Shadows of the Workhouse

on the mantelpiece and stood up. He was very tall, more than six feet, and stood very straight. He walked slowly over to the door and opened it for us, then bowed again slightly as we left.
    Out in the courtyard the air smelled sweet and fresh. A horse-drawn coal cart entered, and a huge man jumped out, lifting a tiny child of about two or three onto the cobbles. The man strode through the courtyard calling in a distinctive and penetrating yodel: “Co-al, co-al,” the second syllables rising a perfect fifth from the first. The long strides of the man took him swiftly through the court and the little boy, running as fast as he could to keep up, tumbled and fell. As he picked himself up, he lifted his fluffy blond head, and in a tiny, piping voice called out: “Co-al, co-al.” A perfect fifth!
    Women came out of many doors and hailed the coal man, who carried a bag, or half a bag, up the stone steps to the balcony where it was required. No one had a real bunker or space to store coal, so small amounts of half a hundredweight had to be bought frequently. Coal fires were to become obsolete due to the 1960s Clean Air legislation, but in the middle fifties they were the only form of heating for most people.
    Inevitably, if you see a person daily in his own home over several months, you will cease to regard him as a patient and come to know him as a person. Treating Mr Collett’s leg ulcers took about half an hour, during which time we talked and, as old people can always remember the distant past more easily than they can remember yesterday, we talked about his early life.
    Mr Collett was not a typical Cockney in appearance, speech or manner. He was much taller than average, and had a slow, thoughtful way about him. His quiet dignity and formal way of speaking commanded respect and I never presumed to call him ‘Joe’. He was a Londoner, first generation, and spoke with a London accent, but it was not heavy Cockney, typified by an idiosyncratic use of grammar and idiom. He told me his parents were country people from Sussex who had been tenant farmers. The family had been displaced by the Enclosure Acts of the nineteenth century and, unable to sustain themselves even at a subsistence level, they had drifted towards the city in search of work. They had settled in Croydon, where Mr Collett had been born in the 1870s, the oldest of eight children. His father had been a painter and decorator, and an unskilled builder’s labourer. He was often out of work, because in the nineteenth century painting was a trade at the mercy of the weather. Paints had no chemical quick-drying components in them and would take about four days to dry, so in wet weather no painting could be done externally, and the men were laid off. The building trade was in the same position, because cement would not dry in less than three days.
    “But my father was a good man,” said Mr Collett. “He would not see his wife and children go without. There was always stone-breaking to be done for road-building and railway construction, and he would go to the yards and break stones all day. He would come home at night wet through, aching all over, with a few pence in his pocket that he had earned, and my mother would rub his back and chest with liniment and apply flannel soaked in hot mustard water to keep out the cold. He was a good man. He wouldn’t go to the pub and drink away his money, like many we came to see.”
    Mr Collett shook his head in disapproval, and cut off a chunk of tobacco, which he proceeded to shred finely in the palm of his gnarled hand and stuff into a leather pouch, in which he kept a piece of apple peel “to keep the tobacco moist”, he told me. I was fascinated by this tobacco, called shag or twist, which was sold in lengths. Shag was the tobacco my grandfather smoked, and the smell of it filled me with happy childhood memories. Tobacconists kept long coils of it, perhaps two or three feet long, like a curled, black sausage, and a few inches would be sawn off and sold to a customer. I thought the smell was lovely as Mr Collett shredded it in his hand (or perhaps it was just an improvement on the usual fusty smell of the room), and I encouraged him to cut it up and smoke the stuff, which produced clouds of thick, grey smoke when a match was applied. Incidentally, shag was the same tobacco that men often chewed. You would see a lot of old men chewing away with toothless gums, sucking the last drachm of juice from the tobacco,