A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

They rioted. Every window in the place was shattered. Everything else breakable—fortunately there was not much—was smashed into small bits. A Y.M.C.A. worker, a young man lent to us for the occasion, and recommended as experienced with boys’ clubs in London, fled to a small room and locked himself in. The tumult became so terrific that an officer of high standing and importance, whose office was in the neighbourhood, sent an orderly to us with threats. It was one of the occasions on which it is good to be an Irishman. We have been accustomed to riots all our lives, and mind them less than most other people. We know—this is a fact which Englishmen find it difficult to grasp—that cheerful rioters seldom mean to do any serious mischief.

Yet, I think, even J.’s heart must have failed him a little. Very soon the colonel, who was to open the club with his address, would arrive. He was the best and staunchest of friends. He had fought battles for the club and patiently combated the objections in high quarters. But he did like order and discipline.

It was one of our fixed principles, about the only fixed principle we had at first, that the club was to be run by moral influence, not by means of orders and threats. Our loyalty to principle was never more highly tried. It seems almost impossible to bring moral influence to bear effectively when you cannot make yourself heard and cannot move about. Yet, somehow, a kind of order was restored; and there was no uncertainty about the cheers with which the colonel was greeted when he entered the room. The boys in the other rooms who could not see him cheered frantically. The boys on the balcony, the boys standing in the window frames, all cheered. They asked nothing better than to be allowed to go on cheering.

With the colonel were one or two other officers, our benefactor, the local head of the Y.M.C.A., and a solitary lady, Miss N. I do not know even now how she got there or why she came, but she was not half an hour in the room before we realised that she was the woman, the one woman in the whole world, for our job. Miss N. was born to deal with wild boys. The fiercer they are the more she loves them, and the wickeder they are the more they love her. We had a struggle to get Miss N. Oddly enough she did not at first want to come to the club, being at the time deeply attached to some dock labourers among whom she worked in a slum near the quay. The Y.M.C.A.—she belonged to them—did not want to part with her. But we got her in the end, and she became mistress, mother, queen of the club.

The colonel’s speech was a success, a thing which seemed beforehand almost beyond hope. He told those boys the naked truth about themselves, what they were, what they had been, and what they might be. They listened to him. I found out later on that those boys would listen to straight talk on almost any subject, even themselves. Also that they would not listen to speech-making of the ordinary kind. I sometimes wonder what will happen when they become grown men and acquire votes. How will they deal with the ordinary politician?

I cherish vivid recollections of the early days of the club. I think of J., patient and smiling, surrounded by a surging crowd of boys all clamouring to talk to him about this or that matter of deep interest to them. J. had an extraordinary faculty for winning the confidence of boys.

There were evenings, before the electric light was installed and before we had any chairs, when Miss N. sat on the floor and played draughts with boys by the light of a candle standing in its own grease. I have seen her towed by the skirt through the rooms of the club by a boy whom the others called “Darkie,” an almost perfect specimen of the London gutter snipe. There was a day when her purse was stolen. But I think the rest of the club would have lynched the thief if they could have caught him.

There were wild boxing bouts which went on in pitch darkness, after the combatants had trampled on the candle. There was one evening when I came on a boy lying flat on his back on the floor hammering the keys of the piano, our new piano, with the heels of his boots. The tuner told me afterwards that he broke seventeen strings.

But we settled down by degrees. We had lectures every afternoon which were supposed to be—I think actually were—of an educative kind. Attendance at these lectures was compulsory. The boys were paraded and marched to the club. As we had not space in our lecture room for more than half our members, we had one set of boys on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, another on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Each lecturer delivered himself twice.