Won’t mention the screw’s personal ‘inspections’.

Scramble for old boots on arrival, humiliation

of a scarlet shirt and trousers, shaved, a new name,

(No 121), dining on the delights of bread and gruel.

If I get into a fight, it’s the treadmill grinding cereals

for months. Must learn to bite my lip,

even when they do ask after my ‘Bog-Trotter’ wife.

St Pancras, London, 1890 –

MARY JANE

ONE HUNDRED children in this classroom and still

Miss Carter has to have a go at ‘Mary Jane!’

Then she’s taking the birch out of its jar of water

so’s it’s soft enough to slide across my bare legs.

If I was a lad I’d wallop her back. Some do.

The windows are so high we can’t see out,

and if I have to write down another dictation

on a slate about sunflowers and snails I’ll run

outside and throw myself under an omnibus.

What use is Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic

when Ma can do two of those and has nothing?

Soon as I’m twelve I’m leaving school so’s

she don’t have to work so hard for a pauper’s pittance,

what with silly old Da banged up again in Newgate.

Do Right and Fear Not is our school motto.

Punctuality. Industry. Obedience. Regularity.

Oh yes, I’m that all right, every morning after tea

and bread dripping, sliding down the banisters

to the toilet outside 5 Elm Court, St Pancras.

EMMA

MY HANDS are crab’s claws.

Knuckles just won’t straighten.

Too blind to thread a needle.

Vertebrae’s like a crooked finger.

Knit blankets from old wool.

A Bermondsey trader collects.

The world outside is dangerous:

carriages and savages.

I want to go home.

Should never have wed an Englishman.

Seduced by brass buttons and shiny boots.

He’s got no gumption.

Cost me my ticket to the Pearly Gates.

I’ll burn in Hell.

HENRY

NO PLEASING the narky wife.

Hard to imagine what I saw in her.

Wrinkled: face, neck, hands.

Don’t see the rest, thank God.

Lasses used to scrap over me.

Not been inside for eight years.

Thanks? She don’t speak to me.

Odd jobs. Labouring. Not well.

Liver disease. Turning yellow.

Mary Jane makes dresses.

She brings home the bacon.

The old bat couldn’t give me a son.

Come to think of it –

were the wife what drove me to drink.

MARY JANE

SEBASTIAN Aloysius Burt.

Glassblower – a proper trade.

His mother Bertha shares our lodgings.

That’s how we met.

Ma had a word, ‘He’s not Irish…’

‘Neither is your husband,’ I retorted.

Did she want me to die a spinster?

Want my own little ones.

Got dribbling parents instead.

Seb’s stocky, teetotal, sensible.

His dad died fighting the Zulus.

Single-handedly, he makes it sound.

Walks me up Oxford Street

after morning Mass on Sundays.

Told him I’ve plans to go to Heaven.