"I'm so sorry, missus; I am really. I didn't see you."
"All right, kiddie. I saw you couldn't help it. I'm used to being kicked about the streets."
But the lad could not forget it. And when he came home at dinner-time, "Oh, mother," he said, "I kicked a poor woman outside our door this morning, and I wouldn't have done it for anything, had I known."
Sometimes a poor wayfarer would knock at the door, mistaking it for the entrance to the casual ward. In answer to a series of sharp raps one night Will raced to the door with the mother of another family who rented the front room. She got there first and opened it, to find a tramp on the step.
"Is this the casual ward?"
"The casual ward!" cried the woman in disgust, turning away and leaving Will to direct him. "That's a nice fashionable kind of knock to come with asking for the casual ward!"
It was from this house that he saw a bread riot in the winter of 1866, when he got the first of many impressions he was to receive of what a winter of bad trade means to a district of casual labour like Poplar. Hundreds of men used to wait outside the workhouse gates for a 2-lb. loaf each. The baker's waggon drove up with the bread one afternoon while they waited. The ravenous crowd would not let it pass into the workhouse yard. They seized the bread, frantically struggling with each other. Almost as fiercely they tore the bread to pieces when they got it and devoured it on the spot.
Sights like these of his childhood, with the shuddering memories of his own dark days in the workhouse and the workhouse school, made him register a vow, little chap though he was at the time, that when he grew up to be a man he would do all he could to make better and brighter the lot of the inmates, especially that of the boys and girls.
Some children's dreams come true, and this was one of them.