big gate in the high red-brick wall opened and a middle-aged man stepped out, turning to doff his flat cap respectfully. He was short and fat and was wrapped up in a thick frieze coat against the December winds and sleet. He held a snivelling small boy by the hand and led him down the unpaved lane to the back of the institution; as soon as he was out of sight of the door he transferred the grip to the boy’s ear.
“Shut tha’ bloody mouth and get walkin’, ye little bastard!”
The boy had never been outside the red-brick wall before; he was eight years old and knew nothing of the world outside of the Magdalen. His name was Harry; that was all. He possessed the old hand-me-down trousers, thin and ready to fall into rags, and the jersey top that he was wearing and the crust of bread that the matron had put into his pocket; he owned nothing else, was barefoot in the icy mud. He wept a little, but there were few tears in him.
There was a one-horse cart tied up at the bottom of the narrow lane. The man heaved the boy into the back where there was a pile of empty sacks.
“Lie down on some, pull the rest over tha’ self. Shut up!”
The man took the nose-bag off the horse and heaved himself up onto the seat and picked up the reins. He arranged a thick rug over his legs and pulled a canvas tarpaulin over his shoulders and down across his body, tying it with string running through a series of eyelets. He was not warm, but he would be fairly dry for the couple of hours on the road.
The boy made a nest for himself up against the front board of the cart; he wrapped a pair of sacks round his freezing feet and pulled others across his body and up over his face so that only his nose and eyes were exposed. The sacks stank of onions and old potatoes, but he hardly noticed that; he smelt, too, was used to the fact. A few minutes and he was as warm and comfortable as ever he had been in the Home for Fallen Women; he ate his bread and stared. The cart moved slowly down the lane and out into the countryside; he had never seen fields before. The view from the upper floor of the Magdalen had been a few yards across the road to the back of a warehouse and he had never been outside of its walls. Once or twice a week he had been allowed to walk in the tiny garden at the rear of the building, but he had never been through the gate.
He knew that he was grown-up now and must make his own way in the world - he could not continue as a beggar in the care of the burgesses of the town. It had been explained to him time after time that he was a bastard, that he should not have been born and that he was a burden on the good people who paid the Poor Law; he believed all that he had been told and was thankful that he had the chance now to earn his own bread. His master had paid the Magdalen for him; now he must work to pay back the good man.
The cart stopped after a while - Harry did not know how long. He did not know what a clock was or what was meant by 'an hour' - he had never been told about time. He knew he was hungry and that he still wanted more to eat, but he was used to that. He stayed silent and waited under the cover of his sacks; he would stay warm while he could, but he knew it would not last.
They were outside a big noisy place. He could hear rumbling and bumping and banging inside; he wondered what it was.
The man came round to the back of the cart.
"Shift tha’ bloody self! Out!"
Harry moved quickly. He knew what to do when he was given an order - obey and avoid a clout, unless he was slapped anyway, just for existing.
The man led him through a big door and into the building. It was on a hillside and there was a great hole leading down at a shallow angle into the ground, with wooden tracks in the middle. As he watched he heard the noise of wheels and a truck slowly appeared, pushed by three boys a little bigger than him. The truck was almost the same size as the bed of the cart and a foot or so taller and was full of black stone; it looked heavy. The boys pushed their load across the floor of the building, still on its tracks, and out of a door on the other side. They left the truck there and came running back inside and went across to a line of half a dozen empties, resting on the bare earth. One by one they bounced them across the two yards of floor and settled them on the rails going into the hole in the hillside. When they had all six ready and lined up they got behind them and started to push and rolled them down and out of sight.
Another man came into the building; he was short and fat, too.
"Just one, Jonas?"
"Aye", said the man in the flat cap. "Down at the Magdalen in town. I paid they twenty shillin' for 'im."
"Costly! Don't look worth ten bob! Not much work in that little bugger - like as not 'e'll die on us afore 'e pays us back. Not big enough to work the trackway yet. Put 'im to sortin'."
"They ain't fed 'im yet."
"Nor they bloody would, tight sods! Give 'im some bread."
The man in the flat cap walked across to a locked cupboard, opened it and pulled out a small brown loaf. He cut it in half with a knife on a length of string inside and gave the lump to Harry, a piece about the size of a man's fist.
The boy snatched it before he could change his
mind and started to cram it down; food could be stolen if you left it hanging about. Harry had learned to eat fast and watchfully.
They showed him the water barrel, let him dip out a clay mug full.
The man in the flat cap led him outside and pointed to a heap of coal.
"Get sortin'. There's good coal, what goes over there." He pointed to a bigger heap over by a wooden loading platform. "There's stone and dirt what gets chucked down the 'ill." He gestured a yard or so to the side to a deep, part-filled ravine. "The dust gets shovelled up and thrown down the other side. When tha’ gets time tha’ can mix it with a bit of clay to make lumps what tha’ can burn where tha’ sleeps."
He quickly showed Harry the difference between coal and stone - the colour made it obvious, even at first sight.
"Right get to it and don't bloody stop. I sees you 'anging around doing bugger-all and you gets a taste of the belt!"
He put his hand to the heavy leather belt at his waist, made his meaning clear.
Harry worked bare-handed till it grew dark. It rained on him for part of the time, but he ignored it.
The man came for him and took him across to a small shed; the other three boys were already inside, eating something. Harry was given a wooden plate, another lump of bread and a small piece of cheese on it; he wiped his hands on his trousers, so as not to eat coal dust as well.
"Eat up! They pinches it from thee, then I belts 'em, they knows that. That's thy place for sleeping."
He pointed to a pile of sacks on a thin pallet.
"The privy’s out the back."
The man left and the boys watched Harry eat; they said nothing. There was light from a small fire; as the coals burned low so the boys laid down in their own pallets.
They were ordered up soon after dawn and hurried into another shack where an old woman handed them bowls of hot oatmeal and wooden spoons. They ate quickly and then went out to work.
It was a week before one of the boys asked Harry his name; three weeks before he learned theirs.
They worked all day, every day; they ate the same food, but at least there was enough of it, they were not hungry. Harry's clothes ripped and fell into rags and they supplied him with more, slightly thicker and warmer. It was better than the Magdalen - he wasn't shouted at so much and there was no one to clout him for being in the way and sometimes he talked to the other boys.
Harry worked through the winter and then into the summer; he noticed it was warmer, but that meant little to him. He grew bigger and one day the man with the flat cap came in with a small boy and set him to sort the coal next to Harry; after a day Harry was taken away and put to pushing the trucks. There were still only three boys at the job.
"Where's Sid?"
"At t' face. They give 'im a pick and tole 'im 'e's to do a man's work now. They pays 'im money now."
"Whassat?"
"Don't you know nuffink?"
"Nope. No bugger told me."
"When you's a man you gets paid, and then you buys fings, like food, and a place to live. A room."
"What, you gets a room all your own?"
"If you pays for it."
"Wiv that money stuff?"
"There's pennies and sixpences - big brown ones and little shiny bits. You got to get what you wants wiv it, and if you ain't got as much as what you needs, you stays 'ungry."
It was Harry's first introduction to Economics.
Pushing the trucks was hard work, especially bringing the loaded ones up the slope of the drift, and he still ate the same food, no increase at all in the amount he was given. For months Harry had no time or energy to spare to look about him - and there was almost nothing to see underground, candles being expensive and used only where light was essential. Eventually he grew strong enough that he had the desire and time to see more. Occasionally they were delayed underground while a truck was filled or, more commonly, while the fat men replaced a broken wooden rail in the trackway. Harry began to take in his surroundings.
The drift itself opened up into the side of a coal seam, or so it appeared. Five men were swinging picks around an arc, cutting into the thick black layer, levering the lumps out onto the floor of the working. Two women worked to each man, shovelling the coal into trucks which they heaved across and onto the end of the trackway as they were filled. The trucks were chalk marked, each set of three knowing their own. One of the short fat men worked behind them, fixing pit props where they were essential; mostly they left pillars of coal uncut and the fat man knocked them out when the miners had moved on and let the roof fall in behind them. Sid, the boy who had recently been promoted off the trackway, worked with two young girls, the spare daughters of the miners; sooner or later one, or both, would become his woman. Each of the five teams filled at least six trucks a day, at about a ton apiece.
Harry realised, as he began to think, that in time he would be given a pick and that he would work twelve hours and more every day at the coal face. That was to be the whole of his life.
The three smaller boys, Harry included, pushed the trucks up one by one to the top and then out into the open air to the dump; that was the only time they saw the sun. Day by day as they came up the trackway and into the daylight he noticed more about the big room at the top, particularly the locked cage at the side where the food was kept.
The little larder was no more than a three-sided slatted wooden box leaning up against the rock of the hillside. The men kept their own food in it as well, because it was cool. There was cheese and cold beef, and pork sometimes, as well as the bread the boys ate. Harry watched and saw that the men took a meal whenever they fancied, often cutting a sandwich during the day, separately; they did not sit down together and so had no idea exactly how much of anything was left. There was a carving knife on the meat dish.
Late one night he stirred from his pallet to go out to the privy a few yards away from the back of the building. He came back in, saw that the other boys were still sound asleep and he was hungry, always wanting more to eat; he sneaked across to the larder. He could just wriggle his hand through at the back of the cage between the timber and the rock; he carved a thin slice off the beef and sat to eat it quietly and slowly, chewing with delight. They had been given a meat sandwich a month earlier, told it was Christmas, and now he enjoyed the flavour for the second time in his life.
He stole from the cage two or three times a week after that, careful not to take much and listening for any mutter of suspicion from the men. They never noticed and he grew bigger, stronger than the other boys without arousing any suspicion - they supposed he had had a big father and that it was coming out in him. He heard them once, talking about him.
"They said 'is ma just turned up on the doorstep one morning, sat there waitin'. They reckoned she weren't barely old enough for the belly she was carryin'. Said she must have been a girl from one of them farms up the 'ills - bloody farmer 'ad 'is way with 'er and then dumped 'er. They said they didn't 'ave no name for 'im acos of she never said a word in the two weeks she were there. She dropped 'im, maybe a bit early-like, they said, and then she just died. So they called 'im Harry, acos that was where they got to in the alphabet - the one before 'im was George - and put 'im to the tit of a girl what 'ad a dead one and 'e lived. Nowhere to go and no name so they couldn't find a father to get any money from. So 'e stayed till 'e was big enough for us to buy 'im for the mine."
"Why didn't they send 'im to the Foundlings Home in town?"
"No name and they didn't know what parish 'e came from, so there wasn't nobody to pay for 'im. The Home only takes them if the parish pays Poor Law for 'em."
"Surprised they didn't just put a pillow over 'is face at night."
"Nah, no pillows in that bloody place, old man!"
They laughed.
Harry had learned that they were father and son, owner of the little mine and his heir, small farmers who had opened up the seam from an outcropping on their hillside and had increased their income ten times over. They talked, often,
of extending their trackway down the hill to the canal that had recently been built through the valley bottom; they thought they could fill a barge a day, thirty tons of coal, and send it into town where there was one of the new iron foundries that burned coke. It would make far more money for them, they said, than sending the same by horse and cart to feed the fires in the local houses.
"Money enough to take a wife, old man."
"You ain't forty yet, no need to be thinking about a missus yet!"
"Better than going into town once a fortnight and payin' a tanner for a bit! Anyway, I reckons I can put the money together, so why not?"
His father had no answer, except that it was the way things always had been - farmers did not marry till they were forty, or five years older even.
"You gets wed and 'as a son, and a daughter or two maybe, and then when you's old and tired the boy takes over and waits 'is turn. You gets wed too young and maybe you ends with a dozen like that silly old bugger down the hill, and what are they goin' to do for a living?"
The farmer four miles away in the valley was a source of local scandal, for having wed in his twenties and sired a massive brood.
"They goes into town, to work in the new places, or joins the army or goes to sea. They's fightin' a war, ain't they?"
"Over the sea, in America, so they told I."
"See. Plenty to do. Anyways, I'm goin' to look about for a missus. She can cook us a dinner each day. You too. Better than just bloody oatmeal the old gal stirs up in the morning and buying a cooked joint in when we needs it.”
That was a good argument and brought silence from the old man; he had eaten poorly in the years since his own wife had died. It brought fear to Harry as well - if there was a missus and she cooked then there wouldn't be food in the cage in the larder.
He stole a little more frequently after that - if the cage was to be emptied then he must get what he could while it was still available. They noticed that the food seemed to be going fast and put out rat traps, but did nothing else for the while.
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