"About My Father's Business": Work Amidst the Sick, the Sad, and the Sorrowing

by Thomas Archer

There is plenty to see in the neighbourhood out of doors, but we need not wander far to find something interesting, for on the ground-floor of these three houses which form the Crèche—the babies' home—provision has also been made for babies' fathers, in the shape of "a British Workman," or working-man's reading, coffee, and bagatelle room, with a library of readable books, and liberty to smoke a comfortable pipe.

Of the servants' home, which is another branch of this cluster of charitable institutions, we have no time to speak now, for our visit is intended for the Crèche, and we are already summoned to the upper rooms by the sound of infant voices. Doubt not that you will be welcomed on the very threshold, for here comes an accredited representative of the institution, just able to creep on all fours to the guarded door, thence to be caught up by the gentle-faced young nurse, who at once consigns the excursionist to a kind of square den or pound, formed of stout bars, and with the space of floor which it encloses covered by a firm mattress. There, in complete safety, and with two or three good serviceable and amiably-battered toys, the young athletes who are beginning to practise the difficult feat of walking with something to hold by, are out of harm's way, and may crawl or totter with impunity. They have had their breakfast of bread and milk, and are evidently beginning the day, some of them with a refreshing snooze in the little cribs which stand in a row against a wall, bright, as all the walls are, with coloured pictures, while in spaces, or on low tables here and there, bright-hued flowers and fresh green plants are arranged, so that the room, necessarily bare and unencumbered with much furniture, is so pleasantly light and gay, that we are again reminded of a great bird-cage. Out here in a little ante-room is a connected row of low, wooden arm-chairs, made for the people of Lilliput, and each furnished with a little tray or table, and, drumming expectantly and with a visible interest in the proceeding, sit a line of little creatures, amidst whom a nurse distributes her attentions, by feeding them carefully with a spoon, just as so many young blackbirds might be fed. Already some of the little nurslings are sitting up in their cribs, quietly nodding their round little heads over some cherished specimen of doll or wooden horse. One wee mite of a girl, quite unable to speak, except inarticulately, holds up the figure of a wooden lady of fashion, with a wistful entreaty which we fail to understand, till the quick-eyed lady who accompanies us spies a slip of white tape in the tiny hand, and at once divines that it is to be bound about the fashionable waist, as an appropriate scarf, and at once performs this finishing stroke of the toilet, to the immeasurable satisfaction of everybody concerned. This is in the upper room, the real baby nursery, where the age of some of the inmates is numbered by weeks only, and there is in each swinging cot a sweet, sleepy sense of enjoyment of the bottle which forms the necessary appliance of luncheon-time.

At the heads of several of these cots are inscribed the names of charitable donors, happy parents, bereaved mothers, sympathetic women with babies of their own, either on earth or in heaven, who desire to show gratitude, faith, remembrance, by this token of their love for the childlikeness of those they love and cherish in their deepest memories, their most ardent hopes. In more than one of the little beds there are signs of the poverty or the sickliness in which the children were born, and the effects of which this home, with its freshness and light and food, is intended to remedy. No cases of actual disease are here, however, since a small infirmary for children suffering from more serious ailments has been added to the institution, and the Sick Children's Hospital is but three street lengths distant.

The first most remarkable experience which meets the visitor unaccustomed to observe closely, is the freshness and beauty of the children in this place. Squalid misery, dirt, neglect, starvation, so disguise and debase even the children in such neighbourhoods, that squeamish sentimentality turns away at the first glance, and is apt to conclude that there are essential differences between the infancy of Tyburnia or Mayfair and the babyhood of Ratcliff and Shadwell. Yet I venture to assert that if Mr. Millais or some other great painter were to select his subjects for a picture from these rooms of the old house in Stepney Causeway, he would leave the galleries of Burlington House echoing with "little dears," and "what a lovely child!" and popular prejudice would conclude that from birth the little rosebud mouths were duly fitted with silver spoons instead of being scant even of the bluntest of wooden ladles.

At this Crèche at Stepney Causeway the reasons of the true childlike freshness, alacrity, and even the engaging impetuosity and loving confidence which characterise these little ones, is not far to seek. As you came up you noticed row after row of blue check bags, hanging in a current of fresh air on the wall of the staircase.

Those bags contain the clothes in which these children are brought to the Home in the morning. They are changed with the morning's ablutions, and clean garments substituted for them until the mothers come in the evening to fetch away their bairnies, and by that time they have been aired and sweetened. It is noticeable that this has the effect in many instances of inducing the women to make praiseworthy efforts to improve the appearance of the children, and, indeed, the whole tendency of the treatment of the little ones is to develop the tenderness and love which lie deep down in the hearts of the mothers. Even the endearing nicknames almost instinctively bestowed upon the tiny darlings have a share in promoting this feeling, and the pretty rosy plump little creatures, or the quaint expressive bright-eyed babies, who are called "Rosie," "Katie," "Pet," "Little Old Lady," and so on, all have a kind of happy individuality of their own in the regards of the dear lady who founded and still directs the institution, and in those of the nurses who tend them. Sometimes the names arise from some little incident occurring when the children are first brought there, as well as from the engaging looks and manners of the little ones themselves. "The King," is a really fine baby-boy, the recognised monarch of the upper nursery, but his sway is strictly constitutional; while a pretty little wistful, plump lassie, is good-humouredly known as "Water Cresses," and has no reason to be ashamed of the name, for it designates the business by which a hard-working mother and elder sister earn the daily bread for the family.

Did I say that the charge for each child is twopence daily? Nominally it is so; and let those who desire to know something of the real annals of the poor remember that even this small sum—which of course cannot adequately represent anything like the cost—is not easily subtracted from the scanty earnings of poor women engaged in slopwork, or selling dried fish, plants, crockery, and small wares in the streets, or going out to work in warehouses, rope-walks, match-making, box-making, and other poor employments, where the daily wages will not reach to shillings, and sometimes are represented only in the pence column. Let it be remembered, too, that the husbands of these women (those who are not prematurely widows, or whose husbands have not deserted them) are employed as dock labourers, and are often under the terrible curse of drink, or are in prison, while the women struggle on to support the little ones, who but for this institution, would perhaps be left—hungry, naked, and sickly—to the care of children only two or three years older than themselves; or would be locked in wretched rooms without food or fire till the mother could toil homeward, with the temptation of a score of gin-shops in the way.

Each of the bright intelligent little faces now before us has its history, and a very suggestive and pathetic history too.

Look at this little creature, whose pet name of Fairy bespeaks the loving care which her destitute babyhood calls forth; she is only ten months old, and her mother is but nineteen, the widow of a sailor lost at sea two months before the baby was born.

Katie, of the adult age of five years, is the child of a man who works on barges. Rosie, one of the first inmates, has a drunken dock-labourer for a father, and her mother is dead. Dicky represents the children whose father, going out to sea in search of better fortune for wife and children, is no more heard of, and is supposed to be dead. "The King" is fatherless, and his mother works in a bottle-warehouse. The pathetic stories of these children is told by Mrs. Hilton herself, in the little simple reports of this most admirable charity. They are so touching, that I cannot hope to reproduce them in any language so likely to go straight to the heart as that in which you may read them for yourself if you will either visit the Crèche, or send ever so small a donation, and ask for a copy of the modest brown-covered little chronicle of these baby-lives. Standing here in the two nurseries, where the dolls and Noah's arks, the pictures and the doves, nay, even the baby-jumpers suspended from the ceilings, are but accessories to the clasp of loving arms and the softly-spoken words of tender womanly kindness, I wonder why all one side of Stepney Causeway has not been demanded by a discriminating public for the extension of such an institution. Loitering in the lower room, where one little bright face is lifted up to mine, as the tiny hands pluck at my coat-skirt, and another chubby fist is busy with my walking-stick, I begin to think of the workhouse ward, where mothers are separated from their children night and day; of a prison, where I have seen a troop of little boys, and a flogging-room provided by a beneficent Government for the recognition by the State of children who had qualified themselves for notice by the commission of what the law called crime.