Hope - Lesley Pearse [80]
She must have fallen asleep again soon after Gussie arrived back with some hot pies for them and she didn’t wake till the following morning. To her shock and horror there were four other people aside from Gussie and Betsy asleep all around her, and a stink coming from the bucket in the corner.
She wanted to relieve herself too, but she couldn’t bring herself to add to that already nearly full bucket, and as she lay there wondering if there was a privy downstairs, she became aware of a strange noise. It was a kind of animal sound, deep and irregular, and it was some time before she realized it was people snoring all over the house. Soon there were other sounds too, babies crying, children shouting, and a man bellowing for them to shut up.
Even as the noise downstairs got louder and louder it didn’t wake her room-mates. She heard a church clock strike eight and it seemed inconceivable that she and all these other people were still in bed so late in the morning. Not that the pile of sacks and a blanket qualified as a real bed, and she was itching all over as if she’d been bitten by something.
Later that morning, she discovered that the slop bucket was emptied out of the window into the alley below. Water had to be drawn from a pump further down, and there was a privy out the back. But as it served the whole house – eight rooms with an average of ten people sleeping in each – it wasn’t a place anyone would visit willingly.
The four extra lodgers, introduced to her as Mole, Shanks, Josie and Welsh Lil, were all around the same age as Betsy, much more shabbily dressed, and almost as sinister-looking as their names. But they disappeared almost as soon as they got up. Betsy said her room was a ‘padding ken’ to them, meaning just a place to flop, and she and Gussie didn’t trouble themselves with what they did all day. There was an implication in that explanation that they were criminals.
Hope’s clothes and boots were dry again, and as it had stopped raining at last, Gussie and Betsy insisted they took her out to show her around.
Maybe it was because she was in pain and very aware people were staring at her injuries, but the part of Bristol they showed her that day looked nothing like the splendid, exciting place she remembered coming to as a child with her father. It was grey, filthy and noisy: mean, stinking alleys with human effluent running down them, houses that looked as if they were on the verge of collapse. She saw people that were like something from a night mare; diseased-looking women with hollow eyes sat like statues in doorways, often clutching a wailing baby in their arms. There were brutish-looking men in broken-down stove-pipe hats and ragged coats swigging from bottles, and hundreds of barefoot, ragged children playing in the muck. Cripples hobbled past on crutches ready for a day’s begging in the better parts of town, and she even saw a child pulling a cart along with a woman with no legs sitting on it. There were mad people raving and shaking their fists, gin-soaked floozies and even men who were as black as coal.
Betsy and Gussie appeared to be oblivious to Hope’s shock as they pointed out the best stall for herrings, their favourite beer shop, and the marine shop where they sold anything they’d managed to scavenge. They pointed out a man carrying a hoe and a net and said he scavenged in the drains that ran into the river, and it was said he could make as much as five pounds on a good day as money dropped in the street often ended up there. Gussie laughingly told her that such men could drown in those drains if they didn’t take careful notice of tides.
Betsy showed her a house with boarded-over windows and said a coiner lived and worked there. Hope had no idea what a coiner was, but it seemed it was someone who made counterfeit money. Betsy said he’d once got her to pass some for him, and all had gone well until one shopkeeper got suspicious, and she had to run like the wind to escape him.
Hope felt a little