Tattycoram by Audrey Thomas Read Free Book Online

elaborate gesture, “is me ’umble ’ome” — he paused — “and now yours.”
    We entered a narrow hallway, where he placed his hat on a hall tree and went to the foot of the stairs.
    â€œKate,” he bellowed, “she’s here!”

4
    I was never a servant but in that one household, so I can’t really say what it was like elsewhere, but through talking to other servants, it seems to me that the Dickens household was very different, chiefly because of Mr. Dickens, who was unlike any man I have met before or since. For one thing, he shut himself up in his study half the day, writing books. I suppose I knew that real people wrote books — weren’t Matthew, Mark, Luke and John real people? wasn’t John Bunyan? — but I assumed they were all dead. It seemed such a queer occupation for a man, to sit by himself for hours, making things up. And to get paid — paid handsomely — for what amounted to daydreaming. Nobody else thought it strange, quite the opposite in fact, and the house catered to his peculiar obsession. He was never to be disturbed when he was writing, and we must all go about on tiptoe. Once Mr. Dickens heard me singing as I was hanging up clothes in the garden (his study was at the back). Suddenly a window flew open and he shouted down at me, “Beware of blackbirds! Stop that racket!” I was so startled, I dropped the sheet and had to rinse it all over again.
    But once he had finished work for the day, he was a different man, noisy, full of fun, bellowing and teasing or presiding at dinners where the sauce was always laughter. He could imitatejust about anyone: soldiers, sailors, barrow men, the Prime Minister even. He loved to pretend he was a drunken district commissioner in some far-off place, India or Africa, giving the toast to the Queen or to Absent Friends, mixing up his words and finally sliding under the table. When I was asked to help Cook serve and remove, I had a terrible time to keep from laughing.
    He loved practical jokes. One day he came to the back door dressed as an old Jew, in a long, dirty overcoat and with a long, straggly beard. I recognized him at once, but he gave me a look, and so I kept quiet while Cook chased him away with her rolling pin, shouting she’d “old rag” him, and how in mercy’s name did he get past the gate at the end of the road? Oh, it was so comical; I had a pain in my side from laughing so hard.
    When Cook found out that she had been hoodwinked, she was not pleased and threatened to give in her notice. I decided it would be wise not to mention that I had seen through the disguise (his eyes gave him away, squint though he would), but it did bring home to me, yet again, how our dress defines us. At the hospital we were more than four hundred separate young souls, with hair in every range of colour and eyes of every hue. Yet to the fashionable ladies who came to see us on Sundays, we were just “boy foundling” or “girl foundling.” That was our identity.
    And the fat young man who guarded the gate into Guildford Street loved to whisper to me, “Orfink, Orfink, oh yes, we knows
you
!” every time I passed in or out. He knew I had come from the hospital; he knew I would always wear that uniform, whatever my clothing. He had a fat sister who brought him his dinner from the public house in Lamb’s Conduit Street. Mr. Dickens enjoyed talking to him. “I declare, that boy sweats gravy!” he said, and — I did not understand this at the time —“I conjure them up and then, by God, they appear in real life! I must be more careful.”
    The house in Doughty Street consisted of four floors, the household of eight persons: Mr. and Mrs. Dickens; Mr. Dickens’s younger brother Fred; the Dickens’s little boy Charley, who was not yet eight months old; Cook; the nursemaid, who left about a month after I arrived; William, the groom, who