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holmes_minorTitle: Private Lessons
Author: gardnerhill
Form/Wordcount: 500
Characters/Pairings: Inspector Lestrade
Rating: PG (language)
Warnings/Content: Rough language.
Summary: Sometimes all you need is one person who gives a damn about you. A side story in my Oubliette series.
Author’s Notes: For the Holmes Minor April 2018 prompt: Transformation (turning points in the characters’ lives—turning points large and small.) One Canon quote hidden below.
You don’t grow up in the slum where I was a boy – you survive it. Fought for every mouthful besides Mam’s scanty plates (hers empty more often than not), fought for every farthing. Filth, sickness and hunger everywhere; lost half my mates to Crossbones Graveyard before I was 10. The grownups drank and screamed and fought, hungry and wicked. Only blokes we saw with new clothes and full bellies was the gang boys, and the coppers who beat them up (when they did come in, only in daytime). We all hated coppers; they were the enemy.
So when I got caught lifting a spud from a cart, knowing I was off to my first stay in chokey and wondering who was gonna feed the others now, with Mam gone after birthing her eighth? I spit at the bluecoat holding my wrist and called him a goddamn peeler.
Most other coppers would have laid on their stick for that, kid or no. But St. Michael, or Mam, sent Constable Wilkins instead. Wilkins handed a tuppence to the angry cart-man and ordered him along, with me still holding the spud in my other hand, then faced me. “You’re coming with me, lad. You’ve a potato to earn.”
So we went to the police station after all, but it was to put a broom in my hand and the order to sweep outside the gaol instead of going into it. And when I was done an hour later, there was my potato, with a cabbage and a carrot next to it. “No boy your age should have an arm that thin,” Wilkins said, in a rough voice. “Go home, son.” Da had never called me son, not once.
That begun it.
At first I felt a right rat even though I never peached – coppers were the enemy, the law was the enemy – but I’d look for Constable Wilkins, who always had something for me to do for an apple, a penny, a shilling. I got beat up for it of course, but I fought back and I didn’t care, cos the other kids in the house stopped crying from hunger.
Sergeant Wilkins taught me to box and I started trouncing the bastards who fought me, even the big ‘uns. He got books about boxers for me, and books about soldiers (“My Jack liked this one,” he’d say), and I got better at reading. I’d left school after Mam died to take care of the others, but I kept learning. Education never ends, you see, it’s a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.
So when I made constable, Inspector Wilkins took me to see his Jack’s gravestone. Twelve, and dropped by the same typhus that had taken my mates. “I swore to make this town safer for boys like you two.”
I wasn’t the only lad he’d saved, as it turns out; there were others. But I was the first one to take up a beat in his very own division.
Author: gardnerhill
Form/Wordcount: 500
Characters/Pairings: Inspector Lestrade
Rating: PG (language)
Warnings/Content: Rough language.
Summary: Sometimes all you need is one person who gives a damn about you. A side story in my Oubliette series.
Author’s Notes: For the Holmes Minor April 2018 prompt: Transformation (turning points in the characters’ lives—turning points large and small.) One Canon quote hidden below.
You don’t grow up in the slum where I was a boy – you survive it. Fought for every mouthful besides Mam’s scanty plates (hers empty more often than not), fought for every farthing. Filth, sickness and hunger everywhere; lost half my mates to Crossbones Graveyard before I was 10. The grownups drank and screamed and fought, hungry and wicked. Only blokes we saw with new clothes and full bellies was the gang boys, and the coppers who beat them up (when they did come in, only in daytime). We all hated coppers; they were the enemy.
So when I got caught lifting a spud from a cart, knowing I was off to my first stay in chokey and wondering who was gonna feed the others now, with Mam gone after birthing her eighth? I spit at the bluecoat holding my wrist and called him a goddamn peeler.
Most other coppers would have laid on their stick for that, kid or no. But St. Michael, or Mam, sent Constable Wilkins instead. Wilkins handed a tuppence to the angry cart-man and ordered him along, with me still holding the spud in my other hand, then faced me. “You’re coming with me, lad. You’ve a potato to earn.”
So we went to the police station after all, but it was to put a broom in my hand and the order to sweep outside the gaol instead of going into it. And when I was done an hour later, there was my potato, with a cabbage and a carrot next to it. “No boy your age should have an arm that thin,” Wilkins said, in a rough voice. “Go home, son.” Da had never called me son, not once.
That begun it.
At first I felt a right rat even though I never peached – coppers were the enemy, the law was the enemy – but I’d look for Constable Wilkins, who always had something for me to do for an apple, a penny, a shilling. I got beat up for it of course, but I fought back and I didn’t care, cos the other kids in the house stopped crying from hunger.
Sergeant Wilkins taught me to box and I started trouncing the bastards who fought me, even the big ‘uns. He got books about boxers for me, and books about soldiers (“My Jack liked this one,” he’d say), and I got better at reading. I’d left school after Mam died to take care of the others, but I kept learning. Education never ends, you see, it’s a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.
So when I made constable, Inspector Wilkins took me to see his Jack’s gravestone. Twelve, and dropped by the same typhus that had taken my mates. “I swore to make this town safer for boys like you two.”
I wasn’t the only lad he’d saved, as it turns out; there were others. But I was the first one to take up a beat in his very own division.
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no subject
Date: 2018-04-23 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-23 03:01 pm (UTC)That relationship would have done Wilkins a world of good too, to save other boys after losing his own.
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Date: 2018-04-23 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-23 11:18 pm (UTC)I'd hinted at Lestrade's street-rat upbringing in other stories in the series. Looks like it was time to tell that one.
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Date: 2018-04-25 04:55 pm (UTC)I like the fact that Constable Wilkins exchanges the potato for a little work at the station. God knows the boy doesn't need the 'dignity' of work - looking after his siblings and trying to get enough food for them is enough to be getting on with. I'm sure Lestrade would have just accepted the potato without worrying any further about it. But I think it indicates Wilkins is trying to treat him with respect.
And I love Wilkins' compassion in the face of his bereavement. He doesn't look at the street children and think, "Why do you get to live when my child died?" Instead he tries to help.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-25 05:22 pm (UTC)If he had a beat that included a Victorian slum, Wilkins would have seen lots of small coffins and shrouds headed for the potter's field from sickness, injury, want, and decide that at least one or two boys could avoid his own son's fate if he took a hand. (It seems to be a common response to such a loss - the movie cowboys Roy Rodgers and Dale Evans adopted a dozen children when their own child died at two, and Eliza Hamilton dealt with the grief of losing her oldest son and husband by opening an orphanage.)