JAMES LOVEJOY

When I was very young, I assumed I would grow to be a waterman like my father, take a wife, and have happy children, and that my life, despite the usual pedestrian vicissitudes, would be, in the main, pleasant and uncomplicated. But that was before everything else happened instead, far worse and much better than I ever could have imagined.

 

I was born in London, the thirteenth of February, 1762, as a cold night edged towards dawn. My father, his mother, my three-year-old brother, and a midwife hastily got from the parish were all in attendance with my mother. I came quickly, giving her an easy time. My father looked me over, and, expecting me not to live, sighed, observed there was scarcely enough of me to feed a rat, and went off to his skiff. The midwife, having washed me, concurred. She advised my mother not to become too attached to me.

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“I can take him now, if you’d like,” she offered.

 

“We can let him to a beggar woman as easily as you and keep the coin ourselves, thank you very much,” responded my grandmother, tartly.

 

Despite her confinement, Mother communicated her sentiments by means of a pewter mug standing at the bedside, which flew within an inch of the midwife’s ear before clattering against the wall opposite. The woman, begging no offense, humbly collected her half crown and removed herself with haste.

 

I was told this long afterwards, of course. When I was small, my mother would tell it to me as she put me to bed, ending with, “And look how you have grown!” Hearing this, I would wriggle with pleasure. I flourished regardless of my inauspicious arrival, and found myself to be well loved, well fed, and as safe as it is possible in this uncertain world to be.

 

My parents were unlettered and unpretentious folk of the kind that may be said to be the backbone of England, which would make me the same by rights, but this asseveration has been much disputed, as I shall tell. My father, a round-faced, mostly placid man of steady habits and no small skill at his waterman’s trade, deeply loved and was entirely overawed by my mother, whose bright and ready wit tutored us all.

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She was every bit as tall as he, black-haired, keen-eyed, with a sharp nose that might have been shrewish on another woman, but given that she laughed readily and often, her visage was deemed handsome. They had met at Billingsgate, where she was sometimes an oyster girl, buying her wares before dawn and peddling them in the streets. This she continued following their marriage. When I was small, I would traipse after her, singing her song.

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She left off her other trade of woman fighter upon marrying, despite having won several nice prizes. Owing to her having won a prize of ten pounds, in fact, my parents were able to marry and let lodgings better than their station might seem to warrant, for my father had but little money. His father, also a waterman, had squandered his time and money in the gin shops that flourished in the forties and early fifties, before they were licensed and put down. Rousting his insensible parent from stinking cellars turned my father against spirits for all time, and he foreswore them when he was grown, rarely indulging in beer or ale, making him very much an oddity amongst his peers.

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We lived in a tightly packed neighborhood of close buildings and narrow streets between St. Paul’s and the Thames, thronging with many thousands of people all more or less like ourselves, none too poor to wear a clean shirt on Sunday and not afraid to wield an opinion, solicited or not. And if the better sort looked a long ways down their noses at us, we returned the compliment full measure, viewing their precious affectations with salty derision.

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Our lodgings on Brickhill Lane, two rooms on the uppermost floor of a doddering rent built immediately after the great fire of the previous century, were more salubrious than many, having piped-in water at a common tap on the ground floor, and proximity to the river, which provided breezes that, at times, dispelled the clouds of flies attendant upon the dung wharf hard by.

On fine days in summer when the water was low, we were oftimes beset by a stench no application of vinegar or soothing powders could quell, this malodorous emanation arising from the river itself and its exposed banks, ripening in the sun. We accepted this as we accepted everything good and bad, for this was simply how life presented itself to us. To quarrel with it would have been mad. And, to be sure, not all was stench and flies. When the water was high and the weather fine, we could swim at any of several stairs leading down to the river, and in the coldest winters had frost fairs on the ice, which exercised our imaginations mightily.

 

With my parents and I dwelt my Gram, my father’s mother, my older brother William, and, in due course, a younger sister, Sarah, who was robust and lively, whether one cared for the din or not. And, of course, several babies died, as babies are wont to do. I don’t recall how many, as I was then very small.

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Gram died when I was five, and I have but few memories of her. She was a jolly, kind old woman in possession of a full store of stories, lullabies, and rhymes, who excelled at playing the little games beloved by small children. Her death was unexpected despite her age. Giving every appearance of perfect health, and without making the slightest fuss or complaint, she quietly fell over dead one morning whilst sewing. My parents counted it a blessing, as she and we were spared the miseries of protracted dotage and illness, but it felt like no blessing to me, and I cried very hard.