By now his Lads were fallen or leapt or pushed out of the dray, tumbling about and swotting each other before the middle and most dilapidated of three doorways that appeared to all lean in toward each other.
The Lads made way for Grimmins, who wiped off a substantial key before and after fitting it to the boy’s eye-high lock. He stepped quickly away as the lads stumbled, tumbled, leap-frogged, and otherwise gambolled in through the narrow dark hallway. I had held back, and A.M. Grimmins now swanned a languid hand, bidding me enter. I could feel him darken the doorway and shut and lock it behind me.
From the moment I’d heard the word “Dustbins,” I’d developed certain preconceptions of what I might discover. First, and most foremost, I expected to encounter a mile of dust, dirt, and garbage. It would make great sense given the boys were so utterly unwashed. Secondly, I’d presupposed it was a sobriquet for a particularly dusty and or dirty manufactory of some unknown household object.
What I beheld was a five-storey-high, partly ceilinged, glass-windowed mountain of refuse. Well, official and domestic debris is more accurate. In the early morning sunlight, the cyclopean, irregular, vast mounds sparkled and glittered. And it was that very sparkle that we lads were most after. For this huge collection of locally residential, Court, and commercial wastage was dropped here untouched, unsorted, unlooked at by those who amassed it from out of back alley, side street, below street, and stable side refuse cannisters.
Separated from the organic ilk of filth—for the greater part—it was primarily and overpoweringly dry. So dry, that within hours I would be sniffling. In a few more hours, my nose would suddenly erupt in rivulets of red blood to the cheers of whatever other Lads were nearby. “Look at ’im. ’E’s got a gusher,” Dungeness cried in delight.
Secondarily, and this is connected with the first, the waste was essentially composed of paper products even though it was predominantly dove to dark grey en masse, not white like most of the paper itself. Thirdly, and most importantly, it was unsorted. Sorting or sifting through it was to be our own lovely work, for which our hands must have gloves of a sort. One of our elders, Crustacean, tossed me a series of cloth rag strips and displayed for me upon his filthy digits how to wrap them about my hands and tuck them in. “Be a mass of bloody ’ands he’d be without ’em rags.” Crustacean sniggered at the for him evidently happy thought.
Each of us had our own unique territory within that Herculean accumulation: mine own was known as Lesser Byward, as it seemed to point in the general direction of that external lane. Of course this was, by the Lads’ standards, one of the more inferior locales. The latter being evaluated by the criteria of how much “acteral swag,” according to Crustacean, was once or might be consistently obtained from any particular vicinity. As the pile-up varied from day to day, this seemed like purest mythology to me, but Lads had been known to break each other’s noses in arguments over someone else taking their “cherce lanes.”
I soon discovered after we entered and had been fed day-old sweet rolls and a small pot of ale with a little fizz remaining it—my first alcohol—that our work was to enter our “lanes” with a sort of swimming motion, hoping to dislodge, disturb, and otherwise loosen up that mountain of debris a bit, but not too much. Once inside, which is to say some three to four feet deep, we were to begin picking through and locating treasure. We each wore a cloth bag across our front, much like a grocer’s apron, in which to place the swag until it could be sorted more carefully.
As with any apprenticeship to any craft, no matter how peculiar or arcane, there were overriding rules as well as well-proven taboos. One should not ever go so deep or so low into one’s lane that one risked being trapped by a “fall over” or, even worse, a “cave-in.” Such had once happened to poor little Sea Urchin, who had since that day never been located again. Vague rustlings and ever fainter cries for help lasting nearly another week had been heard following his disappearance down, down, deeply down into his lane, but the lad himself was never seen alive again and at last was given up for lost, his name a warning to all—or at least to me, as in, “Don’t be an Urchin, eh, there, Scallop!”
As bad or worse a destiny was “holding back” on one of Andrew Marvell Grimmins’s five days. What one did on one’s own day mattered not. But that very clean man could become, I was assured by each and sundry boy, a veritable “demon outta very hell,” according to Little Tarpon, who had witnessed one such ill-judged holding back of a discarded paste jewel tiara by one unfortunate boy, Ocean Anemone.
“Thrashed?” asked I, who’d only recently found out such a thing was possible in life.
“Near skinned alive. If Lobs and me hadn’t run inbertwixt him and Nemo, he’d have no rear left to ever be caned agin, never mind sit ’pon.”
The fate of poor Ocean Anemone was a cautionary tale for us all. He’d been thrashed and then exiled out the front door of the Dustbins Paradise. Forbidden to ever again to re-enter those holy gates, Anemone supposedly languished outside long enough to be seen and then dragged inside the next tall edifice by a very tall, elderly old maid, who—and this was said with such horror it took me a while to make out—bathed the boy repeatedly and so assiduously that he was rendered unrecognizable.
“’Ereafter, ’e smelled like a flaking roose.” Tarpon wrinkled his nose in disgust at his fellow boy’s heartrending fate. “Schooled to this day, indoors and out. Wears a cravat.” And then, the most crushing condemnation of all from any true Grimmins Lad. “’E carries nothing greater in his pocket than a ha’pence!” sneered Lobster Tail.
I, of course, would have spun cartwheels upon my head to have had a ha’pence in my pocket. Even so, I heeded my elders and betters and was carefully instructed to keep my wits about me and to be constantly on the lookout for any such sinister spinsters exhibiting sanitary schemes or educational designs upon my innocent self.
The first day, I shared Little Tarpon’s lane, he being the slimmest and lightest of weight, and he showed me how to obtain treasures out of the great heap of waste, which contained so many brightly false leads. In this manner did I quickly learn that sealing wax was of great use. One pulled out a letter, and if it was waxed, as many official papers were, one determined by fingering it how thick the wax was. If of a certain thickness, it was valuable and might be scraped off and re-moulded into tapers, and Andrew Marvell Grimmins or one of his Lads profit thereby.
Any metal whatever was to be retrieved, whether it be partial, scrap, sliver or whole. From chamber pot to pen squib to ale tankard, it could be profitable. Similarly, any crockery or pottery, from porcelain down to grub-stone, was to be gathered. Fur, cloth, leather, quill, pencil-lead, and any and all wood larger beyond a splinter was to be taken, too.
It soon became astonishingly remarkable to me what folk discarded. Toy boats with half masts and parchment sails; paste pots still one quarter filled with glop; copper finger-rings missing only their inset stone; candle ends; foxed notebooks; girdled book spines without boards; pen nibs by the hundred-fold; rancid lamp oil, including a half litre of once quite redolent spermaceti; scrimshaw and uncarved ivory combs and knitting needles; canvas and other heavy sail cloths; wooden boxes of all sizes; unused stationery paper of the thickest, softest weave and finish; little blackened metal tubs still holding a smudge of ink; iron nails, bent or straight; brass door fixtures, tarnished or not; sheared-off crystal paperweights; teak and ebony wooden back teeth; half-wigs and demi-perukes, especially those days when the Holborn Courts dust-drays delivered to us; hair dye in little cyan bottles; carpet ends; and bent-to-be-woven basket osiers.
Whenever we found triangle papers of unknown pharmaceuticals, we invariably licked them off and gulped them down, usually putting on a great show of swooning, in pretence of a reaction. One time, I came upon a complete seven inch long Copp-a-cola, a savoury dried meat the breadth of my arm and far tastier that we Lads shared late that night, Grimmins having thrown it to us, more concerned as he was with the very fine, blue and gold met
al foil it had come wrapped inside. It had found its way to us from an Italian city I read from that hurriedly snatched label—Parma. Perhaps I shall be there myself soon.
Naturally, I returned to the construction site after we had feasted every night, our supper being of whatever unspoiled and unrancid foodstuffs any of had come upon that day, in addition to regular portions of small, yeasty meat pies and enough ale to get the younger of us sleepy, all of it ordered by Grimmins at a bulk rate from a local tavern known as the Deaf Hound. If Grimmins was in a good temper, we might also divide a gooseberry or pear tart that his landlady, who was said by the elder Lads to be wooing him, had baked. That would sweeten our palates.
That first night I slept in surprising comfort and warmth, exhausted, surrounded and yet not overly bothered by the rank aromas of many dirty boys. By the second evening and onward, I would fall to sleep instantly and awaken in an hour or so to hear one or two of the older Lads telling stories, but I would quickly fall asleep again.
Within a week, I had made the first find I might keep myself—a particularly handsome green marble lamp base, cracked neatly in half and ringed in brass—that Grimmins then bought off me for a quid. That was more money than I’d ever seen, and I would stare at the large fat, somewhat chewed-edge coin with growing pleasure, thinking what tasties and pasties it would buy.
A week later, I realized I had become a Grimmins Lad in yet another way. We had no employment Sunday afternoons, A.M. Grimmins’s only acknowledgement of the existence of a power higher, or cleaner, than himself. Left to our own devices after morning labours, we would remain at Thameside on all but the rainiest of days, and there too we naturally rushed through Billingsgate Market for what Prawn referred to as “loose change,” i.e., anything whatsoever of value not tied down or pushed deep in someone’s pockets. At the nearby Swan Lane Pier, in those years, a sort of impromptu fish-fry caravan was invariably lodged for several hours midday. It belonged to two fat and rather jolly sisters, the Cridleys, who for a very few ha’pence would well feed a bundle of dirty Lads, so long as we remained out of sight of the ’van’s more respectable clientele.
It was on one such Sunday near sunset when we had feasted well, thanks to Evangelina and Leona Cridley’s generosity with our few offered ha’pence, that we began tumbling about swotting each other and somehow or other myself and Crustacean found ourselves rolling further on and crossing paths with a brace of somewhat down at heels clergy who’d also just finished their repast in front of the ’van.
“You are the filthiest children I ever laid eyes upon,” said one demi-divine, with hair so yellow it looked green, while the other spat upon the ground.
“Undesired bastards,” he said.
We immediately made fun of the two, but later on that day, I found myself thinking, he couldn’t have meant me, could he?
Those half free days, we used to beg at the open common in front of the Tower by the statue called Hammer Thrower, in truth more for hilarity than for pelf, and as we passed a horse trough an hour after, I stared into the reflection of its unstirred waters. I was indeed grimy. In weeks to come, I would look into another trough or shop window and so my progress in dirtiness as a Grimmins Lad was made inexorably clear. I advanced from grimy to grubby, thence to grungy, from smoky to dusty, until I had achieved the ultimate and was truly sooty in hue.
Like the other Lads, I would pick up whatever bits of cloth or ornamentation Grimmins disdained, employing them to spottily embellish my increasingly dirty clothing. None of us actually looked poor, tattered, or ragged. We thought that we resembled ocean-going pirates and as yet unhung highwaymen. Later on, I would realised we looked childishly outlandish.
One other Sunday when some of us were “taking the air,” as Prawn put it, sticking out his rump and head in different directions as though he were a fat lady with a bustle, at Tower Pier, a laughing young woman walking with a group of young people came up to me.
She held her handkerchief in front of her face and said, “You are aware, young man, that the brooch upon your breast contains a precious stone?”
I had found the brooch the day before, on one of my own days, but I hadn’t yet shown it to Grimmins, who had been otherwise occupied, and I was so surprised by the encounter that I replied, “No ’tisn’t. Anyway, I found it in a dustbin,” so she would know I’d not stolen it.
“Then you are fortunate indeed, although your appearance suggests you actually rendezvous in dustbins a great deal,” she said with good humour. “The stone is real. It’s called a beryl. And that one looks to weigh five or six carats.”
“Would you like it, Miss?” I offered to remove it.
She laughed. “I don’t have enough money to pay you for it, and as I am a proper young lady, I may not accept a gift from a stranger,” said she, then moved away.
“Is it worth a quid, then?” I asked, since that was the amount Grimmins commonly offered us for such sparkling finds.
“Five guineas at least,” said she, turning around to whisper it.
I immediately unpinned it from my chest, wrapped it in cloth, and hid it upon my person. This act would prove crucially serviceable in later days, and I would thank that young lady for it.
I’ve mentioned I would sometimes awaken and hear some of the older Lads telling stories. One evening, something that one of them, Lobster Tail it was, said caught my attention, and I quietly swotted myself awake to listen.
“Two and fourpence she said it was worth? He only gave a quid for it?”
“He offered a quid ’nd a hav!”
“Just as bad. Did you face ’im wid it?”
“So’s I did. I said, ‘Miz Cridley ov the ’vans wants it an she’ll pay better.’ I told ’im how much and ’e sez, ‘She’s a fool then, that one. Take it, me Lad,’ and ’e tost it at me. But yer could tell Old A.M. rued letting it go.”
“An easy way out. But I take yer point, old Lobs.”
“Do yer, Crusty?”
“Aye, and I advise yer to no more nivir agen tells him such as that. ’Tiz how poor Starfish met ’is own end.”
“Starfish?”
“Afore yer time, Lobs. The best of the best of we Lads, and the best earner and finder ov all. He found out one time a copper and bone pen set was worth a quid or more and was offered two shillings on it and ack-ooosed the Big Feller ov theevery. Steeling from pooer hapless youths, said he.”
“Aye. And what wer his comeuppance?” Lobster Tail asked.
“Don’ know. Nivir saw the Lad agen. Up and vanished, he did, with nary a word to none of we.”
The two of them made a similar humming sound.
“’Nd so, Lobs, I advise yer agen to nivir agen tell him nothing like that.”
“Starfish was in his rights, then?”
“De yer want ter be a Lad? De yer want ter have a roof to sleep oonder and ale and meat pies? Iv yer do, them’s the unspoke rooles.”
“So’s if’n I find sum’ing valerble, I keeps it? I donts offer it him?”
“Yer said it, Lobs. Not me. G’night.”
The very next afternoon, when we was tumbling about during one of our several impromptu free time periods, Crustacean grabbed me especially hard and very quietly said to me, “Keeps what yer heard las’ nigh’ ter yerself, hear?” and accented his comment with a twist of my ear.
It wasn’t difficult to elude the other Lads when I needed to, and so I got my precious beryl to Evangelina Cridley, who looked at it—holding her nose—and said, “Too rich for my blood, laddie. Yer’ll need to go to Mr. Hausfroth fer that.”
We’d passed the Hausfroth Antiquities shop on a few occasions, so I asked, “Will he let me in the door, then?” When she made a moue with her magenta painted lips, I added, “Pr’aps for a gift, you’d do it for me, Miss Cridley?” We settled on a twenty percent cut for her, and I asked her to give me a receipt, which she did, most surprised I could read.
“His Nibs don’t know you can read, do he? ’Causing if he did!” she warne
d. When I looked surprised, she said, “He must keep account books of some sort, showing his earnings above his payment for the Lads’ finds.” Which meant she and her sister had suspected his theft all along.
Suddenly I understood. Even so, discretion—as my little Alphabetical Reader at the Gillips Kindergarten had taught me—is the better part of valour, and I waited until she had gone to Hausfroth and brought me back the royal amount of four pounds, nine shillings and sixpence after her percentage was taken, which I then secreted upon my person in various areas by loopings and threads, before I decided to see exactly how much the very clean Mr. Grimmins profited off his Lads.
Weeks would pass before I had my chance, but it came. Grimmins was called out by a “client” to adjudge some largish amount of what he claimed was “frippery.” Crustacean was put in charge of the Lads, and as I continually asked for the smaller piles of waste, closest to Grimmins’s office in just such an event, he was easy enough to circumvent.
Within the office, the account books were findable. But only just, and after some fooling about searching with the greatest of care, one ear turned all the while to the doorway. At last, two tooled leather sheafs were unshelved that produced results. One was titled His Garden the other His Coy Mistress. Only later on would I discover these were references to the poet Marvell’s works. But one ledger clearly showed Grimmins’s payment to us, and the other ledger his sale of the varied items. And at what—usually far greater—profit.
The books could not be removed without him noticing, so I had to find a way to get my way into the office and copy them.
Pursuit Page 11
