A Memory of Violets by Hazel Gaynor

from someone, maybe. Either way, he didn’t even stop to say sorry, so he didn’t. Right ruined they were—all my cresses and primroses—muddied and spoiled on the ground, and there I was, sobbin’ and sobbin’ as I tried to wash ’em under the freezing water, when up walks this great black top hat, soaring into the sky like the factory chimneys. ’Course there was a head attached to it, and a smart frock coat. Stopped to ask mewhat the matter was, that hat did—wanted to know why I was all weepin’ and wretched.
    Thought he was a copper’s nark at first, come to arrest me for shouting after a gen’leman, but then didn’t he pay me the money for the spoiled flowers and give me and Rosie a breakfast ticket for a room he has at the Garden. I known he was a good, kind man then. “He’s a good, kind man, Rosie.” That’s what I told Little Sister when she asked who it was had stopped to talk to us. “A good, kind man with a great big hat. A good, kind man what prays to God and has given us a special ticket to get a hot drink and a slice of bread and butter.”
    We go to the Club Room each mornin’ now. I give Rosie most of my bread and butter, and her cheeks get rounder each day and have a bit of color in them. And that hot cocoa feels just grand in our bellies after the cold nights and mornin’s at the market buying our stock. Like a taste of Heaven, so it is. And when it’s after raining, we get dry clothes to wear and some kind women read to us from the Bible, telling us about God’s love. Sometimes they mend the holes and tears in our clothes and dip a rag in a bowl of warm water and teach us to wash our hands and feet and faces, telling how it stops the disease if ye stay clean. Sometimes we get given a blanket, and that’s a grand thing to be given altogether!
    Mr. Shaw is the name of the man in the hat who helped us. A good, kind man he is, and no mistake. And the ladies who help in the Club Room are good and kind, too. One lady, who Rosie has come to have a particular liking for, always stops to buy a couple of bunches when she sees us out selling on the street. She gave a silver sixpence once, when a penny would do. “Buy a mug of hot cocoa for yourself and your sister, and you’ll still have plenty left to take home to your father,” she said. And she’ll sometimes payfor the violets, too, when they’re all ruined and wilted by the late frosts.
    There’s lots of other flower sellers go to the Club Room. Some have a crutch, like me. Some have an arm missing or hands that won’t work proper, and some are midgets, no taller than Rosie, though they’re much older in years. One of them girls is after telling me that Mr. Shaw takes his Sunday School girls on a trip to the seaside at Clacton every summer and that they swim in the sea—putting their whole bodies in the water! I told her I don’t think I’d dare to even put my toe in the sea—“Ye could drown,” I say. But it would be a grand thing to walk on the sand, all the same, and they say the sea air smells as fresh as peas after the summer rains.
    It’s them shamrocks on our handkerchiefs for certain. It’s them what brought Mr. Shaw to us—they’re looking out for us, just like Mammy said. Even so, I know that good, kind men in chimney-pot hats and fancy frock coats can’t keep me an’ Rosie safe and warm forever. I still shiver till my bones rattle when we huddle together under a market barrow at night. I still keep my eyes open, watching for those bad men what lurk in the shadows. I can hear them, creeping in and out of the laneways, as quiet and menacing as a winter fog.

Chapter 9
London
    April 1876
    I do the washing and run errands for Da, and each morning he gives me a few coins and sends us out to the markets at the Garden to buy our stock for the day’s sellin’. I