After a protracted yawn he began rubbing the sleep-grit out of his eyes, and then reached over to his friend David, who at four years old was even smaller and younger than himself. David, a tiny mite of a child, was still curled up in oblivious slumber inside the dusty sack, so William grabbed his arm and shook him with forceful urgency, trying to rouse him before the violence of Mr Goode’s boot did.
‘Davy, wake up, quickly! Wake up Davy, hurry, wake up,’ William hissed, fully awake now, his eyes glinting in the flickering orange glow of Mr Goode’s swinging lamp.
‘Who’s talking there?’ Mr Goode snarled, his wrath adding a terrifying rasp to his voice. ‘Who?! I’ll bring my cane in here right now, by Jove! I swear I’ll give each one of you rats the soundest thrashing of your worthless little lives!’
An hour later, just after a chilly dawn had broken over the smog-breathing city, Mr Goode and his five chimney sweeps were gathered outside a large and imposing townhouse. They had just received their instructions on who had been detailed to which flue, and how long their jobs were supposed to take.
‘Cor blimey,’ exclaimed the usually reticent Andrew, who was a year older than William. ‘This ‘ouse is a good five storeys tall, it is. It’ll be quite the climb to sweep out these stacks, lads!’
‘Crikey, look at the size o’ that main stack,’ remarked Paul, Andrew’s identical twin, who shared his brother’s almost bovine chestnut eyes, but who had a decidedly different nature to his sibling. While Andrew was a quiet and reserved introvert, Paul was loud and boisterous, and revelled in attention from others. Physically, though, both boys seemed to have been cast from the same mould; each had the same narrow shoulders, thin arms and slim torso, with muscular legs that were strangely disproportionate to the upper halves of their bodies. Their sharp-chinned, almost triangular faces, with their pinched features and almost too-large eyes, were nearly indistinguishable from one another, except to those who knew them very well. Each boy sported the same thick mop of chestnut hair, but while Paul’s was as messy as any sparrow’s nest, Andrew would run his long, slender fingers through his hair with almost compulsive regularity, ensuring that his hair was always kept in as neat a side parting as he could manage.
‘That’s the one I’m going up,’ William said, his soft voice barely louder than a whisper.
‘Aye, an’ Goody-Goode says he’ll light a brimstone candle under you if don’t shimmy up there fast enough like,’ Paul added with a grimace. ‘And you know he’ll do it, that old git doesn’t never ‘and out empty threats.’
‘Aye, aye. He’s done it to me before, he ‘as,’ William murmured with a sad sigh, his words bolstered by a pathos that belied his years. ‘As well as sendin’ that scoundrel Pip up after me to prick needles into my toes when he thought I was draggin’ me feet.’
‘Poor ol’ Pip,’ Michael sighed. ‘He wasn’t the nicest lad, an’ he did enjoy prickin’ them needles into our feet sometimes, but it was right ‘orrible to see him just getting’ worse an’ worse with that sooty cancer, as they calls it.’
‘What’s a cancer?’ David asked in his squeak of a voice.
‘It’s a terrible blight,’ Michael answered. ‘You get real sick like, an’ no doctors can ‘elp you or nuffin’. Pip’s cancer, that’s somefing that ‘appened before you came along. You were Pip’s replacement, see? After he died from the sooty cancer, ol’ Goody Goode went an’ bought you from the parish ‘ouse.’
‘He didn’t buy me from no parish ‘ouse, I ain’t never been in no parish ‘ouse,’ David said indignantly. ‘Me mum gave me to Mr Goode, she got a whole guinea for me, she did! I do miss her though, even with all the wallopings she used to give me.’
‘My mum died,’ William interjected, speaking in a plain matter-of-fact manner, his words untainted by self-pity. ‘She ‘ad the plague, she did. She was lovely though, she didn’t never wallop me, although some of the uncles that visited our room, they sometimes gave me a good thrashin’, oft times for no reason … I didn’t like them uncles, not one bit, but most of ‘em I only saw once or twice, an’ they never came back.’
Before William could continue, Mr Goode waddled over to the boys. Sweat glistened on his pockmarked forehead, and his mouth was twisted into a dirty scowl. He grabbed the youngest two boys, William and David, and dragged them by their soot-blackened shirts along the path to the front door, while cursing and shouting at the others to follow after him. He rapped on the door, and a few moments later a meticulously dressed butler opened it a crack.
‘Ah, you’ve brought the climbing boys, I see,’ remarked the butler, a tall, thin man with a narrow head crowned with wispy white hair.
‘I certainly ‘ave, guv’nor,’ Mr Goode replied, his greedy eyes gleaming with keenness as he rubbed his thick hands together. ‘And they’re ready to scrub every last ounce o’ soot out o’ this lovely mansion’s chimneys.’
The butler raised a condescending eyebrow and peered down his Roman nose at Mr Goode.
‘Yes, yes,’ he murmured coolly. ‘Well I’m afraid that we don’t admit the likes of you and these young rascals through the front entrance. Please make your way around to the back of the mansion, and you may enter via the kitchen.’
‘Whatever you say ‘guv, whatever you say,’ Mr Goode said, beaming out a greasy, gap-toothed grin. As soon as the butler shut the door, though, the smile vanished from Mr Goode’s pockmarked face. ‘Right you little rats,’ he growled, ‘let’s get to work! And I’m warnin’ you, the slowest lad’ll be strung up from the beam in the cellar and flogged senseless, and
