CHAPTER I

GENERALLY speaking, there is no mystery about birth, even in the least creditable circumstances. The most mysterious thing that can happen to any man is not to be born at all. Less mystery why, swathed (one presumes) in voluminous shawls, one should be carried from Ashburnham Road to a little court hard by the Deptford Creek which separates the Royal Town of Greenwich from the unsalubrious purlieus of Deptford.

I was adopted at the age of nine days. Otherwise there might have been for me a romantic upbringing in Greenwich Workhouse or one of those institutions whither motherless and fatherless persons of nine days old and having no visible means of support are brought to maturity. Happily, there was a philanthropist who heard of my plight, and having for the workhouse the loathing which is the proper possession of the proud poor, he dispatched Clara to fetch me,

"She's adopted", said Mr. Freeman, an autocrat in his way.

Nor when he discovered that he had been mistaken as to my sex did he vary his humane decision.

In name and fact he was Freeman—a liveryman of the Haberdashers' Company; a Freeman of the City of London—he could trace his ancestry back for five hundred years through family and city records. And he was a fish porter at Billingsgate Market. A stocky, big-featured man, with a powerful nose and a chin beard such as Abraham Lincoln wore.

I never saw him write anything but his name. I never saw him read anything but the New Testament—a big, calf-bound volume with leaves that were yellow from age. He used to"break out" about twice a year and drink brandy. Then was the Testament laid reverently aside, and he would fight any man of any size and beat him. Once he fought for two hours, perilously, on the edge of a deep cutting.

He had the strength of an ox; balanced on the flat leather hat he wore in business hours, he could carry heavy cases of fish, and they were no more to him than such chaplets as the patricians wore.

He never did a crooked thing in his life. His wife was the gentlest mother that ever lived. She could not write, but she could read. Mostly she read aloud the murders in the Sunday newspapers, and we discussed historic criminals—Peace, Palmer (whose trial she remembered) and such moderns as Mrs. Maybrick. I loved them and they loved me. They are dead, and I am the poorer for it.

I remember dimly the sinking of the Princess Alice. Greenwich had a maritime flavour in those days. It was a town of blue-jerseyed men, and in every other house in our neighbourhood was the model of a full-rigged ship. And over most parlour mantelpieces hung a collection of brightly coloured china rolling-pins, the exact significance of which I have never understood, except that they had to do with foreign travel.

My first vivid recollection in life is one of a sort of possessive pride in prison vans. The gloomy"Black Maria" that rumbled up the Greenwich Road every afternoon. I recollect giving the infants' class at St. Peter's School a miss and toddling up Trafalgar Street to see the gloomy tumbril pass in the rain, with a shiny warder sitting on a little knifeboard behind and a top-hatted driver under the tarpaulin apron in front.

I think Young Harry was in the van on his way to Wandsworth. And Young Harry was my adopted"brother." All his life he hated policeme