"Can't he earn more than that?"
"Well, sir, the milkman says he's a very willing boy and always punctual, but he's so little that he doesn't think he can pay him more than sixpence yet."
And the little boy looked furtively at the great man in the great chair, never dreaming that the time would come when he would occupy that chair himself, and that almost the first order he would issue from it would be one putting an end to the bad practice of making mothers drag their young children before the Board.
On that unhappy afternoon the Guardians, firm in their resolve not to renew the out-relief, offered to take the children into the workhouse. The mother said 'No' at first, marching them all bravely home again. Stern want forced her to yield at last. The day came when she saw the five youngest, including Will, taken from home to the big poorhouse down by the Millwall Docks. The crippled father was admitted into the House at the same time.
They were put into a bare room like a vault, the father and two sons, while the three sisters were taken they knew not where. There the lads and their dad spent the night and the next day until the doctor saw them and passed them into the main workhouse building. Then Will lost sight of his father, though he was permitted to remain with his young brother and share with him the same bed.
In the dormitory was an idiot boy, who used to ramble in his talk all through the night, keeping the others awake. Sometimes Will succeeded in coaxing his young brother off to sleep, but as for himself, he would lie awake for hours listening to the strange talk of the idiot boy, and thinking of his mother. Often in the night the idiot boy would cry out for his own mother, leaving Will wondering who she was and where she was, and whether the plaintive cry of her imbecile child ever reached her ears in the night's stillness.
The lad was ravenously hungry all the time he spent in the workhouse. He often felt at times as though he could eat leather; yet every morning, when the "skilly" was served for breakfast, he could not touch it. Morning after morning, spurred on by hunger, he forced the spoon into his mouth, but the stomach revolted, and he always felt as though the first spoonful would turn him sick.
Somehow his father, away in the men's ward, got to know that young Will, who he knew could relish dry crusts at home with the best of them, was not able to eat the fare provided in the workhouse. The men occasionally got suet pudding, and one dinner-time the old man secretly smuggled his portion into his pocket. In the afternoon he made over to the children's quarters, hoping to hand it to Will. The pudding was produced, the lad's hungry eyes lighted up, when, behold! it was snatched away, almost from his very grasp. The burly figure of the labour master interposed between father and son. This was a breach of discipline not to be tolerated in the workhouse.
"But the boy's hungry, and this is what I've saved from my own dinner," argued the father (all in vain). "You don't know how that boy likes suet pudding."
For two or three weeks the Crooks children were kept in the workhouse, before being taken away in an omnibus with other boys and girls to the Poor Law School at Sutton. Then came the most agonising experience of all to Will. They parted him from his young brother. In the great hall of the school he would strain his eyes, hoping to get a glimpse of the lone little fellow among the other lads, but he never set eyes on him again until the afternoon they went home together.