"But you must be crying about something, mother."
And then, in a doleful tone, she said, "It's through wondering where the next meal is coming from, my boy."
The little chap pretended to go to sleep soon after; but now and again he would peep cautiously over the side of the box at his mother silently crying over her work at the table. And he puzzled his young head as to what it all meant.
"My mother crying because she can't get bread for us! Why can't she get bread? I saw plenty of bread in the shops yesterday. Do all mothers have to cry before they can get bread for their children?"
It was the first incident that made him think.
There was one morning, the morning after a Christmas Day of all times in the year, when his mother refused to let him or the others get up, even when she left the house. It was not until she returned after what seemed a long time, bringing with her a portion of a loaf, that she allowed them to get out of bed.
"It was many years afterwards before I learnt the reason for her strange conduct that Boxing Day morning. Then I found out that she had made a vow that her children should never get up unless there was some breakfast for them.
"We were so poor that we children never got a drop of tea for months together. It used to be bread and treacle for breakfast, bread and treacle for dinner, bread and treacle for tea, washed down with a cup of cold water. Sometimes there was a little variation in the form of dripping. At other times the variety was secured by there being neither treacle nor dripping. The very bread was so scarce that mother could not afford to allow the three eldest, of whom I was one, more than three slices apiece at a meal, while the four youngest got two and a half slices. Whenever we could afford to buy tea or butter, it was only in ounces. Once my brother and I were sent to buy a whole quarter of a pound of butter—it turned out that auntie was coming to tea—and on the way we speculated seriously whether mother was going to open a shop."
Perhaps the first occasion upon which Crooks as a lad showed something of that spirited resentment at aspersions on the poor which ultimately led him into public life was one that arose in a cobbler's shop. He was about eight years old, when his father sent him back with a pair of boots that had been repaired to ask that a little more be done to them for the money.
"I don't know what he wants for his ninepence," said the cobbler, referring to the lad's father; "but, there!"—throwing the boots to his man—"put another patch on. He's only a poor beggar."
There was an angry cry from the other side, of the counter. "My father's not a poor beggar!" shouted the boy. "He's as good a man as you, and only wants what he has paid for."
If the boy thought much of the father the father thought much of the boy. It had often been his boast that "Our Will will do things some day."
One little fancy of the old man's was brought to my notice the morning after Crooks was first returned to Parliament for Woolwich. His elder brother told me then of a little incident that took place over forty-five years before.
"We children were playing in the home together when young Will said something which made the dad look up surprised. And I heard him say to mother, 'That lad'll live to be either Lord Mayor of London or a Member of Parliament.'"
The poverty deepened and darkened in the little one-roomed home during Will's boyhood. It soon became impossible even to spend an odd ninepence on boot repairs. The mother met this emergency as she met nearly all the others. She became the family cobbler, as she had all along been the family tailor. Often would she go on her knees, hammer in hand, mending the boots. The children could not remember the time when she did not make all their clothes.
"God only knows, God only will know, how my mother worked and wept," says Crooks. "With it all she brought up seven of us to be decent and useful men and women. She was everything to us. I owe to her what little schooling I got, for, though she could neither read nor write herself, she would often remark that that should never be said of any of her children. I owe to her wise training that I have been a teetotaller all my life. I owe it to her that I was saved from becoming a little wastrel of the streets, for, as a Christian woman, she kept me at the Sunday School and took me regularly to the Congregational Church where I had been baptised.
"I can picture her now as I used to see her when I awoke in the night making oil-skin coats by candle-light in our single room. Youngster though I was, I meant it from the very bottom of my heart when I used to whisper to myself, as I peeped at her from the little box-bedstead by the wall, 'Wait till I'm a man! Won't I work for my mother when I'm a man!'"
He thought he was a man at thirteen, when he could bring home to her proudly five shillings every week, his wages in the blacksmith's shop. There came a memorable Saturday night when, having worked overtime all the week and earned an extra five shillings, he was paid his first half-sovereign. He threw on his coat and cap excitedly and ran all the way home from Limehouse Causeway, the half-sovereign clenched tightly in his hand, until he burst breathlessly into the little room, exclaiming:
"Mother, mother, I've earned half a sovereign, all of it myself, and it's yours, all yours, every bit yours!"
CHAPTER II AS A CHILD IN THE WORKHOUSE
With an Idiot Boy in the Workhouse—Life in the Poor Law School at Sutton—At Home Once More—A Fashionable Knock for the Casual Ward—A Bread Riot.
But we must go back a few years—to the evil day when, the father being a cripple, the family have to enter the workhouse.
The mother had before this been forced to ask for parish relief. For a time the Guardians paid her two or three shillings a week and gave her a little bread. Suddenly these scanty supplies were stopped. The mother was told to come before the Board and bring her children.
Six of them, clinging timidly to her skirt, were taken into the terrible presence. The Chairman singled out Will, then eight years of age, and, pointing his finger at him, remarked solemnly:
"It's time that boy was getting his own living."
"He is at work, sir," was the mother's timid apology. "He gets up at a quarter to five every morning and goes round with the milkman for sixpence a week."
"Can't he earn more than that?"
"Well, sir, the milkman says he's a very willing boy and always punctual, but he's so little that he doesn't think he can pay him more than sixpence yet."
And the little boy looked furtively at the great man in the great chair, never dreaming that the time would come when he would occupy that chair himself, and that almost the first order he would issue from it would be one putting an end to the bad practice of making mothers drag their young children before the Board.
On that unhappy afternoon the Guardians, firm in their resolve not to renew the out-relief, offered to take the children into the workhouse. The mother said 'No' at first, marching them all bravely home again. Stern want forced her to yield at last. The day came when she saw the five youngest, including Will, taken from home to the big poorhouse down by the Millwall Docks. The crippled father was admitted into the House at the same time.
They were put into a bare room like a vault, the father and two sons, while the three sisters were taken they knew not where. There the lads and their dad spent the night and the next day until the doctor saw them and passed them into the main workhouse building. Then Will lost sight of his father, though he was permitted to remain with his young brother and share with him the same bed.
In the dormitory was an idiot boy, who used to ramble in his talk all through the night, keeping the others awake. Sometimes Will succeeded in coaxing his young brother off to sleep, but as for himself, he would lie awake for hours listening to the strange talk of the idiot boy, and