“They didn’t give me no money, only pies; but I got a shilling another time for tumbling to some French ladies and gentlemen in a pastry-cook’s shop under the Colonnade. I often goes into a shop like that; I’ve done it a good many times.
“There was a gentleman once as belonged to a ‘suckus,’ (circus) as wanted to take me with him abroad, and teach me tumbling. He had a little mustache, and used to belong to Drury-lane play-house, riding on horses. I went to his place, and stopped there some time. He taught me to put my leg round my neck, and I was just getting along nicely with the splits (going down on the ground with both legs extended), when I left him. They (the splits) used to hurt worst of all; very bad for the thighs. I used, too, to hang with my leg round his neck. When I did anythink he liked, he used to be clapping me on the back. He wasn’t so very stunning well off, for he never had what I calls a good dinner—grandmother used to have a better dinner than he,—perhaps only a bit of scrag of mutton between three of us. I don’t like meat nor butter, but I likes dripping, and they never had none there. The wife used to drink—ay, very much, on the sly. She used when he was out to send me round with a bottle and sixpence to get a quartern of gin for her, and she’d take it with three or four oysters. Grandmother didn’t like the notion of my going away, so she went down one day, and says she—‘I wants my child;’ and the wife says—‘That’s according to the master’s likings;’ and then grandmother says—‘What, not my own child?’ And then grandmother began talking, and at last, when the master come home, he says to me—‘Which will you do, stop here, or go home with your grandmother?’ So I come along with her.
“I’ve been sweeping the crossings getting on for two years. Before that I used to go caten-wheeling after the busses. I don’t like the sweeping, and I don’t think there’s e’er a one of us wot likes it. In the winter we has to be out in the cold, and then in summer we have to sleep out all night, or go asleep on the church-steps, reg’lar tired out.
“One of us’ll say at night—‘Oh, I’m sleepy now, who’s game for a doss? I’m for a doss;’—and then we go eight or ten of us into a doorway of the church, where they keep the dead in a kind of airy-like underneath, and there we go to sleep. The most of the boys has got no homes. Perhaps they’ve got the price of a lodging, but they’re hungry, and they eats the money, and then they must lay out. There’s some of ’em will stop out in the wet for perhaps the sake of a halfpenny, and get themselves sopping wet. I think all our chaps would like to get out of the work if they could; I’m sure Goose would, and so would I.
“All the boys call me the King, because I tumbles so well, and some calls me ‘Pluck,’ and some ‘Judy.’ I’m called ‘Pluck,’ cause I’m so plucked a going at the gentlemen! Tommy Dunnovan—‘Tipperty Tight’—we calls him, cos his trousers is so tight he can hardly move in them sometimes,—he was the first as called me ‘Judy.’ Dunnovan once swallowed a pill for a shilling. A gentleman in the Haymarket says—‘If you’ll swallow this here pill I’ll give you a shilling;’ and Jimmy says, ‘All right, sir;’ and he puts it in his mouth, and went to the water-pails near the cab-stand and swallowed it.
“All the chaps in our gang likes me, and we all likes one another. We always shows what we gets given to us to eat.
“Sometimes we gets one another up wild, and then that fetches up a fight, but that isn’t often. When two of us fights, the others stands round and sees fair play. There was a fight last night between ‘Broke his Bones’—as we calls Antony Hones—and Neddy Hall—the ‘Sparrow,’ or ‘Spider,’ we calls him,—something about the root of a pineapple, as we was aiming with at one another, and that called up a fight. We all stood round and saw them at it, but neither of ’em licked, for they gived in for to-day, and they’re to finish it to-night. We makes ’em fight fair. We all of us likes to see a fight, but not to fight ourselves. Hones is sure to beat, as Spider is as thin as a wafer, and all bones. I can lick the Spider, though he’s twice my size.”
The Street where the Boy-Sweepers lodged.
I was anxious to see the room in which the gang of boy crossing-sweepers lived, so that I might judge of their peculiar style of house-keeping, and form some notion of their principles of domestic economy.
I asked young Harry and “the Goose” to conduct me to their lodgings, and they at once consented, “the Goose” prefacing his compliance with the remark, that “it wern’t such as genilmen had been accustomed to, but then I must take ’em as they was.”