Adventures of Working Men. From the Notebook of a Working Surgeon

“Yes,” I replied, “I read it all yesterday morning. Terrible affair.”

“Awful, only it might have been so much worse. There sit down, doctor. You know I used to have a canal boat – monkey boat we called ’em, because they are so long and thin.”

“Yes, I know it,” I said.

“Ah, and I’ve had a load of powder scores o’ times both in monkey boats and lighters on the Thames. You ain’t in a hurry to-day, doctor?”

“Not particularly,” I said.

“That’s good,” said the old fellow. “Asthma’s better. Look here, doctor, I might have been blown up just as those poor chaps was at any time, and I nearly was once.”

“What, blown up by powder!”

“To be sure I was. Look here, I take my long clay pipe off the table – so; I pulls the lead tobacco box towards me – so; I fills my pipe-bowl – so; and then I pulls open this neat little box, made like somebody’s first idea of a chest of drawers, takes out one of these little splints of wood, rubs it on the table, no good – on the floor, no good – on the sole of my boot, no good; but when I gives it a snap on the side of a box – fizz, there’s a bright little light, the wood burns, and I am holding it to the bowl of my pipe, drawing in the smoke and puffing it out again, looking at you pleasantly through the thin blue cloud, and – how are you?

“Times is altered since I was a lad, I can tell you. Why, as you know, that there match wouldn’t light not nowhere but on the box, so as to be safe and keep children from playing with ’em and burning themselves, or people treading on ’em and setting fire to places; and what I’ve got to say is this, that it’s a precious great convenience – so long as you’ve got the box with you – and a strange sight different to what it was when I was a boy.

“Now I’ll just tell you how it was then, whether you know or whether you don’t know. Lor’ bless you, I’ve seen my old aunt do it lots o’ times. There used to be a round, flat tin box, not quite so big as the top of your hat; and the lid on it used to be made into a candlestick, with a socket to hold a dip. Then into this box they used to stuff a lot of old cotton rag, and set light to it – burn it till it was all black, and the little sparkles was all a-running about in it, same as you’ve seen ’em chasing one another in a bit o’ burnt paper. Down upon it would come a piece o’ flat tin and smother all the sparkles out, ’cos no air could get to ’em; and then they’d put on the lid, and there was your tinder-box full o’ tinder.

“Next, you know, you used to have a piece o’ soft iron, curled round at each end, so as you took hold on it, and held it like a knuckle-duster; and also you had a bit o’ common flint, such as you might pick up in any road as wasn’t paved with granite; and, lastly, you had a bundle – not a box, mind, but a bundle – of matches, and them was thin splints o’ wood, like pipe lights, pointed at the ends same’s wood palings, and dipped in brimstone. Them’s what the poor people used to sell about the streets, you know – a dozen of ’em spread out and tied like a lady’s fan – in them days, and made ’em theirselves, they did. A piece o’ even splitting wood and a penn’orth o’ brimstone was a stock in trade then, on which many a poor creetur lived – helped by a bit o’ begging.

“Say, then, you wanted a light – mind, you know, those was the days when the sojers used to carry the musket they called Brown Bess, as went off with a flint and steel, long before the percushin cap times – well, say you wanted a light, you laid your match ready, took your tinder-box off the chimneypiece, opened it, took the bit o’ flint in one hand and the steel or iron in the other, and at it you went – nick, nick, nick, nick, nick, with the sparks flying like fun, till one of ’em dropped on your black tinder, and seemed to lie there like a tiny star. You were in luck’s way if you did that at the end of five minutes; and then you made yourself into a pair o’ human bellows, and blew away at that spark, till it began to glow and get bigger, when you held to it one of the brimstone matches, and that began to melt and burn blue, and flamed up; when the chances was as the stifling stuff got up your nose, and down your throat, and you choked, and sneezed, and puffed the match out, and had to begin all over again.

“Well, that’s a long rigmarole about old ways of getting a light; but I mention it because we’d got one o’ them set-outs on board, and that’s the way we used to work. You know, after that came little bottles in which you dipped a match, and lit it that way – in fosseros, I think you call it. Next came what was a reg’lar wonder to people then – lucifers, which in them days was flat-headed matches, which you put between a piece of doubled-up stuff, like a little book cover, and pulled ’em out smart. Soon after, some one brought out them as you rubbed on the bottoms of the box on sand-paper, and they called them congreves; but by degrees that name dropped out, and we got back to lucifers for name, and now folks never says nothing but matches.

“In the days I’m telling you about, I was capen of a lighter – a big, broad, flat barge, working on the Thames; not one of your narrow monkey boats as run on the canals, though it was the blowing up of the Tilbury the other day as put me in mind of what I’m going to tell you in my long-winded, roundabout fashion. But I s’pose you ain’t in no hurry, so let me go on in my own way.

“You see, your genuine lighterman ain’t a lively sort of a chap, the natur’ of his profession won’t lot him be; for he’s always doing things in a quiet, slow, easy-going fashion. Say he’s in the river: well, he tides up and he tides down, going as slow as you like, and only giving a sweep now and then with a long oar, to keep the barge’s head right, and stay her from coming broadside on to the piers o’ the bridges.

“Well, that’s slow work, says you; and so it is. And it ain’t no better when your bargeman gets into a canal, for then he’s only towed by a horse as ain’t picked out acause he’s a lovely Arab as gallops fifty mile an hour – one and a half or two’s about his cut, and that ain’t lively. As for your new-fangled doing with your steam tugs, a-puffing, and a-blowing, and as smoking, like foul chimneys on a foggy day, what I got to say about them is as it’s disgustin’, and didn’t ought to be allowed. Just look at ’em on the river now, a-drawing half-a-dozen barges full o’ coal at once, and stirring up the river right to the bottom! Ah! there warn’t not no such doings when I was young, and a good job too.

“Well, as I was going to tell you, I was capen of the Betsy– as fine a lighter as you’d ha’ found on the river in them days, and I’d got two hands aboard with me. There was Billy Jinks – Gimlet we used to call him, because he squinted so. I never did see a fellow as could squint like Billy could. He’d got a werry good pair o’ eyes, on’y they was odd uns and didn’t fit. They didn’t belong to him, you know, and was evidently put in his head in a hurry when he were made, and he couldn’t do nothing with ’em. Them eyes of his used to do just whatever they liked, and rolled and twissened about in a way as you never did see; and I’ve often thought since as it was them eyes o’ Billy’s as made him take to drink – and drink he could, like a fish.

“T’other chap was Bob Solly – Toeboy they used to call him on the river, acause of his lame foot and the thick sole he used to wear to make one leg same length as t’other; and perhaps, after all, it was Bob’s toe as made him such a drinking chap, and not the example as Gimlet set him. Anyhow, that there don’t matter; only when I’m a-telling a thing I likes to be exact, as one used to be with the inwoices o’ the goods one had to deliver up or down the river.

“Well, I was going up and down the river with all sorts o’ goods, from ships, and wharves, and places – sundry things, you know, for I never had no dealings with coals – and one day, down the river, we loaded up with barrels off a wharf down by Tilbury – not the Tilbury as was blowed up the other day, ’cause that was only a monkey boat, but Tilbury down the river, you know; where there’s the fort, and soldiers, and magazines, and all them sort o’ things.

“Loaded up we were, and the little barrels all lying snug, and covered up with tarpaulins, and us a-waiting for the tide to come – for we was going up to Dumphie’s Wharf, up there at Isleworth – when Bob Solly comes up to me, and he says, says he —

“‘Guv’nor,’ he says, ‘we ain’t got no taties.’

“‘Well, Bob,’ I says, ‘then hadn’t you better get some?’

“‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I will.’

“And then Gimlet, who had been standing by, he says —

“‘And we ain’t got no herrins.’

“The long and the short on it was that them two chaps goes ashore to buy some herrins and some taties, so as we could cook ’em aboard in the cabin, where we bargees reg’lar kind o’ lived, you know.

“I ought to ha’ knowed better; but I’d got an old Weekly Dispatch, as was the big paper in them days, and I was a-spelling it over about the corrynation o’ King George the Fourth, and the jolly row there’d been up by Westminster Abbey when Queen Carryline went up to the doors and said as she wanted to be crowned too. I might ha’ knowed what ud follow, but I was so wrapped up in that there old noosepaper, not being a fast reader, that I never thought about it; and consequently, when it was about low tide, and time for us to go, them two chaps was nowhere.

“‘Seen anything o’ my mates?’ I hollers to a chap ashore, for I was now out in the stream.

“‘They’re up at the Blue Posties,’ he says. ‘Shall I fetch ’em?’

“‘Yes, and be hanged to ’em!’ I says; and I goes down to the cabin, vexed like, gets hold o’ the flint and steel and my pipe, and was going to fill it, when I remembered what we took aboard, and I put ’em all back in the cupboard.

“Quarter of an hour arter, just as the tide was beginning to turn, them two chaps comes aboard, reg’lar tossicated, not to say drunk, and werry wild I was, and made ’em go down into the cabin, thinking as they’d sleep it off; and then, casting loose, I put out one of the sweeps, and we began to float gently up the river.

“I got on very comfortably that afternoon, never fouling any of the ships lying in the Pool, getting well under London Bridge, and old Blackfriars with its covered-in seats like small domes of St. Paul’s cut in half, and so on and under Westminster Bridge, which was very much like the one at Blackfriars, and on and on, till the tide was at its height, when I let go the anchors and went to look at them two chaps; when, instead of being all fight, I found as the money as ought to have bought herrins and taties had gone in a bottle of stuff which one of ’em had smuggled in under his jacket, and they was wuss than ever.

“Of course I was precious wild; but as it’s waste o’ words to talk to men in that state, I saved it up for them, went forward, and rolled myself up in my jacket, pulled a bit o’ tarpaulin over me, wished for a pipe, and then began to think.

“Now, I suppose that I got thinking too hard, as I sat there looking at the lights, blinking here and there ashore, as the tide ran hissing down by the sides of the barge; for after a time I got too tired to think, and I must have gone off fast asleep, for I got dreaming of all sorts of horrible things through being in an uncomfortable position, and among others – I suppose all on account of twenty ton of gunpowder I had on board – I dreamed as it had blown up, and I was in our little boat, rowing about on the river amongst burnt wood and bits of barge and powder barrels, picking up the pieces of myself.

“Yes, rowing about and picking up the pieces of myself; because, I said to myself, I ought to be buried decently, and not be left to go floating about up and down with the tide. I had a hard job, I remember – now fishing up a foot, now a leg, and now pieces of my body. How it was I never seemed to ask myself, that I could be rowing about and fishing myself up; but there it was, and I got quite cross at last because my head gave me so much trouble: for every time I reached at it with one of the oars it bobbed under water, and came up again, and rolled over and over, and seemed to laugh at and wink at me, till, in a passion, I gave it a heavy tap with the oar, and it went under again, and came up on the other side of the boat, bobbing up and down like a big apple.

“‘Now what’s the good of making a fool of yourself?’ I says. ‘Why don’t you come in the boat along with the rest of the pieces?’

“Then it opened its mouth, and says out loud —

“‘I’m as thirsty as a fish.’

“Now, the idea of that head of mine being thirsty, when it was swallowing water out there in the river, so tickled me that I began to laugh, and that laughing woke me, all of a cold shiver, to find it very dark, and these words seeming still to be buzzing in my ears —

“‘I’m as thirsty as a fish.’

“What followed seems to me now just like some horrible nightmare; for as I sat there, in the forepart of the boat, I could just make out Bob Solly and Gimlet bending over a little keg, evidently as drunk as owls; and I saw in a flash that they’d been busy with an augur, and bored a hole in it, thinking it was spirit of some kind, when it was fine grain powder.

“What did I do? Nothing; but come all over of a cold sweat, the big drops ran down my face, and I felt as if I couldn’t move. I knew well enough what they’d done – they’d pulled up the tarpaulin, and dragged out a cask, and were going as they thought to drink; and as I saw them struggle along towards the cabin, I thought of my dream, and felt that the barge would be blown to pieces.

“I wanted to jump overboard, and swim for my life; and even then I remember smiling, and wondering whether I should go in a boat and pick myself up. Then I tried to go after them, to shout, to do something; but the bones seemed to have been taken out of my body, and for the first time in my life I knew what it was to be in a horrible state of fear.

“That went, though, at last, and I stood up shivering and made for the side. I looked at our distance from shore – about fifty yards – and kicked off my boots. I raised my hands, and in another moment I should have plunged overboard, when something seemed to say to me ‘You coward!’ and I stopped short.

“Of course: I was capen, and if I deserted the barge up she must go, and Lord help the poor people ashore.

“But if I stayed?

“Well, I might save ’em.

“I ran aft along the side of the barge, feeling sure that it was all a dream, for the men were out of sight; but when I reached the cabin hatchway I heard words as chilled me right through.

“‘It’s awful queer, Bob,’ Gimlet hiccupped; ‘the stuff’s running out all over my hands, and yet it ain’t wet, and it tastes salt.’

“‘We’ll soon see what it’s made on, lad,’ says Gimlet, thickly; and then I had the old nightmare feeling come over me, and couldn’t stir – couldn’t speak, only listen, with the thought of twenty ton of powder aboard and there, with the loose powder running all over them, was my mate Gimlet busy with tinder-box, flint, and steel.