bare tables, in front of a steaming plate of stewed meat and vegetables.
His pulses were beating with excitement at his secret plot, and the food
was like sawdust in his mouth. Afternoon school began, and he sat with
the resigned boredom of his kind, chanting in shrill chorus the eternal
truths of the multiplication table.
Then some other subject, equally dull, was started, when suddenly his
heart leaped to his mouth, and he nearly fell off the bench with the
unexpected joy of it, for the teacher had brought up the intimate
question of his soul: "Which is the way to London?"
The blood throbbed so loud in his ears that he could scarcely hear the
answer. "London lies south of this schoolroom. If you walked out of that
window, and followed your nose up the white road yonder, it would take
you to London."
Other strange instruction followed--how to find north and south, and all
about the sun and moon--but he purposely refrained from attending. By
the act of God the position of London had been miraculously revealed to
him, and he clung fast to that knowledge, so that his brain was burning
with the effort of concentration.
At last the bell rang, and they flocked out again into the playing
field. He stood alone with his great knowledge and reconnoitred the
situation like an experienced general; a high fence with barbed wire ran
round the field (clearly boys had run away before), but on the left of
the square school-house he could see the shrubbery and the big locked
gates by which he had been brought in with fellow-prisoners two days
before.
Clearly, there was no escape but by going back to the house and facing
perils unspeakable. So, humming softly to himself, he walked back
through the long corridors to the entrance-hall, and out at the front
door, which was standing open, for the day was hot. He sneaked along
like a cat under the laurel bushes.
The big gates were locked, but farther down, hidden in the ivy of the
wall, was a small door which yielded to his push, and then, by the
favour of the angels, he stood free, and ran for his life up the white
road which led to London. At the top of the hill he paused and panted
for breath. The windows of the great school-house glared at him like the
eyes of some evil beast, and, small as he was, he was painfully
conscious of his conspicuousness on the white highway. A farmer's cart
passed him, and the man turned round and gazed after him curiously. A
motor-bus thundered past in a cloud of white, and again it seemed as if
every head turned to watch him.
Hot and faint and thirsty, he still plodded on. London, with its beloved
chimneys and friendly crowds, would soon burst into view, and his
mother, with her cheery "What-ho, Percy!" would be welcoming him. The
new shoes of the school were pinching badly. He longed to take them off,
but funked the knots, which some female person had tied that morning
with damnable efficiency. The sun had suddenly tumbled into a
dangerous-looking pool of red fire, and the shadows which ran beside him
had grown so gigantic he felt alarmed. Such terrifying phenomena were
unknown in the blessed streets of London. The queer night noises of the
countryside had begun around him: strange chirrups and cries from
unseen beasts, which seemed to follow and run beside him; and every now
and then a horned monster stuck its head over the gate and roared
hungrily for its prey.
At length, wearied and hungry, and terrified by the sinister darkness
stealing over the landscape, he threw himself down by the wayside. He
heard the sound of footsteps behind, and braced himself to meet the
knife of the murderer, when a cheerful voice greeted him: "What-ho,
sonnie! You are out late. Time for little boys to be in bed."
"Please, sir," said the child, "I am going home to mother."
"Where does your mother live?"
"In London."
"London, eh! But you've a long way to go."
A sob rose and tore at his throat. Still a long way to go, and darkness
was coming on--black, inky darkness, uncut by familiar street-lamps.
"Come home with me, Tommy, and my missis will sleep you for the night."
With a feeling of perfect confidence, the child slipped his small
fingers into the horny hand of the farm labourer, and half an hour
later, washed and fed, he was sleeping in a big bed amongst a
heterogeneous collection of curly heads.
"Look 'ere, Bill," said the labourer's wife as she folded up the neat
little garments provided by unwilling ratepayers, "'e's runned away from
that there barrack school."
"I knowed that," said Bill, knocking the ashes out from his clay pipe.
"It ain't the first time as I've met youngsters on the road, and, mebbe,
it won't be the last, as folks in the village have been before the beak
for harbouring them, poor little devils!"
"A GIRL! GOD HELP HER!"
The Lady Catherine Castleton lay dying in the stately bed-chamber of
Castleton Hall. Night and day they had sought for my lord in clubs and
gambling dens and well-known haunts of vice and pleasure, but they did
not know of the rose-grown cottage on the Thames which he had taken for
his latest inamorata.
When they told my lady the child was a girl she had given a low cry,
"God help her!" and had turned her face to the wall. Great obstetricians
summoned by telephone had sped in flying motors from town, but they
stood baffled and helpless by the bedside of the young woman, who lay so
still and indifferent, making no effort to live.
In the library the family lawyer and the white-haired admiral, her
father, sat signing cheques for the great specialists, who had done so
little and charged so much.
When they had gone the admiral, who loved his daughter, swore long and
vigorously with the gorgeous powers of the seafaring man, and the lawyer
listened with fascinated approval.
"I told her what her life would be with a loose-living scoundrel like
Castleton, but she would not listen--madly in love with him and his
handsome face, and now he has killed her at twenty-two!"
"I had a very distressing interview with Lady Catherine a few weeks ago.
She went away in disgust and despair when I had to tell her that I did
not think she had sufficient evidence for a divorce, and that she must
prove cruelty or desertion as well as adultery."
"D---d shameful law, sir; can't think how the country puts up with it.
But she shall be safe from him if she lives, my poor little girl!"
Then they were silent, for the shadow of death crept nearer.
* * * * *
Outside the park gates at the end of the village, in Castleton Union,
another girl lay dying. The local practitioner had been called in on his
way back from consultation with the great gynæcologists, and as at the
hall, so in the workhouse, he found his patient sinking. "She came in
late last night, sir," said the nurse, "and the child was born almost
immediately. Her pulse is very weak, and I can't rouse her; she won't
even look at the child."
"I hear it is Jennie Appleton, the carpenter's daughter at
Kingsford--very respectable people. How did she get here?"
"Usual thing. Got into trouble at her situation in London; the man
promised to marry her, but he kept putting it off, and then one day he
disappeared, and wrote to her from Glasgow saying that he was a married
man. She came back home, but her father drove her out with blows and
curses, and she walked here from Kingsford--goodness knows how. It is a
sad case, and the relieving officer tells me she will probably not be
able to get any affiliation order enforced, as the man has evaded
liability by going to Scotland."
"Abominable!" said the doctor; then he went towards the bedside of his
patient, felt her pulse, glanced at the temperature chart, and his face
grew grave.
Taking the babe from the cradle, he laid it beside the mother: "You have
a pretty little girl."
The eyelids flickered, and, as the Countess had spoken, so spoke the
pauper: "God help her!"
"He will," said the doctor, who was a religious man.
"He didn't help me. He let me come to this, and I was born respectable.
She is only a little come-by-chance maid."
"Cheer up, my lass! My wife will help you: she knows it has not been
your fault."
The doctor gave a few directions, and then left, looking puzzled and
worried. He was a good _accoucheur_, and hated to lose a case. What was
the matter with the women that they seemed to have lost the will to
live?
* * * * *
Three days later, in the glory of the May sunshine, there was a double
funeral in Castleton churchyard.
ON THE PERMANENT LIST
(1905)
Now also when I am old and grey-headed,
O God, forsake me not.
"Spend but a few days in the police-court," says Juvenal, "and then call
yourself an unhappy man if you dare." Had he sat on a Board of
Guardians, he would doubtless have included that also as a school of
personal contentment.
All sorts of griefs and tragedies are brought up before us, some of them
abnormal and Theban in horror, some of them so common that we seem to
hear them unmoved: an honest man who cannot find employment, women with
unborn babes kicked, starved, and deserted, children neglected or
tortured, poor human beings marred in the making, the crippled, the
diseased, the defective physically and mentally, too often the pitiful
scapegoats for the sins of the race.
All these things seem too terrible for words or tears; it is the
cheeriness and humour of the poor, their pluck and endurance, their
kindness and generosity one to another, that bring a lump to the throat
and a dimness to the eyes.
We are a very careful Board, and pride ourselves on the strict way in
which we administer our small amount of out-relief; to get it at all
one must be, as an applicant observed, "a little 'igher than an angel,"
and so it is the very aristocracy of labour that files past us this
morning, men and women against whom even the Charity Organization
Society could find no fault, a brave old army, seventy and eighty odd
years of age, some of them bent and crippled with rheumatism and weight
of years, short of breath, asthmatic, hard of hearing, dim in vision,
but plucky to the last, always in terror of looking too ill or too old,
and being forced into the workhouse.
A few, like Moses, do not suffer the usual stigmata of age. "Their eye
is not dim, nor their natural force abated."
"How do you keep so young?" said our chairman, half-enviously, to an
applicant eighty years of age, but upright still, with hair thick and
untinged with grey.
"'Igh living does it, sir," replied the old man, as he took his food
tickets for the week, amounting to 3s. 1¾d. One old lady of eighty-two
runs a private school, and, in spite of the competition of free
education and palatial school buildings, she has six pupils, whose
parents value individual attention and "manners" at sixpence per head a
week. She is fully qualified and certificated, and is a person of strong
views and much force of character, and not only holds Solomon's opinions
upon corporal punishment in theory, but still puts them into practice. I
wonder which of us will have the conviction and energy to cane boys at
eighty-two?
We are a very clean Board, and every half-year the relieving officer
brings a report as to the condition of the homes; but some of the old
people are so withered and shrunken, and their span of remaining life is
so short, that there seems little left both of time and space in which
dirt can collect, and I always hope death will free them before they are
brought into the bleak cleanliness of the House.
Lately in the workhouse one old man took such an affectionate leave of
me that I asked him if he felt ill. "Not yet, ma'am, but I have got to
have a bath to-night, and the last one I took turned me so queer I was
laid up ten weeks in the infirmary. It does you no 'arm, ma'am, very
likely--I've 'eard say as the gentry is born and bred to it--but when
they starts a-bathing of us poor people for the first time at eighty in
them great long coffins full of water, no wonder our rheumatics comes on
worse than ever. And then, ma'am, you forget as you ladies and gentlemen
'ave a drop of something hot to keep the cold out afterwards, and I
don't blame you for it, but that we never gets."
On the whole, the old ladies keep themselves wonderfully clean and
smart, and the cheap drapery stores in the vicinity of the workhouse do
a great trade twice a year in violets and rosebuds at 1¾d. a dozen for
the adornment of bonnets; feminine instinct is not atrophied by age, and
the applicants know the value of a good appearance before "the
gentlemen." The old men are not so clever, and when deprived of the
ministrations of a wife they seem to have no idea of "mackling" for
themselves, and too often lapse into a fatal condition of dirt and
hugger-mugger. Sometimes the reports are brought by daughters, nieces,
or neighbours, or sometimes "only the landlady"--that abused class
showing often much Christian charity and generosity.
Some of the old people have led such blameless lives that members of the
C.O.S. offer to take them up and save them from the Poor Law, a
privilege they do not always fully appreciate.
"No, thank you, sir, I don't want to go there. I've 'eard of the Charity
Organization, and the questions as they ask--Mrs. Smith told me they
sifted and sifted her case and give her nothing in the end. I'd rather
have a few ha'pence from you, sir."
"But you will be a pauper!" said one of the Guardians, in a sepulchral
voice of horror.
"Oh! I don't mind that a bit, sir. My mother was left a widow and on the
parish at forty. I'm sixty-seven, and I'd work if I could, but they
turned me off at the laundry because the rheumatics has stiffened up my
fingers, and I can't wash any more, and I don't see why I shouldn't come
on the parish now."
Having no vote, and being accustomed to be classed in the category of
"lunatics, criminals, and idiots," no wonder the term "pauper" conveys
little opprobrium to women.
"Bother the House!" says another spirited old laundress, who complains
that "a parcel of girls" are preferred before her. "I'm too young to
come in there. I'm only seventy, and I'll wait till I'm eighty."
One poor old man has his relief stopped because his wife is reported as
"a drinking woman," though he is told he may still draw the money if his
wife enters the House. "Thank you, sir, my wife does not come into the
workhouse. She has a glass sometimes, but she is never the worse for
liquor, and she's been a good wife to me. Spiteful gossip, sir. Good
morning!" and he walks out, an honourable and loyal gentleman fallen on
evil days.
Sometimes cold and starvation is worse than they thought, and they do
come in; sometimes they die. The body of an old man was lately fished
out of the pond, and at the inquest it was stated that he had lost his
employment after thirty years at one place. The firm had changed hands,
and the new manager had told him, brutally, "he wanted no old iron
about." At seventy-five one is a drag in the labour market, and the poor
old fellow, feeling acutely that he would only be a burden on his sons
and his daughters, asked neither for out-relief nor indoor-relief, but
stood his mates a drink with his last shilling, and took the old Roman
method.
However, light seems dawning through the darkness, and I think many Poor
Law Guardians will rest better in their beds knowing that old-age
pensions seem to have come into the sphere of practical politics.
THE PAUPER AND THE OLD-AGE PENSION[2]
On January 1st the receipt of Poor Law relief ceases to be a
disqualification for old-age pensions, and some interesting statistics
have been compiled by the _Daily Mail_ which show that only about 17 per
cent. of old people in the workhouses are applying for their 5s. per
week. These are the figures for England and Wales. In the Metropolitan
area, where rents are high, and the smallest room cannot be had under
two shillings or half a crown a week, the proportion will be lower
still.
At first sight these figures are very disappointing, and it seems to
some of us who have counted so much on this reform as if we cannot
escape from the evils of the workhouse system. But a little thought will
show how impossible it is for this generation of old folk to take
advantage of the change; the wished-for has come too late; they have
burnt their ships, or rather their beds, sold up "the little 'ome"; they
have neither bag nor baggage, bed nor clothing. They are like snails
with broken shells. There is no protection against the rude world, and
once having made the sacrifice, few people over seventy have the pluck
to start life afresh. It is hardly worth while; for them the bitterness
of death is past.
A committee of our Board has held three special sessions for the purpose
of interviewing these old people, and the answer has come with wearying
monotony, "No, thank you, five shillings would be no good to me. I have
nowhere to go." Some have sons and daughters, but "heavy families" and
crowded rooms dry up filial piety. There is no place for the aged father
or mother in our rack-rented city, and the old people accept their fate
with the quiet philosophy of the poor. The long string of human wreckage
files past us, some bowed and bent with the weight of years, others
upright and active, some with the hoary heads of the traditional
prophets, others black-haired and keen-eyed still, for the "high living"
of the workhouse, as is often remarked, preserves youth in a miraculous
way. Some are crippled and half-blind, others suffer with deafness--an
ailment of poverty, which very naturally grows worse under inquisitive
questioning--and nearly all have rheumatism. A curate once told me that
he was summoned to a sick parishioner who was "troubled in mind," and
wanted to make his peace with Heaven, but the only sin he could remember
was "the rheumatics." The disease seems to be a national sin.
One hears the country accents of the United Kingdom--the burr of
Northumbria, the correct English of East Anglia, the rough homeliness
of Yorkshire and the Midlands, the soft accents of Devonshire and the
West, the precision of the foreign English of the Welsh mountains, the
pleasant ring of the Scottish tongue, the brogue of old Ireland. Few
seem Londoners. Take any group of people, and see how few of her
children London seems to bring to maturity.
It is our last meeting to-day, and we go to visit those who cannot
attend, the sick and bed-ridden in the infirmary--a mere form, for these
are vessels which will sail no more, sea-battered, half-derelict,
nearing port, and for them the dawn will break in the New Jerusalem.
Some are palsied and paralysed and half-senile, but now and again keen
old eyes look at us from the whiteness of the ratepayers' sheets and
regret they are "too old to apply."
Very ancient folk live in these wards, and their birthdays go back to
the tens and twenties of last century, one old lady being born in the
historic year of 1815. An old man, jealous of her greater glory, says he
is 109, but our register of age gives the comparatively recent date of
1830. Few of them seem to have any friends or visitors. Children are
dead, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have forgotten them; but
they do not complain, age mercifully deadens the faculties, though their
terrible loneliness was once graphically written on my brain by the
speech of an old Irishwoman: "I am quite alone, lady; I have no friends
but you and the Almighty God."
We have interviewed 103, and only eleven have applied for the pension.
The wished-for, as I have said, has come too late; but another
generation will be saved from "the House" and will be able "to die
outside," so often the last wish of the aged.
The merciful alteration in the law will save this generation of "outdoor
poor." Old people in the late sixties have no longer been dying of
starvation in the terror of losing the pension through accepting poor
relief, and the greater independence of the State pensioner is
heartening many. "On the Imperial taxes," said an old gentleman with a
somewhat low standard of cleanliness, "I can be as dirty as ever I
like."
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Act amended 1911.
THE EVACUATION OF THE WORKHOUSE
(1915)
The workhouse is being evacuated; the whole premises, infirmary and
House, have been taken over by the War Office as a military hospital;
after weeks of waiting final orders have come, and to-day
motor-omnibuses and ambulances are carrying off the inmates to a
neighbouring parish.
One feels how widespread and far-reaching are the sufferings caused by
war, and spite of this bright May sunshine one realizes that the whole
earth is full of darkness and cruel habitations, the white blossoms of
the spring seem like funeral flowers, and the red tulips glow like a
field of blood.
It never occurred to me before that any one could have any feeling,
except repugnance, towards a workhouse, but some one--I think it was the
prisoner of Chillon--grew attached to his prison, and evidently it is
the same with these old folk. Old faces work painfully, tears stand in
bright old eyes, knotted old fingers clutch ours in farewell, and some
of the old women break down utterly and sob bitterly. On the journey
some of them lose all sense of control, take off their bonnets, and let
down their hair, obeying a human instinct of despair which scholars
will remember dates back to the siege of Troy. "It's all the home I've
known for twenty years, and I be right sorry to go," says an aged man,
as he shakes my hand.
Folks live long in the workhouse, and seventy and eighty years are
regarded as comparative youth by the older people of ninety and upwards;
to the aged any change is upheaval; they have got used to their bed,
their particular chair, their daily routine, and to have to leave the
accustomed looms in the light of a perilous adventure. Perhaps heaviest
of all is the sense of exile; it is a long walk to the adjoining parish,
and bus fares will be hard to spare with bread at ninepence a quartern.
"I've been on the danger list and my son came every day to see me," says
one old lady, "but he won't be able to get so far now."
Alarming rumours are being spread by a pessimist much travelled in
vagrant wards, but they are speedily contradicted by an optimist, also
an expert in Poor Law both in theory and practice.
We try to cheer them, but our comfort is not whole-hearted; we can guess
how the chafing of the unaccustomed, the new discipline, the crowds of
unfamiliar faces will jar upon the aged. We try to impress upon them the
joy of self-sacrifice, the needs of our wounded soldiers, the patriotic
pride in giving up something for them. Oh, yes, they know all that, the
Guardians had been and talked to them "just like a meeting," they
understand about the soldiers, they want to do their best for them; but
it is hard. The workhouse is nothing if not military in its traditions;
heroes of South Africa, of Balaclava, and the Crimea have found asylum
in the whitewashed wards; many of the present inmates have been
soldiers, and there are few who have not some relatives--grandsons and
great-grandsons--fighting in the trenches. One of the oldest of the
"grannies," aged ninety-three, went off smiling, proud, as she said, "to
do her bit."
The sick are being brought down now into the ambulances--the phthisical,
the paralytic, the bed-ridden--blinking in the sunlight from their
mattress-tomb, one poor woman stricken with blindness and deafness, who
in spite of nervousness looks forward to her first motor-drive. These
are less troubled; they are younger, and the sick hope ever for a quick
cure, and the majority are only in for temporary illness. Then come the
babies, astonishingly smart and well-dressed, including the youngest
inmate, aged but eight days.