Sunday at the Cross Bones. John Walsh

girl,’ said I, ‘this is snow. These white precipitations are flakes from Heaven, sent to settle upon the fields and hills, the houses and trees and streets of your village, and upon the people too, on Mr Phillips, our deliverer tonight, the gentleman whose back you see before you, and upon your mother, who is now standing on the Rectory porch wondering what has become of you, and upon your hapless father’s snow-white head, and upon you too. It is a boon of nature, for all its cold and sodden malignancy, for it settles on all things like divine grace covering the land and its inhabitants, binding us all, the virtuous and the unjust, in an eternal present, reminding us of the kindly folds of Redemption that will wrap us all, one day, in the bosom of the Lord, if we give up our sins and follow His precepts.’

      My tiny daughter understood not one word of my elegant homily, but something happened that will never leave my memory. Her eyes gazed through the window at the falling snow, as incurious as if I had shown her one of those glass toys in which, when shaken, a snowstorm riots over a miniature hamlet. But then her eyes flicked into mine a look of steady interrogation, as though pondering these elevated sentiments, then flicked back to the window and the descending flakes, and she made, as if calling up a bitter-sweet memory, a secret smile. I held my breath – I had never seen her smile before – and thanked God for this small epiphany, and thanked Him also for the snow and ice that had occasioned it, no matter that we had to freeze and suffer for its arrival.

      At home, Mimi seized the child, protested that never again would she let her stray from her loving arms et cetera, and fed her from both bursting breasts for full half an hour, while I plied Mr Phillips with hot brandy and water to thaw his frozen extremities. I built up the fire, procured some fruit cake from the larder and we ate it together like huddled refugees, and to this day I can recall no moment more redolent of family love, for all the strange upsets that befell us half a dozen years later, when I went away to war, and Mimi had a baby without my –

      But these father’s tales are idle nostalgia. I left Dickens’s house, regained Theobald’s Road, went down Gray’s Inn Road and I lunched on a park bench set back from the road for the convenience of fatigued travellers, and fell into conversation with a young nanny who parked her black perambulator by the wooden seat. A comely girl of limited social graces, she met my enquiries as to her employment, her address and her current state of mind with a guarded hostility that one finds too often in young women nowadays. My genial enquiry as to which music-hall performer she would like to meet fell on stony ground. I turned the conversation to the Stimulation of the Infant Mind, and the folly of too early an exposure to language-learning, and we were away for half an hour, as she complained about her employers, their insistence on her holding up cards for the infant, showing the words ‘CAT’ and ‘APPLE’ and ‘BONNET’ and even ‘POLICEMAN’. I agreed vigorously about the importance of giving children the freedom to wander in the wild wood of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. She listened with interest to my tales of Sheilagh and Nugent in the nursery, their screams and laughter as we enacted together the tale of Hansel and Gretel and the crone in the Gingerbread House. But I went too far. Emboldened by our brief acquaintance, I acted the part of the Witch and, while demonstrating the scene in which she prods Hansel in the rib to determine if he was fattened enough to eat, the young lady took fright. Such a fuss, when I merely poked her playfully in the chest and said (in character, of course), ‘There needs to be more meat on this girl before she is ready.’ She shrank away, gathered the remains of her luncheon, her hat and the perambulator, and fled down Fetter Lane.

      I watched her flight (women run so oddly, do they not?), tinged with concern that she may have misinterpreted my little performance as an attempt at seduction. How could she know that for years I acted on stages from Oxford to Bayswater, in student and amateur theatricals? I can, when occasion demands, impersonate a fearsome predator, as easily as I can a saintly family doctor. The stage has always been my second calling. I cannot help it if the suspicious-minded see the performance, rather than the kindly Samaritan behind it.

      The afternoon passed agreeably in the Public Records Office, as I sought the documented provenance of Lily Beane. A splendid girl, full of vim and zest but with no discernible ambition, she channels all her energies to whatever is immediately in front of her: laundering (Oh! her rhythmic drubbing of a washboard), selling fruit from a stall at Greenwich Market, buttering rolls in licensed premises on the Strand, talking to men sixteen to the dozen – such undisciplined enthusiasm! How does Browning put it in ‘My Last Duchess’?

       ‘She had

      A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,

      Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.’

      I arrived in her life just in time to stay her from sliding into exploitation. I have an instinct for these things. I knew it would be only a matter of weeks before some foul opportunist enlisted her good-natured joie de vivre for venal purposes. I saw the way they looked at her in the Jolly Gardeners in Putney – the leery gang of off-duty lawyers’ clerks and fly-by-night office boys who beguile the female bar staff with lies about their status, and lure them to casual indecency in omnibus shelters. I know how these convivial evenings of conversation and piano-centred hilarity can conclude with invitations to less innocent revels elsewhere. ‘Parties’ – that simple word that covers a multitude of vices, the social obsession of the last decade, along with the multicoloured folly of ‘cocktails’ – have come to represent all the headlong sinfulness of the modern age. I am no wet blanket when it comes to social gatherings. Many are the times I have entertained the Rectory company with recitals – sometimes a little near the edge of propriety! – from the music hall and the dramatic stage. But the parties to which young Lily was invited, Friday after Friday, left me sitting in the snug chewing my fingernails with concern for the fate of the poor girl in the company of such reprobates.

      As soon as I could, I engaged her in conversation at the bar, talked with fervour about the danger she faced from plausible youths with too much drink in them, how they would lead her astray with promises of love. She laughed at me. She laughed at me!

      ‘You don’t know much about the boys round here, mate,’ she said. ‘They’re a long way off talking about love. What century’re you livin’ in?’ She yanked the beer tap until a pronounced blue vein stood out on her cottoned forearm.

      ‘I assume a young woman of your disposition will not suffer local louts to paw you like a piece of veal when you are so evidently –’

      ‘I don’t let anyone take advantage of me, matey, thank you very much,’ she remonstrated – her bright brown eyes like button mushrooms agleam in a stew – ‘and I don’t so much as kiss a boy unless he’s told me about his folks. Once they tell you about their folks, you know they’re not wrong ’uns. And even then, it’ll take more than a bit of chat to make me go home with nobody, because I got to be up for work, dead early.’ She paused, handed over two foaming pints to a pink-cheeked, high-collared young City type, no more than eighteen, took his money with the words, ‘Thank you, ’andsome.’ You could almost hear the dereliction of her morals in the immediate future, crashing down in a matter of weeks.

      ‘You have a friendly disposition, Lily,’ I said. ‘It’s what makes you so popular. You are generous, good-natured, and wish to see the best in people. But do you not realise it is this idealistic nature that renders you a prey to ignorant men who misconstrue your warmth as – as an invitation to come closer?’

      ‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ she said with a brassy laugh. ‘I’m a good girl. I don’t go anywhere I shouldn’t with boys. Well, not unless they’re goin’ to treat me like a lady, and buy me a nice roast supper at the Stockpot.’

      There, in one sentence, is the reason for my presence among these young victims! Poor creature, she could not see that she had already entered the sloping path that leads, with increasing celerity, to the shanty towns of Hades. Part of my mission is to educate foolish youth about the economic underpinning of impurity. Male behaviour which they would not countenance on sober first acquaintance, they will accept as due reward for being bought dinner and port wine at a squalid men’s chophouse in Panton Street. The first impulses towards prostitution, I have often said, arrive with the appearance