Ten Tons stared across the choppy brown water. “It’s out there waiting,” he groaned.
“It’ll have a long wait,” I said.
Ten Tons looked up at me and winked. “Waiting for me to get some sense into my head,” he said. Then he started doing a stupid dance in the mud. It was too early for jokes. I turned away, treading for coals. The mud sucked at my feet. It was cold deep down there.
“I swam down to it this morning,” said Ten Tons suddenly. “It took me thirty dives.”
“Did you?” That was something! See? People think Ten Tons is just a madman. But he can stick with things like no one once he gets going. I told you he taught himself to read and write. The trouble is, most of the time he sticks with stupid things … well, what does he need to read for? Come to that, what did he need to know where the copper was for? No one was ever going to lift THAT out of the mud, that was for sure.
“It’s about two fathoms down at low tide. Down there…” He pointed at the place on the water and I could just picture it shining like an angel under the river … yes!
“Do you think we could saw bits off?” I asked hopefully.
“Naw!” He looked sideways up at me and he said, “I’ve been having a think about it, Jamie-boy…”
Then Davies saw us talking and shouted, “Get on with it!” Him and Ten Tons worked together. You only get a few hours to get in your coals and bits of iron. Davies would thrash him if he thought he was slacking.
Ten Tons hefted his basket onto his shoulders and shouted, “I must have ten tons of coal in here, Davies!” He always says that. Davies swore and ran his arm along his nose. Green snot. Davies always had green snot running out of him, even in the summer. He said it gave him a headache. Maybe that’s why he gets so cross.
* * *
We ate our grub on the jetty. I had a chunk of bread with dripping on, but all Davies and Ten Tons had were stale crusts. I was going to tell them what I had for supper last night for a tease. I used to say neither of them would know supper if it got up and hit them. But Davies was sitting there holding his face and staring over the brown water, and I kept my mouth shut. You keep quiet when he’s like that.
All the time Ten Tons kept glancing at Davies and giggling. You could tell he had something on his mind and I was willing to bet I knew what it was.
The copper.
That’s Ten Tons! He’s always coming up with these crazy schemes to get rich. And of course none of them ever worked. Well … if they had we’d have been rich men by now, wouldn’t we?
* * *
After eating I went to sell my basket of coal. I found an old woman soon enough on Cotton Street, who gave me three farthings for it. It began to rain, but, well … that doesn’t bother me! I’m wet all day, I don’t even notice it. I had the weight of that coal off my shoulders, that was all I cared about.
The tide was in by now, the coals all covered up, so I went onto the river to collect sticks for my mother to burn. I found a row boat on the jetty … no one minds you borrowing the boats, they always get put back … and I pushed out into the traffic.
The river’s always busy. There was a tug pounding up the river, gushing thick black smoke from its funnel, paddles spinning. You’d think they’d knock a hole in themselves, with their engines thumping away like that. There were the tall ships that cross the oceans, floating on the water with their fine sails like grand ladies. I thought, one day I’ll be a sailor and ride all day on one of those.
There were ferry boats carrying people to and fro, the fishermen flinging out their nets. There were the Thames barges and schooners and ketches. There was traffic everywhere. The river was yellow-brown with mud. I was a part of it.
I found a long stick to reach over the side with, and I started fishing for wood.
* * *
I always stored my wood in the barge Tens and Davies lived in until it was time to go home. The barge was half rotted, sunk on its side in the mud, and close enough to the docks for us to keep an eye on it as we worked, but even so people used to come and try and steal our stuff. Then we’d have to run back through the thick mud, falling and slipping and black with ooze, while the thieves tried to run back up to the banks. It was the slowest chase you ever saw!
Davies and Tens lost a lot of wood that way … it was dangerous in the winter. A lot of orphans froze to death as they slept for the want of a fire.
I could hear Ten Tons snivelling as I got close. I leaned over and dumped my wood through a hole in the hull. Tens was sitting inside. The side of his face was a fiery red. Davies was nowhere to be seen.
Ten Tons sniffed and wiped his face on his sleeve as I climbed in. I went over to him and had a look. It looked really sore.
“He just kept on slapping me,” moaned poor old Tens. Davies shouldn’t loose his temper on Tens like that. He gets carried away sometimes.
I winked at Tens. “Never mind, Tens. He’ll be sorry … he always is. Come on. Let’s get to work.”
I took Ten Tons by the hand and we walked together out of the hulk and onto the mud.
There was a brig beached on the mud, and as soon as we got behind it Ten Tons wiped his face on his sleeve, which made it dirtier than ever. Then he said, “I’ll show you instead.”
I sighed and leaned against the hull.
He took a short rod of iron and some lengths of string out of his coat and tied the string around the iron. He looked at me and winked and grinned.
I sighed. The iron was meant to be the copper. What else? That’s why Davies had attacked him … he was sick to death of another mad plan. But I didn’t say anything. I felt sorry for poor Tens so I just watched.
Next he got some pieces of wood and he tied those to the other ends of the string. Then he put the whole thing into a puddle. The iron sank to the bottom, of course, and the wood floated.
“Watch,” said Tens. He put his hands flat under the wood. “My hands are the water,” he explained. He lifted his hands up a little and looked at me. I nodded … I got the picture. His hands rising in the air were the water rising as the tide came in. And the sticks of wood floating on top of the water were being lifted up by the tide.…
Slowly he lifted his hands up … up, up, up. The string tightened. Then, very gently, as if he were lifting a baby, Ten Tons lifted the iron clear of the mud so it swung free in the air.
“I am the tide, the iron is the copper,” he chanted. “What do you say, Jamie?”
I stared at it, imagining half a ton of copper swinging free of the deep Thames mud, slowly sliding away on the current downriver, buoyed up by the timbers, the whole vast weight of it lifted up by Old Father Thames as lightly as if it were a feather on the air. The copper would be as light as that to the river and the copper was enough to buy all of us any life we wanted.…
“Damn you, Ten Tons!” I shouted. “Just let me get going, will you?” And I stamped off into the mud to hunt for lost lumps of coal.
I was furious! God knows how many hours we’d wasted trying to carry out those mad plans of his … and they never work! Once he had us for three whole days trying to steal a brass sextant he’d seen shining in the sunlight from the cabin of a clipper. We got caught on board and whipped with tarred rope by one of the hands, like real sailors. Poor old Ten Tons got whipped again once we got off … by me and Davies. And I got whipped again as well when my father saw the marks.
Tens always made it sound so likely! And now he was at it again!
Half an hour later I was dragging Ten Tons by the hand to go and see Davies.
He was treading for coals farther downriver. He stood straight and watched us, unsmiling, as we came round to him.
“Davies,” I said. “You’ve got to listen to this one.”
“If it’s another of his plans…”
Ten Tons was hiding behind me. “It only takes one of ’em to work, Davies,” he squeaked.
“I’ve got work to do,” he growled, and he turned his back.
“Davies,
this is driving me mad. Just listen. Ten minutes. Please,” I begged.
Davies’ face turned hard as a lump of iron. I could hear Ten Tons tittering nervously. He always giggles when he gets scared. I gave him a nudge. “Get on with it,” I said.
Ten Tons went through the whole rigmarole with the iron and the sticks and the string. Davies watched without saying a word. When it was done he clenched his fists and he hissed, “I’ll kill him!”
I grabbed Ten Tons’ hand and we ran away, through the mud and downriver to the flour mill.
An hour later Davies suddenly appeared next to us. Me and Ten Tons held our breath.
“Ten Tons,” he said. “I’m sorry I hit you.”
“That’s all right, Davies,” said Ten Tons, and he began to cry. He always cries when someone says sorry to him. God knows why.
Davies squatted down on his haunches, his bum in the mud, and explained the rest to us.
“We float it downriver while the tide is high,” he said. “Then we cut the ropes. The copper drops to the bottom. We wait for the tide to go back out, come back at night … and there it is, boys, lying in the mud waiting for us. We’ll have to pinch a pair of horses to drag it out and get it to the dealers. And then, my boys … we go to sea! Ten Tons … you’re a genius!”
He jumped up and grabbed Tens, and he grabbed me … and we all did a mud waltz, round and round in circles, rubbing black mud in each other’s hair and crowing and kissing Ten Tons, and bouncing him up and down. Because, I tell you … who else could have thought of it? Who else but Ten Tons! Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I? Didn’t I?
Four
The Rope
Davies wanted us to go straight away and steal rope. We needed lots of good rope if we were going to float that copper off the bottom. But … it was the old problem.
I had money to earn for my family.
I couldn’t make them see. They thought if you had a mother and father, all you had to do was open your mouth and the food just fell in.
Davies looked anxiously at me. “You make up your mind, Jamie. It’s no use me and Tens doing all the work and then you coming up and saying, ‘It’s all us three together, and where’s my share?’”
Ten Tons stood there with his hands behind his back squidging up and down in the mud. We were all covered from head to foot.
“You know I’ll get whipped if I take time off,” I whined. “Why can’t we just do a few hours each day?”
Davies shook his head.
“You can’t have both,” said Ten Tons.
Davies put his hand in the middle. Ten Tons put his hand on top of that.
“Are you with us, Jamie?” said Davies.
I thought about my mother sitting at home with her tired face and that baby wailing away day and night. I thought of her breaking up a lump of bread into smaller and smaller pieces to feed the eight of us. I thought of my father coming home black with dust and grinning at me when I handed my money over. “You’re a man now, Jamie. There’s children here’d go hungry if it weren’t for you.”
Then I thought about Ten Tons, who needed all the help he could get and how there was no one in the world like him. And Davies, who’d break your nose for not much … but he’d die for me and Ten Tons if he had to. And I thought of that copper, lying at the bottom of the river like a band of gold.
I said, “I’m with you.” I put my hand on top of theirs and we all swore we were like one man together.
“In the name of Jesus’ blood,” said Davies.
“In Jesus’ blood,” said Ten Tons and me together.
And now it had to work because they were all I had.
* * *
I said, “But where will we get all that rope?” Davies and Ten Tons looked at me, then at each other, and just started to laugh.
“You tin-head!” screamed Ten Tons. Davies stretched his arm out over the wide river and said, “Wherever we like.”
I’m always making a fool of myself like that.
Thing is, there’s rope everywhere. Rope ties the sails to the masts, it ties the masts to the deck, and it ties the ship to the dock. Rope furls and unfurls the sails. It lifts goods on and off ship. You use rope to lash down anything that’s not nailed to the decks and you lash a man across the back with it, too. I reckon the world would fall to bits if it wasn’t for rope.
Funny thing is … I never thought you could just take it. The dealer’ll buy scraps you’ve found in the water, but if you turned up with a good length of rope, he’d just shake his head. He knows it means someone’s boat’s adrift and it’s not worth the trouble.
You can’t sell good rope. But we weren’t planning on selling it.
* * *
We waited for high tide in the middle of the night. It was a dark night with a mist on the water … just right for this sort of work. Davies suffers from cold so he got the dry job. He went from mooring to mooring along the piers, unlooping the ropes and throwing them into the water. I swam in between the boats, sawing through the ropes with a knife … we’d spent half the morning sharpening it up. Ten Tons swam by me, collecting the ropes up.
One by one, the boats we’d cut adrift were sliding away into the dark river. Me and Tens, we got the giggles and half drowned. Those boats’d be halfway to the sea by morning! We kept pulling faces like the men would when they found their boats gone. They were going to go mad!
In the end we nearly got caught. Davies did, anyway. A man with an oil lamp was coming up the pier. The way he was going, he was going to walk smack into Davies. Me and Tens could see it coming, but poor old Davies hadn’t a clue he was going to get nabbed. It was scary and funny at the same time.
I was on deck on a row boat, where I’d found a rope all neatly coiled they’d not stowed. I could hear Ten Tons sniggering to himself from the water below. The man was getting really close and Davies was still running from mooring to mooring slipping the ropes off. He’d get murdered if they caught him.
* * *
He got really close and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I yelled out, “There’s someone coming!”
Davies looked over his shoulder just as the light reached the water and the man saw him …
“Oi!”
… and … splash! He was in the water and swimming for it. The man yelled out in a Welsh accent … “Ere, what you doing?” It was too dark for him to see the little boats wagging their way out into the night, so it was a few seconds before he realized.
“Oh … my bow-at! My bow-at!” he hooted in that funny sing-song Welsh voice.
Ten Tons picked it up straight away. “My bow-at! Oh, my poo-wer bow-at!” Ten Tons hooted back at him, in a proper Welsh voice.
I was killing myself. Davies swam up and gasped at Tens to shut up in case he gave us away.
“He won’t know me, Davies,” said Ten Tons proudly.
We all swam quietly off, dragging half a mile of rope behind us. Back on shore the man was still running up and down, wailing, “My bow-at! I’ll get you fer this … oh my poo-wer, poo-wer bow-at!”
Ten Tons and me nearly drowned ourselves laughing.
We went back to the barge and buried the ropes in the mud, where no one would ever guess. Ten Tons was right about no one recognizing him, though. The next morning they had hold of poor old Jenkins, the Welsh boy who sleeps under the jetty up there, marching him up and down and everyone taking a swipe at him. We must have let slip a dozen boats that night. All the owners were up there and every one of them wanted to knock poor Jenkins down.
“But I did’n do it, no I did’n!” wailed poor Jenkins, while the Welshman roared back, “Do you think I don’t know a Welsh voice when I yere one, you bloody little thief?”
And up and down the river there were boats, stuck aground on the mud, or bumped into the jetties or stuck on the side of the bigger ships. Those were the lucky ones. The rest of them were probably halfway to France by then.
Five
The Timber
It could have taken
us days to get enough timber to float that copper, but we had good luck. It was like this … we found a logjam.
A big old fallen willow tree had been washed down and grounded itself in the mud just opposite the Isle of Dogs, and ten big beams were stuck behind it. We rowed across like racers when we saw. Some loose ponies had got down onto the mud and they were trying to get their noses in between them to have a drink, but the beams kept jostling in the water and nipping their hocks and their noses.
The ponies were getting cross but we were delighted. The beams were enormous, at least two foot square and twenty long. It was enough to float that copper twice over!
We did a dance right there among the ponies. Ten Tons tried to dance a hornpipe but the beams were slippery and he fell in. Me and Davies laughed like dogs. The logjam must have passed by a sewage outlet, and the gaps between the logs were choked with … well, you know. Ten Tons came up covered in it. I fell in the mud with laughing! Even Davies was bending over and hooting. Ten Tons was smiling like a silly sheep and did a poo-dance in the water, which made us laugh all the more.
Well, we all got covered in it on the way back. It was all over the beams. There’s worse on the roads everywhere. Only twenty yards from where I live there’s a huge pool of it where everyone dumps their waste. At least in the river there’s water to wash in, and it doesn’t often come all stuck together like that.
Getting all that wood back safe was a problem, though. We couldn’t do it all in one go. In the end we nailed five timbers together with rope like a long tail, and then nailed the long tail to the row boat. Davies and me took the oars in the row boat and Tens sat behind, getting poo-ed up on a beam.
Those five were still too many. Even with the tide behind us, they kept getting stuck and we ended up cutting two loose. We got the other three back safe, and lashed them to the barge. Then we went back to pick up more … but by that time there were men arguing over them. We tried telling them we were there first, but they only laughed at us and chased us away.
But our luck wasn’t over. On the way back we picked up the two we’d cut loose. That made five. But then we all had a big argument. We were all starving hungry. Me and Ten Tons wanted to sell one of the timbers to a timber yard, but Davies as usual had to do it the hard way.