Alexander Irvine - From the Bottom Up

The world in which I first found myself was a world of hungry people.

My earliest sufferings were the sufferings of hungerphysical hunger. It was not an unusual sight to see the children of our neighbourhood scratching the offal in the dunghills and the gutterways for scraps of meat, vegetables, and refuse. Many times I have done it myself.

My father was a shoemaker; but something had gone wrong with the making of shoes. Improvements in machinery are pushed out into the commercial world, and explanations follow. A new shoemaker had arriveda machineand my father had to content himself with the mending of the work that the machine produced. It took him about ten years to find out what had happened to him.

There were twelve children in our family, five of whom died in childhood. Those of us who were left were sent out to work as soon as we were able. I began at the age of nine. My first work was peddling newspapers. I remember my first night in the streets. Food was scarce in the home, and I begged to be allowed to do what other boys were doing. But I was not quite so well prepared. I began in the winter. I was shoeless, hatless, and in rags. My contribution to the family treasury amounted to about fifty cents a week; but it looked very large to me then. It was my first earning.

Our home was a two-room cottage. Over one room was a little loft, my bedroom for fourteen years. The cottage floor was hard, dried mud. There was a wide, open fireplace. Several holes made in the wall by displacing of bricks here and there contained my father's old pipes. A few ornaments, yellow with the smoke of years, adorned the mantelpiece. At the front window sat my father, and around him his shoemaking tools. Beside the window hung a large cage, made by his own hands, and in which singing thrushes had succeeded one another for twenty years. The walls were whitewashed. There was a little partition that screened the work-bench from the door. It was made of newspapers, and plastered all over it were pictures from the illustrated weeklies. Two or three small dressers contained the crockery ware. A long bench set against the wall, a table, several stools, and two or three creepies constituted the furniture. There was not a chair in the place.

There was a fascination about the winter evenings in that cottage. Scarcely a night passed that did not see some man or woman sitting in the corner waiting for shoes. A candlestick about three feet high, in which burned a large tallow candle, was set in front of my father. My mother was the only one in the house who could read, and she used to read aloud from a story paper called The Weekly Budget. We were never interested in the news. The outside world was shut off from us, and the news consisted of whatever was brought by word of mouth by the folks who had their shoes cobbled; that was interesting. In those long winter evenings, I sat in the corner among the shoes and lasts. On scraps of leather I used to imitate writing, and often I would quietly steal up to my mother and show her these scratchings, and ask her whether they meant anything or not. I thought somehow by accident I would surely get something. My mother merely shook her head and smiled. She taught me many letters of the alphabet, but it took me years to string them together.

My mother had acquired a taste, indeed, it was a craving, for strong drink; and, even from the very small earnings of my father, managed to satisfy it in a small measure, every day, except Sunday. On Sunday there was a change. The cobbler's bench was cleared away, and my mother's beautiful face was surrounded with a halo of spotless, frilled linen.

My father's Sunday mornings were spent in giving the thrush an outing and in cleaning his cage. Neither my father nor mother made any pretensions to religion; but they were strict Sabbatarians. My father never consciously swore, but, within even the limitations of his small vocabulary, he was unfortunate in his selection of phrases. I bounced into the alley one Sunday morning, whistling a Moody and Sankey hymn.

"Shut up yer mouth!" said my father.

"It's a hymn tune," I replied.

"I don't care a damn," replied my father. "It's the Lord's day, and if I hear you whistlin' in it I'll whale the hell out o' ye!"

That was his philosophy, and he lived it. Saturday nights when the town clock struck the hour of midnight, he removed his leather apron, pushed his bench back in the corner, and the work of the week was overand if any one was waiting for his shoes, so much the worse for him. He would wait until the midnight clock struck twelve the next night or take them as they were.

The first tragedy in my life was the death of a pet pigeon. I grieved for days over its disappearance; but one Sunday morning the secret slipped out. Around that neighbourhood there was a custom among the very poor of exchanging samples of their Sunday broth. Three or four samples came to our cottage every Sunday morning. We had meat once a week, and then it was either the hoofs or part of the head of a cow, or the same parts of a sheep or a calf. On this particular occasion, I knew that there was something in our broth that was unusual, and I did not rest until I learned the truth. They had grown tired of nettle broth, and made a change on the pigeon.