The lad was ravenously hungry all the time he spent in the workhouse. He often felt at times as though he could eat leather; yet every morning, when the "skilly" was served for breakfast, he could not touch it. Morning after morning, spurred on by hunger, he forced the spoon into his mouth, but the stomach revolted, and he always felt as though the first spoonful would turn him sick.
Somehow his father, away in the men's ward, got to know that young Will, who he knew could relish dry crusts at home with the best of them, was not able to eat the fare provided in the workhouse. The men occasionally got suet pudding, and one dinner-time the old man secretly smuggled his portion into his pocket. In the afternoon he made over to the children's quarters, hoping to hand it to Will. The pudding was produced, the lad's hungry eyes lighted up, when, behold! it was snatched away, almost from his very grasp. The burly figure of the labour master interposed between father and son. This was a breach of discipline not to be tolerated in the workhouse.
"But the boy's hungry, and this is what I've saved from my own dinner," argued the father (all in vain). "You don't know how that boy likes suet pudding."
For two or three weeks the Crooks children were kept in the workhouse, before being taken away in an omnibus with other boys and girls to the Poor Law School at Sutton. Then came the most agonising experience of all to Will. They parted him from his young brother. In the great hall of the school he would strain his eyes, hoping to get a glimpse of the lone little fellow among the other lads, but he never set eyes on him again until the afternoon they went home together.
"Every day I spent in that school is burnt into my soul," he has often declared since.
He could not sleep at night nor play with the other boys, haunted as he was by the strange dread that he must have committed some unknown crime to be taken from home, torn from his young brother, and made a little captive in what seemed a fearful prison. The nights seemed endless, and were always awful. He whispered his fears on the fourth day to another Poplar boy who was there.
"Ah! you just wait until Sunday," said the other lad. "Every Sunday's like a fortnight."
When Sunday did come it proved to be one lasting agony. He thought time could not be made more terrible to children anywhere. They had dinner at twelve and tea at six, confined during the yawning interval in the dull day-room with nothing to do but to look at the clock, and then out of the window, and then back at the clock again.
During the week, after school hours, he hung about in abject misery all the time. From the day he went in to the day he left he never smiled. One afternoon he was loitering in the playground as the matron showed some visitors round.
"Who is that sad-faced boy?" he heard one of them ask.
"Oh, he's one of the new-comers," the matron answered. "He'll soon get over it."
The new-comer said to himself, "I wonder whether you would soon get over it if you had been taken from your mother and parted from a young brother?"
How long he stayed in the workhouse school he has never been able to tell. It could not have been very long in point of time, but to the sensitive lad it seemed an age. An indescribable burden was lifted from his shoulders when one day at dinner someone called him by his name.
He sprang to his feet.
"Go to the tailor's shop after dinner and get your own clothes."
"What for, sir?"
"You are going home!"
His heart leapt up. The boys crowded round him, wishing they were in his place. Poor miserable lads, he parted from them with feelings of the deepest pity.
At the gate he met his young brother and sisters again, and they were taken back to Poplar, to be welcomed with open arms by their mother. She had worked harder than ever to add to the family income in order to justify her in going before the Guardians to ask that her children be restored to her own keeping.
Not until thirty-three years later could he command the courage to enter that same workhouse school again. Many changes for the good had been made, but the sight of the same hall, with the same peculiar odour, brought back the same old feeling of utter friendlessness and despair. And he saw in imagination a sad-faced boy sitting on the form, straining his eyes in the vain search for his young brother.
The mother had moved to a cheaper room when the children returned home from the workhouse school. It was in a small house in the High Street, next door to the entrance to the casual ward, with the main workhouse building in the rear. This was Will's home for the rest of his boyhood.
There, with the workhouse surrounding him as it were, he got daily glimpses of the misery that hovers round the Poor Law. Men and women would sit for hours huddled on the pavement in front of his home waiting for the casual ward to open. Will came bounding out of the house in the dull dawn to go to work as an errand boy one morning, when he kicked violently against a bundle of rags on the pavement.
There was a cry of pain in a woman's voice, and the lad pulled up sharp, filled with remorse:
"I'm so sorry, missus; I am really. I didn't see you."
"All right, kiddie. I saw you couldn't help it. I'm used to being kicked about the streets."
But the lad could not forget it. And when he came home at dinner-time, "Oh, mother," he said, "I kicked a poor woman outside our door this morning, and I wouldn't have done it for anything, had I known."
Sometimes a poor wayfarer would knock at the door, mistaking it for the entrance to the casual ward. In answer to a series of sharp raps one night Will raced to the door with the mother of another family who rented the front room. She got there first and opened it, to find a tramp on the step.
"Is this the casual ward?"
"The casual ward!" cried the woman in disgust, turning away and leaving Will to direct him. "That's a nice fashionable kind of knock to come with asking for the casual ward!"
It was from this house that he saw a bread riot in the winter of 1866, when he got the first of many impressions he was to receive of what a winter of bad trade means to a district of casual labour like Poplar. Hundreds of men used to wait outside the workhouse gates for a 2-lb. loaf each. The baker's waggon drove up with the bread one afternoon while they waited. The ravenous crowd would not let it pass into the workhouse yard. They seized the bread, frantically struggling with each other. Almost as fiercely they tore the bread to pieces when they got it and devoured it on the spot.
Sights like these of his childhood, with the shuddering memories of his own dark days in the workhouse and the workhouse school, made him register a vow, little chap though he was at the time, that when he grew up to be a man he would do all he could to make better and brighter the lot of the inmates, especially that of the boys and girls.
Some children's dreams come true, and this was one of them.
CHAPTER III SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS
The School of Life—Borrowed Magazines—Reading Dickens—Crooks's Humour and Story-Telling Faculty—Discovering Scott—Declaiming Shakespeare—Books that influenced him.
Little education of the ordinary kind came into Will's life as a lad. We have seen that he turned out before five o'clock every morning at eight years of age to take milk round for a wage of sixpence a week. Soon after coming out of the workhouse he got a job as errand boy at a grocer's at two shillings a week. At eleven he was in a blacksmith's shop, where he stayed until at fourteen he was apprenticed to the trade of cooper.
"In a sense, my training for becoming a servant of the people has been better than