Through the mill: The life of a mill-boy

by Frederic Kenyon Brown

I attended a low brick schoolhouse which in spring and summer time was buried in a mass of shade, with only the tile chimneys free from a coat of ivy. The headmaster gave us brief holidays, when he had us run races for nuts. In addition to the usual studies I was taught darning, crocheting, plain sewing, and knitting. Every Monday morning I had to take my penny for tuition.

Outside of school hours there were merry times, scraping sparks on the stone flags with the irons of our clogs, going to the butcher’s every Tuesday morning, at the slaughter-house, where he gave us bladders to blow up and play football with; and every now and then he would ask us to lay hold of the rope and help in felling a bull across the block. The only apple I ever saw growing in England hung over a brick wall in a nest of leaves—a red crab no bigger than a nutmeg. I used to visit that wall with my companions, but not to try for that apple—it was too sacred in our eyes for that—but to admire it, as it bent up and down in the wind, and to wonder how many more were inside the wall among the larger branches. On Saturdays, after I had brightened the stone hearth with blue-stone and sand, I went out to greet the Scotch bag-piper who, with his wheezy pibroch, puffed out like a roasted Christmas goose, perambulated down our road so sedately that the feather in his plaid bonnet never quivered. As this did not take up all the morning, we borrowed bread-knives from our families, and went to the fields, where we dug under the sod, amongst the fresh, damp soil, for groundnuts, while the soaring lark dropped its sweet note down on us.

But the gala days were the holidays, filled as only the English know how to fill them with high romance and pure fun. There were the Sunday-school “treats,” when we went to the fields in holiday clothes and ran, leaped, and frolicked for prize cricket balls and bats, and had for refreshment currant buns and steaming coffee. There was the week at the seashore, when aunt and uncle treated me to a rake, shovel, and colored tin pail, for my use on the shore in digging cockles, making sand mountains, and in erecting pebble breastworks to keep back the tide. To cap all else as a gala opportunity, full of color, noise, music, and confusion, came Glossop Fair, to which I went in a special train for children. There I dodged between the legs of a bow-legged, puffy old man to keep up with the conductor of our party, and I spent several pennies on shallow glasses filled with pink ices, which I licked with such assiduity that my tongue froze at the third consecutive glass. I was always given pennies enough to be able to stop at the stalls to buy a sheep’s trotter, with vinegar on it; to eat a fried fish, to get a bag of chipped potatoes, delicious sticks of gold, covered with nice-tasting grease, and to buy a Pan’s pipe, a set of eight-reed whistles on which, though I purchased several sets, I was never able to attain to the dignity and the thrill of so simple a tune as “God Save the Queen.” The grand climax of the fair, the very raison d’être, were the fairy shows, held under dirty canvases, with red-nosed barkers snapping worn whips on lurid canvases whereon were pictured: “Dick Whittington and His Cat,” at the famous milestone, with a very impressionistic London town in the haze, but inevitable for Dick and His Cat; or “Jack and the Beanstalk,” showing a golden-haired prince in blue tights and a cloud of a giant reaching out a huge paw to get the innocent youth and cram him down his cavernous maw.

“’Ere you are, Ladies and Gents!” screamed the barker, pattering nervously and significantly on these pictures, “Only ’riginal ‘Dick Whittington and His Cat,’ Lord Mayor o’ Lunnon! Grown ups a penny, childer ’arf price! Step up all! The band will play! ’Ere you are, now! Tickets over there!”

My tenth birthday marked the end of my boyish, merry play-life. Over its threshold I was to meet with and grasp the calloused hand of Labor. Not the labor which keeps a healthy lad from mischief or loafing, not the labor of mere thrift, but the more forbidding form of it; the labor from which strong men cringe in dread, the labor from which men often seek escape by self-inflicted death, the labor of sweat, of tears, of pitiless autocracy—the labor of Necessity! And necessity, which is not induced by reasonable and excusable circumstances, nor is the result of a mere mistaken judgment of events, such as comes through unskilled business acumen or an overconfidence in a friend’s advice, but the necessity which is rooted in carelessness, squandering, drunkenness.

For in that tenth year of my life, what had appeared to be the strong walls of my uncle’s house collapsed utterly. The undermining had been unseen, unthought of. In that year the parlors of the “Linnet’s Nest” and “The Blue Sign” saw more of my uncle than they had previously. His piano-playing and his flute solos formed an almost continuous performance from early afternoon until late at night. When he started out to peddle his fish, he would stop Bob in front of the “Linnet’s Nest” and forget his customers until I went and reminded him. The public-house tills began to draw the money that came to uncle’s from his peddling, his shop, and the interest from his bank account. But the money loss was trivial in comparison with the loss of what little business initiative or inclination he had possessed. He soon became unfit to order fish from Manchester. His former customers could not depend upon him. Uncle Stanwood had become a confirmed drunkard.

Previous to this, in spite of the incompatibility of temper between uncle and aunt, there had always been a little breath of peace around our fender, but now it fled, and the house was filled with nervous bickerings, hiccoughs, and piggish snortings. The temple of man that had been so imperfectly built was henceforth profaned. The fluent words passed, and an incoherent gurgle took their place. The intelligent gleam grew dim in those sad grey eyes. The firm strides which had indicated not a little pride became senile, tottering, childish. There was written over the lintels of our door: “Lost, A Man.”

All this was not one thousandth part so serious to the creditors who clamored for their pay as it was to aunt and me. To see that slouching, dull-eyed, slavering creature cross the kitchen threshold and tumble in a limp heap on the sanded floor was a sword-thrust that started deep, unhealing wounds. The man and boy changed places, suddenly. That strange, huddled, groping creature, helpless on the couch, his muddy shoes daubing the clothes, was not the uncle I had known. I seemed to have no uncle. I had lost him, indeed, and now had to take his place as best I could. Aunt tried her best, with my help, to keep the business going, but the task was beyond us, as we plainly saw.

But uncle fought battles in his effort to master himself. He strained his will to its utmost; postulated morning after morning intentions of “bracing up”; took roundabout routes with his cart to avoid the public-houses, left his purse at home, sent aunt to Manchester to buy the fish so that he would not have that temptation, took me with him to remind him of his promises, even sent word to the “Blue Sign” and the “Linnet’s Nest” to give him no more credit, and signed the pledge; but the compelling thirst would not be tamed. To take a roundabout route in the morning only meant that he would tie up his horse at the “Blue Sign” lamp-post on his way back; to send aunt to Manchester only meant that, with her out of the way, he had a clear road to the “Linnet’s Nest.” When I went with him, as a moral mentor, he bribed me with a penny to get me out of the way. Sometimes he left me waiting for him until I grew so miserable that I drove home alone. As uncle was a good customer, the public-houses only smiled when he sent word to them not to give him credit; they were not in the business of sobering customers.

So it was a losing fight all the way. Uncle was a coward in full retreat. He blamed nobody but himself; in that he was not a coward. In his sober moments there was a new and discouraging note in his voice. He echoed the language of those who fail. He met me with an ashamed face. He looked furtively at me, just as a guilty man would look on one he had deeply wronged. His shoulders stooped, as do the shoulders of a man who for the first time carries a heavy burden of shame.