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Authors: Carol Birch

Jamrach's Menagerie

BOOK: Jamrach's Menagerie
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Contents

Title Page

Dedication

PART ONE
1

2

3

PART TWO
4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

PART THREE
15

16

17

Acknowledgements
Also by Carol Birch

Copyright

PART ONE
1

I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.

Say Bermondsey and they wrinkle their noses. Stil , it was the home before al other homes. The river lapped beneath us as we slept. Our door looked out over a wooden rail into the channel at the front, where dark water heaved up an odd sul en grey bubble. If you looked down through the slats, you could see things moving in the swil below. Thick green slime, glistening in the slosh that banged up against it, crept up the crumbling wooden piles.

I remember the jagged lanes with bent elbows and crooked knees, rutted horse shit in the road, the dung of sheep that passed our house every day from the marshes and the cattle bel owing their unbearable sorrows in the tannery yard. I remember the dark bricks of the tanning factory, and the rain fal ing black. The wrinkled red bricks of the wal s were gone al to tarry soot. If you touched them the tips of your fingers came away shiny black. A heavy smel came up from under the wooden bridge and got you in the gob as you crossed in the morning going to work.

The air over the river though was ful of sound and rain.

And sometimes at night the sound of sailors sang out over the winking water – voices wild and dark to me as the elements themselves – lilts from everywhere, strange tongues that lisped and shouted, melodies running up and down like many smal flights of stairs, making me feel as if I was far away in those strange hot-sun places.

The river was a great thing seen from the bank, but a foul thing when your bare toes encountered the thin red worms that lived in its sticky mud. I remember them wriggling between.

But look at
us
.

Crawling up and down the new sewers like maggots ourselves, thin grey boys, thin grey girls, grey as the mud we walked in, splashing along the dark, round-mouthed tunnels that stank like hel . The sides were caked in crusty, black shit. Peeling out pennies and trying to fil our pockets, we wore our handkerchiefs over our noses and mouths, our eyes stang and ran. Sometimes we retched. It was something you did, like a sneeze or a belch. And when we came blinking out onto the foreshore, there we would see a vision of beauty: a great wonder, a tal and noble three-masted clipper bringing tea from India, bearing down upon the Pool of London, where a hundred ships lay resting like pure-bred horses getting groomed, renewed, readied, soothed and calmed for the great sea trial to come.

But our pockets were never ful . I remember the gnawing in my bel y, the hunger retch. That thing my body did nights when I lay in bed.

Al of this was a long time ago. In those days my mother could easily have passed for a child. She was a smal , tough thing with muscular shoulders and arms. When she walked she strode, swinging her arms from the shoulders. She was a laugh, my ma. She and I slept together in a truckle. We used to sing together getting off to sleep in that room over the river – a very pretty, cracked voice she had – but a man came sometimes, and then I had to go next door and kip in one end of a big tumbled old feather bed, with the smal naked feet of very young children pushing up the blankets on either side of my head, and the fleas feasting on me.

The man that came to see my mother wasn’t my father. My father was a sailor who died before I was born, so Ma said, but she never said much. This man was a long, thin, wild-eyed streak of a thing with a mouth of crooked teeth, and deft feet that constantly tapped out rhythms as he sat. I suppose he must have had a name, but I never knew it, or if I did I’ve forgotten. It doesn’t matter. I never had anything to do with him, or he with me.

He came when she was humming over her sewing one day – some sailor’s pants gone in the crotch – threw her down upon the floor, and started kicking her and cal ing her a dirty whore. I was scared, more scared I think than I had ever been before. She rol ed away, hitting her head against the table leg, then up she jumped, screaming blue murder, that he was a bastard and a fly boy and she’d none of him no more, flailing with her short strong arms and both fists bal ed for punching.

‘Liar!’ he roared.

I never knew he had a voice like that. As if he was twice as big.

‘Liar!’

‘You cal
me
a liar?’ she screeched, and went for the sides of his head, grabbing him by both ears and bashing his head about as if it was an old cushion she was shaking up. When she let go he wobbled. She ran out onto the walkway hol ering at the top of her voice, and al the neighbour women came out at a run with their skirts hoicked up, some with knives, some with sticks or pots, and one with a candlestick.

He dashed out amongst them with his own knife drawn, a vicious big stabber raised over his shoulder, damning them al as whores and scattering them back as he ran for the bridge.

‘I’l get you, you bitch!’ he yel ed back. ‘I’l get you and I’l cut out your lights!’

That night we ran away. Or that’s how I remember it.

Possibly it was not that night, possibly it was a few days or a week later, but I remember no more of Bermondsey after that, only the brightness of the moon on the river as I fol owed my mother barefoot over London Bridge, to my second birth.

I was eight years old.

I know we came in time to the streets about Ratcliffe Highway, and there I met the tiger. Everything that came after fol owed from that. I believe in fate. Fal of the dice, drawing of the straw. It’s always been like that. Watney Street was where we came to rest. We lived in the crow’s nest of Mrs Regan’s house. A long flight of steps ran up to the front door.

Railings round the basement area enclosed a deep, dark place where men gathered nights to play cards and drink strong liquor. Mrs Regan, a tal , worn woman with a pale, startled face, lived under us with an ever-changing population of sailors and touts, and upstairs lived Mr Reuben, an old black man with white hair and a bushy yel ow moustache. A curtain hung down the middle of our room, and on the other side of it two old Prussian whores cal ed Mari-Lou and Silky snored softly al day long. Our bit of the room had a window looking over the street. In the morning the smel of yeast from the baker’s opposite came into my dreams. Every day but Sunday we were woken early by the drag of his wheelbarrow over the stones, and soon after by the market people setting up their stal s. Watney Street was al market. It smel ed of rotten fruit and vegetables, strong fish, the two massive meat barrels that stood three doors down outside the butcher’s, dismembered heads of pigs sticking snout upwards out of the tops. Nowhere near as bad as Bermondsey, which smel ed of shit. I didn’t realise Bermondsey smel ed of shit til we moved to the Highway. I was only a child. I thought shit was the natural smel of the world. To me, Watney Street and the Highway and al about there seemed sweeter and cleaner than anything I’d ever known and it was only later, with great surprise, that I learned how others considered it such a dreadful smel y hole.

Blood and brine ran down the pavement into the gutters and was sucked into the mush under the barrows that got trodden al day long up and down, up and down, into your house, up the stairs, into your room. My toes slid through it in a familiar way, but it was better than shitty Thames mud any day.

BOOK: Jamrach's Menagerie
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