Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  Hetty said nothing about it to Mona that morning, or the rest of the day, but on the Monday afternoon, two hours before Richard was due to come home, she said that Mona must have a bath, using the same water in which Phillip, and then the baby, had been washed. And making an excuse to go into the bathroom while Mona was in the bath, Hetty saw that the girl was pregnant.

  Before saying anything to her, Hetty consulted her mother. Sarah said that the best thing to do was to have a quiet talk with Mona, and advise her to tell her own mother on her next afternoon off.

  “Your own experiences, dear, will enable you to know what to say to the poor child,” remarked Sarah. “She is so very young, only fourteen, dear me. She is such a good girl too, you can see that by the way she cares for your little two ones, Hetty.”

  So on the Wednesday, after a dinner of cold mutton, and the rest of the potatoes and greens of the night before fried up together warm and brown, and some hot jam tart, Hetty spoke to Mona, who hung her head and began to cry at once.

  At three o’clock she left the house, going down the road in the direction of Randiswell and her home in Mercy Terrace. And Hetty knew nothing more until Richard returned, late because of the fog, with Mona that evening.

  Richard was putting on his coat at the foot of the banisters by the front door, the dark lantern having been lit, more from an idea of romantic companionship in the forthcoming ordeal of the lecture than for finding a way through the fog, when there came the noise of knuckles knocking on the coloured glass panes. He opened the door slightly, on the chain, and a woman’s voice said breathlessly, “Is our Mona ’ere? Are you the master? ’Im as put it acrost our Mona will ’ave to pay, that’s what I come to say, to get what is ’er rights!”

  “Who is it, Dickie?” called out Hetty, in anxious tones behind him.

  “I do not know,” he replied, and turning the screen of the lantern, shone the beam on the sad face of a prematurely-aged woman.

  “I think it must be Mona’s mother, dear.”

  “Oh,” said Richard. “I’d better turn up the gas.” It was usually turned low for economy. He slid the dog of the chain out of its groove, and opened the door.

  “I think I had better have a talk with Mrs. Monk, dear,” said Hetty. “You go to your lecture, Dickie,” she added, with an attempt at calm, “I am sure everything will be all right.”

  “So it’t’d better be!” cried Mrs. Monk. “It’s a shime, an’ the man what done it will ’ave to pay, Mr. Monk will see to that!”

  “Why are you talking to me in that tone of voice?” said Richard, for the woman had addressed her remarks directly to himself.

  “Mrs. Monk is not herself, Dickie,” said Hetty. “Pray go to your lecture, it will come all right. I will see Mrs. Monk, perhaps it will be best to leave it to me, dearest.”

  But Richard was not going to leave Hetty with what he fancied to be a violent woman. It was plain to him now what was the implication.

  “I must ask you to explain your attitude, Mrs. Monk,” he said. “No, Hetty, I cannot leave you: I shall have to abandon all idea of my address, there is no help for it. Here, come into the kitchen; we shall awake the children if we talk here in the hall. Please wipe your boots on the mat, Mrs. Monk.”

  “I’m sure I never intended no offence, sir.” Mrs. Monk wiped her boots vigorously. She was overawed to be inside such a house, of whose splendours she had heard from her daughter. She was now beginning to be afraid.

  Hetty rose to the occasion. “Let me make you some cocoa; it is a cold raw night, Mrs. Monk. Mona, put on the little kettle, there’s a good girl, fill it up from the big kettle on the hob, and set it on the ring. Mr. Maddison has to give a lecture in St. Simon’s Church Hall, and must not be late. You go, dear, Mrs. Monk and I and Mona will have a talk together, and decide what is best to be done.”

  Richard hesitated. His experiences in the district had given him a profound distrust of the lower orders. He was trying to make up his mind—a man already unsure because of lack of sufficient food—when a sudden thumping on the door and a shout without decided the question of go or remain, for him.

  *

  The scene that followed was one to be remembered with recurrent agitation by Hetty for many years, until greater events beginning seventeen years later shook, and altered, all of Hillside Road and the district circumadjacent to the Hill—the flux of consciousness extending to those known to her, even to far places of the earth, involved in an almost universal upsurge of human violence arising from repressed human instincts. On this November night of 1897 there were blows on the door of No. 11 Hillside Road when Richard refused entry to Mona’s father. The blows were followed by the shattering of stained and leaded glass, and hysterical screams from the kitchen. Richard went to the door and fastened the brass chain on its catch, and then slid the bolt into its socket. Having turned out the gas, he ran down the three steps, lantern in hand, to the sitting-room. Pushing up the roll-top of the desk there, he seized his truncheon and whistle.

  Meanwhile the front door, its latch having been turned by a bleeding hand thrust in the space of broken glass, and the bolt pushed back, was receiving heavy blows as the weight of the body outside was hurled against it. The screws holding the chain were torn out of the wood; the door was burst in and was only saved from fracture against the wall by the coats hanging from their hooks on the rack.

  By this time the children upstairs had been awakened by the noise. The screams of Phillip added to the upset as Monk the navvy, drunk on gin and porter from the Railway, pushed his way into the kitchen, tore off his shapeless cloth cap and hurled it upon the oilcloth, while the terrified women cowered back. With a bellowing cry of “Where is ’e, the ’kin’ bleeder? Stole ’arf ’er wages, the ’kin’ bastard, and put it acrost my litt’l gal, ’e ’as! By God A’mighty, when I done wiv ’im—where’s ’e gorn, Jes’ Chris’ on tin wills? Coward, ’at’s what ’e is, ’kin’ coward run away! I’ll get ’im, if I swing for it!”

  Monk pulled off his coat, spat on his hands, loosened his belt, and went towards the passage, down which Richard had disappeared.

  “Oh please do not!—Dickie, Dickie!—O my children!” and Hetty wrung her hands.

  Then she heard the noise of the sash-window in the sitting-room being flung up; and a long-drawn Fran-nn-nn-aa-aa-nn—the twin discordant blast of a police whistle. Lantern in one hand, truncheon in the other, nickel-plated whistle in mouth, Richard was summoning help through the fog.

  He drew a deep breath; blew a second blast; inhaled deeply again, as he secured the cord of the varnished wooden truncheon, with the arms of the City of London painted upon it, around his right wrist; and summoning up himself, with lantern in left hand, walked resolutely towards the kitchen, his nostrils wide, his hair feeling to be standing up on the back of his head. He felt entirely calm, events were happening outside himself.

  Monk the navvy spat on his hands again, and was holding fists before face and head preparatory to the crouch and rush when the tip of the hard-wood billet, coming up with a flick of Richard’s forearm and wrist—the old Indian club twirl—struck him under the chin and not down upon his head as he had expected. Immediately he collapsed in a loose heap.

  More whistle blasts into the fog. Answering blasts and shouts. Footfalls upon asphalt, upon the tiles of the porch.

  “Hullo, sir, had some trouble? We know this customer.”

  Monk was hand-cuffed before being hauled to his feet, whimpering. He was frog-marched into the hall. More oaths as he was pushed through the door, more blows; and the sobbing of Mrs. Monk and Mona in the kitchen audible again.

  The delinquent was flung down upon the little lawn in front of the house. He pitched face-first over the burnt-brick rockery, there to lie and await the hand-ambulance.

  By this time other front doors down Hillside Road had opened—“Montrose”, “Chatsworth”, “Knebworth”, etc. Voices came from the fog. One preceded action: Mrs. Bigge, shawl over Assyrian style of
hair-dress, beset with pins and clasps after the mid-weekly wash, popped into “Lindenheim”, and at once went upstairs to Phillip, calling out as she hauled herself up by the banisters, “There now, little man, there now! Aunty Bigge is coming, Aunty Bigge is coming, to tell you about Goldilocks and the Three Bears!” Hetty was already with the baby.

  When it was over—the statements written into books, the wheeled and hooded cart brought and the man taken away prostrate under the brown canvas, strapped across feet, middle, and wrists—Richard pasted brown paper over the shattered leaded panel of the front door, while Mrs. Bigge, in the kitchen, had a cup of cocoa, wide-eyed Phillip in her arms.

  “I hope Josiah is not upset by it all, perhaps I ought to pop back into the house and see.” Gallantly Richard escorted Mrs. Bigge to the front gate of “Montrose”. From the notes of the harp coming from upstairs, it appeared that Mr. Bigge was undisturbed. Thanking her for her good offices, Richard returned to his own house, with no further thoughts of his lecture.

  Which, as it turned out, was in accordance with the thoughts of other members of the Antiquarian and Archeological Society; for owing to the extreme density of the fog, only Mr. Mundy and Miss MacIntosh, who had but to walk a hundred yards or so, arrived at St. Simon’s Hall that night.

  The next evening Miss Thoroughgood called, asking to see Mr. Maddison on particular business, in private. Richard saw her in the front room, behind the door shut for about five minutes. Afterwards Miss Thoroughgood left with raddled face, and Hetty heard her thanking Richard profusely as he let her out of the front door, and saw her down the dark porch and awkward path to the gate. Hetty did not ask what Miss Thoroughgood had said, nor did Richard tell her.

  In due course local newspapers printed accounts of the proceedings at Greenwich Police Court, where a remand was made; and later still, the details at the Quarter Sessions. Richard appeared as a witness on both occasions. The accused man declared on oath that his daughter had told him that her employer had not only interfered with her, but had kept back half her wages, paying only half-a-crown a week. Hetty denied this, saying she had paid Mona five shillings every Saturday. Medical evidence was given that conception had occurred before the girl entered employment as a domestic servant. An earnest member of the Society for the Elevation of the Poor was permitted to give evidence of extenuating circumstances. She said that there were seven children in the family, which was one of three families occupying a three-bedroom’d house in Mercy Terrace. The Monks occupied one room. Monk had always been a good husband and father until he had experienced a prolonged period of being out of work, for no fault of his own.

  Mrs. Monk was not required by law to testify against her husband, nor was Mona brought into the witness box; so the charge of incest, known by the court missionary and others to be common enough in such rookeries of the poor, was not made. It was sufficient that Monk had committed the acts of burglary, assault and battery, with intent to do grievous bodily harm. He was sent to penal servitude for the maximum number of years.

  Richard was deeply mortified by accounts printed in the newspapers. He never went back to St. Simon’s Tennis Club, nor did he attend any further Antiquarian Society meetings. His feelings about the matter may perhaps be indicated by the fact that, when his quarterly season-ticket expired on the London, Brighton railway, he changed to the South Eastern, going to and returning from Randiswell every day, in order to avoid passing down Foxfield Road and the parish hall of St. Simon Wakenham. And he never told Hetty, or anyone else, what Miss Thoroughgood had told him in confidence: that she was suffering from skin cancer, and had charged Mona an excessive commission of half her wages, as that was the only way she could pay the doctor’s bills. “Old Loos’am”, as she had been known, died in the Infirmary half a year later, and was buried in the graveyard of the parish church.

  PART TWO

  COURAGE

  Chapter 10

  HETTY IS ISOLATED

  THE may blossom was white on the thorns upon the Hill, as though to adorn the first springtime of the new century. Leaves of silver birch and elm hid the black branches of winter; the grass was a deeper green, like the colour painted upon the spiked iron railings enclosing the forty acres of the Recreation Ground. Hetty had planned to dress the two children in their best clothes—Sonny in white sailor suit and Mavis in the silk frock she had made for her—and take them to Greenwich, to visit her favourite Aunt Marian; but on rising that morning she felt ill, and wondered if she were going to have one of her bilious attacks.

  She was so obviously unwell, head hot and cheeks flushed, that Richard ordered her to remain in bed, saying that he would get his own breakfast. The porridge was already cooked in the double-cooker, and had only to be heated under the gas. Rashers of streaky bacon were in the larder. Hetty prayed that Dickie would not be upset if he found any food that he considered stale on the shelves; and she started to get up, but felt so giddy that she climbed back again into bed, shivering.

  “I shall be quite all right, Dickie.” Thinking of the children, she felt relief that Mamma was next door. “Mrs. Bigge will come in, dear, if I want any help. I’ll take some nux vomica, perhaps that will put me right. No, dear, I don’t feel like—I mean I don’t want any breakfast. Just a cup of tea, thank you Dickie. Sonny and Mavis only have a plate of porridge each, and then a slice of bread and butter with marmalade.”

  “I know, I’m not entirely unobservant, Hetty!”

  “No, dear, of course not. My head aches a little, I can’t think very clearly.” Her eyes shone with fever. “Oh Dickie, please don’t bother about getting the children’s breakfasts, on second thoughts. Sonny has never dressed himself alone, dear.”

  “Well, it’s time he learned! A boy who cannot dress himself, at his age, indeed! I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

  He went to the door and called down the corridor, “Phillip, are you awake?”

  “Yes, farver,” a thin voice floated back.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing, farver.”

  “Then get up, at once, and dress yourself!”

  There was no reply, so Richard, in dark-blue dressing-gown and carpet slippers, went down the corridor to the end bedroom but one. On the way he turned on the cold tap for his morning tub.

  “Come on, old chap!” he said to the boy lying in bed. “Are you feeling seedy, too?”

  “No, farver.”

  “Then get up!” He stripped back the clothes, revealing the thin child lying curled up with a golliwog, and a loudly purring brindled cat, in his arms.

  The boy stared at his father. Something in the stare penetrated to an inner feeling of the man, who almost against his will heard himself speaking with an abruptness that he did not really intend. Indeed, Richard never really intended to be censorious or critical; but gradually the habit had formed.

  “Now you know very well it is forbidden to take Zippy to bed with you, don’t you?”

  When the boy did not answer, but continued to stare with full dark stare, the inner feeling seemed to leap out of Richard and he said severely, “If you do this again, my boy, you will have to go to bed and have only bread and water for a day! I will not have you grow up in deceit! Come on, up with you!” and he gave the boy a slap on his bottom.

  The cat stretched itself and yawned, while the boy began to cry.

  “Oh come on, Phillip! Cannot I say anything to you without you turning on the water-works? Be a man! Look at Zippy, he doesn’t start crying because he has to get up. Zippy, Zippy! Come on then, old fellow.” With tail erect the brindled cat walked over the bed, and rubbed its neck against Richard’s knuckles.

  “Oh, come on Phillip, stop snivelling! Anyone would think you’d been ill-treated, the way you respond to a slap! Why bless my soul, I hardly touched you. Your Mother is not very well, and so you must be an extra special good boy to-day, and look after your Aunt Isabelle when she arrives. It’s time you had a cold tub in the morning, I started them before I was
your age. Come on, I’ll give you a swish before I have mine.”

  He led the boy into the bathroom.

  “Come on, now, off with your nightshirt.” The bath was a third full, a quivering oblong of pale green coldness.

  “Now then, in you go, like a man. Come on, climb over by yourself. Don’t stand there shivering, and for heaven’s sake don’t start grizzling again! Come on, don’t be a mamby-pamby!”

  Hetty was listening. The bedroom door was wide open. She had heard the slap, the overbearing voice, the whimpering, and wondered anxiously what Sonny had been doing to upset his father. She knew how the boy had adored his father, and had felt after the birth of Mavis that his father did not want him any more. It grieved her to think that during the past year the boy had become noticeably more shut-in upon himself. At times it seemed to Hetty that Dickie had forgotten how he, in his boyhood, had felt when his father had been cross and impatient.

  The bathroom window was open at the top. Richard believed in plenty of fresh air. It was a calm summer morning outside. Through the drawn-down top of the window a starling was visible on the chimney pot of the opposite house, belonging to Mr. Turney. Richard always thought of his father-in-law as Mr. Turney, as invariably he addressed him as Mr. Turney. Thomas Turney’s sons addressed the Old Man as “sir”; Richard had done the same to his father; but to him Mr. Turney was Mr. Turney, an individual he could not respect.