The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper (3 page)

I was born at Tottenham, at that time a new suburb—if, indeed, it could have been called a suburb of London at all. My first childish recollections of the place are associated with bricks and mortar and muddy gashes cut into the green fields; our own house was, I think, quite a new one. It was a double-fronted, semi-detached house, the last of a row of six; its left side adjoined a field owned by a dairy farmer and into this field small parties occasionally came to picnic, lighting furtive fires in dangerous proximity to our wooden fence. When detected, the picnic parties were chivvied from the field by the farmer with whom my father was glad to co-operate fearing, as he did, that sooner or later his fence would be set on fire. This disaster never, in fact, happened; but many were the arguments carried on over our fence. Several of these ended by my father dousing the illegal fire with a pail of water and on such occasions I felt that only the intervening fence saved my father from savage reprisals at the hands of the trippers. I learned to view with excited anticipation the advent of strange parties to our neighbour's field.

My father was a doctor who, no doubt, considered he was exercising wise foresight in renting a house in what appeared to be a rapidly expanding district. But in spite of this his practice was, I now know, but a small one for many years; not until relatively late in life was he ever free from grave financial anxiety.

Our house was built on the plan held, in those days, to be convenient. It contained three reception-rooms and a comparatively large number of bedrooms of small size, the builder, presumably, being determined to make adequate provision for the results of the procreative enterprise common at that period. As our household was limited to myself and my parents, a large proportion of the rooms was never used.

The lower front room on the left-hand side of the entrance-hall, or “passage,” was utilized by my father as a surgery; the room behind it which communicated by folding-doors was fitted up as a dispensary. Into this room I was strictly forbidden to enter under any circumstances, but secret violation of orders had shown me that it contained shelves bearing innumerable bottles of varying size and fascinating appearance. The not unpleasant smell which proceeded from this Blue Beard's chamber permeated the whole of the lower floor and could occasionally be detected in the upper rooms.

My father, as I first remember him—if such a definite term can be applied to so indefinite a thing as the gradually dawning perceptions of a child—was a tall, thin man, wearing a fair moustache which extended into “mutton-chop” whiskers. Later he adopted gold-rimmed spectacles, for his eyes were weak and his sight was probably affected by his habit of poring over a microscope during his periods of evening leisure. When I cast my mind back to those very early days I picture him crouching over the recently cleared tea-table, one side of his face red from the reflected light of the fire, the other green from the illuminated shade of an oil-lamp standing beside the microscope down which he was peering. Or I see him fiddling with small tweezers and little circles of almost incredibly thin glass, or with a glass tube, drawing up drops of dirty-looking water from a collecting-bottle which, to my eye, contained nothing else but green weed. When, these drops being placed in a reservoir slide under the microscope, I was sometimes invited to look, I would never believe that the strange, moving creatures which swam across my field of vision had come from the bottle. My father's proficiency in producing these things from nothing at all astonished me and yet, somehow, it did not carry with it increased feelings of pride in him; in some curious way I acquired the idea that the talent he displayed in this magical procedure was one inherent in all adults.

My father's microscopic hobby coloured the Sunday morning walks which I took with him into the country lanes near our house. A favourite walk was to a place called Clay Hill, and my father always carried with him on these occasions a telescopic walking-stick which I considered a miracle of ingenuity. To the extended end of this he would attach, by means of a screwed-on ring, a collecting-bottle and this he would dip into any pond or ditch which lay along our course, transferring the “catch” to one of the other bottles bulging in his pockets. He wore on these walks, in place of his professional top-hat, a cap with ear-flaps tied above the crown with tape: this headgear he persisted in assuming in spite of the protests of my mother who considered it to be unseemly for a man in my father's “position” to go out on a Sunday morning in such a thing.

My mother's frequently expressed views as to what was, or was not, respectable formed a large part of my early home training. I am thinking now of the time when I was about seven or eight years of age, a period during which the lower orders “knew their place”; when those members of the middle-class community above the social status of the “working man” (who, however, was a working man in those days) were oppressed by the fear that by a breach of conventional conduct, the demarcation of class might become blurred. The “lower orders” were largely uneducated—quite a large proportion were unable to read or write—they received, from their betters, tips of two-pence for casual services with apparent gratitude, and they lived, ate and bred like animals—though, on the whole, fairly respectful animals. And I believe that they were, in their unthinking animal way, more content than is the so-called working man of to-day.

To be guilty of any act or habit such as might be ascribed to the lower classes was, my mother drilled into me, a matter of special shame. She was more disturbed by conduct on the part of my father or myself which seemed “low” than by any other manifestation; and her conventional religious views were, I think, based more upon what seemed “respectable” than upon any conviction of divine benevolence. Her abhorrence of an atheist or free-thinker was due less to the realization that he might be an outcast from God than to the fact that his convictions were held to be not respectable convictions.

Strangely enough my mother was not, to me, such a definite personality as my father, although I was, I suppose, more in her company. She had little to say apart from her outbursts on matters of religion and convention to which I have alluded. She moved quietly about on her household duties in a mood which may have been either sullenness or apathy—I cannot say. And she was much given to furtive weeping. It was not until I reached the age of, I suppose, ten that I realized that my father's “habits” were the cause of this, and some further years elapsed before I knew the habits in question were connected with drink. It is quite evident to me now that he drank steadily and persistently and this, no doubt, accounted to some extent for his lack of professional success.

I can touch but lightly upon these very early years for the memory of them is fitful, and the trivial incidents I am able to recall can have but little interest. I will pass over the period of my first schooling at what must have been, I think, a “dame's” or church school, and try to describe my first boys' school to which I was sent at the age of about twelve.

“There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emanuel's veins—”

One of my earliest school recollections is the yelping of that hymn (then a new one) in the company of two or three dozen school- fellows; I suppose it is safe to say that the words held for us no religious significance whatever. In fact, I did not then realize who “Emanuel” was and only learned later by a species of deduction. It seems to me, looking back to those school-days, that most of our time was given to the receipt of religious instruction. The school was a small, private day-school of the kind which, happily, is now rapidly disappearing and the principal was, to all intents and purposes, a religious fanatic.

He was an elderly man—to our boyish perceptions he seemed a very old man—with a nearly bald head and bushy white side-whiskers. A well-set-up man, he took frequent opportunities of mentioning to us his practice of bathing each morning in cold water and following this with an earnest supplication to his Maker. One or both of these procedures had given him a ruddy and wholesome complexion and an upright carriage in spite of his years, but had failed to mellow his temperament, which was harsh and utterly lacking in imagination.

This Dr. Styles prefaced the day's instruction by leading us through one or more hymns, which he followed by an hour's discourse of a religious character. Taking from the day's issue of the newspaper an item of news, and treating this as text, he would justify or condemn the occurrence recorded in the light of his dogmatic religious convictions. His vocabulary was, like that of the Cromwellian puritans, derived from the Old Testament, and his ideas were as rigid as theirs. Frequent references to biblical texts under his instructions necessitated the presence of a Bible on the desk of each boy, and it was our practice to relieve, to some extent, the boredom of these discourses by furtive search in the holy book for the more unsavoury and objectionable passages. These we would memorize and ultimately retail to each other with much boyish glee during the period of the mid-morning recess.

What a hateful, narrow-minded, ignorant bore the man was, and what hypocritical young humbugs he made of us! He employed, one at a time, a series of assistant masters, poor sycophantic wretches no one of whom ever remained in his employment for a longer period than a term. These youths were expected to profess the doctor's own stern religious sentiments, and I have a vivid recollection of the utterance of one of these disciples on the occasion of a meeting of our boys' “Mutual Improvement Society.” The evening had been devoted to the reading of a “paper” dealing with the destruction of Pompeii in which the wholesale wiping-out of the city and its inhabitants was described; the destruction, we were given to understand, was salutary and engineered by a Deity displeased by persistent “idolatry.” “But afterward,” explained our young preceptor, “God, in his goodness, sent a strong wind which blew away the clouds of ashes.” Even my young mind was unable to appreciate the evidence of God's goodness offered in this grotesque statement. That a Deity should blow the ashes from the remains of the several thousand people he had destroyed struck me as entirely unacceptable as evidence of benevolence. This seemingly trivial utterance remained in my memory chiefly, I think, because it marked the first occasion on which I seriously attempted to grapple with the logic of the religious stream constantly flowing over me.

This Mutual Improvement Society to which I have alluded, and of which membership was more or less enforced, met at the school on one evening in each week for the purpose of listening to the reading of a “paper” by a member. Choice of subject was left to the individual reader—though subject to censor by the presiding power. Following the reading the audience were permitted, and, in fact, expected, to offer criticism of the essay, and as the members' standard of criticism was universally regarded by them as the degree of ingenuity with which offensive and derogatory statements regarding the lecturer and his subject matter could be made within the limits imposed by the president, many enmities were conceived at the meetings. Almost invariably a meeting of the Mutual Improvement Society was followed on the succeeding day by a fight furtively conducted in a cul-de-sac conveniently situated near the school. This, in its turn, usually led to wholesale and impartial canings of both the participants and the lookers-on by our seemingly omniscient principal.

Mutual Improvement Society! By Jove, yes.

Occasionally Dr. Styles was able to induce returned missionaries to lecture to us; these events were regarded as welcome breaks in the school curriculum though the lecturers seldom dwelt sufficiently upon the more romantic attributes of the natives amongst whom they had been working. We were less interested in the conduct of the natives after conversion than in the technique of torture and cannibalism.

My life at that school passes through my mind in flashes, fading or superimposing themselves like the jig-saws of a modern German film. The faces of individual school-fellows—Sanders, the big ginger-headed Scot; another whose name I have forgotten, the son of a local publican and a fearsome fighter; the prig Humphreys with his curious backward-jutting skull; the lean, dark Wellcome continuously afflicted with a snuffling cold. And a seemingly endless, ghostly procession of assistant masters like the nun's lovers in Reinhardt's production of “The Miracle.” Young or in broken middle-age, smug, shabby, bad-tempered, nervous or hopelessly resigned. But in place of the Spielmann's piping I hear, as an obbligato, references to, and hymns about, blood. Emanuel's blood; the blood of the Lamb; shedding blood; washing in blood. Blood.

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But I fear my inexperience as a writer is betraying me; I have said nothing about the physical aspect of this school where I spent such a large proportion of my waking hours. And yet perhaps I am not so far wrong in trying to convey at first the general atmosphere which assisted the budding of my youthful mind.

The school was a private house situated about a mile from my home; and as the house still exists and may, for aught I know, be occupied by members of my late principal's family, I will refrain from specifying the exact address. A large back room on the ground floor of the house had been converted into a school-room. It was panelled to a height of about three feet with deal match-boarding stained a horrible yellowish-brown. Above this woodwork the walls were whitewashed. I think a portion of this room must have been a built-out extension of the original house, for a large skylight had been let into one end of the ceiling and the rear wall of the room consisted almost entirely of glass-work.

The school-room was warmed by an iron stove standing upon a stone slab, and beside this was an earthenware water-filter with a mug hanging from it by a piece of cord. Upon the wall near the stove hung a baize-covered notice-board which usually bore announcements of forthcoming missionary lectures, lists of positions and marks gained in class, a syllabus of the Mutual Improvement Society, and so forth. A door at one end of the room led into the private part of the house and by this were a series of book-shelves untidily stacked and, on the opposing side, the wooden dais of the principal, bearing a black-board and a large desk finished to the same offensive colour as that of the wall panelling. Running across the room, and facing this dais, were rows of desks and forms, while further desks ran along the right-hand side of the room.

We boys, numbering about forty, had entry to the school-room by a rear door leading from a “cloak-room,” which, in its turn, communicated with the playground. To provide this playground Dr. Styles had sacrificed the greater part of what had been a fairly large garden. It was covered with knee-biting gravel (for most of the “play” indulged in was of a rough and tumble violence) and enclosed by high brick walls. At one end the gravel ceased, giving place to the surviving remnant of the original garden. This, so far as we could judge, consisted almost entirely of masses of raspberry canes and gooseberry bushes, and was protected from our intrusion by a light wooden railing. Our principal appeared to be passionately fond of gooseberries, and during the mid-morning play-times of summer he could always be discerned, wearing a pseudo-clerical hat, moving in a crouching posture amongst his bushes like an Indian brave patiently tracking the foot-prints of an enemy. So great was our respect for this holy piece of ground, and so dreadful did the penalty for intrusion appear to our imaginations (though never actually specified by our principal), that never once during my school career do I recall that any spirit was bold enough to overstep the wooden rail. Yet that rail was more a symbol than a protection, for a child of five could have surmounted it.

Although the temptation to trespass upon the doctor's private patch and gorge upon his fruit was always withstood—or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the yielding to temptation seemed as unthinkable to us as would the flouting of a religious taboo to a South Sea Islander—another temptation lay at hand to offset it. On the western side of the playground lay, beyond the brick wall, another garden which, by the number of fruit-trees it contained, might almost be called an orchard. The penalty for climbing, or even peering, over this wall was distinctly and repeatedly specified and, moreover, frequently exacted to the uttermost tear; for infringements of the regulation were common.

Many were the raids carried out by the more lawless of my school-fellows upon this inviting domain, and this despite the fact that detection was the usual rule. The owner of the orchard was an elderly man not physically unlike our Dr. Styles, but with a large, black beard. He was referred to amongst ourselves as Bap—short for John the Baptist—but his real name I never heard. However, we credited him with an almost uncanny perception in the matter of missing fruit. The saying arose in our midst that the pears of his orchard were, like the hairs of his head, all numbered; it was remarkable that the jump-and-grab extraction of even a single pear would be followed within the hour by a visit from Bap to our principal, and a dreadful Nemesis.

In discussing the unpopular Bap amongst ourselves we usually supplemented the nick-name by the term “worldling.” That old worldling Bap; or the old worldling next door. In explanation of this apparently quite innocent pleasantry I should say that the word “worldling” was one constantly in the mouth of Dr. Styles, by whom it was meant to signify a person unduly interested in this earthly life as opposed to the promised joys of the hereafter. But the word caught our fancy and was used by us in exactly the way that a more objectionable word was, and is, used in a lower stratum of society. Just as the latter term, while literally to be interpreted as a vulgar allusion to sexual perversion, is yet applied with no real regard to its meaning as an epithet of contempt (or, perhaps, genial endearment), so was the term “worldling” used by us. We meant exactly what the navvy meant when he used the (to us) analogous expression—no more and no less. And our term was less likely to cause us trouble if overheard.

Incidentally when, by long usage, we had adapted the word “worldling” to our own peculiar needs, it became to us a source of great joy to hear it continually cropping up in our principal's religious discourses. It was like listening to a clergyman preaching a sermon interlarded with the obscene colloquialisms of the tap-room.

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My attendance at this school is distinguished in my mind, as I look back upon it, for two things. The first of these was that I suddenly evinced a talent for drawing. It blossomed under the sympathetic encouragement of one of that long stream of under-masters to which I have previously referred; the only one of those masters of whom I retain a clear recollection.

We learned in some roundabout way that this man, whose name was Pearson, had been an artist before his reduction to the lower dregs of schoolmastering. Other than that an artist was a man who painted pictures, we had but a shadowy conception of the term, but a lad named Sanders, whose father was connected with the Press in some obscure capacity, was able to enlighten us. We learned from him that an artist is a man who paints pictures of girls with nothing on; that he lives in a state of guilty splendour in one of certain districts given over to debauchery—such as St John's Wood and Chelsea—and that he can be found in his lair at most times of the day with a naked girl on his knee and a pot of beer beside him. This ideal life postulates, of course, the satisfactory earning power of the artist based, presumably, upon the obvious market value of pictures of girls with nothing on; and we could not reconcile it with Mr. Pearson's descent to schoolmastering. Speculation and romance grew up around him, but I need not retail the several suppositious stories which one or two of my imaginative school-fellows brought forward to account for it.

I question whether Dr. Styles was aware of his usher's previous occupation, for he would undoubtedly have classed the artist with the actor in the lowest category of worldlings. Strange as it may seem, the turpitude of the artist was almost universally assumed amongst the middle-classes in my younger days, though the belief in his earning capacity was entirely contrary to that advanced by the lad Sanders. I am not at all sure that the old popular conception is dead even now.

Drawing was one of the subjects included in the curriculum of the school, and it was “taken” by Mr. Pearson; not because Dr. Styles assumed any particular ability in drawing on the part of the new-comer (for it is highly improbable that he suspected such ability), but simply for the reason that the subject always had been taken by the assistant master. The teaching consisted in the handing out of lithographed sheets representing various objects from tea-cups (Elementary) to horses (Advanced). These pictures we laboriously copied in pencil, and when our efforts reached sufficient accuracy to satisfy the master in charge, we finished our drawings by cleaning them up with stale bread and “lining them in” with hard, wiry outlines made by a sharp pencil. This method of “teaching” drawing had always prevailed at the school and Mr. Pearson was not encouraged to amend it. Nor did he show any inclination to do so; possibly because he felt no desire to advertise his own artistic attainments, but more probably from sheer apathy.