He paid all my doctor’s bills as a child. There was no

National Health Service then. I’d’ve died but for him.

I won’t go against what he stood for. I won’t.

CHAPTER 9

London, 1860 –

LOUIS WILKENING felt like a Teutonic titan,

a warrior colossus bestriding the seas as the Friedhelm,

which had brought him safely from Hamburg,

sailed down the Thames towards the Port of London.

He stood up on deck, where he also slept, as the city

where he would make his fortune came into view.

Louis carried youth and hope, impatience and a knife

used to slaughter pigs and slit the throats of chickens,

and he wore clogs carved by the village cobbler

out of a limb of birch found on his dead father’s farm but

no jacket, for he had sold it on board to buy bread,

no coppers weighing down the pockets of his trousers,

no photographs of family for none had ever been taken,

no plans to write back for he had never held a pen,

no English words except Hello, Gutbye and How you are?

no doubts about the future when starvation was the past.

When the Friedhelm dropped anchor at Royal Victoria Dock

so too did his heart – there was no looking back.

A young outlander determined to conquer England,

Louis rolled up his sleeves to look for work.

ROBBED of his clogs, rats chewed his toes, bats

hung upside down from the eaves of the wharf ’s arches,

a battalion of lice squirmed in his scalp, he cursed,

clambered up, surveyed the stinking, urine-stained

mass of human despair escaping the rain: mothers,

babies, children of the streets, cripples, drunks,

the insane, blind, ancient, contagious, dying, dead.

He had barely slept in weeks, not safe, but his eyes

kept closing. He could do anything, he’d begged

bosses with his eyes, except – speak the language.

He stole a bagel, brandy-ball, penny pie,

and one heaven-sent slice of mouth-watering spiced cake.

In the end he succumbed to the oldest trade

and sold himself – for three beers in a tavern.

Welcome to London, Louis.

Welcome to England, your Garden of Eden.

THE ASYLUM for the Houseless Poor

slid back the bolts of its great oak doors to Louis

and his ilk only when morning threatened to find each one

a glassy-eyed, foetal-shaped block of ice.

Africans, Chinamen, Lascars, Irish, Scots, English –

the pauperised in the largest city in the world.

Close to the blazing stove Louis felt his bones thaw,

with hot tea inside full sentences formed in his mind,

for the first time in weeks he was lucid.

From an old German seaman at his side, he took advice.

This was an angry, savage, hungry city, he was told,

where very few struck gold. Stick to your own.

The German Society of Benevolence shaved the vermin

from his head, set his hair and foul clothes alight

(how he sobbed when his humilation turned to ash),