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Street Child
Berlie Doherty
Unforgettable tale of an orphan in Victorian London, based on the boy whose plight inspired Dr Barnardo to found his famous children’s homes.When his mother dies, Jim Jarvis is left all alone in London. He is sent to the workhouse but quickly escapes, choosing a hard life on the streets of the city over the confines of the workhouse walls.Struggling to survive, Jim finally finds some friends… only to be snatched away and made to work for the remorselessly cruel Grimy Nick, constantly guarded by his vicious dog, Snipe.Will Jim ever manage to be free?
Copyright (#uf2bc2de8-aee5-5bf9-b33a-15cce1a74f3a)
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton
First published by HarperCollins Children’s Books 1995
This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2016
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Berlie Doherty’s website address is
www.berliedoherty.com (http://www.berliedoherty.com)
Text copyright © Berlie Doherty 1993
Why You’ll Love This Book copyright © Julia Golding 2009
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Cover illustration © Giodarno Poloni 2016
Berlie Doherty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007311255
Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007397631
Version: 2016-06-14
For Hilda Cotterill
With thanks to the children of Lynne Healy’s class at Dobcroft Junior School in Sheffield, who helped me with their advice and enthusiasm, and to Priscilla Hodgson, Deborah Walters, Mike Higginbottom, the Barnardo Library, Dickens House, The Ellesmere Port Boat Museum and Sheffield Libraries, who all helped me with their knowledge.
CONTENTS
Cover (#ua2a8040c-64fd-5c54-95b6-88cc17cc8ef4)
Title Page (#ue3c311a3-4532-571d-a5c5-c8a48bffaeca)
Copyright
Dedication (#u4b4c2711-7499-5dc0-85b8-b6954223bb48)
Why You’ll Love This Book by Julia Golding
Tell me Your Story, Jim
Chapter One – The Shilling Pie
Chapter Two – The Stick Man
Chapter Three – Rosie and Judd
Chapter Four – The Workhouse
Chapter Five – Behind Bars
Chapter Six – Tip
Chapter Seven – The Wild Thing
Chapter Eight – The Carpet-Beaters
Chapter Nine – The Jaw of the Iron Dog
Chapter Ten – Lame Betsy
Chapter Eleven – The Spitting Crow
Chapter Twelve – Shrimps
Chapter Thirteen – The Lily
Chapter Fourteen – The Waterman’s Arms
Chapter Fifteen – Josh
Chapter Sixteen – Boy in Pain
Chapter Seventeen – The Monster Weeps
Chapter Eighteen – You Can Do It, Bruvver
Chapter Nineteen – Away
Chapter Twenty – The Green Caravan
Chapter Twenty-One – Circus Boy
Chapter Twenty-Two – On the Run Again
Chapter Twenty-Three– Shrimps Again
Chapter Twenty-Four – Looking for a Doctor
Chapter Twenty-Five – The Ragged School
Chapter Twenty-Six – Goodbye, Bruvver
Chapter Twenty-Seven – Barnie
The End of the Story
More Than a Story
About the Author
By the same author
About the Publisher
Why You’ll Love This Book By Julia Golding (#uf2bc2de8-aee5-5bf9-b33a-15cce1a74f3a)
It could’ve been you – that might be the slogan on the movie poster if this story of an ordinary boy up against impossible odds was put on to the big screen. Street Child does something quite extraordinary. It dissolves the gap between just reading about the poverty in Victorian London and makes you live it. This is no dry history lesson, but an adventure into the dark underbelly of those times. Within these pages, you will find monsters and heroes, comedy and tragedy, all set against the backdrop of the scary docklands of London. As I read Berlie Doherty’s brilliant and moving book, I was constantly challenged. How would I have fared if I had been left an orphan with no money or friends to help me? Where would I have gone for love and help? What would you have done?
This is the crushing fate that the main character, Jim Jarvis, faces when his mother dies. He journeys through the horrors of the workhouse, finds brief happiness in a fragile existence helping a street seller and comes to a state close to slavery working on a coal boat where he is treated worse than his master’s dog. The book is full of vivid characters, some of whom could be plucked from a horror novel: Grimy Nick and his dog Snipe, Shrimps, the boy named for the toes showing through the end of his boots, the glittering but treacherous Juglini circus troupe. Acts of kindness – a hug from a woman in the workhouse, Rosie’s care for Jim, Josh on the Newcastle collier ship, the boys tending to a dying friend – these are rare moments that shine out from the darkness like diamonds in a shovel of coal.
But what really works is that you can’t help but fall in behind Jim, rooting for him to find a way out of the traps continually sprung on him. He’s not sweet – don’t expect an angelic Oliver Twist waiting for rescue. He’s a child of the streets with all the savvy that goes with that hard life. But you’ll feel for his overwhelming loneliness and when finally – thankfully – someone listens to his story, you’ll want to cheer.
Jim’s story makes you want to go out and change things so others don’t have to go through the same experience, therefore it comes as a shock to realise that he did exist. Maybe not this exact version of Jim, as Berlie Doherty admits, but it is true that Dr Barnado listened to a street child who sketched out a similar tale and then went on to set up the Barnado’s homes that offered such children a refuge.
Over a hundred years later, the homes still exist. But so does Jim. Maybe close to where you live in the stairwell of a housing estate, or further off in a slum in a developing country, there are millions of Jims and his sisters living today. I felt it was important to listen to Jim’s tale, but it did also make me wonder how many untold stories there are out there and what we can do about it. What do you think?
Julia Golding
Julia Golding is the author of over 13 novels for young people, including The Diamond of Drury Lane, a historical novel about a feisty orphan called Cat Royal, living in an Eighteenth century London theatre, which won the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize and the Nestlé Smarties Gold Medal in 2006. Before becoming a writer, she worked as a diplomat in Poland and later became a policy adviser for Oxfam, somehow fitting in a doctorate at Oxford and three children along the way.
TELL ME YOUR STORY, JIM (#uf2bc2de8-aee5-5bf9-b33a-15cce1a74f3a)
Jim Jarvis. Want to know who that is? It’s me! That’s my name. Only thing I’ve got, is my name. And I’ve give it away to this man. Barnie, his name is, or something like that. He told me once, only I forgot it, see, and I don’t like to ask him again. “Mister”, I call him, to his face, that is. But there’s a little space in my head where his name is Barnie.
He keeps asking me things. He wants to know my story, that’s what he tells me. My story, mister? What d’you want to know that for? Ain’t much of a story, mine ain’t. And he looks at me, all quiet.
“It is, Jim,” he says. “It’s a very special story. It changed my life, child, meeting you.”
Funny that, ain’t it? Because he changed my life, Barnie did.
I can’t believe my luck, and that’s a fact. Here I am with food in my belly, and good hot food at that, and plenty more where that came from, he says. I’m wearing clothes that smell nice and that don’t have no holes in, neither. And I’m in this room where there’s a great big fire burning, and plenty more logs to put on it so it won’t just die off. There’s just me and him. The other boys are upstairs in their hammocks, all cosy in the big room we sleep in. And downstairs there’s just me and him, special.
I want to laugh. I’m so full of something that I want to laugh out loud, and I stuff my fist in my mouth to stop myself.
Barnie gives me that look, all quiet. “Just tell me your story.”
My story! Well. I creep back to the fire for this. I hug my knees. I close my eyes, to shut out the way the flames dance about and the way his shadow and mine climb up and down the walls. I shut out the sound of the fire sniffing like a dog at a rat-hole. And I think I can hear someone talking, very softly. It’s a woman’s voice, talking to a child. I think she’s talking to me.
“Mister,” I says, just whispering so’s I don’t chase the voice away. “Can I tell you about my ma?”
Chapter One (#ulink_b2c27991-f8a2-51a6-ab2f-183352e1d9c9)
THE SHILLING PIE (#ulink_b2c27991-f8a2-51a6-ab2f-183352e1d9c9)
Jim Jarvis hopped about on the edge of the road, his feet blue with cold. Passing carriages flung muddy snow up into his face and his eyes, and the swaying horses slithered and skidded as they were whipped on by their drivers. At last Jim saw his chance and made a dash for it through the traffic. The little shops in the dark street all glowed yellow with their hanging lamps, and Jim dodged from one light to the next until he came to the shop he was looking for. It was the meat pudding shop. Hungry boys and skinny dogs hovered round the doorway, watching for scraps. Jim pushed past them, his coin as hot as a piece of coal in his fist. He could hear his stomach gurgling as the rich smell of hot gravy met him.
Mrs Hodder was trying to sweep the soggy floor and sprinkle new straw down when Jim ran in.
“You can run right out again,” she shouted to him. “If I’m not sick of little boys today!”
“But I’ve come to buy a pudding!” Jim told her. He danced up and down, opening and closing his fist so his coin winked at her like an eye.
She prised it out of his hand and bit it. “Where did you find this, little shrimp?” she asked him. “And stop your dancing! You’re making me rock like a ship at sea!”
Jim hopped on to a dry patch of straw. “Ma’s purse. And she said there won’t be no more, because that’s the last shilling we got, and I know that’s true because I emptied it for her. So make it a good one, Mrs Hodder. Make it big, and lots of gravy!”
He ran home with the pie clutched to his chest, warming him through its cloth wrapping. Some of the boys outside the shop tried to chase him, but he soon lost them in the dark alleys, his heart thudding in case they caught him and stole the pie.
At last he came to his home, in a house so full of families that he sometimes wondered how the floors and walls didn’t come tumbling down with the weight and the noise of them all. He ran up the stairs and burst into the room his own family lived in. He was panting with triumph and excitement.
“I’ve got the pie! I’ve got the pie!” he sang out.
“Ssssh!” His sister Emily was kneeling on the floor, and she turned round to him sharply. “Ma’s asleep, Jim.”
Lizzie jumped up and ran to him, pulling him over towards the fire so they could spread out the pudding cloth on the hearth. They broke off chunks of pastry and dipped them into the brimming gravy.
“What about Ma?” asked Lizzie.
“She won’t want it,” Emily said. “She never eats.”
Lizzie pulled Jim’s hand back as he was reaching out for another chunk. “But the gravy might do her good,” she suggested. “Just a little taste. Stop shovelling it down so fast, Jim. Let Ma have a bit.”
She turned round to her mother’s pile of bedding and pulled back the ragged cover.
“Ma,” she whispered. “Try a bit. It’s lovely!”
