Far From Home: The sisters of Street Child. Berlie Doherty

      Dawn was beginning to break with a grey, steely light. The street was deserted, except for the lamplighter tramping towards the main road, stretching up his long pole to extinguish the street lamps. Emily ran to him, her bare feet slapping the cold stones.

      “Wait, oh wait! Please, mister, have you seen a woman and a girl coming this way?” she panted.

      Saying nothing, the lamplighter just pointed to where an early mist was coiling up in smoky wreaths from the direction of the river. Emily ran on to the Thames and along the bank, calling, “Lizzie! Lizzie! Lizzie!” She had to find her. Would they have gone this way, or that? “Lizzie! Rosie!” Her voice echoed off the old boat sheds. People were beginning to move, horses were being fastened to their carts, beggars uncurling from their sleeping-holes. Costermongers trudging out of their cottages, their trays loaded with breakfast shrimps to sell to the early-morning workers; street children crept like rats out of the shadowy arches of bridges to scavenge what they could. But there was no sign of Lizzie and Rosie.

      “Which way? Oh, which way?” Emily gazed round in despair.

      “’Ere. You’re lost, ain’tcha?”

      A boy was sitting in the gutters, with a string of shoelaces in his hand. He was dressed in the tattered clothes of a street child, barefoot and dirty, with tangled hair.

      “Don’t know yer way back home? Cos like, I know these streets inside out and upside down, I do, and I can take you anywhere you wants to go, and maybe your ma and pa would give me a penny or a farving for finding you, or maybe not, I don’t care.” He grinned up at her. “Why don’t you sit down for half a minute and catch your breff, and have a little fink?”

      She shook her head, though she was exhausted with running so far. She didn’t have time to take a rest. Rosie was a quick walker. They could be anywhere by now. “I’m looking for my sister,” she said. “And my friend Rosie. You haven’t seen them, have you?”

      The boy frowned. “Not seen no one this morning of the female kind, ’cept for Raggedy Annie and the like. Seen a lot of dogs. There was an old man as wouldn’t buy me laces, even though his own was frayed like pieces of old straw. Too mean, he was, and when he trips over he’ll remember me and fink, I wish I’d helped that boy out. But I ain’t noticed anyone else this morning. Why don’t yer go back home? Maybe they’ll be there, waiting for you.”

      Emily shook her head, too upset to speak now. She turned away from him and began to trudge back the way she had just come. She hadn’t got a home, not any more. Even if she found her way back to the Big House, she couldn’t go inside. She didn’t belong there now. She didn’t belong anywhere. She felt a surge of panic. What if she didn’t find them? What on earth would she do?

      “Any idea where they was heading?” the boy called after her.

      She stopped. “Yes!” Why hadn’t she thought of that? She tried to force the word out of the back of her memory. Somewhere that made her think of sunshine. “Sunbury! They were going to Sunbury!”

      He whistled softly. “That’s out of my patch, that is. Cor, it’s miles and miles away! Tell you what. You’ll have to get onto one of the main roads and ask the coachmen there. Go along there to that big church and then you’ll find some coaches. Maybe they’ve took one, cos they won’t be walking that far I don’t fink.”

      “They won’t be on a coach,” Emily said sadly.

      The boy whistled again. “No money, eh? There’s only two choices for people wiv no money. The streets, or the workhouse up that lane, and I know which one I choose. I’ve been there, I have, and I got out again as quick as a cat. Never go there again, I won’t.”

      Emily started running again. Her head was thudding. She’d wasted too much time; she shouldn’t have stopped. She must have really lost them by now. Ahead of her she saw the church. She could just make out a line of coaches where someone might tell her the way to Sunbury. Sunbury – the long, long walk. Could Lizzie manage it? But what were the other choices? The streets, and a life of begging and stealing and sleeping under bridges. Would Rosie let that happen? The workhouse. No, no, not the workhouse. Surely they wouldn’t go to the workhouse. But Ma might be there. Jim might be there. She stood at the end of the lane that the boy had pointed to. At the far end, she could see a tall building with black gates. No. They wouldn’t go there. Never.

      

      Rosie and Lizzie had stopped running by now. They were well away from the Big House, and Rosie knew that Lizzie would never find her way back there on her own. She drew her under a bridge to rest a little, and let go of her grasp. Gulls screeched mournfully, the tide was out, the riverbanks were a stinking mess of mud and fish bones and rubbish. Further down the river they could see a huddle of fishermen’s cottages, clustered together like a mouthful of rotting teeth.

      “That’s where I come from,” said Rosie. “That’s where I was born. Went up in the world, I did, thanks to your ma.” And now it looks as if I’m sunk back down, just like that, she thought to herself.

      Lizzie thought the cottages looked even worse than Mr Spink’s tenement house where she used to live with Ma and Emily and Jim. How long ago was that? Only three days? And where was Ma now? Where was Jim?

      “Is that where you’re taking me?”

      “Oh no. My granddad would eat you up. Like a snappy dog, he is. He’s wicked. I wouldn’t take you there. No, Lizzie, we’re going to Sunbury.”

      “I want to go back to Emily. Back to the Big House.”

      “Well, you can’t,” Rosie said firmly. “We’ve been kicked out. There, now you know, and I wasn’t going to tell you that. We’ve got to go to Sunbury, or starve, and that’s the truth. It’s our only hope now. My sister might speak for us. We’ll be all right there, maybe. But we’re going to be walking till our legs drop off, so best get a move on. Up that lane now.”

      It was beginning to drizzle with a sharp, frosty sleet. Rosie stopped to pull her shawl up over her head. I wish I was back in that big warm kitchen, she thought. The job of my dreams, that was, working there. Never again, Rosie. Not for you.

      “What’s that big building up there, with the black railings?” Lizzie asked. She had a feeling that she knew very well what it was, that it had been pointed out to her in the past as a house to be afraid of, a last-place-in-the-world sort of house, more frightening even than a graveyard.

      “It’s the workhouse,” Rosie said. She tugged Lizzie’s arm, anxious to hurry past the place, but Lizzie pulled herself away from her.

      “I want to go there. If I can’t go back to the Big House, I want to go there.”

      “Not there! I won’t let you.”

      “But Ma might be there. And Jim. I want to be with them.” Lizzie was already running up the middle of the slippery road, and all Rosie could do was to lift her skirts out of the muck and run after her. Maybe, she thought fleetingly, it would be for the best. In her heart of hearts she knew that her sister would never be able to find work for both of them, probably not even for one of them. At least if Lizzie was in the workhouse she would have food of sorts, and a roof over her head. She wouldn’t be sleeping on the streets like the other homeless children. But the nearer she drew to the huge iron gates that kept the inmates of the workhouse away from the rest of the world, the more her dread and fear of the place grew.

      Never, she thought. I’ll never let Annie’s child go there.

      Lizzie had nearly reached the railings when she saw a group of children being