Bleak Expectations (20 page)

‘Terribly. I do really, really terribly,’ said Mr Parsimonious, taking and shaking Harry’s offered hand, then using it as a rather literal hand-kerchief to wipe his weep-runny nose.

‘We’ll have no more of that wretched talk, Mr Parsimonious,’ I admonished him, for his appearance had reinvigorated my own spirits. ‘Pippa is here also, and the four of us together, why, surely we can overcome these dire circumstances and return our lives to happy joy once more!’

And as I said those words I truly, honestly, really, really, really believed them.

A bit.

¹
A reference to the game of book blackjack, which Sir Philip played keenly with other authors.

²
By law all nineteenth-century funerals had to take place in mood-matchingly miserable weather – hence great rain-making machines were present at all cemeteries.

³
The Emotional Repression Act of 1798 banned men from showing any strong emotions. The most emotional outbursts allowed were ‘I have high regard for you, dear wife’ and ‘Well played, sir’. Many blamed its repeal in 1885 for General Gordon’s loss of Khartoum later that year.

Alas, in the following weeks, that bit of belief which nestled inside me, like a hopeful acorn in a squirrel’s cheek, cracked open and revealed itself to be hollow for truly it appeared as if we were trapped in a real-life painting by that noted Dutch depicter of religious wretchedness Thereonymus Basch.
¹

The workhouse ran to a brutal and punishing schedule of brutality and punishment according to the dictates of the Bible – or, at least, selected parts of the Bible as chosen by Beadle Hardthrasher, including the hitherto unknown to me Book of Judgmentals and St Paul’s Letter About How Poor People Are Evil And Must Be Punished.

Each day we performed twenty-three and a half hours of harsh physical labour, interspersed with bouts of grim manual toil and painful corporeal exertion, and in the remaining half-hour we were compelled to eat, sleep, perform both ablutions and short dramatic scenes glorifying Jesus, do chores and also say the regulation twenty-seven minutes of pre-bed prayers.

It was quite tiring, actually.

The food did not help our energy levels. At school, the problem with mealtimes had been the absence of food; in the workhouse the problem was the presence thereof.

For, oh! It was grim. To sum it up in one word: gruel. To sum it up in two words: revolting gruel, which, given that the word ‘gruel’ already contains an unspoken hint of ‘revolting’, is really saying – or, rather, writing – something. If I am allowed a third or fourth word, and I don’t see why I am not seeing as I am the author of this book, I would choose ‘foul’, ‘vile’, ‘gruesome’, ‘repulsive’, ‘abhorrent’, ‘nauseating’, ‘obnoxious’, ‘loathsome’, ‘vile’ again, ‘ghastly’, two more ‘repulsive’s and a ‘disgustivating’.

There! I actually took fifteen words, for three reasons: one, to show you adjectivally the horror of our meals; two, to prove that as author I am in charge of my own word destiny; and three, to demonstrate the excellence of my new reference book, an Other-words-that-mean-the-same-onary.
²

Even though we were perpetually hungry, no one wanted to eat the gruel; and workhouse inmates would do anything to avoid it. Indeed, I remember one little mite – his name was Oliver as I recall – approaching Beadle Hardthrasher, bowl held up in supplicant hands, his quavering voice asking, ‘Please, sir, I want some less.’

The beadle made him eat the entire workhouse’s gruel supply for the day, including the tureen it was served from, the combination of gruesome gruel and force-fed crockery killing him instantly, or, rather, slowly and painfully.

He went to fiery Hell with terrible indigestion and literally and metaphorically a nasty taste in his mouth.

Given my recent experiences at school, the awfulness I had witnessed at the asylum my home had become and now the horrors of the workhouse, I was beginning to develop a deep suspicion of nineteenth-century institutions; and it seemed I was not alone, as Mr Parsimonious shared his fears with me one night.

We were involved in our daily chores, namely peeling potatoes. Not for consumption, but because Beadle Hardthrasher believed that unpeeled potatoes looked like the face of Satan and that they must therefore be peeled into the shape of either the cross or Jesus’s elbow, which was apparently the holiest part of Him due to His having dipped it accidentally into a bowl of soup He had just blessed at the Last Supper. This night there were some ten thousand potatoes, and all the beadler had given us to peel them with was another, slightly sharper, potato.

Nevertheless, we peeled away and, though we were forbidden to consume anything, occasionally a small fragment of spud would fly through the air and land by chance on our hungry lips, a nectar of raw, tubery delight by comparison to our usual food. Then, mid-peel, Mr Parsimonious suddenly set down his peeling potato and turned to me. ‘Young Pip, I very much fear that this is where our story comes to an end.’
³

‘Why, Mr Parsimonious, do not be so downhearted, for our tale has many chapters yet to run, I should guess perhaps twenty-three or even -four more, and some of them may even be happy.’
⁴

‘Pip, we are going to die in this place. Search your peelings, you know it to be true.’

I looked down at the potatoey fragments between my feet, and there, clearly spelled out among them in peelings, as if by some higher power who had chosen to use a weird, vegetable-based form of message system, were the words: ‘It’s true.’

Admittedly that was after looking for a really long time, scrunching my eyes until they were almost shut and then using quite a lot of imagination, but there they were, a stark and clear warning.

We had to escape this povertous hellhole!

I knew instantly we could not do it alone.

I decided that if a higher power had sent the peeling message, then a higher power might be the help we needed.

So I set about composing a letter to my Member of Parliament.

But I had got no further than ‘Dear my Member of Parliament’ when I realized I needed a power higher even than that.

I had to ask the big guy.

By which I mean God, and not Fat Dave, another rather large inmate of the workhouse.

I threw myself to my knees, and I prayed.

First I prayed that my knees might stop hurting because in my imprecatory alacrity I had thrown myself to them quite hard, and the workhouse floor was stony and ouchy.

Then I began to pray for release.

I prayed as hard as I could, harder even than a really keen nun trying to impress the Catholic Church’s national praying team selectors.
⁵

Over and over again I prayed, ‘Please, Lord, let me escape from this place.’

After a while, I changed my prayer slightly to ‘Please, Lord, let me and Pippa and Harry and Mr Parsimonious escape from this place,’ because, frankly, I had been selfish in not including them before; and, besides, if the prayer worked and I did get out I’d want some friends to do stuff with.

Oh, how I prayed! I squeezed every drop of entreating juice from my supplication gland
⁶
that God might deliver me from the suffering I was in. As I slumped into an exhausted, prayed-out sleep on the floor, my last thoughts were ones of perseverance: I knew that, no matter how hard I had prayed, even the truly devoted must wait for a godly response, for our Lord has huge numbers of prayers to work through and, even though He is obviously divinely efficient at working through His admin, it would still take time; time I was prepared to wait, be it years, decades or even centuries, millennia, aeons or ages, even though, were it to be that long, I would be much lengthily dead, for the patient shall have their reward, and patience was now my watchword, middle name and creed.

¹
Even more religiously violent painterly contemporary of Hieronymus Bosch.

²
The word ‘thesaurus’ was not used in the sense we used it until the twentieth century. Oddly, a thesaurus is also a giant lizard obsessed with the definite article. Or, at least, that’s what it says on Wikipedia.

³
It doesn’t. Just look at how much book there is left.

⁴
There are actually twenty-seven to go. And only three of them are definitively happy.

⁵
The World Praying Cup competition took place every four years. Britain’s team was decimated by the Reformation in the sixteenth century and never regained its previous eminence. For forty-three consecutive tournaments the final was contested by Ireland and Italy.

⁶
The medical profession at the time believed there was a gland connected to every human behaviour. It was only when they really began cutting people up in the name of science that they discovered this was untrue.

Actually, we were safely out the next morning, which was much quicker than I had been anticipating and our lives were free and our own to live once more.

Once free, I immediately— Hmm? What’s that? How? You desire to know the how of our escape from povertous punishment?

Very well.

I shall tell.

Ooh, those two lines rhyme. Take that, Thomas Hardy!

You’re not the only man who can write novels and poetry, you miserable grump.
¹

I woke after nearly four whole seconds of exhausted sleep to face another workhouse day with all the fun that that entailed, which was to say none. None fun.

By this time Harry and I had been moved from the bottle factory to different duties, namely the treadmill. Pacing in place, we drove a great geared belt, which turned a grindstone, itself connected to that most notorious of workhouse punishments, the pain-wheel, a horrific circle of agony to which were strapped miscreants whom the beadle had deemed to have committed sins such as being short (the sin of not striving to reach high enough to Heaven), being meek (they were destined to inherit the earth and therefore commit the sin of avarice), or being ugly (he didn’t like ugly people). The wheel rotated them through a scraping, stinging mass of brambles and nettles before dunking them in a bath of lemon juice, and their shrieks of woe could be heard as far afield as nearby and really far away. As we ran on the treadmill, large men in strangely skin-tight outfits shouted at us if we slowed, utilizing phrases such as ‘No pain, no gain’, ‘Work it’ and ‘Feel the burn’.

Then, over the noise of these hectoring hectorizers, I heard the phrase that heralded a change in my fortunes as great as that experienced by wily Odysseus himself when he rolled nine consecutive double sixes to defeat Circe the witch in a game of backgammon after having previously only thrown rubbish scores such as three, one and two.
²

‘Letter for Pip Bin!’

It was a representative of the Royal Postal Corps, the most noble of Britain’s armed forces after the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Wish-we-could-fly Force.
³
By law, if a stamped letter was addressed to you even slightly it had to be delivered, or the postman would be locked up in the Tower of London for treason; anyone stopping you receiving your letter faced the same punishment.

Thus I was allowed to dismount the treadmill and receive my epistolary gift. The envelope it came in was marked ‘Pip Bin, Somewhere’. It was a vague address, but enough to have found me, thanks to the diligence of the postman. What could it contain? It was not my birthday so was unlikely to be a missive with a birthday greeting; equally it was not Christmas, Easter or Harvest Festival, those other great card-sending holidays; true, it was the day after the Greek Orthodox
tyrine
or Cheese Sunday,
⁴
but I had never heard of a card sent in celebration of that curdled-milk-product feast day.

So what was within?

Could it be the answer to my prayers of the night before? Though I doubted God would actually use the post for His reply.

Despite my desperate desire to see what was inside, I gently and carefully opened the envelope – I had heard many a tale of someone tearing an envelope hastily open with excitement only to accidentally rip the stamp containing our glorious monarch’s head and therefore be executed.

Inside were two pieces of paper. On one were some barely legible letters, spelling out ‘Hope this helps you as you helped me.’ Beneath was a smudged and smeared signature: ‘Bakewell Havertwitch’.

The escaped convict from the churchyard whose chains I had broken with Pippa’s anvil! Had my kindness to him now been repaid? I looked at the second piece of paper and saw that it had indeed.

For it was no ordinary piece of paper.

It was a note.

And not a note saying ‘Buy more milk’ or a musical note or any of the other sorts of note that would have been less than helpful in the circumstances.

It was a banknote.

Specifically, it was a £312 banknote.

This was more money than I had ever seen ever in my whole life ever.

My prayers had been answered; in terms of the plot of my life this was less
deus ex machina
and more
pecunia ex deo et fugiente malefactore
. Truly Bakewell Havertwitch had not fibbed or spoken untrue when he had promised one day to repay my kindness!

The news of my letter had been heard around the work-house and Harry, Pippa and Mr Parsimonious had joined me.

‘Gosh,’ said Harry. ‘With that you could buy three hundred and twelve one-pound notes. Or a hundred and fifty-six two-pound notes. Or seventy-eight four-pound notes. Or—’

‘I get the idea, Harry.’ I feared if I did not stop him he would go through every possible money-changing permutation.

‘Does this mean we are poor no more?’ asked Pippa.

‘It does. Surely now the beadle will release us for we no longer belong in a workhouse or poorhouse but in a rich-house or leisurehouse.’
⁵