Tom Pinder, Foundling: A Story of the Holmfirth Flood

by D. F. E. Sykes

Mr. Redfearn glanced at the schoolmaster, the schoolmaster at Mr. Redfearn.

“You’re the chairman of the Guardians,” said the teacher mildly.

“An’ th’ biggest ratepayer, worse luck,” said his crony.

CHAPTER III.

THE Workhouse for the Saddleworth Union is a low stone building of no great dimensions, standing on about as bleak and cold a site as could well I have been selected. It stands on the hill-side on your left hand as you walk from Diggle to Saddleworth, part of that dorsal Pennine Range we call “the back bone of Old England.” Its exterior is grim and forbidding, nor is the external promise redeemed by any extravagance of luxury inside. It is in unenviable contrast to the palatial structures modern architects design for the option of the sick and destitute. But it is healthily situated, and that counts for much. All in front as you look down the valley, are the green fields; at its rear stretch the moors on which sheep graze and lambs bleat and gamble conies sport and burrow and where the warning "Go-back, go-back” of the grouse salutes the ear as summer softens into autumn, and the purple heather hides the luscious bilberry.

At the time of which I write no mill chimney belched their smoke into the air and the breezes that swept the Workhouse on every side though blowing at times with unwelcome force, were pure and sweet. The Workhouse kine yielded milk so abundantly that adulteration was never thought of; the kitchen-garden, tended by the pauper hands, was rich in its herbs and vegetables, and a small flower garden gave forth the fragrance of the hardier roses, of musk and mignonette, whilst sweet williams, forget-me-nots and stocks gave colour and variety, dear to the eye of the female paupers. It is true the wards were low, the benches hard, the light and ventilation far removed from modern notions; but in this respect they differed in no wise, or if they differed, differed for the better, from the houses of the well-to-do farmers and tradesmen of the district.

Anyway there the young foundling of my story was in babyhood and boyhood tended, petted, and made much of. Consigned to the charge of an elderly pauper he had a not unkindly foster-mother. Rare, thank God, the women whose hearts do not soften to the helpless child. Tom sucked his bottle like a hero, waxing chubby and rosy, “poiting” with his legs on which the flesh lay in creases, and crowing lustily as he grew. Mr. Redfearn, it has been said, was the Chairman of the Guardians and did not conceal the interest he felt in the lad; Mr. Black, a privileged visitor everywhere for miles around, had to be restrained by the nurse from gorging his protege with lollipops. The story of his birth had spread in all those parts and lost nothing in the telling. For anything the master and matron knew the Workhouse might be entertaining, if not an angel, unawares, at least a baronet. The lad, when able to run about, was transferred to the particular care of “Workhouse Jack,” a pauper of some thirty years of age, supposed to be “not altogether there,” or as it is sometimes put, to have at least a half slate off. Jack was the messenger or Mercury of the Workhouse. He fetched the masters newspaper from the village post-office, he was entrusted with commissions to the grocer and draper by the matron, and smuggled snuff and twist and forbidden luxuries to the inmates. He knew every farm-house and every shop for miles around, and never wanted for a meal or a copper when he went his rounds. But, best of all, he knew the habits and the haunts of every bird that nested in the tree or hedge, on the greensward or, like the stone-chat, in the crevices of the long, grey dry-walling of the pastures. He knew, too, to an inch, the curvature of the field drains, their exits and their entrances. He kept surreptitiously in the old, two-stalled stable of the House a sharp-toothed ferret, which he oft-times carried in his pocket and that allowed him to handle and fondle it with quite appalling familiarity. It took Tom a long time to overcome his shrinking awe of that lithe and stealthy ferret, but he did it, and once nearly sent Mrs. Schofield into convulsions by insinuating it from his own into the capacious pocket of this steadfast friend. For I regret to say that Jack was a daily visitor at the Hanging Gate, and was doubly welcome when the little Tommy toddled, haud aquis passibus, by his side. But Jack had a seasoned head and though he called, on one pretext or another, at many an hostelry, was never overcome and had the rare good sense to inculcate sobriety on his admiring charge by many a precept if not by example. To Tom, Jack was the very incarnation of wisdom, and his very first battle was fought at the back of the Workhouse stable with another foundling who had called his guide, philosopher, and friend by no less derogatory a title than “Silly Billy.” From that encounter Tom emerged with streaming eyes and nose, but in the proud consciousness of victory. Nor was Jack’s lore confined to the creatures of the air and land. Down the mountain sides trills many a gushing stream to join the Diggle Brook, pellucid waters murmuring over the worn pebbles and larger fragments of volcanic rock that still, to this day, resist the action of the fretting air and pelting storm. Who so deft a hand as Jack at tickling the shy trout that darted among the sedges and rushes of the banks or lurked beneath leaf and boulder motionless as the stones themselves. And if the matron, when the dainty fish graced her table was not scrupulous to ask whence came this toothsome addition to the dietary approved by my lords in London town, whose business was it to interfere?

Ah! It is grand upon the billowing hills to wander idly in the sweet spring-time; to mark the lark rising above its nest high in the azure sky, trilling joyous melody, to hear the lambs calling to their dams, to see the kine cropping pensive, in the meadows the sweet new blades of the greening grass; sweet is it to bask at mid-day nodding on the heather and lulled to sleep by the hum that, like distant muffled music, just falls upon the ear, and sweet too, is it as the western sun drops to its rosy curtained couch, to call the cows with their swelling udders from pasture to their byre; sweet to stand by rustic maid of rosy cheek and buxom form as, piggin betwixt her knees and head pressed on the flanks of patient and grateful beast, she strains the warm and frothy fluid to the can. Glorious, too, to hearken to the whetstone drawn by practised hand across the scythe, to bear its swish as the swathe lengthens out before the steady strokes of the mower; glorious to strew the damp, green grass upon the ground to catch the morning sun, and grander still to mount upon the load of fragrant hay and be borne triumphant with the gathered harvest of the fields. Who that has passed his early youth on the hill sides of Marsden and Diggle can ever forget the changing raptures of those early days or weary in recalling them when the brain is distraught by the turmoil of the town, and the heart turns sickening from the searing sorrows of thwarted schemes and fallen hopes.

It may seem to the reader that Tom Pinder’s workhouse life was not the life depicted by the immortal genius who told the piteous tale of a pinched and bruised Oliver asking for more. But be it remembered that all masters were not and still less are not Bumbles. The Saddleworth Workhouse in the thirties of last century had few inmates. The people on the sparsely populated hill-sides were mostly hand-loom weavers; not a few of them had a patch of land, a cow, a pig, and poultry. They were as clannish as the Scotch and when age, infirmity, or affliction overtook the declining years it was counted shame even of distant kin to suffer one of their name and blood to go to the big House. The poor then were mindful of the poor, and though the pinch of want was felt in the long winter days it went hard with folk if a neighbour’s cupboard was left bare or his grate without the mountain peat. Add to this that the master and matron were good, easy-going folk; that the Guardians knew well every inmate of the House; had perchance played truant with them in their youth and been birched by the same cane, or employed them in their prime, and, to cap all, forget not that Saddleworth was an obscure Union, scarce worth the expenditure of red-tape or the visit of an inspector.

Mr. Black did not forget his promise to see to Tom’s education. Almost before the child could lisp he was at him with the alphabet, and with his own hands designed alluring capital letters and emblematic animals so that to his dying day Tom never saw the letter D without thinking of a weaver’s donkey going “a-bunting,” or in other words, taking in his master’s warp. At six Tom could read big print, and at seven was set to read chapters of the Bible to the old grannies of the women’s side of the House; at eight he could do sums in Practice and was not afraid of Tare and Tret. But beyond this he stubbornly refused to budge. In vain Mr. Black wooed him to decline Rosa, a rose, or to conjugate Amo. Tom feigned indeed an interest he did not feel, but promptly forgot on one day all the Latin he had learned the day before. Mr. Black was fain to confess with a sigh that Tom was not bent by nature to a clerkly calling.