Tattycoram (15 page)

“He's family, sir, all the family I've got.”

“But Lord, woman, his life has been so very different from yours! His has been a life of the streets, a rough, hand-to-mouth existence. I know, I've talked to many birdhawkers. You will eat coarse bread and drink weak tea and count yourself lucky if you see meat once a week. You are above all this; you are practically a lady.”

“I'm a Foundling, sir. Jonnie was my childhood playmate, the constant companion of my early years. It broke my mother's heart when Sam was transported and Jonnie fled. Now that he's found, she'd want me to care for him in any way I can. What I am hoping is that, perhaps in a year or two, once we have become reacquainted with one another, we might be able to emigrate. I had been thinking along the lines of emigration when I met him.”

“Why isn't he married, with his own woman to look after him?”

“I don't know. I haven't asked him. What I do know is that he has had a hard and lonely time, always fearing that someday a policeman's hand would fall heavily on his shoulder. And he blames himself that Sam got caught. Sam hadn't wanted to take him along that night, but Jonnie carried on until Sam relented,
and he says Sam was paying too much attention to him and not enough to where he was walking.”

“Sam shouldn't have been poaching.”

“I know, sir, but times were hard. Our parents didn't like it, but many boys did it, men as well. With Sam it was only rabbits at first, Jonnie says, he never took the game birds until just before he was caught.”

“Jonnie says. Well, I can't stop you, of course, but I think you are making a mistake. You have worked hard to get where you are. One should always move forward, never backward.”

“Forward to what, sir?”

“Well . . . I don't know. Don't you want to marry one day soon and raise a family, have a home of your own?”

“I am twenty-nine years old; I suspect that future is not open to me.”

“Don't be so sure — a handsome, intelligent woman like yourself. Many men would be proud to have you for a wife. I think your emigration idea was an excellent one, but on your own, unencumbered by your foster brother. Miss BurdettCoutts and I can help you. A new country, eh? A new start?”

“Not without my brother, sir, and not right away.”

“Oh very well. You have always been a stubborn miss. Go and live amongst the bird-droppings and bad language. But promise me you will leave your money in the savings bank for now and that you will let us know if you change your mind.”

“Yes, sir.”

He sighed. “You always seem to be leaving me, Harriet, but no doubt we shall meet again. And by the way — I thought you weren't fond of birds.”

“Only ravens, sir.”

And so once again I packed up my little trunk and set out on
a new adventure. It was hard to leave Urania Cottage. Whatever I had originally thought about the experiment, most of the girls had lasted out their year and emigrated successfully. A few had even married. I was proud to have played a part in its success.

Ori I left behind. He was happy at the cottage and, even at his age, I did not think he would be welcome in the bird-hawkers' world.

“I usually goes alone,” he said, “because this job wants utter silence, Hat. Once we sets the nets, you keep mum, understand?”

We had risen before daybreak, the nets and all our apparatus in a large basket Jonnie wore on his back. I held the callbird in a covered cage. We had walked miles before he nodded to me and said, looking across to a far field with some trees beyond, “That will do nicely.” We stopped to share some bread and cheese and ale, then set off to erect the great net which would ensnare the birds. When all was ready, Jonnie told me to place the callbird carefully in the centre.

“Now,” Jonnie whispered, “now we wait.”

We withdrew to a safe distance away, about thirty yards, and lay flat on our bellies, with a piece of canvas under us to keep off the damp. Side by side, not speaking, hardly breathing.

My previous life, all my previous lives, seemed to have fallen away from me like the shed skins of a snake. I had always been living with my foster brother in a little two-room dwelling — it would be wrong to glorify it with the name of house — sharing it with a crippled man who made cages. I had always slept on a flock bed and awakened to a bedlam of birdsong. I had always
sat on the stoop of an evening, trying to read a little while Jonnie/Archie went off for a pint with his mates. I had always drawn water at a common standpipe; I had never felt completely clean. None of this mattered because here I was with my long-lost brother, lying beside him, waiting for dawn. On a sudden impulse I reached over and touched his hand; he turned to me and whispered, “This is the life, ain't it?”

As soon as the sun rose, our callbird began his merry song, and after a while we watched the wild birds began to arrive, first in ones and twos, then more and more. When he felt that he had a sufficient quantity, Jonnie quickly drew the pull-line towards him, the wings of the net collapsed and all the birds were trapped in its folds. He showed me how to pick them off gently and transfer them to a large collapsible cage he had brought in his basket.

The callbird continued to sing, unaware of what he had done.

When I held a bird in my cupped hands, I could feel its frantic heart beating and I nearly let it go. If this work had been for anyone but Jonnie, I would have turned and run. I was sorry now that I had come out with him, and I knew I would not come again. It was not for me to judge him; this was how my brother kept himself. Yet I was sickened by the sight of those creatures of the air, tricked into captivity, who would never again roam the sky but sit in some window, caged, singing for the amusement of their jailers.

Jonnie was delighted with the pull — more than seventy-five young birds — and he whistled as we tramped back into the city. He did not notice my silence. (And the birds were silent too, had stopped their frantic beating against the cage. The callbird was once again covered up.)

“We've been lucky today, Hattie. These should fetch a good price.”

Almost half the birds died in the first two days. The survivors hung in cages which covered the walls of our second room: linnets, bullfinches, all the songbirds. From these Jonnie selected the very best and trained them to sing. The rest he sold to dealers and in the markets.

“Now 'ere's where you can help, Hattie, 'ere's where you can be most useful to me. See this 'ere?” He held up a flat object with a hole at one end. “Now this 'ere is our bird organ, and it's what we teach the birds to sing with. Watch and listen for a while, you'll soon get the knack of it. I'm known around town for 'avin' the very best singin' birds, I has a reputation for it.”

The bullfinches were his specialty, and once they were old enough to whistle, he placed them aside in a little darkened cupboard and fed them infrequently. Then he brought them out and played over and over the notes he wanted them to learn. When one began to sing, he was fed, and then the next commenced, and so on.

By listening attentively I found I could whistle any bird's song without the aid of the bird organ, and the birds responded well to me. Jonnie was delighted. “Why Hat, yer worth your weight in gold, you are! What you've got is a gift.”

A singing bullfinch could go for as much as three guineas, but the ordinary little goldfinches were his stock in trade. They were pretty and long-lived and affordable, never costing more than a shilling.

He also carried canaries, which he bought from another fellow. “They don't mind bein' caged up, Hat, they're bred to it.”

The only birds he wouldn't touch were sparrows. The
hawkers tied strings to their legs and sold them as playthings to children. “And you know what 'appens to them then, don't you? Teased and tortured until they die. There's a great trade in sparrows — quick money to be made there — but I draws the line at sparrows.”

I discovered that Jonnie could barely read — fingerposts, mostly, as he tramped around bird-catching to Highgate, Richmond, Epping Forest, or signs over shops in the areas he frequented (he liked the signs with pictures best; it wasn't hard to find the Blue Boar if the boar was right there on the sign) — and it was the same for writing. I offered to teach him to read, but he said, “Why?” He could add with the best of them and find his way to and from all the places he needed to go, and that was enough.

“Besides, Hat, I'm not much of a person for sittin' still. I don't have time for it in my business. Early to bed and early to rise, that's my motto.”

I never went hawking the birds but stopped at home, did the washing and sweeping, worked for hours at training our singers — I called them my choir — and talked to the crippled man who made cages for the neighbourhood.

One night I asked my brother, “Do you like this business, Jonnie?”

“It's a long day's work and a long walk 'ome when you've done the catchin', but it's the only life for me. Besides, I'm forced to like it, ain't I? I got no other trade to live by.” He smiled.” And when I'm lyin' out there, I think.”

“What do you think about?”

“I dunno. Nothin' perhaps. Sometimes about Father and Mother, but that makes me sad, so I try not to think that way. I thinks about God, sometimes.”

“About God?”

“Yes. It seems to me that when they say God watches over everybody — if you'd spent any time in the workhouse or in a shelter, you'd know that's a constant refrain with the Bible-thumpers — well, I think it means just that. 'E watches us, but don't interfere. 'E just lets us get on with it, like, and our fate is in our own 'ands, not 'is. Then at Judgement Day, when we all 'as to line up and 'E weighs our sins, well, whether we flies or fries, it's been entirely up to us.”

He was so solemn, saying all this, that I wanted to throw my arms around him and comfort him somehow, but he tended to shy away from such shows of affection. His own tenderness came out in his treatment of the birds, although, of course, he was quite cold-blooded about catching them. But once they were caught he talked to them constantly — the ones he kept for his singing school — and was saddened when any died.

Covent Garden was his usual place, but he went all over London — Smithfield, Clerkenwell-Green, the City, Shore-ditch, Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hill, Docklands. He carried the birds in wicker cages, which he sometimes fastened to a railing near one of the great parks. When he arrived home of an evening he could hardly wait to take his boots off. When I saw his poor swollen feet, I decided to invest in a big enamel basin, which I had ready with warm water as soon as I heard his step. “Ah, Hattie, you'll make me soft.” But I could see that he was pleased.

The room we lived in was furnished very simply: a bed and my flock bed, a table, two chairs and a stool, a fender, a few pots and pans, some crocks. In the other room were empty cages of all sizes, sacks of various seeds and feed, the caged birds we were training to sing and the birds he was presently hawking.
We had one lamp, with a cracked chimney, and a few candles. The cripple lived in a kind of lean-to off the side of our rooms. Sometimes he shared our meals, sometimes not.

One night Jonnie said, out of the blue, “It's amazin' what a difference a woman's touch makes to a 'ouse. I had a woman once, a nice lass, but she went off with a cabbie, said she were sick and tired of birds, birds, birds. I told 'er I 'oped she liked 'orses, 'orses, 'orses, and cleanin' cages might turn out to be more pleasant than muckin' out stables, but she just tossed 'er 'ead and off she went. We wasn't together all that long and there weren't children, thank the Lord. I wouldn't 'ave let her run off like that if there 'ad been children. Some of them cab drivers is pretty rough, for all their yes sir and no sir to their fares. I knew one who beat 'is wife with the same whip he used on 'is 'orse.”

“And you never wanted to marry again?”

“Well I'm still married, ain't I? If I wanted to marry again I'd 'ave to seek 'er out and go through all the legal nonsense. I couldn't afford all that, and besides, I 'ates wrangles. Things are best left alone, although I don't mind tellin' you I wasn't 'alf lonely when she first went. Still, I got over that — as Mother used to say, the back is made for its burthen — and now here you are, when I never expected to see you again in this life.”

The crippled man was called “Old Albert,” even though he wasn't old at all, maybe just a year or two past twenty. He was born a cripple, but his father never made him feel like a burden. He remembered his father taking him to bathe in the sea, hoping it would do some good, but nothing helped, and when he was twelve his father put him to the bird trade. However, it was very hard for him to move about, the other street-sellers mocked him, and the children teased him. His father died (he
thought his mother had died at his birth) and he ended up in the workhouse.

“I was there for six months, Miss Hattie, and I vowed I would never go back, I would rather starve. And starve I did, many a day, until I met your brother, and he brought me here. He saw me fall down in the street, for want of food. His wife had left, and he put me to minding the shop and keeping the birds company while he was abroad. Then one day I picked up a broken cage and mended it and then another. He suggested I try making a few, and I discovered I had a knack for it. So he bought the necessary and set me up as a birdcage maker. I work for the whole neighbourhood now, and I never been happier. The children round here never tease me, for your brother has told them he'll do for them if they dare.”

As he talked, he took wet willow out of a pan and fashioned it into a pretty basketcage for a thrush. My brother insisted upon paying him for every cage, and then, very solemnly, Old Albert would hand over a sum for materials and rent. He purchased his dinner at a public house and on Saturdays treated himself to a meat pie. He could read — I suppose his father must have taught him — and read his Bible every day. He believed most fervently in Heaven and Hell, and if he heard of an itinerant preacher anywhere nearby, he would make a slow and painful journey to listen to him and come back refreshed.