The Great Showman (and The Mermaid in the Glass Case)

Milk Teeth

   Like many people when I was very young, I grew up with my mother and my father. We were not wealthy, my father being a lowly middle-class bank clerk in London. My mother Therese Joseph nee Blackwell was a devout Catholic her whole life and therefore she saw it as her duty to do charitable works. She volunteered as a charitable worker with an organisation called, 'The little sisters of Camden' staffed mainly by nuns from the nearby convent. These charitable sisters offered help and companionship to the elderly and infirm. They  also took food and second-hand clothing to the poorest in society and also to those confined to the workhouse. The workhouse was a place that loomed large in my memory. An ugly, hateful memory. A place that devoured the poor and needy. I remembered it as a tall windowless building made of a yellow stone brickwork.  It was the tallest building on a street with only small, neat white alms houses on either side of it. The hulking building stood out like a rotted tooth on a street of pearl white properties.

     My father Isiah Joseph. I am certain had  been a good man, one who perhaps had made some bad choices but he was ultimately decent. I only have very vague memories of him. He was very hard working, I remember that, but I never really knew him, I was never particularly close to him. In fact, I never saw that much of him either as he worked such long hours in what I can only imagine to be a very gloomy office in the city. He was friendly enough to me when I did happen to see him, but it was like talking to a distant stranger. He died of typhoid fever when I was ten years old, and suddenly the lives of my mother and myself were thrown into unexpected turmoil and upheaval. My father it seemed had little in the way of savings, and it seems that he had acquired debts, from an almost secret existence, another secret life, that my mother knew nothing about. My mother and I both became all too aware of those secret debts after his death, when two bailiffs arrived at our door. I remember those two very large, brusque  and overbearing men arrive,  dressed head to foot in black. Two strangers barged their way into our house and began touching, evaluating  and taking away our things.  I stood observing them, while peeping out from where I was hiding behind my mother's skirt, holding tight to her hand, as in my immature way I was terrified that they may take me away too.  And we both watched as these men took away the few items that we did own, including the furniture and even my mother's wedding ring. The money raised in the sale of our precious items would barely cover the cost of these debts, let alone my father's funeral, which in the end had to be a very simple affair. My mother tried to hide her devastation, and the fear she had, the terror of what our future may now involve for herself and me. But even though I was  just a ten-year-old boy I could see the terror in her eyes, and I understood even back then what it meant for us. I was not so silly and naïve as it turns out.

     My father's death was a huge turning point in my life. Until then I would never have known that we merely rented our house. That I was about to experience a moment of immense change and upheaval. A swift transition from one part of my life to another. I always knew we were not wealthy, but I always had food and I always had shoes to wear and clothes on my young back, even if they were often second hand. I never thought about these domestic worries. There was now a real genuine fear that we would be thrown out onto the streets by our landlord, as we had no money for the rent. Our house stripped of its furnishings was an empty, barren shell. My mother appealed to the church for help. But I know she felt ashamed and uncomfortable now taking the charity which we used to collect for others. My mother on many occasions had often taken me with her when visited the workhouse, to offer charity, but I hated that place. The look of it and the very smell of poverty. I did not hate the poor people of course not  and I had wanted like my mother to help them, but the actual state of the building. The sight of the hunger, the horrific dirty conditions and the rapidity in which disease was spread was something that truly terrified me. I remember on my many trips here before my father's death swearing an oath to myself to always work hard in life and to never end up in this position. But now it was looking like this may be something that was a reality, for both of us, and my young world was swirling out of my control