South of Darkness

by John Marsden

  ‘Why did your folks not take you with them when they went away to the countryside?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Don’t you have grandparents or uncles or aunts or cousins?’ Silas asked. ‘Do you have brothers, lad, or sisters?’

  When I didn’t answer he shook his head and bent his back to the oars once more. As we got under way I trailed my hand in the water, wondering how much longer the Piggotts would put up with my ignorance and bad habits.

  Chapter 7

  It did not take long to find out. Four days after the conversation in the boat Abigail, Mrs Piggott, found I had been stealing food and hiding it under my bed. Unfortunately – I had not anticipated this – rats found the food and ruined it, and then Mrs Piggott found the rats.

  I am ashamed as I write these words, for the Piggotts had been so good to me, sharing their home and their food, and even putting clothes on my back. I don’t know why I kept taking food, for they were good providers and shared all they had. Yet something within me seemed unable to resist when I opened a cupboard or jar and found bread or cheese or sausage inside. It was as though I had to have it, and some demon made me stretch out my arm, take it, and scurry to my bed like I was a rat myself, to secrete my ill-gotten gains.

  It seemed that of all the creatures in the world the ones Mrs Piggott could least abide were rats, and she went to great trouble to keep them out of the house. When three fled from under my bed one morning, the screams of the good lady could be heard down by the river, where Silas and Thomas and I were caulking the boat. We ran up to the house and in through the door, me some distance behind the two men, because I did not of course have strength in my legs to equal theirs. When I arrived Mrs Piggott was standing on the kitchen table and pointing at my bed. Thomas was already peering underneath it, and a moment later, in front of my stricken eyes, he pulled out the remains of my hoard.

  ‘How could a rat drag so much food in there?’ Silas asked in simple bewilderment.

  His wife turned to me. ‘There’s the rat,’ she screeched. ‘I thought we was missing food all the time. The ingratitude of it. Stealing food from under our very noses.’

  Silas looked at me, horror stricken. Watching him through eyes of shame I saw grief slowly stealing over his face, replacing the horror. ‘Why would you do such a thing?’ he asked slowly. ‘Didn’t we take you in? Didn’t we nurse you through your sickness? Didn’t we fill your belly morning and night?’

  I nodded. ‘Indeed you did all of those things,’ I whispered. ‘I’m sorry, Silas. I’m sorry, Abigail. I don’t know why I took the victuals.’

  Shaking her fist at me Abigail said: ‘The eighth commandment. Thou shalt not steal.’ She folded her arms and marched into the next room.

  Silas shook his head. ‘I think it’s time you be leaving us,’ he said. ‘You can keep the clothes. I’ll row you down the river and set you off at the place where we picked you up.’

  And so I left the house, in disgrace and ignominy, with Mrs Abigail Piggott’s back turned to me. ‘Shall I be coming with you?’ Thomas asked his father, but Silas replied: ‘No, there’s no need. It’s a heavy load I’m taking, to be sure, but a light one, if you know what I mean.’

  Thomas shook his head sadly at me as I departed. ‘You’ll end up on the gallows,’ he said. ‘You had better mind yourself.’

  I sat in the boat despondently as Silas let the current carry us down the river, just taking an occasional stroke with the oar to keep us straight. Would that my life could be kept straight so easily, I reflected bitterly. But my thoughts were interrupted by Silas. He had the habit of speaking as if to himself, when he intended his words to be heard by others, and so he did on this occasion.

  ‘There’s no doubt Mother can be easily upset,’ he said. ‘The trouble is, not many get to know her. Not many know the goodness in her heart. And her heart has stayed good, despite the troubles she’s seen. Ah, life, it’s a hard affair for such as us. We’ve buried three infants, Mother and I, that the Lord saw fit to take. And then there was Johnny, what a lad he was, the apple of her eye, and no wonder. He was the darling of all who knew him.’

  ‘What happened to Johnny?’ I asked tentatively. I had always wondered.

  Still without looking at me, Silas responded to my question. ‘He fell in love with Madame Geneva. That were the real story of his downfall, though his mother won’t have it at any price.’

  I knew well who, or rather what, Madame Geneva was. It was one of the names people in Hell, and no doubt various other places, used for gin. Along with Hell water, strip-me-naked, bunter’s tea, blue ruin and meat-drink-washing-and-lodging. And a dozen others.

  I had seen many men and women in love with Madame Geneva, whatever alias she went under, and she did not serve them well.

  ‘Yes,’ Silas went on. ‘He took to it like a babe to mother’s milk. Night after night he came home reeking of it, staggering in his walk, and day after day I pleaded with him to keep away from grog shops and the low types who patronise them. And then one night he didn’t come home. Before dawn I went out looking for him, and found no trace of him until three days later, when I was nearly mad with despair and loss of sleep. A young barmaid I had spoken to several times during my search finally took pity on me and told me what she had seen. Mind you, she had to do it some ways from her place of work, for she would have lost her position had they known she was snitching on them. Johnny had been plied with gin by a press-gang who were in league with the owner of the place, and when they had him so he didn’t know which way was up and which was down, they put him in their cutter and rowed him away into the darkness. And he were only seventeen years old.’

  ‘What’s a press-gang?’ I asked.

  Silas looked at me directly for the first time. ‘It’s the way they have of manning His Majesty’s ships. Evil creatures roam the streets of the city looking for young men they can steal away for the Royal Navy. It’s a foul trade indeed.’

  ‘And have you not heard any news of Johnny since?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh we heard news all right,’ Silas said heavily, looking at me again. ‘We had a fine letter from the Admiralty, done up in a ribbon with the seal of the Secretary for the Navy himself upon it, informing us that Able Seaman Jonathan Piggott had been lost overboard in a storm off the coast of Scotland, and they could not recover his body. And the Secretary conveyed his deepest sympathy, but mentioned as how we could be consoled by knowing that Johnny had died serving his country.’

  ‘Not much consolation, sir,’ I ventured, not sure how my remark would be received.

  Silas shook his head dolefully. ‘None at all,’ he said, looking up at the clouds. I had the feeling he did so to prevent tears spilling from his eyes. ‘And later, a good deal later, they sent us a parcel containing his possessions, of which there were precious few. But to his mother they were precious indeed, and she pored over them day after day. His bed, too, remained untouched until you arrived, drenched and half-drowned and feverish and lost.’

  His words brought home to me the enormity of my betrayal. I felt I had not been worthy to occupy the bed which was previously Johnny’s.

  We arrived at Horse Ferry Stairs, and Silas had the goodness to shake my hand as I disembarked. ‘God be with ye,’ he said. ‘He saved your life for a reason, be sure of that.’

  He was a righteous man, who did his best to live as the Lord ordained, and he could not understand one such as me. My heart was too full to answer him, but I stood watching as he rowed away up the river, bending his back and applying his great strength in the battle against the current. I knew that I would be unlikely to meet anyone better. I just wished I could be as sure as he of God’s having a special plan for me. God’s taking of Johnny’s life seemed reminiscent of the way He had treated Job. It was hard to discern any special plan in anything.

  When Silas was out of sight, I turned and toiled up the steps, back into the familiar streets
of Hell. The noise and smells and zigzag movements of the people and animals and vehicles drew me in as though I had never been away. I sometimes had the odd feeling that London, or this part of it at least, was about to vomit a great excrescence of rotting food and stinking water and faecal matter and disease all over itself. I had a fancy that there would be a great convulsion of the city, causing a giant water spout of corruption to flood over its inhabitants. Perhaps I was casting my mind back to Revd Mr Grimwade in the pulpit at St Martin’s, quoting Leviticus to the congregation in his cold voice: ‘Do not defile yourselves with any of these things; for by all these the nations are defiled, therefore I visit the punishment of its iniquity upon it, and the land vomits out its inhabitants. You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgements, and shall not commit any of these abominations, either any of your own nation or any stranger who dwells among you, lest the land vomit you out also when you defile it, as it vomited out the nations that were before you.’

  There was much that was vile about London, and it is the vileness I tend to remember, though if I look back honestly, without a jaundiced eye, I have to say there was much also that was enticing and attractive. Every day my life on the streets showed me human nature at its best and worst. Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, as the playwright described, and romance as well, which he omitted from his list: they were all there in the open; little was concealed. The tragedy of seeing a boy about my age pinned to a wall by the wheel of a carriage driven too wildly down a narrow alley, his stomach torn open, and his insides spilling onto the cobblestones as he gasped his last breath, was that mitigated by the people who gathered around him and held him and wept over the pitiful sight, and by the rage of those who chased the coach driver and had to be restrained from lynching him there and then? Comedy there was too, in abundance for those who had eyes to see, from the sight of Uncle Bert dancing drunkenly to the music of a piano accordionist on a street corner, to the magician who could make pennies come out of my ears, to the strange lady dressed in black who always walked sideways along the street. Or was there tragedy too in her story?

  Wonders there were in plenty, including Hector the Performing Pig, who could do arithmetic by tapping his trotter when his master named the right answer to a sum, and the Spotted Man, whose skin was white with dark spots, a marvellous thing to behold. But nothing was the equal of the menagerie at the Tower of London, which Quentin and I travelled to one Sunday afternoon. Getting there was neither comfortable nor pleasant, as we had to pass through the foulest display of butchers’ stalls I ever had seen. It was not so much that the sights and smells were worse than we were used to in Hell, but that there were so many of them, and they covered a vast area. The road was slippery with the secretions from the guts that were tossed onto the cobblestones with indifference, there to be trodden underfoot by the passers-by.

  Nevertheless, we survived the ordeal of the butchers’ stalls and arrived at the Tower gates. There we met with disappointment. We had not known that it cost four pence each to gain entrance, and having not a penny between us we were refused entry. As we turned away in disappointment a kind gentleman dressed in the finest of clothes, with a top hat on his head, took pity on us. ‘Lacking the wherewithal, lads?’ he said cheerfully. ‘Here you are,’ and he tipped us sixpence each.

  Thus we gained entrance to the most marvellous and wonderful sight I had ever been privileged to see. Lions stalked up and down in their enclosure, and cheetahs too, and leopards. We watched as a keeper threw a dead dog to the savage beasts and they fought over it. I overheard a gentleman remark that a person’s admission to the Tower could be gained by tendering a dead dog or cat, knowledge which Quentin and I wished we had possessed before setting out on our trip. We could have laid our hands on a couple of each and the owners would have been none the wiser. I wondered why they did not simply bring in baskets of animal guts from the streets outside.

  An elephant, with small eyes on top of its head, and waving its extraordinary trunk, made a noise that set the ladies shrieking. The keeper remarked to the crowd that for six months of the year the elephant had to be given wine, as it was unable to drink water during that time. This information occasioned much merriment among the onlookers.

  Ostriches, the most peculiar of birds, too big and heavy to fly, ran around their enclosures. They are able to eat metal, an oddity which sets them apart from all other of God’s creatures. When I saw the emu-bird in New South Wales I thought they were very alike, but I could not imagine an emu-bird eating metal.

  Yes, there was plenty to marvel at, despite the stench, which hung over the place like a shroud and was as bad as the stench from the butchers’ stalls outside. It made Quentin nauseous, although I have a strong stomach and did not suffer the same symptoms.

  Really though, when I think back, every day that we survived in Hell was something of a marvel, if not a miracle. Plenty our age or younger did not survive; the churchyards were so chock-a-block with bodies that people like us were buried in poor pits, three or four lined up abreast, then more piled on top until they were at least seven deep, twenty or thirty bodies altogether, and only then would they fill in the hole. Pooh, the smell! You’d try to stay a block or more away, especially in summer.

  A boy had to keep his wits about him if he were to survive in these convulsing streets. I threaded my path along the laneways, ducking under the elbows of the gossiping women, manoeuvring around the whores and stepping over the drunks, trying to avoid the pools of muck, keeping one eye on the heavy shop signs hung out into the street on iron bars: signs that were notorious for falling in strong winds and crushing any unfortunate soul standing beneath.

  It had taken me a day and a half after my precipitate eviction from the Piggotts’ to find Quentin again. He looked at me in some confusion when I appeared at the end of an alley where I had been told I might find him. He was engaged in a game of hopscotch with a couple of other boys, neither of whom I knew. Quentin gazed at me as if unsure of who I was. Then he approached me, saying cautiously: ‘Barnaby. I thought you was drowned.’

  ‘I very nearly was.’

  He thought about this for a few moments. ‘Do you want to play hopscotch?’

  ‘All right.’

  Once we had played the game for a time he seemed to become more comfortable with me again, and from then on we resumed our friendship, going around together much of the time.

  Chapter 8

  At age twelve or thereabouts, for I could never fix my age with certainty, I got my first regular employment. Up until then I had been earning what I could where I could, which meant mostly doing odd jobs that I picked up in the streets, such as standing at the heads of horses and holding their reins while their owners went into a tavern, or sweeping the footpath out the front of a shop, or running errands for people who had stalls along the marketplaces. Then an apothecary called Mr Ogwell started to pay me some attention. I cleaned his windows quite often, and having been taught by Mother Abigail, I was now a good deal more proficient at such tasks. Several times Mr Ogwell came out onto the footpath and stood watching me at work, and finally one morning he said to me: ‘Well young Barnaby, I am inclined to engage you as a delivery boy, for you know Ralph has been missing two weeks now, and I fear we must give up hope of his returning, for the time being at least.’

  Ralph was about eleven or twelve, a nice kind boy whom I knew a little. One day he had not come home from work, and he had not been glimpsed since. I believe he lived with his parents down past the park. I had seen his distressed mother and father walking the streets day after day, searching for their boy, but as Mr Ogwell said, there was neither hide nor hair to be seen of him.

  I took the job gladly, although the pay was only sixpence a day, which considering bread was tuppence a loaf, and cheese tuppence or more a pound, was never enough to live on, but it was something, and I could supplement my income by the usual means.

  Mr Ogwell handed me a lis
t of names and addresses which I had to read to him, to prove that I knew my letters, before he would confirm my employment. He seemed impressed by my reading, which had been reinforced by my lessons with Silas Piggott.

  And so I became the delivery boy for Mr Ogwell’s business. I knew that should Ralph return I would lose the position, but he never did so, and eventually his parents gave up their search. Mayhap he had run away to sea, as boys sometimes did, for he was too young to be press-ganged.

  I quite enjoyed my new-found respectability. I particularly enjoyed the time spent bustling along the streets with my basket, searching for the addresses of the customers. At first it was difficult, because my master, Mr Ogwell, expected me to make more deliveries than seemed possible, but although I knew the streets and alleys and lanes well, or so I thought, it turned out that Mr Ogwell knew them considerably better. So when he made out the delivery schedule, he did so with a particular route in mind. Not knowing this, I rearranged the schedule upon leaving the shop, unwittingly giving myself a longer path to travel. With many premises, Mr Ogwell knew of back doors or side doors which could be reached by expedited means; I only knew of the marked doors, at the front, and I quickly found I was given a frosty welcome at those in the better class establishments. Angry servants, resenting my presumption, would tell me to take myself to the trade entrance, which oft-times required a detour of half a block.

  Armed with my basket and my list of customers, I found myself exploring parts of London that had previously been outside my familiar territory. So much of London life was lived below street level, and time and time again I found myself descending grimy, greasy staircases as if to Hell itself, except that the temperature dropped quickly during my descent, instead of rising as one might expect if truly entering the satanic realms. Groping through the darkness trying to find the right door, being cursed when I found the wrong one, quenching my nausea at the stench of sickbeds, holding grimly onto the medicines until the exact money was counted into my palm . . . I often felt I had entered an underworld indeed.