Tattycoram

by Audrey Thomas

  As soon as the sun rose, our callbird began his merry song, and after a while we watched the wild birds began to arrive, first in ones and twos, then more and more. When he felt that he had a sufficient quantity, Jonnie quickly drew the pull-line towards him, the wings of the net collapsed and all the birds were trapped in its folds. He showed me how to pick them off gently and transfer them to a large collapsible cage he had brought in his basket.

  The callbird continued to sing, unaware of what he had done.

  When I held a bird in my cupped hands, I could feel its frantic heart beating and I nearly let it go. If this work had been for anyone but Jonnie, I would have turned and run. I was sorry now that I had come out with him, and I knew I would not come again. It was not for me to judge him; this was how my brother kept himself. Yet I was sickened by the sight of those creatures of the air, tricked into captivity, who would never again roam the sky but sit in some window, caged, singing for the amusement of their jailers.

  Jonnie was delighted with the pull — more than seventy-five young birds — and he whistled as we tramped back into the city. He did not notice my silence. (And the birds were silent too, had stopped their frantic beating against the cage. The callbird was once again covered up.)

  “We’ve been lucky today, Hattie. These should fetch a good price.”

  Almost half the birds died in the first two days. The survivors hung in cages which covered the walls of our second room: linnets, bullfinches, all the songbirds. From these Jonnie selected the very best and trained them to sing. The rest he sold to dealers and in the markets.

  “Now ’ere’s where you can help, Hattie, ’ere’s where you can be most useful to me. See this ’ere?” He held up a flat object with a hole at one end. “Now this ’ere is our bird organ, and it’s what we teach the birds to sing with. Watch and listen for a while, you’ll soon get the knack of it. I’m known around town for ’avin’ the very best singin’ birds, I has a reputation for it.”

  The bullfinches were his specialty, and once they were old enough to whistle, he placed them aside in a little darkened cupboard and fed them infrequently. Then he brought them out and played over and over the notes he wanted them to learn. When one began to sing, he was fed, and then the next commenced, and so on.

  By listening attentively I found I could whistle any bird’s song without the aid of the bird organ, and the birds responded well to me. Jonnie was delighted. “Why Hat, yer worth your weight in gold, you are! What you’ve got is a gift.”

  A singing bullfinch could go for as much as three guineas, but the ordinary little goldfinches were his stock in trade. They were pretty and long-lived and affordable, never costing more than a shilling.

  He also carried canaries, which he bought from another fellow. “They don’t mind bein’ caged up, Hat, they’re bred to it.”

  The only birds he wouldn’t touch were sparrows. The hawkers tied strings to their legs and sold them as playthings to children. “And you know what ’appens to them then, don’t you? Teased and tortured until they die. There’s a great trade in sparrows — quick money to be made there — but I draws the line at sparrows.”

  I discovered that Jonnie could barely read — fingerposts, mostly, as he tramped around bird-catching to Highgate, Richmond, Epping Forest, or signs over shops in the areas he frequented (he liked the signs with pictures best; it wasn’t hard to find the Blue Boar if the boar was right there on the sign) — and it was the same for writing. I offered to teach him to read, but he said, “Why?” He could add with the best of them and find his way to and from all the places he needed to go, and that was enough.

  “Besides, Hat, I’m not much of a person for sittin’ still. I don’t have time for it in my business. Early to bed and early to rise, that’s my motto.”

  I never went hawking the birds but stopped at home, did the washing and sweeping, worked for hours at training our singers — I called them my choir — and talked to the crippled man who made cages for the neighbourhood.

  One night I asked my brother, “Do you like this business, Jonnie?”

  “It’s a long day’s work and a long walk ’ome when you’ve done the catchin’, but it’s the only life for me. Besides, I’m forced to like it, ain’t I? I got no other trade to live by.” He smiled.” And when I’m lyin’ out there, I think.”

  “What do you think about?”

  “I dunno. Nothin’ perhaps. Sometimes about Father and Mother, but that makes me sad, so I try not to think that way. I thinks about God, sometimes.”

  “About God?”

  “Yes. It seems to me that when they say God watches over everybody — if you’d spent any time in the workhouse or in a shelter, you’d know that’s a constant refrain with the Bible-thumpers — well, I think it means just that. ’E watches us, but don’t interfere. ’E just lets us get on with it, like, and our fate is in our own ’ands, not ’is. Then at Judgement Day, when we all ’as to line up and ’E weighs our sins, well, whether we flies or fries, it’s been entirely up to us.”

  He was so solemn, saying all this, that I wanted to throw my arms around him and comfort him somehow, but he tended to shy away from such shows of affection. His own tenderness came out in his treatment of the birds, although, of course, he was quite cold-blooded about catching them. But once they were caught he talked to them constantly — the ones he kept for his singing school — and was saddened when any died.

  Covent Garden was his usual place, but he went all over London — Smithfield, Clerkenwell-Green, the City, Shore-ditch, Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hill, Docklands. He carried the birds in wicker cages, which he sometimes fastened to a railing near one of the great parks. When he arrived home of an evening he could hardly wait to take his boots off. When I saw his poor swollen feet, I decided to invest in a big enamel basin, which I had ready with warm water as soon as I heard his step. “Ah, Hattie, you’ll make me soft.” But I could see that he was pleased.

  The room we lived in was furnished very simply: a bed and my flock bed, a table, two chairs and a stool, a fender, a few pots and pans, some crocks. In the other room were empty cages of all sizes, sacks of various seeds and feed, the caged birds we were training to sing and the birds he was presently hawking. We had one lamp, with a cracked chimney, and a few candles. The cripple lived in a kind of lean-to off the side of our rooms. Sometimes he shared our meals, sometimes not.

  One night Jonnie said, out of the blue, “It’s amazin’ what a difference a woman’s touch makes to a ’ouse. I had a woman once, a nice lass, but she went off with a cabbie, said she were sick and tired of birds, birds, birds. I told ’er I ’oped she liked ’orses, ’orses, ’orses, and cleanin’ cages might turn out to be more pleasant than muckin’ out stables, but she just tossed ’er ’ead and off she went. We wasn’t together all that long and there weren’t children, thank the Lord. I wouldn’t ’ave let her run off like that if there ’ad been children. Some of them cab drivers is pretty rough, for all their yes sir and no sir to their fares. I knew one who beat ’is wife with the same whip he used on ’is ’orse.”

  “And you never wanted to marry again?”

  “Well I’m still married, ain’t I? If I wanted to marry again I’d ’ave to seek ’er out and go through all the legal nonsense. I couldn’t afford all that, and besides, I ’ates wrangles. Things are best left alone, although I don’t mind tellin’ you I wasn’t ’alf lonely when she first went. Still, I got over that — as Mother used to say, the back is made for its burthen — and now here you are, when I never expected to see you again in this life.”

  The crippled man was called “Old Albert,” even though he wasn’t old at all, maybe just a year or two past twenty. He was born a cripple, but his father never made him feel like a burden. He remembered his father taking him to bathe in the sea, hoping it would do some good, but nothing helped, and when he was twelve his father put him to the bird trade. However, it was very hard for him to move about, the other street-sellers mocked hi
m, and the children teased him. His father died (he thought his mother had died at his birth) and he ended up in the workhouse.

  “I was there for six months, Miss Hattie, and I vowed I would never go back, I would rather starve. And starve I did, many a day, until I met your brother, and he brought me here. He saw me fall down in the street, for want of food. His wife had left, and he put me to minding the shop and keeping the birds company while he was abroad. Then one day I picked up a broken cage and mended it and then another. He suggested I try making a few, and I discovered I had a knack for it. So he bought the necessary and set me up as a birdcage maker. I work for the whole neighbourhood now, and I never been happier. The children round here never tease me, for your brother has told them he’ll do for them if they dare.”

  As he talked, he took wet willow out of a pan and fashioned it into a pretty basketcage for a thrush. My brother insisted upon paying him for every cage, and then, very solemnly, Old Albert would hand over a sum for materials and rent. He purchased his dinner at a public house and on Saturdays treated himself to a meat pie. He could read — I suppose his father must have taught him — and read his Bible every day. He believed most fervently in Heaven and Hell, and if he heard of an itinerant preacher anywhere nearby, he would make a slow and painful journey to listen to him and come back refreshed.

  More than once Jonnie offered to take me with him again when he went bird-catching, but I couldn’t do it; my hands still tingled from those frantic, beating hearts. I did not try to explain this to him but I think he understood. Nevertheless, I always awoke on a night when he was going to seek out birds. He usually started around two in the morning in order to get to his place before daylight and have time to set the net. However quietly he slipped from his bed or however carefully he gathered his traps together, I always arose, put a shawl around myself and saw him off. Perhaps I had a fear that something might happen to him and I would never see him again, I don’t know. Sometimes I stood at the door and waited until he had disappeared around the corner. London was very still at that hour, in the district where we lived; it was hard to believe that in just a few hours the streets would be full of noise. In those hours before dawn I often lit a candle and went back to my bed with a book, for although, in the end I had stored most of my belongings in the box room at Urania Cottage, I had carried my precious books with me. It did not matter to me that I had read them before, many times before; just the act of reading soothed me, the sound of the words in my head. After a while I snuffed the candle and settled down again to sleep.

  11

  Once a year, I travelled home to visit Mother and Father’s graves and spend some quiet hours in the churchyard. Now I asked Jonnie if he would go with me. I could see, from the moment the sentence was out of my mouth, that the very idea of going back in broad daylight frightened him.

  “It’s been years,” I said. “Surely no one would ever arrest you now?”

  “I can’t chance it, Hat, I couldn’t bear to be locked up. Just the thought of it . . .”

  And so I went alone, stood in the pale winter sunshine saying my prayers for the souls of my family. Then I went into the church and sat for a while, not praying, not thinking, just glad to be there, glad, I suppose, that nothing had changed. In a little while I would visit the school, take a walk on the Downs and gather some holly for Mother’s grave. Although the church smelled a bit musty — it was very old — the air was much better than the fug of London. I was almost asleep when hurrying footsteps came up behind me. It was the curate, wringing his pale hands in his usual nervous manner.

  “Miss Harriet, thank heavens! I thought I had missed you.”

  I was dismayed that my quiet time had been interrupted, and I suppose it showed, for he said, “I would not normally bother someone so deep in contemplation, but my wife said she saw you in the churchyard and then you disappeared.”

  He’s going to invite me to tea, I thought, and I don’t want to go to tea, I want to walk on the Downs. I wished he hadn’t come looking for me; there would be no way to get out of tea and small talk without hurting his feelings — or his wife’s feelings. No doubt she was already putting the kettle on, getting out a nice tea cloth and wondering if she should slice some bread and butter or if the fruitcake would be enough. What would she say if I told her I now live in a dwelling with half a hundred birds and a dirt floor?

  “. . . message for you.” He had obviously been speaking to me and was waiting for some response.

  “I’m so sorry. What did you say?”

  “I have a message for you. The Misses Bray are away until the new year or I should have left it with them. I know you write to them.”

  “A message?” It had to be Mr. Dickens, but he knew I was in London.

  “A stranger. I think he was a foreigner, although he spoke English perfectly well. From the colonies, perhaps.”

  My heart began to pound.

  “What was the message? What did he want?”

  “He wanted to find you.”

  “Did he leave his name? Where I could find him?” I practically grabbed the poor man by the arm.

  “He left a letter, in case you came here. And another for the Misses Bray. If you just step over to the house I’ll get it for you.”

  I nearly pushed him out of the church door, I was so eager to get my hands on that letter. Nearly tore it out of his hands. And it was as I had hoped. Sam had come home and was looking for Jonnie and me!

  Perhaps Jonnie was right — that all God does is watch — for the next few weeks were among the happiest and saddest in my life thus far. I hurried back to London, refusing even a cup of tea with the curate and his wife, and went to find Sam. He had told me to write him at a lodging house not far from the India Docks. Night had fallen by the time I reached London, along with one of our dreadful fogs, a thick yellow blanket that would have made it hard to negotiate even familiar streets. I was sorry I hadn’t stopped to get Jonnie first, for this was a rough district, and to the men who frequented the area — sailors mostly or longshoremen as well as thieves and those who dragged for the drowned — a woman walking alone at night, even if she were hurrying and not loitering, could want only one thing.

  “Hello, darlin’, lookin’ for comp’ny?”

  A foot without a body would suddenly appear and disappear, a hand reaching out of a filthy coat, voices, the sound of water slapping against wood. Twice I was sure I was being followed — weren’t those heavy footsteps I heard behind me? — and l walked faster, terrified of the hands that would grab me, of the rag thrust into my mouth. The whole world seemed to have turned evil. Men’s laughter behind the dull glow of a public house window, the sudden cackle of a woman’s voice — these increased my pace until I was almost running.

  With some difficulty, for I did not want to stop and ask directions, I found the address and pounded on the door. No one came for what seemed a very long time, and I was about to turn away in despair when a slatternly girl of about fifteen opened the door halfway, peered out and demanded to know what I wanted. She held up a battered tin candlestick, and the light from it made her face look old and evil.

  “Do you have a lodger here? Mr. Samuel Allen? I’ve come to see him. I’m his sister.”

  “I dunno.”

  “Well, could you go and fetch someone who would know?”

  “The mistress is busy.”

  I held out a sixpence.

  “Please, it’s important.”

  She took the money and shut the door in my face. I stood on the step, shivering. The fog wrapped around me, thick and greasy, and the cold made my bones ache.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, but I was determined to wait all night if necessary, in spite of the fog and the chill. Eventually the door opened and the girl beckoned me into a dingy hall.

  “’E’s in the parlour.”

  “Did you tell him his sister was here?”

  “I didn’t tell ’im nuffink. I just got ’im for you.”

 
; “He doesn’t know I’m here?”

  She shrugged. “You can go tell ’im yerself.”

  My hand trembled on the knob. What would I find when I opened the door? I could hear men’s voices, so more than one man awaited me. The letter had been brief but well-written, yet this seemed such a low place. Perhaps he had gone to a scrivener and could not write himself.

  “Well,” said the girl, “are yer going in or not?”

  I knocked and went in.

  Four men played cards by lamplight. The three who could see the door looked up in surprise.

  “Hello, hello,” said one, “who’s this?”

  They were big men, rough-looking men, stevedores or bargemen.

  “Whatever ’tis you’re offerin’,” said another, “I’m buyin’,” and he laughed heartily at this witticism.

  “I am looking for my brother,” I said, my voice trembling. “I believe he is stopping here.”

  The man with his back to me whirled around and stood up, knocking over his chair.

  “Hattie?” he said. “Hattie?”

  I would not have recognized him, this tall, muscled giant, had he not spoken my name. Then he moved towards me, and I could see that he walked with a limp.

  “Sam, is it you?”

  The giant began to sob, great tears rolling down his cheeks, his hands outstretched, palms upward. I, who had never fainted in my life, felt the room spin and fell to the floor.

  When I regained consciousness, I was lying on an old sofa, with Sam beside me and a cool cloth on my forehead. The other men were gone. I struggled to sit up, but Sam gently pressed me down.