“Before winter comes, we general save up our money and buys a pair of shoes. Sometimes we makes a very big snowball and rolls it up to the hotels, and then the gentlemen laughs and throws us money; or else we pelt each other with snowballs, and then they scrambles money between us. We always go to Morley’s Hotel, at Charing-cross. The police in winter times is kinder to us than in summer, and they only laughs at us;—p’rhaps it is because there is not so many of us about then,—only them as is obligated to find a living for themselves; for many of the boys has fathers and mothers as sends them out in summer, but keeps them at home in winter when it’s piercing cold.
“I have been to the station-house, because the police always takes us up if we are out at night; but we’re only locked up till morning,—that is, if we behaves ourselves when we’re taken before the gentleman. Mr. Hall, at Bow-street, only says, ‘Poor boy, let him go.’ But it’s only when we’ve done nothink but stop out that he says that. He’s a kind old gentleman; but mind, it’s only when you have been before him two or three times he says so, because if it’s a many times, he’ll send you for fourteen days.
“But we don’t mind the police much at night-time, because we jumps over the walls round the place at Trafalgar-square, and they don’t like to follow us at that game, and only stands looking at you over the parrypit. There was one tried to jump the wall, but he split his trousers all to bits, and now they’re afraid. That was Old Bandy as bust his breeches; and we all hate him, as well as another we calls Black Diamond, what’s general along with the Red Liners, as we calls the Mendicity officers, who goes about in disguise as gentlemen, to take up poor boys caught begging.
“When we are talking together we always talk in a kind of slang. Each policeman we gives a regular name—there’s ‘Bull’s Head,’ ‘Bandy Shanks,’ and ‘Old Cherry Legs,’ and ‘Dot-and-carry-one;’ they all knows their names as well as us. We never talks of crossings, but ‘fakes.’ We don’t make no slang of our own, but uses the regular one.
“A broom doesn’t last us more than a week in wet weather, and they costs us twopence halfpenny each; but in dry weather they are good for a fortnight.”
Young Mike’s Statement.
The next lad I examined was called Mike. He was a short, stout-set youth, with a face like an old man’s, for the features were hard and defined, and the hollows had got filled up with dirt till his countenance was brown as an old wood carving. I have seldom seen so dirty a face, for the boy had been in a perspiration, and then wiped his cheeks with his muddy hands, until they were marbled, like the covering to a copy-book.
The old lady of the house in which the boy lived seemed to be hurt by the unwashed appearance of her lodger. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself—and that’s God’s truth—not to go and sluice yourself afore spaking to the jintlemin,” she cried, looking alternately at me and the lad, as if asking me to witness her indignation.
Mike wore no shoes, but his feet were as black as if cased in gloves with short fingers. His coat had been a man’s, and the tails reached to his ankles; one of the sleeves was wanting, and a dirty rag had been wound round the arm in its stead. His hair spread about like a tuft of grass where a rabbit has been squatting.
He said, “I haven’t got neither no father nor no mother,—never had, sir; for father’s been dead these two year, and mother getting on for eight. They was both Irish people, please sir, and father was a bricklayer. When father was at work in the country, mother used to get work carrying loads at Covent-garden Market. I lived with father till he died, and that was from a complaint in his chest. After that I lived along with my big brother, what’s ’listed in the Marines now. He used to sweep a crossing in Camden-town, opposite the Southampting Harms, near the toll-gate.