Goslings

by J. D. Beresford

The progress of the plague through London and the world in general was marked, in the earlier stages, by much the same developments as are reported of the plague of 1665. The closed houses, the burial pits, the deserted streets, the outbreaks of every kind of excess, the various symptoms of fear, cowardice, fortitude and courage, evidenced little change in the average of humanity between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. The most notable difference during these earlier stages was in the enormously increased rapidity with which the population of London was reduced to starvation point. Even before the plague had reached England, want had become general, so general, indeed, as to have demonstrated very clearly the truth of the great economist’s contention that England could not exist for three months with closed doors.

The coming of the plague threw London on to its own very limited resources. That vast city, which produced nothing but the tokens of wealth, and added nothing to the essentials that support life, was instantly reduced to the state of Paris in the winter of 1870–71; with the difference, however, that London’s population could be decreased rapidly by emigration, and was, also, even more rapidly decreased by pestilence. Yet there was a large section of the population which clung with blind obstinacy to the only life it knew how to live.

There was, for instance, George Gosling, more fortunate in many respects than the average citizen, who clung desperately to his house in Wisteria Grove until forced out of it by the lack of water.

On the ninth day after the first coming of the plague to London—it appeared simultaneously in a dozen places and spread with fearful rapidity—Gosling broke one of the great laws he had hitherto observed with such admirable prudence. The offices and warehouse in Barbican had been shut up (temporarily, it was supposed), and the partners had disappeared from London. But Gosling had a duplicate set of keys, and, inspired by the urgency of his family’s need, he determined to dare a journey into the City in order to borrow (he laid great stress on the word) a few necessaries of life from the well-stored warehouse of his firm.

In this scheme, planned with some shrewdness, he co-operated with a friend, a fellow-sidesman at the Church of St John the Evangelist. This friend was a coal merchant, and thus fortunately circumstanced in the possession of wagons and horses.

These two arranged the details of their borrowing expedition between them. Economically, it was a deal on the lines of the revived methods of exchange and barter. Gosling was willing to exchange certain advantages of knowledge and possession for the hire of wagons and horses. It was decided, for obvious reasons, to admit no other conspirator into the plot, and Boost, the coal merchant, drove one cart and Gosling drove the other. Perhaps it should rather be said that he led the other, for, after a preliminary trial, he decided that he was safer at the horses’ heads than behind their tails.

The raid was conducted with perfect success. Boost had a head for essentials. The invaluable loads of tinned meats, fruits and vegetables were screened by tarpaulins from the possibly too envious eyes of hungry passers-by—quite a number of vagrants were to be seen in the streets on that day—and Boost and Gosling, disguised in coal-begrimed garments, made the return journey lugubriously calling, “Plague, plague,” the cry of the drivers of the funeral carts which had even then become necessary. Their only checks were the various applications they received for the cartage of corpses; applications easily put on one side by pointing to the piled-up carts—they had spent six laborious hours in packing them. “No room; no room,” they cried, and on that day the applicants who accosted Boost and Gosling were not the only ones who had to wait for the disposal of their dead.

Gosling arrived at Wisteria Grove, hot and outwardly jubilant, albeit with a horrible fear lurking in his mind that he had been in dangerous proximity to those tendered additions to his load. His booty was stored in one of the downstairs rooms—with the assistance of Mrs Gosling and the two girls they managed the unpacking without interruption in two hours and a half—and then, with boarded windows and locked doors, the Goslings sat down to await the passing of horror.

Boost died of the plague forty-eight hours after the great adventure, but as he had a wife and four daughters his plunder was not wasted.