"I don't know what he wants for his ninepence," said the cobbler, referring to the lad's father; "but, there!"—throwing the boots to his man—"put another patch on. He's only a poor beggar."
There was an angry cry from the other side, of the counter. "My father's not a poor beggar!" shouted the boy. "He's as good a man as you, and only wants what he has paid for."
If the boy thought much of the father the father thought much of the boy. It had often been his boast that "Our Will will do things some day."
One little fancy of the old man's was brought to my notice the morning after Crooks was first returned to Parliament for Woolwich. His elder brother told me then of a little incident that took place over forty-five years before.
"We children were playing in the home together when young Will said something which made the dad look up surprised. And I heard him say to mother, 'That lad'll live to be either Lord Mayor of London or a Member of Parliament.'"
The poverty deepened and darkened in the little one-roomed home during Will's boyhood. It soon became impossible even to spend an odd ninepence on boot repairs. The mother met this emergency as she met nearly all the others. She became the family cobbler, as she had all along been the family tailor. Often would she go on her knees, hammer in hand, mending the boots. The children could not remember the time when she did not make all their clothes.
"God only knows, God only will know, how my mother worked and wept," says Crooks. "With it all she brought up seven of us to be decent and useful men and women. She was everything to us. I owe to her what little schooling I got, for, though she could neither read nor write herself, she would often remark that that should never be said of any of her children. I owe to her wise training that I have been a teetotaller all my life. I owe it to her that I was saved from becoming a little wastrel of the streets, for, as a Christian woman, she kept me at the Sunday School and took me regularly to the Congregational Church where I had been baptised.
"I can picture her now as I used to see her when I awoke in the night making oil-skin coats by candle-light in our single room. Youngster though I was, I meant it from the very bottom of my heart when I used to whisper to myself, as I peeped at her from the little box-bedstead by the wall, 'Wait till I'm a man! Won't I work for my mother when I'm a man!'"
He thought he was a man at thirteen, when he could bring home to her proudly five shillings every week, his wages in the blacksmith's shop. There came a memorable Saturday night when, having worked overtime all the week and earned an extra five shillings, he was paid his first half-sovereign. He threw on his coat and cap excitedly and ran all the way home from Limehouse Causeway, the half-sovereign clenched tightly in his hand, until he burst breathlessly into the little room, exclaiming: