Hope - Lesley Pearse [76]
Born in Liverpool, Betsy was eight when her father, a cooper by trade, brought the family to Bristol. Three months later, both her parents and Sadie, her younger sister, died when the lodging house they were staying in caught fire. Her father had lifted Betsy through the upstairs window and dropped her into a man’s arms. He didn’t have time to do the same for Sadie.
Sometimes Betsy wished she’d died in that fire too. She had survived by mingling with the hundreds of other orphaned or abandoned children who hung around the docks and learned begging, stealing and scavenging from them. Home was wherever she could squeeze in for the night, and she was grateful if she was given a blanket, even if it was crawling with lice.
By the time she was ten many of the children she’d got to know when she was first orphaned were in prison. Some had died. Almost all the older girls had become whores. Betsy didn’t want to end up in prison or dead, and she didn’t intend to become a whore either.
Even at that tender age she had already learned that her only asset was her virginity. Twice she was foolish enough to be taken in by seemingly motherly women who offered her a home, new clothes and all the food she could eat. But she was lucky both times in being helped to escape before she was presented to a ‘gentleman’ who had a penchant for children.
She never ruled out using that one asset one day, providing she got big money for it. But until then she intended to stay alive and keep out of prison, so she kept her wits about her and didn’t take unnecessary risks.
The dank, stinking alleys and narrow lanes around the docks were her domain. She knew almost everyone who lived there and didn’t steal from them. She knew all the marine shops where she could get a few pennies for the wood, nails and metal she managed to scavenge. That paid the rent. When there was nothing left over for food, she would go up to the big houses in Clifton and find one where the cook had been foolish enough to leave the back door open while she was baking. It took only a few seconds to slip in and steal a pie or a cake – once she grabbed a whole leg of lamb straight from the oven.
The docks were a source of many free gifts for anyone prepared to watch and wait, patiently armed with a basket and a pot or jar. Betsy would check every morning which ships were being unloaded, and loiter in the hopes that a dropped crate would spill open. She would pounce on the fruit, sugar or tea and be off with it, often even before the dockers became aware that they’d damaged the crate.
There were also the foreign sailors she could charm into giving her a sixpence to buy a new dress so she could meet them later.
She never bought clothes, just as she never kept those appointments with foreign sailors. But up in the High Street there were second-hand clothes shops where she could whip a petticoat, dress or hat while the shopkeeper was distracted.
Betsy met Gussie when she was thirteen and he was twelve, a small, freckle-faced, ginger-haired boy who’d tramped from Devon to Bristol to seek his fortune. He’d come up to her as she was hanging about waiting for a pie man to turn his back so she could snatch one of his wares, and he’d asked her where he could sleep for the night.
Betsy was so hungry that she said if he could distract the pie man’s attention she’d help him. He played a blinder by pretending to throw a fit in front of the stall, and she didn’t get just one pie, but three.
She was of course obliged to give Gussie one of the pies and to take him back to the flophouse she mostly stayed at.
Within a couple of days Betsy had decided Gussie was the perfect partner for her. He wasn’t tough,