Through the Mill: the Life of a Mill-Boy

CHAPTER XXI. _the Ichabod of Mule-Rooms, Some Drastic Musing, College

The Ichabod of Mule-rooms, some Drastic Musing, College at my Finger-tips, the Mill People wait to let me pass and I Am Waved into the World by a Blind Woman 273

Illustrations

THEN THE EPILEPTIC OCTOGENARIAN LET ME GO AND THE PAUPER LINE WENT IN BEFORE THE PARISH CLERK FOR THE CHARITY SHILLING Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

WHEN THE TRAIN STARTED FOR LIVERPOOL, I COUNTED MY PENNIES WHILE MY AUNT WEPT BITTERLY 52

PAT AND TIM LED ME TO THE CHARLES STREET DUMPING GROUND--WHICH WAS THE NEIGHBORHOOD GEHENNA 78

I WAS GIVEN A BROOM, AND THEN I FOUND MYSELF ALONE WITH MARY 122

“PETER-ONE-LEG-AND-A-HALF” LED US AT NIGHT OVER HIGH BOARD FENCES 146

THE SPINNERS WOULD NOT STOP THEIR MULES WHILE I CLEANED THE WHEELS 170

HE PLUCKED THE VENERABLE BEARD OF A SOMNOLENT HEBREW 196

THE GANG BEGAN TO HOLD “SURPRISE PARTIES” FOR THE GIRLS IN THE MILL 246

THROUGH THE MILL

Chapter I. A Mixture of Fish, Wrangles, and Beer

THROUGH THE MILL

Chapter I. A Mixture of Fish, Wrangles, and Beer

My tenth birthday was celebrated in northern England, almost within hailing distance of the Irish Sea. Chaddy Ashworth, the green-grocer’s son, helped me eat the birthday cake, with the ten burnt currants on its buttered top.

As old Bill Scroggs was wont to boast: “Hadfield was in the right proper place, it being in the best shire in the Kingdom. Darby-shir (Derbyshire) is where Mr. George Eliot (only he said ‘Helliot’) got his ‘Adam Bede’ frum (only he said ‘Hadam Bede’). Darby-shir is where Hum-fry Ward (he pronounced it ‘Waard’) placed the ‘Histry o’ Davvid Grieve.’ If that don’t top off the glory, it is Darby-shir that has geen to the waarld Florence Nightengale, Hangel of the British Harmy!”

It was in the first of those ten years that I had been bereft of my parents and had gone to live with my Aunt Millie and Uncle Stanwood. In commenting on her benevolence in taking me, Aunt Millie often said: “If it had been that none of my own four babbies had died, I don’t know what you’d have done, I’m sure. I shouldn’t have taken you!”

But there I was, a very lucky lad indeed to have a home with a middle-class tradesman in Station Road. My uncle’s property consisted of a corner shop and an adjoining house. The door of the shop looked out upon the main, cobbled thoroughfare, and upon an alleyway which ended at a coffin-maker’s, where all the workhouse coffins were manufactured. We passed back and forth to the shop through a low, mysterious door, which in “The Mysteries of Udolpho” would have figured in exciting, ghostly episodes, so was it hidden in darkness in the unlighted storeroom from which it led. As for the shop itself, it was a great fish odor, for its counters, shelves and floor had held nothing else for years and years. The poultry came only in odd seasons, but fish was always with us: blue mussels, scalloped cockles, crabs and lobsters, mossy mussels, for shell fish: sole, conger eels, haddock, cod, mackerel, herring, shrimps, flake and many other sorts for the regular fish. Then, of course, there were the smoked kind: bloaters, red herrings, kippered herring, finnan haddock, and salt cod. In the summer the fish were always displayed outside, with ice and watercresses for their beds, on white platters. Then, too, there were platters of opened mussels a little brighter than gold in settings of blue. My uncle always allowed me to cut open the cod so that I might have the fishhooks they had swallowed. There was not a shopkeeper in the row that had half as much artistic window display skill as had Uncle Stanwood. He was always picking up “pointers” in Manchester. When the giant ray came in from Grimsby, the weavers were always treated to a window display twice more exciting than the butcher offered every Christmas, when he sat pink pigs in chairs in natural human postures, their bodies glorified in Christmas tinsel. Uncle Stanwood took those giant fish, monstrous, slimy, ugly nightmares, sat them in low chairs, with tail-flappers curled comically forward, with iron rimmed spectacles on their snouts, a dented derby aslant beady eyes, and a warden’s clay pipe prodded into a silly mouth--all so clownish a sight that the weavers and spinners never tired of laughing over it.

But while Uncle Stanwood was ambitious enough in his business, seeking “independence,” which, to the British tradesman, represents freedom from work and therefore, “gentlemanliness,” though he knew the fine art of window display and was a good pedler, he was never intended by nature to impress the world with the fact of his presence in it. He lacked will power. He was not self-assertive enough at critical times. The only time when he did call attention to himself was when he took “Bob,” our one-eyed horse, and peddled fish, humorously shouting through the streets, “Mussels and cockles alive! Buy ’em alive! Kill ’em as you want ’em!” At all other times, the “Blue Sign” and the “Linnet’s Nest,” our public-houses, could lure him away from his business very readily. Uncle Stanwood had a conspicuous artistic nature and training, and it was in these public-houses where he could display his talents to the best advantage. He could play a flute and also “vamp” on a piano. True his flute-playing was limited to “Easy Pieces,” and his piano “vamping” was little more than playing variations on sets of chords in all the various keys, with every now and then a one-finger-air, set off very well by a vamp, but he could get a perfunctory morsel of applause for whatever skill he had, and very few of the solo singers in concerts attempted to entertain in those public-houses without having “Stan” Brindin “tickle it up” for them. In regard to his piano-playing, uncle had unbounded confidence. He could give the accompaniment to the newest ballad without much difficulty. The singer would stand up before the piano and say, “Stan, hast’ ’eard that new piece, just out in t’ music ’alls, ‘The Rattling Seaman?’”

“No,” uncle would say, “but I know I can ‘vamp’ it for thee, Jud. Hum it o’er a bar or two. What key is’t in?” “I don’t know key,” would respond the singer, “but it goes like this,” and there would ensue a humming during which uncle would desperately finger his set of chords, cocking his ear to match the piano with the singer’s notes, and the loud crash of a fingerful of notes would suddenly indicate that connections had been made. Then, in triumph, uncle would say, “Let me play the Introduction, Jud!” and with remarkable facility he would stir the new air into the complex variations of his chords; he would “vamp” up and down, up and down, while the singer cleared his throat, smiled on the audience, and arranged his tie. Then pianist and singer, as much together as if they had been practising for two nights, would go together through a harmonious recital of how:

“The Rattling Seaman’s jolly as a friar, As jolly as a friar is he, he, he.”

After the song, and the encore that was sure to follow, were done, uncle always had to share the singer’s triumph in the shape of noggins of punch, and mugs of porter, into which a red hot poker from the coals had been stirred, and seasoned with pepper and salt. This would be repeated so many times in an evening that uncle soon became unfit for either piano or flute-playing, and I generally had to go for the flute the next morning before I went to school.

Uncle Stanwood had a golden age to which he often referred. In the first place, as a young bachelor he had traveled like a gentleman. His tour had included Ireland, France, and the Isle of Man. This was before he had learned to play a flute and piano and when public-houses were religiously abhorred. He was always repeating an experience that befell him in Ireland. I can record it verbatim. “I was walking along through a little hamlet when night came on. I saw one of them sod houses, and I knocked on the door. A blinking Irish woman asked me what I wanted. I told her, ‘a night’s lodging.’ She pointed to a far corner in the sod house where a pig and some hens lay, and said to me, ‘Ye can dossy down in the corner wid th’ rist of the fam’ly!’” In its time there was no more vivid story that caught my imagination than that--pig, hens, and blinking Irish woman. About his Isle of Man experiences, uncle was always eloquent. Besides all else he had a ditty about it, to the accompaniment of which he often dandled me on his knee.

“Aye, oh, aye! Lissen till I tell you Who I am, am, am. I’m a rovin’ little darkey All the way from Isle of Man. I’m as free as anybody, And they call me little Sam!”

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