"One thing I am very certain of, I should never have grown either, but should most likely have withered and died in it had I remained, like my possible predecessors the plants, a few blackened and withered sticks of which could still be seen in some broken red flower-pots upon a shelf out of my reach. How these people came to have charge of me I shall never know, but I have sometimes believed, from odds and ends of conversation they let drop when they were quarrelling, which they were always doing, that my real father and mother had died when I was a tiny mite.
"The woman, who seemed at one time to have been better off, was left a sum of money to bring me up, as no relations appeared to claim me. At this time the woman was single, and had not met the man she afterwards married, the man who used to beat me so cruelly. Whether she spent all the money left for me, or whether they both spent it, appears to be of little consequence; anyway, once it was gone I was regarded with black looks as an encumbrance, and turned out into the streets to make some money, or do something for my board and lodging, as they expressed it. I have already told you what the lodging was like. Well, the board part of it corresponded to the rest of the picture in every way. Crusts of old dry bread, which they couldn't eat themselves, did for me and the dog, sometimes a little milk, varied by an occasional awful form of hard cake which the woman cooked, and which was impossible to eat unless first soaked in something. In the long hours of waiting between selling the newspapers I learned to spell, and then to read, very slowly at first, but still I learned. Then one of the men employed at the newspaper office I collected papers from, although I should imagine a very poor man himself, found a few pence every week to have me taught to write and spell, together with arithmetic, grammar, history and other things. This rather uncertain method of education went on for about two years. I was getting on fine, and absorbing everything I was taught with great rapidity, when my one friend, who had provided the night school education, departed to another world where I always hope he found the conditions easier than the one he had left. I might have been at my miserable home in the slums with the man and woman for years after this, only a curious form of providence was working upon my behalf.
"It had been a bad night for selling papers, I had a few coppers only, and my heart sank down when I approached the hovel where we all lived. The man and woman were quarrelling violently. As I slunk in white of face and with a terrible quaking feeling inside me, I saw at once the man was worse than he had ever been, and as I entered the door of the squalid room he struck the woman an awful blow, then he saw me. He grabbed me, and I think might have killed me that night, but I wrenched myself away after he had given me the first blows; he pursued me, catching at my coat, which at the best of times was only rags; he tore part of the coat away, which was left in his hand, and I ran for dear life. The man was mad and didn't know what he was doing, maybe, but the only thing he could lay his hands upon was a broken brandy bottle; he hurled this at my head. It struck me as I reached the street and cut the back of my head open. Although I was hurt I staggered on. I was dizzy and sick and the blood was dripping all over my shirt, but though I swayed about I never stopped, I would go anywhere away from the horror of that place. I never meant to go back there again.
"The next thing I remember was some sort of Square, which I had never seen until then, for I had never gone so far West in London before. There was nobody about, and I sank down beside a sort of stone thing and held my head, which hurt me horribly, and began to cry, I think.
"I was only about ten or eleven years old at that time, if as much, for no record of my age had ever been kept. Whether it was the pain, or simply fright because the few clothes I had were covered in blood from the wound in my head where the bottle had cut me, I don't know, but there is no doubt that I lost consciousness, probably for some considerable time. When I came to myself and woke up, it must have been very late at night. It was a fairly cold night, but the moon was shining, and the Square where I was sitting all looked like polished silver, and the clock of a big church at the side of the Square boomed out one.
"I looked about me, and raised myself up painfully upon one elbow and tried to think.
"Here I was outside everything—no shelter, no home, alone in London with a vengeance. True the other place had been a hateful home, yet at the very worst it had been a shelter, and, moreover, the rough-haired dog Sam and I had somehow squeezed together to keep ourselves warm, and Sam was the only thing that was in any way fond of me, and Sam was really good company.
"As the thought of him came across my mind, and how I had lost him for good now, I think I was about to start crying again, when a rather gruff but quite kindly voice just over my head called out—
"'Now then, stop that.'
"Of course I was only a very common Cockney little street boy at that time, and I couldn't either speak the Queen's English properly or spell it correctly, so when the voice said 'Stop that,' I said 'Wot?' 'Going to cry,' said the voice."