From the Bottom Up: The Life Story of Alexander Irvine

by Alexander Irvine

This was the advent of a new life to me. I was taken in hand by the head groom and fitted out with two suits of clothes, and in this change the first great ambition of my life was satisfied. I became the possessor of a hard hat. For two years, I had instinctively longed for something on my head that I could politely remove to a lady. The first night I marched down that village street, shoes well polished, starched linen, and hard hat, I expected the whole town to be there to see me. I had made several attempts at this hat business before. They organized a flute band in the town and I joined it for the sake of the hat. But it was too nice a thing to be lying around when people were hungry, and, as it was in pawn most of the time, I finally redeemed it, returned it, and quit. But this time the hat had come to stay.

With my new vision still warm in my heart, I became very active in the parish Sunday School. My inability to read relegated me to the children's class; but I had a retentive memory, and before I was able to read, I memorized about three hundred texts from the Bible.

The first outworking of my vision was on a drunken stone mason of our town. His family, relatives, and friends had all given him up. He had given himself up. I went after him every night for weeks; talked to him, pleaded with him, prayed for him, and was rewarded by seeing him make a new start. Together we organized a temperance society. I think it was the first temperance society in that town. I was much more at home in this kind of work than in the Sunday School; for, while I could be neither secretary, treasurer, nor president of the temperance society I had organized, my inability to read or write did not prevent me from hustling after such men as my first convert.

In the Sunday School, I felt keenly the fact that I was outclassed by boys half my age; but I persevered and went from one class to another, until I had gone through the grades, and was then given the opportunity to organize a class of my own. This I did with the material on the streets, children unconnected with any school or institution. I taught them the Bible stories and helped them to memorize the texts that I had learned myself.

Despite the fact that I was now clean and well groomed, I could not help comparing my life to the life of the horses I was attending, especially with regard to their sleeping accommodations. The slightest speck of dirt of any kind around their bedding was an indictment of the grooming. The stables were beautifully flagged and sprinkled with fine, white sand. The mangers were kept cleaner than anything in the houses of the poor, and, when I trotted a mount out into the yard, the master would take out his white silk handkerchief, run it along the horse's side, and then examine it. If the handkerchief was soiled in the slightest degree, the horse was sent back. Probably not once in a year was a horse returned under such circumstances. The regularity of meals was another point of comparison, and the daily washings, brushings, groomings.

It meant something to be a horse in that stable—much more than it meant to be a groom. When these points of comparison arose, I pushed them back as evil and discontent with the will of God. This master man used to talk to his horses, but he seldom talked to his grooms. Sometimes I was permitted the luxury of a look at the great dining-hall, or the drawing-rooms. That also was another world to me, a world of beauty for God's good people. Even the butlers, footmen, and other flunkies were superior people, and I envied them, not only the uniform of their servitude but their intimate touch with that inner world of beautiful things.

I spent one winter at the big house, and then the shame of my ignorance drove me forever from the haunts of my childhood. I entered the city of Belfast, seventeen miles distant, and became coachman and groom to a man who, by the selling of clothes, had reached the economic status of owning a horse. In adapting himself to this new condition, he dressed me in livery, and, after I had taught him to drive, I sat beside him in the buggy with folded arms, arrayed in a tall hat with a cockade. The wages in this new position were so small that when I had paid for my room and meagre board, I had nothing left for the support of my brothers and sisters, who were still in dire poverty.

The young lady I had met on the farm lived in this city and in my neighbourhood; but I would have considered it a matter of gross discourtesy to call on her, or, indeed, do anything save lift my hat if I met her on the street, our social stations were so far apart. But she had told me the name of the church she attended, and, as I was thinking more about her at that time than about anybody else, I stole quietly into the church as soon as the doors were opened, and, ensconcing myself in a corner under the gallery, I scanned the faces eagerly as they came in. From that obscure point I saw the young lady once a week. At the end of three months, her family came without her. The third Sunday of her absence I was almost on the point of asking about her; but I mastered the desire, held my station, and went to Scotland, where I entered a coal-pit as a helper to one of my brothers. My pay for twelve hours a day was a dollar and fifty cents a week. If I had not been living in the same house with my brother, this would not have sustained me in physical efficiency.

The contrast between my life as a groom and this blackened underworld was very marked, and I did not at all relish it. We were all, men and boys and sometimes girls, reduced to the common level of blackened humans, with about two garments each. The coal dust covered my skin like a tight-fitting garment, and coal was part of every mouthful of food I ate in that fetid atmosphere. I had a powerful body that defied the dangers of the pit; but the labour was exhausting, and my face was blistered every day with the hot oil dripping from the lamp on my brow.

Sometimes I lay flat on my back and worked with a pick-axe at the coal overhead. Sometimes I pushed long distances a thing called "a hutch," filled with coal.