To London Town by Arthur Morrison

SO life went at the cottage. For a little while they looked for another visit from Uncle Isaac; since, as he sent no postal order, it was felt that he must defer the return of the half-crown merely because he contemplated an early payment in person. But weeks passed and nothing was heard of him, nor seen. Meantime the problem of Johnny's trade met no solution. He had left school nearly three months now, and, the thing seeming desperate, he had well-nigh resolved to give in to the post-office. At the thought London seemed a far and wondrous place whereto he could never attain; and awe of the terrible list his grandfather had compiled from the London Directory, became longing for the least inviting trade in the collection. He had his memories of London, too, and they were more numerous and more pleasant than Bessy's. There he could see, from his bedroom window, the masts of many ships, quite close. In the strong winds (and in his remembered London the weather was ever cold, brisk, dry, and windy) the masts bent and rocked gravely, the ropes bellied, and the blocks whistled aloud. At nights he lay and heard the yards groan and the cordage creak and rattle. Just by the corner, ships sometimes thrust prying jib-booms clean over the dock wall, as if to see what a town was like; and often he had stood in the street to watch men climbing the rigging and hanging bent over spars, like earwigs. He had gone shopping, too, gripping tight at his mother's skirts, in flaring market-streets, where everybody shouted at once, and there were mountains of bulls'-eyes and peppermint on barrows. There was a street with shops on one side and a blank wall on the other; and over and behind this wall, lifted high in the air, was the monstrous skeleton of a great ship. Men swarmed like ants about the skeleton, and all day hammers went with a mighty clangour, and great lights flared at night. There were big blank walls at all the places where they made ships, and he could remember a little door in one such wall, a door beyond which he greatly desired to see. But it was rarely opened, and then but a little way, by an ill-natured old man, who squeezed through and closed it very quickly. So that Johnny believed he must issue thus to prevent the escape of some small and active animal, imprisoned within. All that Johnny remembered of his father was that he wiped his oily hands on cotton waste: a curious stuff -- like a great deal of soft sewing-thread in a hopeless tangle -- that he had never seen since. That and the funeral: when he rode in a carriage with a crape bow pinned to his new jacket, and his mother held his hand very tight at the grave-side. Most of his memories were of the streets, and some revived after long oblivion: as when the smell of roasted chestnuts brought a vision of a glowing coke fire by the corner of the ship-yard wall, with a pock-marked man behind it whom he would know anywhere now. And he was not to return to this place of wistful memory after all, nor to learn to make a ship nor an engine -- let alone a picture.

The weeks went, and berries hung where flowers had been. Johnny and Bessy made their yearly harvest of blackberries, some for puddings and jam at home, some to sell at such kitchen doors as might receive them. Until an afternoon in early October: when, with an order from a lady at Theydon, they betook themselves in search of sloes.