Dad, don’t leave me here. Take me with you,’ he implored his father.
‘I can’t,’ said Daniel. ‘I don’t have the money to support us both. Not until I’ve got work. And you’ll be safe here.’
‘I don’t want to be safe; I want to be with you.’
‘You will be. I promise. But for now you’ve got to stay here and trust me. Can you do that, Adam?’ Daniel asked. He leant down, putting his hands on his son’s shoulders, trying to look him in the eye. But Adam kept his gaze on the floor: he hated his father just as much as he loved him at that moment. Finally, reluctantly, he nodded his head.
‘Good lad,’ said Daniel, straightening up. ‘I knew I could count on you.’ He reached out his hand and pulled the bell cord.
‘Listen, Adam, I’ve got to go now,’ said Daniel quickly. ‘The Guardians, the people who run this place, might cause problems if they see me here, but if you’re on your own they’ve got to look after you; so – goodbye. I’ll be back, I promise.’ He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and suddenly pulled him close in a tight embrace. And then, picking up his bag, he walked quickly away.
And for Adam there was no time to think. A wooden grating in the door was shot back and a pair of dark eyes looked out at him for a moment from above a thick moustache.
‘New?’ asked the voice of the otherwise invisible man.
Adam nodded, and there was a sound of bolts being drawn back and a key being turned in the lock. Adam wanted to run away. He felt that once inside, behind this thick iron door, he would never get out again. He hesitated, looking wildly up and down the street, and gave up. He had nowhere to go, no money in his pockets, and he had given his word that he would stay. If he left now his father might never find him when he came back. If he came back.
The porter was dressed in a blue serge suit with gold braids on the sleeves and collar. He looked pleased with himself; pleased with his uniform and with his elaborate military moustache curled up into tiny black spikes at the corners of his mouth. He towered over Adam, looking him up and down as if he was conducting a preliminary assessment, which perhaps he was.
‘All right then,’ he said eventually. ‘Follow me.’ And he set off at a brisk pace down a series of wide corridors with spotless linoleum floors and plain whitewashed walls. There was not a speck of dust anywhere. And all the doors they passed were shut; the porter’s thick bunch of keys jangled against his trousers as he walked and Adam imagined that he had individual keys for every one.
In the receiving ward Adam was told to take off his clothes by a male attendant who went through all the pockets, searching for contraband, before packaging them up in brown paper. And then he had to endure a bath in cold water and a badly executed haircut before he was allowed to get dressed again, this time in the workhouse uniform: a striped cotton shirt, ill-fitting trousers and a jacket made of some coarse fabric with ‘Islington Workhouse’ stitched above the breast pocket.
He felt tired suddenly and wanted desperately to sit down, but the attendant pushed him forward down yet another corridor and into a small windowless office where a grey-haired man with half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose was sitting behind a large kneehole desk from which he never seemed to look up. He asked Adam questions about his history and recorded the answers in a huge ledger, pausing frequently to dip his pen in the inkwell, and then listened without interruption to Adam’s account of how he had ended up at the workhouse door before writing the single word, ‘Abandonment’ in the ‘Reason for admission’ column.
‘What’ll happen to me?’ asked Adam. There was fear in his voice: each stage of the admission process had seemed to strip another layer of his identity away until he felt that there was almost nothing left.
‘Perhaps they’ll send you back to school, although you’re almost too old for that. The Guardians will decide,’ he told Adam.
‘When?’
‘At their next meeting,’ the grey-haired man laconically replied, and turned his attention to the next admission, an old man with his belongings tied up in a dirty red handkerchief, distraught because he’d just been separated from his wife of forty years. His protests fell on deaf ears. The Poor Law required separation of the sexes and in the workhouse the law was absolute.
It was a terrible place: everything was regulated – from the exact weight of stones required to be broken in the yard each day to the precise allowances of food for each inmate (Adam received six ounces of bread at supper, although he would have been entitled to eight if he had been a year older). The refectory vividly reminded Adam of the penny sit-up that his father had taken him to in what felt like another lifetime. The inmates sat in rows facing forward, eating their allotted portions in silence before the bell called them back to work.
Because of his age Adam was excused from stone-breaking and was instead put to work picking apart tarred ropes to make oakum that the shipyards used for caulking boats. After unravelling the rope into corkscrew strands, the inmates had to roll them on their knees until the mesh became loose and the fibres could be broken up into hemp. Soon Adam’s fingers became red and raw, so they looked like his father’s hands had sometimes used to look when he came back from work after using soda water to strip old paper from the walls of houses that his crew was refurbishing.
Throughout the day two old sallow-faced officials dressed in identical threadbare black suits walked up and down the aisles between the benches, watchful for any slacking. The inmates picked in silence and the overseers’ monotonous pacing of the hard boards was the only noise in the big windowless workroom in which all the light came from above through circular skylights set in the flat roof. And at the end of the day each worker’s oakum was weighed at a desk by the door; failure to pick the required quota was punished by a reduction in the malefactor’s food allowance. In this, as in all its rules and regulations, the workhouse was mindful of its legal duty to ‘provide relief that was inferior to the standard of living that a labourer could obtain without assistance’. The Guardians wanted to be quite sure that nobody in their right mind would choose this life if he could possibly avoid it.
At night the inmates slept side by side on flock-filled sacks in narrow unheated dormitories. There were men of all ages and boys all mixed together. Some screamed out in their sleep: unintelligible cries which kept Adam awake into the small hours. Lying on his back in the dark, he thought of his mother and then tried not to because it hurt to remember her when she was dead. But blocking her out of his mind made him feel guilty – it felt as though he was killing her a second time. He remembered what the children in his street said about the dead: touching them stopped you dreaming of them. That’s why the old midwife who lived above the Cricketers was paid to lay out the corpse; that’s why bereaved families stopped the clocks and kept candlelit vigils around the body while the neighbours came by and paid their respects. But Adam’s father had refused to do any of this. He’d refused to employ the midwife; he’d shut the door on his neighbours. And as a result Adam had never seen his mother dead; he’d never had the chance to say goodbye.
Adam blamed his father for his mother’s death and for abandoning him in the workhouse. He was angry with his father, angrier than he had ever been with anyone in his whole life, and yet he longed for his father to return and take him away as he’d promised. But he heard nothing. It was as if he had been forgotten, walled up and left to rot like the Frenchman in the iron mask in the story that his mother had read to him the year before from a book that she’d bought second-hand from the barrow man.
In the workhouse only the birds were free, able to escape. Adam looked up through the skylights in the workroom and saw them circling overhead and remembered an autumn evening years and years before when his mother had come and woken him. He was sleepy and she had carried him down the stairs and out of the door and pointed up into the misty sky where he could make out the shapes of hundreds of low-flying swallows, calling to one another as they flew over.
‘Where are they going?’ he’d asked.
‘To Africa where it’s warm. They’ll be back in the spring. Aren’t they wonderful, Adam?’ she’d