"Archer, Jeffrey - As the Crow Flies v0.9(txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Archer Jeffrey)

Charlie 1900-1919 1
Becky 1918-1920 95
Daphne 1918-1921 209
Colonel Hamilton1920-1922 253
Charlie 1919-1926 293
Mrs. Trentham 1919-1927 337
Charlie 1926-1945 373
Daniel 1931-1947 439
Mrs. Trentham 1938-1948 493
Becky 1947-1950 535
Cathy 1947-1950 607
Charlie 1950-1964 655
Becky 1964-1970 761



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CHARLIE
1900-1919
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CHAPTER 1


"I don't offer you these for tuppence," my granpa would shout, holding up a cabbage in both hands, "I don't offer 'em for a penny, not even a ha'penny. No, I'll give 'em away for a farthin'."

Those were the first words I can remember. Even before I had learned to walk, my eldest sister used to dump me in an orange box on the pavement next to Granpa's pitch just to be sure I could start my apprenticeship early.

"Only stakin' 'is claim," Granpa used to tell the customers as he pointed at me in the wooden box. In truth, the first word I ever spoke was "Granpa," the second "farthing," and I could repeat his whole sales patter word for word by my third birthday. Not that any of my family could be that certain of the exact day on which I was born, on account of the fact that my old man had spent the night in jail and my mother had died even before I drew breath.

Granpa thought it could well have been a Saturday, felt it most likely the month had been January, was confident the year was 1900, and knew it was in the reign of Queen Victoria. So we settled on Saturday, 20 January 1900.

I never knew my mother because, as I explained, she died on the day I was born. "Childbirth," our local priest called it, but I didn't really understand what he was on about until several years later when I came up against the problem again. Father O'Malley never stopped telling me that she was a saint if ever he'd seen one. My father who couldn't have been described as a saint by anyone worked on the docks by day, lived in the pub at night and came home in the early morning because it was the only place he could fall asleep without being disturbed.

The rest of my family was made up of three sisters Sal, the eldest, who was five and knew when she was born because it was in the middle of the night and had kept the old man awake; Grace who was three and didn't cause anyone to lose sleep; and redheaded Kitty who was eighteen months and never stopped bawling.

The head of the family was Granpa Charlie, who I was named after. He slept in his own room on the ground floor of our home in Whitechapel Road, not only because he was the oldest but because he paid the rent always. The rest of us were herded all together in the room opposite. We had two other rooms on the ground floor, a sort of kitchen and what most people would have called a large cupboard, but which Grace liked to describe as the parlor.

There was a lavatory in the garden no grass which we shared with an Irish family who lived on the floor above us. They always seemed to go at three o'clock in the morning.

Granpa who was a costermonger by trade worked the pitch on the corner of Whitechapel Road. Once I was able to escape from my orange box and ferret around among the other barrows I quickly discovered that he was reckoned by the locals to be the finest trader in the East End.

My dad, who as I have already told you was a docker by trade, never seemed to take that much interest in any of us and though he could sometimes earn as much as a pound a week, the money always seemed to end up in the Black Bull, where it was spent on pint after pint of ale and gambled away on games of cribbage or dominoes in the company of our next-door neighbor, Bert Shorrocks, a man who never seemed to speak, just grunt.

In fact, if it hadn't been for Granpa I wouldn't even have been made to attend the local elementary school in Jubilee Street, and "attend" was the right word, because I didn't do a lot once I'd got there, other than bang the lid of my little desk and occasionally pull the pigtails of "Posh Porky," the girl who sat in front of me. Her real name was Rebecca Salmon and she was the daughter of Dan Salmon who owned the baker's shop on the corner of Brick Lane. Posh Porky knew exactly when and where she was born and never stopped reminding us all that she was nearly a year younger than anyone else in the class.

I couldn't wait for the bell to ring at four in the afternoon when class would end and I could bang my lid for the last time before running all the way down the Whitechapel Road to help out on the barrow.