Shadows of the Workhouse

put her to bed.
    For the next three months, Peggy hunted for Frank every day. She always expected to find him, but never did. She asked everyone: “Where’s Frank?” and was told that he had been transferred to the big boys’ section, but she did not understand. She developed the habit of sitting alone in a corner and rocking herself. A nurse, who knew that this was a particularly frightening development in a lonely, insecure child, tried to comfort her. But Peggy would not be comforted. Each lonely night, she sucked her thumb and rocked herself and cried for Frank to come to her. But he didn’t come.
    As time passed, she stopped looking for Frank and asked for him less, until eventually she stopped asking. It was assumed that she had forgotten all about him.
    It was to be nine years before brother and sister saw each other again, and by that time they did not recognise each other.

BILLINGSGATE

    At the age of seven, Frank had entered an all-male world of petty rules, upheld by harsh, uncompromising discipline and gratuitous tyranny. Many of the workhouse officers were men who had been brought up in a workhouse themselves during the nineteenth century, when conditions for paupers were simply appalling. A child had to have a very strong constitution to survive the brutality, the work, the cold, and near-starvation. These men knew of no other way of life, and to them it was only natural to impose the same sort of regime on the boys in their charge.
    Frank was immediately set to work on one of the numerous tasks assigned to paupers: cleaning potatoes, cutting cabbage, scrubbing out the huge cooking vats (only the smallest boys could get inside them), burnishing the stoves, cleaning the brass, and hosing down the vast stone floors of the kitchen – and woe betide any boy who got himself wet! The list was endless and the day long, starting as it did at 6 a.m. The boys also went to the local council school, so the work had to be done before or after school. Frank found that if his tasks were not finished before he went to school, he got a beating from the officer in charge, and if he stayed behind to finish the job, he got a beating from the schoolmaster for being late!
    Small boys quickly learned to hide their tears. They knew that any sign of weakness would be seized upon by a bigger boy and mercilessly exploited. Bullying, constant intimidation and jeering were the only response a smaller boy would gain from tears.
    Once, and once only, Frank asked an officer where Peggy was. The man must have told one of the older boys, perhaps maliciously, knowing what would happen. The same day, in the washroom, a chorus went up. “Peggy, Peggy, who’s Peggy?”
    “Peggy’s his tart. What a fart!”
    “Peg, Peg, peg your nose, what a pong!”
    “Peggy’s a stink.”
    “He has to put a clothes peg on his nose ’afore he can touch ’er.”
    Frank burst into tears, and a big boy came and pushed him over onto the slippery floor.
    “Garn, you ain’t got no tart, yer titch,” said the boy, squeezing Frank’s testicles so hard that he screamed with pain.
    The officer came in and the big boy swiftly merged into the crowd, looking innocent.
    The officer looked round and asked no questions. “Get up,” he said curtly to Frank, “get washed and go to the dormitory.”
    Frank crept into bed and cried, as he did every night, for his mother and his sister. He had learned to make no sound when crying, so as not to attract attention, and to keep very still, so that he seemed to be asleep. But he often lay awake for hours, his heart bursting.
    During these wakeful hours he often – nearly always, in fact – heard movements and soft footsteps, grunting and puffing and cursing sounds, as iron bedsteads rattled and straw mattresses squeaked. Each dormitory had an officer in charge who had himself once been a workhouse boy. The officer slept in a closed cubicle at the end of rows of beds, and each night a boy would slip quietly out of bed and go into the cubicle.
    What can one expect if a crowd of boys are thrown together, with no escape and no female influence? All the boys were lonely. All of them were motherless. They had only each other in whom to find comfort and, let us hope, a little happiness because for them life would be short. From 1914 to 1918 the older boys in Frank’s dormitory – those born in the 1890s – were destined to be sent straight from the workhouses of England to the trenches of France, to die as