Bleak Expectations

by Mark Evans

  And now I stood a mere two or three incidents away from being permanently overdrawn in the matter of family attachments; even worse, my postal address for any statements to be delivered was currently ‘The Nastiest Workhouse in Britain, No Hope Street, London’.

  In the moments after my sister Poppy’s death, the other residents of our cramped poverty-cell crept forward to offer us comfort, arms wrapping us in compassion and human solidarity; or so I thought. In truth, their sympathetic hugs were mere disguise for attempted theft of whatever possessions we had on our persons, up to and including the very clothes we stood in. I suppose, given their own wretched circumstances, one could not blame them, but as I stood now half naked, shivering with chilly grief, I found I could in fact quite easily blame them or, rather, hit them until they gave us our clothes back.

  In matters of death the workhouse did not stint in its haste, and within the hour poor Poppy was buried in a pauper’s grave due to our pecuniary lack. The weather was not accomplice to our misery, it being a cheerily sunny day, so, as was the case back then, elements were matched to emotions by the deployment of the parish’s metaphorical meteorology maker, a contraption of hoses, pipes and suspended colanders that allowed a mock rain to fall upon our small mourning party.2 The pauper’s service was a short one, meaning the beadle offered but a rapid ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to et cetera, chuck her in,’ before our beloved sister was deposited unfeelingly in a shallow, undignified scrape in the London clay, at its head a rough wooden cross with written on it: ‘Another povvo, 18whatever – 18whocares’.

  But I cared; sister Pippa cared; and though he had known her but a short while, my best friend Harry Biscuit cared.

  And, surprisingly, the viciously religious Beadle Hardthrasher also seemed to join in with the caring as he now leaned towards us and, in a tone far from tender but much less fierce than his regular one, said, ‘You may now have time to grieve.’

  His Christianity might have been biceps-bulgingly muscular but at least it seemed to allow space for the weaker emotions and, thus given permission, we raised the sluice gates of grief and allowed our tears to flood out and attempt to wash away the pain of our de-sistering.

  But barely had our lachrymose lament begun when the beadle struck his gold-plated staff of office on the ground and, fully re-fierced in tone, said, ‘And that’s enough of that!’ With a flick of his hand he summoned two of his under-beadles, who seized us and started to drag us away. ‘Now let us scourge the poverty from you with hard work! For by vigorous labour you may one day free yourselves and find respite in the arms of the ever-loving Jesus.’

  Even to a non-euphemistically minded boy such as myself, this sounded less like worldly freedom and more like death, and it occurred to me that the Anglican Church of the time was much nicer to people who had money.

  Then, still be-teared, we were assigned to the improving tasks of the workhouse. Pippa was set to work sewing. But not usefully, oh, no – for what use for usefulness did such a cruel establishment have? She was given a piece of torn material and told to repair it; as soon as she had done so, the weaselly witch who supervised her took it up and tore it once more, then compelled Pippa to re-repair it, the whole ritual designed to inculcate Christian patience, forbearance and, presumably, massive rage.

  As for Harry and me, the workhouse had an attached bottling factory to which we were taken and where I was given the job of testing the strength and integrity of the bottles.

  Unfortunately, this was done by having them smashed over my head.

  ‘Bow your head!’ commanded the beadle, and I did. He then lustily swung a bottle at my skull, hitting it squarely and precisely.

  The bottle shattered instantly, the impact being both painful and full of pain.

  ‘A bottle as weak as the human spirit.’ The beadle sighed.

  ‘Ow!’ I exclaimed, not unreasonably, I thought, as my cranium was now suffering from both blunt trauma and an infusion of small splinters of glass.

  ‘What did you say, boy? Did you cry out weakly in the face of pain?’ He wheeled upon me, wielding a Bible. ‘Did our wonderful Lord Jesus cry out weakly on the Cross? He did not. He bore His pain stoically, reciting poetry and composing witty epigrams. If you lack such fortitude you dishonour His name and fiery Hell awaits you!’

  Of course it did.

  ‘Right, next bottle!’

  This bottle did not shatter, instead merely striking me with a hollow but no less painful clunk.

  ‘Behold! A good, strong bottle, fit for the Lord. But we must test it yet further.’

  This time he hit me with it really, really hard and it shattered shardily and, I need hardly add but will anyway, with a gargantuan amount of agony.

  ‘Alas, its faith has fallen short. But we fill find a worthy bottle yet!’

  We didn’t, because even if it took a good five or six goes, each bottle was eventually found wanting in its rendezvous with my skull.

  Meanwhile Harry’s job seemed at first to be much easier for he was assigned the task of clearing up the fragments of broken bottle, and to that end the beadle opened a cupboard full of brooms and brushes suited to that task.

  ‘You must choose your tools as splendid Jesus would have chosen,’ said the beadle.

  ‘Ooh, well, I think Jesus would have liked that one,’ said Harry, reaching for a broom.

  ‘You chose poorly!’ yelled the beadle, slamming the cupboard door closed. ‘Super Jesus would not have chosen at all. For brooms and brushes are the Devil’s cleaning tools, sent to tempt us into proud laziness, and by reaching for one you have surely condemned yourself to fiery Hell.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’ wailed Harry, and I saw his point, particularly since the broom he had reached for had actually had ‘Jesus’s special broom’ written on it.

  ‘You must take a more bodily path to redemption.’

  Thus it was that Harry was compelled to lick the pieces of bottle from the floor.

  He didn’t enjoy it.

  Nor did his tongue, rapidly becoming swollen and hurty.

  ‘Do you feel closer to our Lord now, boy?’ enquired Beadle Hardthrasher.

  ‘Yuth,’ replied Harry, unleashing more Christian rage.

  ‘You dare speak unclearly? Diction is next to godliness! By your slurring words you have surely condemned yourself to fiery Hell!’

  Was there any act in this place that did not lead to fiery Hell? Though as the pain-filled hours dragged on, that Hadean destination began to seem a marginally more attractive option than the workhouse.

  Eventually our shift was over and, exhausted and pained, Harry and I headed for our quarters.

  All we wished to do was sleep, but that desire was flung from my mind like a badly strapped-in child from a poorly maintained merry-go-round as I heard a voice from the past, and not just a random or ghostly voice from the past, such as that of William the Conqueror or a mad old monk, but a real, friendly, much-liked voice.

  ‘Young Pip? Pip Bin? Is that you?’

  Why, it was the voice of Mr Parsimonious, once the ironically named business partner to both my father and my evil guardian, Mr Benevolent; and close behind it came the body and face of Mr Parsimonious as well. Unhappily, whereas he had once been a plumply prosperous figure, jolly-clothed and gaudy, now he was be-ragged, tatty and poor – though evidently still his old generous self.

  ‘Dear Pip, though I wish we had met in better circumstances you must still have a gift!’ This most munificent of men now patted his pockets and looked about him. ‘But what do I have to give you? I know! Have this crust of bread, this hard, mouldy crust of bread . . .’ He handed over just such an unappealing object. ‘And this fetid water!’ He now knelt and scooped a handful of gruesome-looking fluid from a puddle on the floor. ‘Lice! All must have lice!’ At this he scraped his hands through his hair and offered us the contents he found therein. ‘And these rags, these hideous, tattered rags . . .’ Now there was desperation in his voice as he tore at his clothing,
rending it from his body. ‘And why not share in these weird sores and bodily lesions that affect me?’ By this point his words were turning into a high-pitched shriek of misery and, sinking to the ground, he began to weep. ‘And these tears! Have these salty tears of shame and regret! And who wants some of my misery? I’ve got a lot to go round.’ Now he was into a full-frontal crying fit.

  ‘Mr Parsimonious, you must not weep . . .’ This was not just an attempt at comfort, it was a statement of the actual legal situation, for at that point in Britain it was still illegal for a man to cry; if the beadle saw him doing so he could be hanged or, worse, pointed at disapprovingly and mocked in public.3

  After a while, he sniffled to a halt and the threat of the law receded.

  ‘I am sorry. It is just that to see a friendly face after such a long time . . .’

  ‘How did you end up in here, Mr Parsimonious?’ I asked.

  ‘Sadly, my fortunes have not run fortunately. It turns out the old adage is true.’

  ‘What old adage?’

  ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. But annual income twenty pounds and it turns out your one remaining business partner is a colossal duplicitous bastard, result misery.’

  ‘You refer to Mr Benevolent?’

  ‘Aye! A name I cannot say any more!’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Harry, though he meant it in a more physical sense as all his glass-splintered tongue would allow him to say was ‘thlee eeeephher’, a pair of incomprehensible words I have chosen not to set down here, though I realize I just have.

  ‘This is my new best friend, Harry Biscuit, by the way,’ I informed Mr Parsimonious.

  Harry stuck out his hand and his tongue in an attempt to get some clarity to his speech. ‘How do you do?’ he somehow managed to emit.

  ‘Terribly. I do really, really terribly,’ said Mr Parsimonious, taking and shaking Harry’s offered hand, then using it as a rather literal hand-kerchief to wipe his weep-runny nose.

  ‘We’ll have no more of that wretched talk, Mr Parsimonious,’ I admonished him, for his appearance had reinvigorated my own spirits. ‘Pippa is here also, and the four of us together, why, surely we can overcome these dire circumstances and return our lives to happy joy once more!’

  And as I said those words I truly, honestly, really, really, really believed them.

  A bit.

  1 A reference to the game of book blackjack, which Sir Philip played keenly with other authors.

  2 By law all nineteenth-century funerals had to take place in mood-matchingly miserable weather – hence great rain-making machines were present at all cemeteries.

  3 The Emotional Repression Act of 1798 banned men from showing any strong emotions. The most emotional outbursts allowed were ‘I have high regard for you, dear wife’ and ‘Well played, sir’. Many blamed its repeal in 1885 for General Gordon’s loss of Khartoum later that year.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTY-SECOND

  Of potatoes, pleases and prayers

  Alas, in the following weeks, that bit of belief which nestled inside me, like a hopeful acorn in a squirrel’s cheek, cracked open and revealed itself to be hollow for truly it appeared as if we were trapped in a real-life painting by that noted Dutch depicter of religious wretchedness Thereonymus Basch.1

  The workhouse ran to a brutal and punishing schedule of brutality and punishment according to the dictates of the Bible – or, at least, selected parts of the Bible as chosen by Beadle Hardthrasher, including the hitherto unknown to me Book of Judgmentals and St Paul’s Letter About How Poor People Are Evil And Must Be Punished.

  Each day we performed twenty-three and a half hours of harsh physical labour, interspersed with bouts of grim manual toil and painful corporeal exertion, and in the remaining half-hour we were compelled to eat, sleep, perform both ablutions and short dramatic scenes glorifying Jesus, do chores and also say the regulation twenty-seven minutes of pre-bed prayers.

  It was quite tiring, actually.

  The food did not help our energy levels. At school, the problem with mealtimes had been the absence of food; in the workhouse the problem was the presence thereof.

  For, oh! It was grim. To sum it up in one word: gruel. To sum it up in two words: revolting gruel, which, given that the word ‘gruel’ already contains an unspoken hint of ‘revolting’, is really saying – or, rather, writing – something. If I am allowed a third or fourth word, and I don’t see why I am not seeing as I am the author of this book, I would choose ‘foul’, ‘vile’, ‘gruesome’, ‘repulsive’, ‘abhorrent’, ‘nauseating’, ‘obnoxious’, ‘loathsome’, ‘vile’ again, ‘ghastly’, two more ‘repulsive’s and a ‘disgustivating’.

  There! I actually took fifteen words, for three reasons: one, to show you adjectivally the horror of our meals; two, to prove that as author I am in charge of my own word destiny; and three, to demonstrate the excellence of my new reference book, an Other-words-that-mean-the-same-onary.2

  Even though we were perpetually hungry, no one wanted to eat the gruel; and workhouse inmates would do anything to avoid it. Indeed, I remember one little mite – his name was Oliver as I recall – approaching Beadle Hardthrasher, bowl held up in supplicant hands, his quavering voice asking, ‘Please, sir, I want some less.’

  The beadle made him eat the entire workhouse’s gruel supply for the day, including the tureen it was served from, the combination of gruesome gruel and force-fed crockery killing him instantly, or, rather, slowly and painfully.

  He went to fiery Hell with terrible indigestion and literally and metaphorically a nasty taste in his mouth.

  Given my recent experiences at school, the awfulness I had witnessed at the asylum my home had become and now the horrors of the workhouse, I was beginning to develop a deep suspicion of nineteenth-century institutions; and it seemed I was not alone, as Mr Parsimonious shared his fears with me one night.

  We were involved in our daily chores, namely peeling potatoes. Not for consumption, but because Beadle Hardthrasher believed that unpeeled potatoes looked like the face of Satan and that they must therefore be peeled into the shape of either the cross or Jesus’s elbow, which was apparently the holiest part of Him due to His having dipped it accidentally into a bowl of soup He had just blessed at the Last Supper. This night there were some ten thousand potatoes, and all the beadler had given us to peel them with was another, slightly sharper, potato.

  Nevertheless, we peeled away and, though we were forbidden to consume anything, occasionally a small fragment of spud would fly through the air and land by chance on our hungry lips, a nectar of raw, tubery delight by comparison to our usual food. Then, mid-peel, Mr Parsimonious suddenly set down his peeling potato and turned to me. ‘Young Pip, I very much fear that this is where our story comes to an end.’3

  ‘Why, Mr Parsimonious, do not be so downhearted, for our tale has many chapters yet to run, I should guess perhaps twenty-three or even -four more, and some of them may even be happy.’4

  ‘Pip, we are going to die in this place. Search your peelings, you know it to be true.’

  I looked down at the potatoey fragments between my feet, and there, clearly spelled out among them in peelings, as if by some higher power who had chosen to use a weird, vegetable-based form of message system, were the words: ‘It’s true.’

  Admittedly that was after looking for a really long time, scrunching my eyes until they were almost shut and then using quite a lot of imagination, but there they were, a stark and clear warning.

  We had to escape this povertous hellhole!

  I knew instantly we could not do it alone.

  I decided that if a higher power had sent the peeling message, then a higher power might be the help we needed.

  So I set about composing a letter to my Member of Parliament.

  But I had got no further than ‘Dear my Member of Parliament’ when I realized I needed a power higher even than that.

  I had to ask th
e big guy.

  By which I mean God, and not Fat Dave, another rather large inmate of the workhouse.

  I threw myself to my knees, and I prayed.

  First I prayed that my knees might stop hurting because in my imprecatory alacrity I had thrown myself to them quite hard, and the workhouse floor was stony and ouchy.

  Then I began to pray for release.

  I prayed as hard as I could, harder even than a really keen nun trying to impress the Catholic Church’s national praying team selectors.5

  Over and over again I prayed, ‘Please, Lord, let me escape from this place.’

  After a while, I changed my prayer slightly to ‘Please, Lord, let me and Pippa and Harry and Mr Parsimonious escape from this place,’ because, frankly, I had been selfish in not including them before; and, besides, if the prayer worked and I did get out I’d want some friends to do stuff with.

  Oh, how I prayed! I squeezed every drop of entreating juice from my supplication gland6 that God might deliver me from the suffering I was in. As I slumped into an exhausted, prayed-out sleep on the floor, my last thoughts were ones of perseverance: I knew that, no matter how hard I had prayed, even the truly devoted must wait for a godly response, for our Lord has huge numbers of prayers to work through and, even though He is obviously divinely efficient at working through His admin, it would still take time; time I was prepared to wait, be it years, decades or even centuries, millennia, aeons or ages, even though, were it to be that long, I would be much lengthily dead, for the patient shall have their reward, and patience was now my watchword, middle name and creed.

  1 Even more religiously violent painterly contemporary of Hieronymus Bosch.

  2 The word ‘thesaurus’ was not used in the sense we used it until the twentieth century. Oddly, a thesaurus is also a giant lizard obsessed with the definite article. Or, at least, that’s what it says on Wikipedia.

  3 It doesn’t. Just look at how much book there is left.

  4 There are actually twenty-seven to go. And only three of them are definitively happy.