The Gambling Man

Pilbey Street was bad but Saltbank Row was worse. Here it was the stench that got him. The dry middens at the back of the Row, dry being a mere courtesy title, seeped away under the stone floors of the two-roomed cottages, and the dirt in front of the cottages was always wet to the feet. In winter the stench was bad enough but in summer it was unbearable. Why the Town Corporation did not condemn the place he didn’t know. Vested interests he supposed; in any case anything was good enough for the Irish immigrants, and they didn’t seem to mind, for as it was well known they had been used to sleeping among the pigs and the chickens in their tiny hovel huts over in Ireland.

Yet there were Irish in the town among Palmer’s men whom he had heard were buying their own houses. That had come from old Kean himself, and the old boy didn’t like it.

His own father had worked in Palmer’s for years, but there was no sign of him being able to buy his own house. Likely because he didn’t want to; his father spent as he went, he ate well and drank as much as he could hold almost every day in the week, because his body was so dried up with the heat from the furnaces.

Drinking was one thing he didn’t blame his father for, but he did blame him for his carry-on with her . . . Lizzie. He supposed it was by way of compensation that he’d had him sent to the penny school but he didn’t thank him for that either, for he hadn’t attended long enough to take in much beyond reading, writing and reckoning up. When funds were low the last thing to be considered was the penny fee. And he wouldn’t go to school without it. Nor would his father have his name put down on the parish list so that he could send him free—not him.

Anyway, his reading and writing had enabled him finally to become a rent collector with a wage of fifteen shillings a week. He was told from all quarters that he was damned lucky to be in such a job. Fifteen shillings for neither bending his back nor soiling his hands. And his employer, more than others, emphasized this statement.

Mr Kean owned about half the cottages in Saltbank Row, and the rent of each was two shillings a week, but when he reached the end of the Row all he had in the back section of his leather bag was twenty-five shillings and sixpence.

It was just turned twelve o’clock when he reached the main street and joined the stream of men pouring out of Palmer’s and the various side streets which led to different yards on the river. They were like streams of black lava joining the main flow, faces grey, froth-specked with their sweat. He was carried along in the throng until he reached the church bank gain by which time the blackness had dwindled into idividual pockets of men.

He reckoned he should be back at the office by one o’clock. He never carried a watch, not on his rounds, because it could be nicked in the time he blinked an eyelid. A gang of lads supposedly playing Tiggy could rough you up. He had seen it done. But he told himself as he paused for a moment on the Don bridge and looked down at the narrow mud-walled banks of the river that there was no immediate hurry today, for old Kean was off on one of his duty trips to Hexham to see his old father. When this happened the day’s takings were locked up until Monday. Saturdays takings didn’t amount to very much, not on his part anyway. John George took more, for he did the Tyne Dock area and the better part of Stanhope Road.

He was getting a bit worried about John George. There was something on his mind; he supposed it was that damned ranter’s lass he had taken up with. Only last night he had told him to think hard about this business, for being her father’s daughter, she might turn out to be a chip off the old block and be ‘God-mad’ like the rest of them.

The whole of Shields was becoming ‘God-mad’; there were chapels springing up all over the place and the more of them there were the greater the outcry against drink and gambling. And them that made the fuss, what were they? Bloody hypocrites half of them. Oh, he knew a thing or two about some of them. That’s why he had warned John George.

As he walked on into Tyne Dock he forgot about John George and his troubles for his mind was taken up with the evening’s prospects. He had heard tell of a square-head, a Swede who lived down Corstorphine Town way. He was known as Fair Square; he did summer trips there and back to Norway and Sweden, but in the winter he stayed put somewhere along the waterfront and ran a school, so he understood, and not just an ordinary one, a big one, for captains and such. But as little Joe, the tout, had said, they didn’t often let foreigners in . . . That was funny that was, a Swede calling an Englishman a foreigner, and in his own town at that. Anyway, little Joe had promised to work him in somewhere.