This story contains elements and characters from HIS DARK MATERIALS, which is a copyright work of Philip Pullman. Other characters and situations are entirely mine and are Copyright (c) Peter Kendell 2001. Naturally I make no claim on anything that is Philip Pullman's property. This story is offered for the enjoyment of readers of HIS DARK MATERIALS and is not intended for commercial distribution or gain.
‘Turn left,’ Sal says. ‘Down that one.’ I doesn’t argue with her. I keeps my face out of the light and dives down the alley. She half flies, half hops ahead of me and hides in a doorway. I follow her and stand with my face to the door, hiding, but I’m ready to run for it.
Sal perches on my shoulder. We listens. The footsteps have stopped, but that don’t mean nothing. I’m still hanging onto the parcel, but I’m scared the wrapping paper will crackle and give us away so I don’t hold it too hard. What a mess. What a bloody stupid mess.
It starts only yesterday afternoon. I’m in the yard, having a wash, when Maggie, the drab that lives opposite, comes up and says she’s got a proposition for me. I tells her I can’t afford what she proposes and she says Arthur, don’t be daft, I don’t mean that. She says she can’t help noticing but that I don’t seem to be too flush these days and she’s got an idea for something that could help us all. I says I don’t know that a silly little tart like her can have any ideas worth the listening to and she gets in a strop about it, so I lets her talk
It seems that she’s got a sister that’s got a friend what works in a big house up Hampstead way. This friend goes in to do general housework and skivvying. She says the house is packed with valuable stuff. Specially, she says, there’s this big silver thing, like a tall lamp, that stands on a table in the study window. She thinks that a likely lad, such as Maggie the drab might know, could maybe slip into the grounds of this big house and relieve the owner of this big lamp thing and give it to Maggie and she could sell it and we could share out the money between us. She says the study window might not always be shut properly.
I has a think. It’s true that I am a little short of the readies just now. This is on account of two things. First is, with the way my Sal settled I’m not finding the dipping – that’s pickpocketing to you – all that easy. You see a likely lad, such as it might be me, with a magpie for a daemon and you know he’s got to be up for it, you know what I mean? “See the daemon, know the man” as they say. I gets tired of being pinched for petty larceny all the time. Sometimes it ain’t even me.
So I takes to the trade. We isn’t proud. It’s easy money; even if it’s painful at times and humiliating too. The punters does what they do, they gives me the dosh and that’s it over and done with. Two weeks ago, though, this mark goes too far. He says he’d like a little extra and he’ll pay lots for it. Then he tells me what he wants to do with my Sal and I can’t help it. I throws up all over his smart suit and his shiny shoes and then I belts him one and then I legs it. So that’s the second thing. I can’t be seen on the Ratcliffe Highway; not for a month or two. And it’s true. Funds is a little short. So I agrees.
We takes the late Cthtonic to Hampstead that night. I don’t pay, of course. There’s ways around that. I walks up the rest of the way, past the Ponds and onto the Heath. The big house is in the middle of the Heath, so I creeps through the bushes, over the wall, which has got stupid trees right next to it so I can climb over easy and into the grounds. It’s just like Maggie says. There’s a ground-floor sash window with a half-an-inch gap at the bottom just asking for me to lever it up, so I does. Sal’s keeping a look out for me. On a table behind this window is this great big ornate silver thing, with a sort of lamp-glass at the top, except it’s too small to be a lamp. I lifts it off the table – it weighs a ton – and runs for it. I can’t believe it’s so easy. We gets over the wall back onto the Heath and put my cunning plan into action. I wraps it up in brown paper with a delivery label stuck on the front. If anyone wants to know, I’m a delivery boy, earning an honest living.
The last tube has gone, but that’s all right. We gets home without any trouble. I knows all the long, hidden ways round the city better than any cabbie. I hides the lamp thing under my mattress and we has a good long kip.
Next morning all Hell breaks loose. It seems that Maggie’s sister’s friend’s idea wasn’t such a good one after all. I’ve only broken into the Papal Legate’s house and taken his prize reliquary. It’s this sort of holy display case. It’s solid silver all right and there’s gold bits on it too. That glass thing at the top is a special vial and in it there’s a piece of the True Cross. No messing! We looks at it later and it looks just like a common or garden wood splinter to me. The glass is like a magnifier, to make it look bigger than it really is.
Thing is, not only is this reliquary thing very impossible to sell on the streets of Limehouse, I soon hears that the Church is very keen on getting it back. The sheets say there’s an Inquisitor out looking for it. When I hears that, we has to go and sit in the privy for a while. There’s banging on the door after the first five minutes, but I can’t move.
I doesn’t know how we could’ve been so stupid. Everyone knows the Church don’t have to set guards on its relics. You can’t sell them and they can always get them back. Then they gets their own back on you, too. We should have known it was too easy.
When I’ve finished emptying my guts out, we goes back to our room to have a think. We’re in it, in it right up to our necks. I’ve got to dump the reliquary thing, but how? The coppers are crawling all over the place and there’s Church agents about too. They’re searching all around north London. Sal says to ask Maggie, and she’s not working just then, so we do. She says don’t keep that thing here, you’ll get us all into trouble. Then she says don’t involve her, she didn’t pinch it, but I says that if we’re caught I’ll tell the coppers all about her and they’ll tell the Church. This soon changes her mind. She and her Jimmy goes into a huddle and they talk to each other and she tells me we’ve got to go to the Old Bill.
‘Old Bill?’ I says. ‘You’ve lost it, girl. It’s the coppers we’re trying to get away from!’
Nah, she says, it’s Old Bill she means. Old Bill the scrap dealer and general-purpose fence. He’s the only one who’ll help. He don’t care, he’ll take anything; she goes on, at his price of course. He’ll melt the thing down and give us scrap value for it. It won’t be much, though.
Look, I says, why don’t we just throw it in the river? That won’t do at all, it seems. The Church has an instrument of some sort that can find it, and say who’s touched it. It’s a truth-teller, or something. The reliquary’s got to be melted down, and as soon as possible. That’s all there is to it.
And where is this Old Bill? I enquires politely. It turns out he’s in Central Finchley, miles out of town. First stop on the Southern Line. I can’t go there, I says, we’d have to go up through the High Gate right next to Hampstead and the place’ll be stiff with Church police. Right, she says, you’ll have to go north and then round to the west.
We think the whole thing smells, but what else can we do? Sal and me lays low in Maggie’s, tries to ignore the noises from upstairs, and waits for night to come.
When it gets dark and the lamplighter’s done his round and the naphtha’s glowing all up and down the street, we gets ready to go. Maggie’s come up trumps, for a change. Her brother’s best mate works for the Penny Post, and he’s got a uniform I can borrow. I puts it on and we wrap the parcel up again with string and puts some stamps on it and draw a postmark over them with pencil. To make it look realistic, see? Then I sets off. I’m doing my trademark Penny Post whistle and swinging the parcel, but it don’t help much and the wrapping’s coming loose so I soon stops. It’s a quiet night, chilly, with a few clouds and not much of a moon, and we can hears things that are miles and miles away, like the Zepps mooring up at Hownslow Field.
We hasn’t gone more than a couple of miles, by main roads this time ‘cos of our effective disguise, when Sal, who’s keeping a look out for us, darts down to my shoulder and tells me we’re being followed. ‘Where?’ I asks. ‘Corner behind us,’ she says, ‘Don’t look!’ So we ducks down the alley, like I say and takes cover in the doorway.
We stays there for three or four minutes. It’s all quiet and then we hear footsteps again. This time, they’re going away from us and we sighs with relief.
Feeling safer again, we steps back out into the road; but we’ve been stupid, we should have waited longer, ‘cos a voice shouts out and we hear more footsteps, many footsteps and they’re running towards us. We pelts down the street, past a big parked car, and turns right into what we think is another alley, but it isn’t, it’s an entrance way and there’s a set of tall iron gates ahead of us and they’re locked with a chain and a big brass padlock.
Sal flaps over the gates, her white tail feathers showing up yellow in the naphtha light, and I flings myself at them and clambers up and over too. I don’t know how I doesn’t drop the reliquary. There’s a passageway beyond that and we run and fly down it. It opens out into a wide-open yard and I stops open-mouthed. I knows this place.
This is the place I grew up in, the place where my Sal got her settled form, the place I lived in for years and years. This is the Tottenham Union Workhouse. I’m standing in the boys’ quad, staring at the main hall.
I bet you doesn’t know about Workhouses. You pay your tithes to the Parish and you grumbles about how much it costs to keep all those useless people in luxury at the public expense, but I bets you doesn’t know what it’s like to actually live in a place like that.
Would you like to know what it’s like in there? ‘Course you wouldn’t. But I’m going to tell you anyway:
It’s all enclosed inside this big high wall with broken glass on top. The building itself sits inside a yard, which is chopped up into four quarters – they calls them quads. There’s one for men, one for women, one for boys and one for girls. The building is divided up inside as well. There’s whole families in there that hasn’t seen each other for years. They shouts to each other over the walls, but there’s trouble if they’re caught doing that. No problem for me – we was found outside the gates when we was just babies.
My part, the boys’ part, is split into two. The other parts is just the same, I suppose. There’s a working hall and a sleeping hall. They call that the dorm. The working hall has long tables where you eats (not much), prays (a lot), and sits all day long doing lessons in the morning and working in the afternoon. It’s too hot in summer and too cold in winter. Lessons is dull, but they’re better than work which is sewing up Penny Post mailbags or picking oakum. That’s where you teases old ropes apart. It rips your fingers to shreds.
If you does something wrong, the Master beats you. If you does something really bad, they’ve got something worse. See, there’s a pulley in the centre of the roof, which is in a kind of bell housing. It’s about forty, fifty feet high. There’s a rope runs over the pulley with a loop at one end and a box about six inches square on the other. It’s got a door with a clasp that locks it on the outside. What you has to do is this: You has to put your daemon in the box and then they locks it. If you won’t put your daemon in yourself, they grabs her, yes they really does, and they puts her in themselves. Then they pull on the rope and it takes her up and away from you and Christ, it hurts, it’s tearing your heart out. They looks at you as they pulls on the rope to make sure it’s hurting enough. And you’re stuck on the ground and your beautiful one, your precious, your darling is up there, you can’t reach her or touch her and if you could fly up to her you would and you both scream and cry and they’re glad ‘cos they likes to see you suffer.
They did that to me twice. For an hour the first time, three hours the second.
Then there’s the dorm. That’s another big room with what they calls coffin beds round the outside. They don’t call them that because you dies in them, though many of us has; it’s just that they’re coffin-shaped and coffin-sized. There are mattresses stuffed with straw in these coffin beds. Yes, that’s the stuff you uses to bed down your horses. They’re called palliasses.
At one end of the dorm there’s a big banner on the wall – GOD IS LOVE, it says. Underneath it there’s that picture of the Crucifixion. You know, the one by that Dali bloke. The really real-looking one. Just to rub it in that you has to be grateful for the charity you’re getting. There’s Jesus bound in agony to the stretcher on the floor, and on the wall above is Magdelena, His dove-daemon, flayed alive, with Her bare wings pinned back to this little wooden cross and Her blood dripping slowly down the plaster. And underneath it, it says “Constans”, which is Roman for Unchanging, ‘cos Jesus’ daemon was only ever a dove from the day He was born until His death, even when He was a kid. But I doesn’t have to tell you that.
In the middle of the dorm is a big cedarwood box. I expect you know how cedarwood makes your daemon a bit dozy-like. Dentists uses it when they pulls your teeth. That box is where your daemon has to go while you’re asleep. They locks it up and keeps the key. It’s to stop you from trying to escape in the night. It’s not so far away from you that it hurts.
I expect you’ve always slept with your daemon next to your heart. We was Workhouse brats and we couldn’t be trusted to do that. They tells me there was a fire in Edgeware Union once and the kids escaped but all the daemons was trapped inside, ‘cos they couldn’t find the key to the box. I doesn’t want to think about it, thanks.
Every day in this place is the same as the day before, until the day your daemon settles and you has to leave. When my Sal decided to be a magpie, we wondered what they was going to do with me and if we’d have a choice, but I needn’t have bothered. All the boys that year got apprenticed to sea captains. I lasted one week and jumped ship at Harwich. I just drifted about for a bit and ended up back in London.
That’s been my life. Dull, ain’t it?
Sal and I are looking at the Workhouse block and there’s something funny going on. One of the office windows is lit upstairs and it’s well after lights out. We walks slowly up to the oakum-sheds, which are like lean-tos against the main building. Sal flies up to the window, looks in, and then comes back in a hurry. ‘Climb up and look. It’s old Lugg and someone else.’
So I wraps my hand through the string that’s holding the parcel together and I shins up one of the posts that holds up the oakum-shed. The roof slopes up to the window and we climbs up it and wedges ourselves up against it so we can see in at the corner.
Inside, it’s the Boys’ Masters’ office. I know that place. Lugg used to beat me in there. Other things too. Father Lugg himself is sitting on one side of a table. There’s a bottle of jenniver on it, half-empty and two glasses; one full, one empty. Lugg looks the same as ever; greasy, ugly and cruel. Lugg the Slug we calls him.
The other person is like nobody I ever sees before.
She’s this impossibly glamorous woman and everything about her shines like it’s just been polished. She’s wearing a glossy fur coat over a red dress. Her hair is glinting chestnut in the naphtha. Her lips are shiny red too and when she talks you can see perfectly white, even teeth. They don’t look real at all. She doesn’t look real. I thinks maybe she’s a witch. Her eyes are all sparkly, too. I puts my ear to the window to hear what they says. They seems to be doing some sort of a deal.
‘Enough of the preliminaries, Father Lugg,’ says Glossy. She reaches down and strokes her daemon. He’s shiny too, a beautiful golden monkey with a black face. Father Lugg’s daemon squats on the table. A toad. Serves the bastard right, we all says. Lugg takes a swig of jenniver. It don’t look as if the woman is drinking hers.
‘There’s just one other thing, Madame,’ oozes Lugg. ‘I would like to know whom I have the honour of addressing.’
‘Madame,’ she says, ‘will do. Now; to business. It has come to our attention that there is some small discrepancy in your accounts. A matter of some five hundred sovereigns. The monies were credited to the Union accounts last May, but they seem to have disappeared.’ She’s got a soft voice, but it’s hard, too.
Lugg tries not to look worried, but his toad-daemon puffs up with fear. He’s worried all right.
‘I’m sure,’ he says, ‘that the matter can be resolved to everybody’s complete satisfaction. At the next Committee meeting in, um, four week’s time.’
‘We need not wait until then, I think. Father Lugg, I have a proposition to put to you which I would like you to consider very carefully. You receive a quarterly sum from the Parish, which you are expected to put to good use in the day-to-day management of the Boys Division of the Tottenham Union. Am I correct?’
Lugg nods.
‘It is intended to provide for the housing, clothing and feeding of the inmates, yes?’
Lugg nods again.
‘The sum allocated is, I believe, calculated according to humane consideration for the inmates’ welfare. And yet, the boys who are in your care seem to be in a rather worse condition than one might expect, given the generous allowance made by the Parish. When I inspected your account books earlier this evening, I noticed that you appear to have underspent your allowance to the tune of five hundred pounds over the last two years. And yet I can find no trace of this money. Can you tell me where it is?
‘Madame, there is a contingency fund set aside for—’
‘Quite so. And yet I can find no mention of this contingency fund anywhere in the Workhouse books and I must come to the unfortunate conclusion that this fund is in fact not under the auspices of the Parish at all. Would that be a reasonable conclusion, Father Lugg?’
Lugg splutters. He’s sweating now.
‘Don’t say anything, Father Lugg. You see, I perceive your difficulty. And I am here; not to punish you, although I am an official of the Church, but to offer you a way out of it.’
She leans forward across the table to Lugg and gives him a dazzling smile. Her monkey-daemon leaps onto the table beside her. Sal and I knows that this won’t have much effect on him. Most of us in the boys’ division has smelled his gin-breath in the cramped coffin-beds of a night. Some of us more than others.
The woman can see this too. She shrugs.
‘Here it is, Father Lugg. You have a money difficulty and too many mouths to feed. I have money, and I wish to purchase five of your boys. I will pay you one hundred pounds in gold for each one. They must be between ten and twelve years of age, in good health, and their daemons must not have settled. I have the money here.’
She opens her big shiny leather handbag and tips a load of coins onto the table. One falls to the ground and the monkey-daemon picks it up.
‘Of course, if you refuse my generous offer, there is always the Parish Committee.’
Lugg gasps. ‘You’re a Gob—’
‘I am an official of the Consistorial Court of Discipline and I am here on Church business. These children are destined for a significant role in Church affairs. You would do well to follow my suggestion.’
He gives in. He ain’t got much choice, has he?
‘Of course, I will leave it up to you to account for the disappearance of the children entrusted to your care. You have been creative enough with your finances. I am sure that making five boys disappear from your roll will not be beyond your capabilities.’
Lugg turns pale under the dirt. The effects of the jenniver has worn off, we sees.
‘I have a large car waiting by the gate. Wake the boys now and meet me in the quadrangle in ten minutes.’
Lugg glances again at the pile of gold on the table and leaves the room with his toad in his coat pocket. The woman strokes her monkey-daemon and then they follows him. You can tell she don’t trust him.
Ten minutes passes. It’s a long time. There’s this big black cloud coming up from the west, making it even darker and colder than before and that uniform’s not exactly well made. I’m getting chilly. Then, when I’m starting to shiver a lot, we sees Lugg and the woman coming out into the quad from the main block. There’s a line of boys shuffling after them. They looks really dopey.
All this time my left leg has been getting stiffer and colder and as I turns to ease it a bit it cramps up completely. I bites my lip to help with the pain but at the same time my arm slips and the parcel slips too and the silver reliquary slides out of the wrappings and rolls down the sloping roof of the oakum-shed. It makes this trundling sound and it’s deafening in the quiet of the night. It balances on the guttering and we thinks it’s going to stop there but it doesn’t; it tips up on its end and falls ten feet to the ground and lands right next to Lugg. It must hit a stone, because there’s a loud crack and the glass vial breaks.
Lugg and the woman turns around. They can see us, up by the window. Lugg opens his mouth to shout at us.
And night turns into day.
From right over us there’s a blinding, brilliant light. It’s white anbaric light and it makes the shiny woman in her glossy fur coat blaze in the glare. And overhead, this enormous metal voice booms out, ‘DO NOT MOVE. STAY EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE.’ It’s like the voice of God.
And then we realises what it is. A Zeppelin of the Church Police – I can see the crosses on the tailfins – has drifted downwind with its engines off until it’s right on top of us, just one hundred feet up. We never got away from the Church at all – they was watching us from Heaven all the time. The light pours down on us from a row of floodlights fixed to the forward gondola. Two of the gas-engines starts up; it’s keeping station above us now.
At the same time, the iron gates bangs open and a police van crashes into the quad. A whole load of coppers jumps out. There’s a full Inspector there too. We all freezes; me, Sal, the boys, and Lugg and the woman. There’s nowhere to hide.
Now, here’s the bit we still doesn’t properly understand. The shiny woman has nothing to worry about if she’s who she says she is. If she’s a high-up in the Court, then nobody can touch her, except maybe an Inquisitor. So all she has to do is turn Sal and me over to the coppers. But she don’t. Perhaps she don’t want the Church to know she’s been in the Tottenham Union at nearly midnight. Perhaps what she’s been doing isn’t official at all. Not officially, at any rate.
‘Inspector Hopkins,’ she calls out. ‘I think you know me.’
The Inspector replies, ‘Yes, I do, Mrs—’
She cuts him off. ‘No more is necessary, I think. Inspector, arrest this man,’ She points at Father Lugg. ‘I have good reason to believe that he has stolen the Reliquary from the Papal Legation in Hampstead. It lies on the ground at his feet.’
The Slug’s face turns a dirty grey with terror. We can’t believe our luck. We can guess what the Church’ll do to him.
The Inspector doesn’t get to be an Inspector by being stupid. He can tell what side his bread’s buttered, even though he can see the shed roof and Sal and me and the parcel wrappings with his own eyes. He also knows who’ll get the credit for returning the reliquary. So he takes hold of Lugg, who’s looking sort of blank, and puts the cuffs on him and then they pick up the broken reliquary and get in the police van and drive off. We wonders what they’ll do about the True Cross. Plenty of spare wood splinters in the police station, I suppose.
The Zeppelin runs up all its engines with this great roaring noise and heads off back to the west. It’s all dim and quiet again. The Workhouse inmates with their cedarwooded daemons hasn’t stirred and the rest of the neighbourhood has hidden its heads under its pillows. The boys and their daemons is standing dazed by the door.
I climbs down off the shed roof and Sal flies to my shoulder. The woman turns to face us. ‘Do you know this place?’ she asks us. ‘Yes,’ Sal tells her.
‘Did you hear us in the office?’
We nods.
‘Then take these boys back inside and put them to bed. There are five hundred sovereigns on the office table. I do not need them. See that they are put somewhere safe. And then—’, she gives us that great big smile, ‘Hop it!’
So we does.
Lyra’s world is a fabulous place in which to set a story. I really enjoyed writing this one. I hope you liked reading it.
This story is for John Arthur Shire Kendell, who died of Disseminated Sclerosis in Truro Union Workhouse in Cornwall on the twenty-ninth of January 1929.
Jopari, June 2001
SAL – her full name is Sarastus.
DRAB – prostitute.
ARTHUR – it’s not clear whether Arthur’s linguistic confusion is a form of thieves’ argot, like backchat or Polari, or a result of his damaged childhood. Couples in our world often mix up “I” and “we” – how much more scope for singular/plural confusion there must be in a world with daemons!
FLUSH – well-off, rich.
TART – prostitute.
TRADE – rough trade or renting. Male prostitution.
RATCLIFFE HIGHWAY – the Ratcliffe Highway ran (and still does, though it’s called simply “The Highway” now) from the Tower of London to Limehouse and the docks.
The Ratcliffe Highway was a notorious haunt, full of low taverns, beggars, thieves and prostitutes. I’m reminded of the song THE DESERTER from Fairport Convention’s 1969 LP, LIEGE AND LEIF:
‘As I was a-walking
Along Ratcliffe Highway,
A recruiting party,
Came a-beating my way.
They enlisted me and treated me
‘Til I did not know.
And to the Queen’s Barracks,
They forced me to go.’
CHTHONIC – a brilliant naming of Philip Pullman’s. Known as the Underground or Tube in our London.
THE HEATH – Hampstead Heath, a large public park in an upmarket part of north London. The big house is known as Kenwood in our London. It houses an art collection (including a fabulous Rembrandt self-portrait) and holds outdoor concerts in the summer.
THE RELIQUARY – just the same as in our world.
LIMEHOUSE – a very low-rent part of east London. Most of the inhabitants prefer not to pay any rent at all…
TRUTH-TELLER – Of the original six, at least three alethiometers are generally known to have survived in Lyra’s time. The Church has one of them, but Fra Pavel, their reader, is very slow and it would only be used in matters of great importance.
CENTRAL FINCHLEY – our Finchley Central. In our London it’s an intermediate stop on the Underground Northern Line. Lyra’s London hasn’t grown as much as ours, I think. We have a North, a West, and an East Finchley too.
HIGH GATE – our Highgate. A middle-class London suburb.
LAMPLIGHTERS – although Lyra’s world has nuclear power (“atomcraft” is derived from German), there’s still quite a lot of naphtha lighting around. Somebody has to light it (and extinguish it too).
PENNY POST – introduced by Rowland Hill in our 19th century. There used to be several deliveries each day. It was nearly as fast as email!
HOWNSLOW FIELD – our Heathrow Airport (near Hounslow). When, in NORTHERN LIGHTS, Mrs Coulter and Lyra travel from Oxford to London their airship docks at Falkeshall, which is our Vauxhall, on the north bank of the Thames. There are several scientific institutions nearby.
It’s an interesting question as to why Lyra and her mother went by airship when the train would have been both quicker and more convenient. The only justification that I can think of is Mrs Coulter’s reference to the Chthonic Railway as not being for people of their class. Perhaps the same stigma attaches to all rail travel in their world.
NORTHERN LIGHTS is English for THE GOLDEN COMPASS.
TOTTENHAM UNION WORKHOUSE – Why “Union”? Under the various Poor Laws, each parish was responsible for providing relief, “in-relief” for workhouse inmates and “out-relief”, or welfare payments, for the poor but not destitute. It was common for parishes to club together, as it were, to form a Union and gain economies of scale by sharing a large workhouse facility (as we would call it now) between them.
The four-sectioned layout Arthur describes was not uncommon, though it varied across the country. The music-hall song MY OLD DUTCH (1897) refers obliquely to the practice of splitting up couples, presumably for reasons of propriety, as there was often no provision of private rooms for them. It’s only when you realise that the oft-mocked opening lines of the chorus:
‘We've been together now for forty years,
An' it don't seem a day too much.
There ain't a lady livin' in the land
As I'd swop for my dear old Dutch.’
refer not to Darby and Joan enjoying a happily contented old age, but to a loving couple come on hard times, sent to the workhouse and forced to live and sleep apart, possibly until they die, that you appreciate how tragic it is. The contemporary audience would have known this and been as affected by it (probably more so, as it would have been much closer to home) as some 21st century readers have been affected by the separation of a certain pair of 12-year-olds.
“Dutch” is cockney rhyming slang, of course. Dutch Plate -> mate. “China” has the same derivation.
TITHE – a tenth. The proportion of your income that you would be expected to give to the Church.
PICKING OAKUM – it’s amazing what work you can find for poor people to do. An oakum/tar mixture was used to waterproof the seams of wooden ships.
DALI – the artist Salvador Dali (1904-1989), who painted in a surreal yet hyper-realistic style.
MAGDELENA – the nature of Christ’s daemon has been the cause of more dissension and more burnings – of books and people – over the centuries than any other Church matter. One generation’s dangerous heresy is the next’s orthodoxy, and vice-versa. The controversy centres on the location of Christ’s Divinity. Some schools of thought maintain that Christ was wholly human and His daemon wholly divine. They point to the nature of the Crucifixion to support their case. Others would have Magdelena be a manifestation of the Holy Spirit and thus count all daemons holy. Yet others say that Christ carried His daemon within Himself, so that She was hidden from the sight of ordinary men and became visible only at His death. This is a dangerous heresy, bordering on blasphemy. To misquote Ursula Le Guin – “Infinite are the arguments of scholars.”
ROMAN – Latin, of course.
CEDARWOOD – see NORTHERN LIGHTS.
EDGEWARE – an area of north-west London.
HARWICH – a port in East Anglia, south of the Fens.
JENNIVER – Geneva Spirit, commonly known as gin.
SOVEREIGNS – it was typically thoughtless of Lord Asriel to tip Lyra five dollars in NORTHERN LIGHTS. He’d just come back from abroad and was happy to unload his foreign money on her. She didn’t mind, though. Gold is gold, wherever you live.
CROSSES ON THE TAILFINS – in our world the airships Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin were emblazoned with the Nazi swastika. The US government, justifiably afraid that Germany was planning to use airships for reconnaissance and spying in the anticipated World War 2, placed an embargo on the export of helium. As the US was the only source of bulk helium at that time, the Hindenburg, although she was designed to be helium-filled, had to use flammable hydrogen instead. Following the resultant disaster at Lakehurst, NJ, no country has built a large rigid airship, although every few years there are rumours that somebody will, using modern materials. Our world is the poorer for it.
Sometimes you only spot them afterwards.
Iain M Banks does a great line in naïve first-person narrative in the wonderful FEERSUM ENDJINN whose narrator, Bascule the Teller, writes in a garbled phonetic language that is at first quite unintelligible but, once you decode it, immense fun to read. Strongly recommended.
A religious object wrapped in a parcel is the Mcguffin in THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN, by GK Chesterton, also set in north London.
In 1930, the German airship Graf Zeppelin flew low over Wembley Stadium in London during the FA Cup Final. There’s an absolutely stunning photo taken from within the ground. The airship seems to cover half the sky…