Comic Classics: Great Expectations. Jack Noel

      I pointed to where our village lay, a mile or more from the church.

      “Who d’ye live with . . . supposin’ I LET you live, which I haven’t made up my mind about?”

      “I live with my sister, sir – Mrs Joe Gargery – wife of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, sir.”

      said he. And looked down at his leg.

      Then he came closer, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he could hold me. “NOW LOOKEE HERE,” he said,

      “You know what a FILE is?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “And you know what WITTLES is?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      After each question he tilted me over a little more.

      I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken bits of food I could, and bring them to him early in the morning.

      I said so, and he put me down.

      He hugged his shuddering body in both his arms, as if to hold himself together, and limped towards the low church wall.

      As I saw him go, picking his way among the nettles and among the brambles, he looked as if he were avoiding the hands of the dead people,

      But now I was frightened again, and I ran home without stopping.

      MY SISTER, MRS Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up ‘by hand’. Not knowing what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up BY HAND.

      Joe Gargery was a mild, good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow, a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

      My sister had such a prevailing redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap.

      Joe’s forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house. When I ran home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was sitting alone in the kitchen.

      “and what’s worse, she’s got TICKLER with her.”

      “She sat down,” said Joe, “and she got up, and she made a grab at Tickler, and she RAMPAGED out. That’s what she did,” said Joe. “She RAMPAGED OUT, PIP.”

      “Has she been gone long, Joe?”

      “Well,” said Joe, glancing up at the clock, “she’s been on the Rampage, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip.

      SHE’S A COMING! Get behind the door, old chap.”

      My sister, throwing the door wide open, and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing me at Joe, who passed me on into the chimney and quietly fenced me up there with his great leg.

      repeated my sister.

      “If it warn’t for me you’d have been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there.

       WHO BROUGHT YOU UP BY HAND?”

      “You did,” said I.

      “And why did I do it, I should like to know?” exclaimed my sister.

      I whimpered, “I don’t know.”

      “I don’t!” said my sister. “I’d never do it again! I know that. It’s bad enough to be a blacksmith’s wife without being your mother.”

      I looked at the fire. The fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was under, rose before me in the avenging coals.

      “Hah!” said Mrs Joe, restoring Tickler to his station.

Joe was about to take another bite, when his eye fell on me, and he saw that my bread and butter was gone.
	“What’s the matter now?” said my sister, smartly, as she put down her cup.
Joe shook his head.
	“What’s the matter now?” repeated my sister, more sharply than before.

      She pounced on Joe while I sat, looking guiltily on. “Now, perhaps you’ll mention what’s