To London Town

by Arthur Morrison

With that the can fell, and Johnny at the door was astonished to observe a grey-headed workman, with a pair of spectacles in his hand and a vast oily patch on his white overalls, dripping and dancing and swearing, and smacking wildly at the heads of the boys about him, without hitting any.

There were no more tricks that breakfast-time. For when at length old Ben subsided to his meal, he put a little pile of wedges by his side, to fling at the first boy of whose behaviour he might disapprove. And as his spectacles were now on his nose, and his aim, thus aided, was known to be no bad one, and as the wedges, furthermore, were both hard and heavy, breakfasts were eaten with all the decorum possible in a smiths’ shop.

Johnny’s new can was satisfactorily blackened, and his breakfast was well disposed of. Such youths as tried him with verbal chaff he answered as well as he might, though he had as yet little of the Cockney boy’s readiness. And at last the bell rang again, and the breakfasters went back to work.

Mr. Cottam, casting his glance about the shop in search of the simplest possible job for Johnny to begin on, with a steady man at hand to watch him, stopped as his gaze reached Long Hicks, and sent Johnny to help him with his bolts. And so Johnny found the tall man’s surmise verified, and the tall man himself received him with another grin a little less shy. He set him to running down bolts and nuts, showing him how to fix the bolt in a vice and work the nut on it with a spanner. Johnny fell to the task enthusiastically, and so the morning went.

XIII.

When Nan May opened shop, she saw that men were pulling down as much of the ship-yard wall opposite as stood between two chalk lines. She thought no more of the thing at the time, not guessing how nearly it concerned her. For this was to be a new workmen’s gate to the ship-yard and passing workmen might change the fortunes of a shop. For that day, however, there was no sign but the demand of a bricklayer’s labourer for a penn’orth of cheese.

It was as bad a day as Saturday, in the matter of trade—indeed there was no drunken man to buy lard—and the woman’s heart grew heavier as the empty hours went. Bessy stood at the back-parlour door, pale and anxious, but striving to lift a brave face. Before one o’clock there was dinner to be prepared; not that either Bessy or her mother could eat, but for Johnny. And at a quarter past one both met him at the door as cheerfully as they could; and indeed they were eager to hear of his fortunes. They wondered to see him coming with the long man who lived next door; and the long man, for his part, was awkward and nervous when he saw them. At first he hung back, as though to let Johnny go on alone; but he changed his mind, and came striding ahead hastily, looking neither to right nor to left, and plunged in at his door.

Johnny was hungry and in high spirits. He and Long Hicks, it seemed, had been bedding down a junk ring for a piston, Johnny easing the bolts and nuts, and Long Hicks doing the other work. He said nothing of the round square, but talked greatly of slide-valves and cranks, till Bessy judged him a full engineer already. Between his mouthfuls he illustrated the proper handling of hammer and file, and reprehended the sinful waste of spoiling the surface of a new file on the outer skin of a fresh iron casting. It cheered Nan May to see the boy taking so heartily to his work, through all her secret dread that she might lack the means to keep him at it. Johnny glanced anxiously at the clock from time to time, and at last declared that he must knock for Long Hicks, who was plainly forgetting how late it was. And in the end he rushed away to disturb the tall man ten minutes too soon, and hurried off to Maidment and Hurst’s, there to take his own new metal ticket from the great board, and drop it duly into the box.

The afternoon went busily at the factory, and busy days followed. Johnny acquired his first tool, a steel foot-rule, and carried it in public places with a full quarter of its length visible at the top of its appointed pocket. It was the way of all young apprentices to do this; the rule, they would say, thus being carried convenient for the hand. But it was an exact science among the observant to judge a lad’s experience inversely by scale of the inches exposed, going at the rate of half an inch a year. A lad through two years of his “time” would show no more of his rule than two inches; by the end of four years one of these inches would have vanished; as his twenty-first birthday approached, the last inch shrank to a mere hint of bright metal; and nobody ever saw the foot-rule of a full journeyman, except he were using it.

Johnny’s christening, postponed by the accident of old Ben Cutts, came when he was first put to a small lathe to try his hand at turning bolts. For when, returning from breakfast, he belted his lathe, he did not perceive that the water-can had been tied to the belt; realising it, however, the next instant, when it flew over the shafting and discharged the water on his head. Then he was free of the shop; suffering no more than the rest from the workshop pranks habitual among the younger lads, and joining in them: gammoning newer lads than himself with demands for the round square, and oppressing them with urgent messages to testy gaffers—that a cockroach had got in the foo-foo valve, that the donkey-man wanted an order for a new nosebag, and the like. Grew able, moreover, in workshop policy, making good interest with the storekeeper, who might sometimes oblige with the loan of a hammer. For a lost hammer meant a fine of three-and-sixpence, and when yours was stolen—everybody stole everybody else’s hammer—a borrowed one would tide you over till you could steal another. Making friends, too, with the tool-smith, at a slight expense in drinks; though able to punish him also if necessary, by the secret bedevilment of his fire with iron borings. Learned to manufacture an apparent water-crack by way of excuse for a broken file—a water-crack made with a touch of grease well squeezed between the broken ends. In short, became an initiated ’prentice engineer. In the trade itself, moreover, he was not slow, and Mr. Cottam had once mentioned him (though Johnny did not know it) as “none so bad a boy; one as can work ’is own ’ead.” Until his first enthusiasm had worn off, he never ceased from questioning Long Hicks, in his hours of leisure, on matters concerning steam-engines; so that the retiring Hicks grew almost out of touch with the accordion that had been the solace of his solitude. The tall man had never met quite so inquisitive an apprentice; engineering was in the blood, he supposed. He had guessed the boy’s mother an engineer’s wife when first Johnny came to his bench, because of the extra button Nan May had been careful to sew on his jacket cuff; a button used to tighten the sleeve, that it might not catch the driver on a lathe.