A Poplar-Leaf

Extract

Last time I spoke at St. Dominic’s Priory, Haverstock Hill, to a crowd of boys, one of them had a fit. This shows how far from suited I am to talk to or even about boys. (However, when I was there before, someone lost his false teeth .... I was accused .... but no matter. Perhaps it’s an affair of place rather than person. Or, just fate. To resume . . . .)

I am not going to speak so much about boys, as about anyone who grows up in a place like Poplar, London, E.14; and though I shall talk about Poplar, I am not selfishly forgetting other desperately poor parishes in London, or in many another city, Glasgow for example; Bristol. I suppose that much the same happens everywhere as in Poplar. For example, the parents, either because they must or because they are short-sighted, send their children out to do such work as children can, immediately after they leave school and even before. (I knew a boy who made quite a good business, between whiles, by stealing leafy twigs and sticking them in flower-pots (also stolen) and selling them to old ladies in the suburbs on the assurance that ‘they would flower in October.’ . . . He had already learnt how to steal enough milk out of doorstep-bottles to supplement his insufficient breakfast. But he was an angel-child in school . . . .) Well, at sixteen the young labourer is sacked, because he has to be insured.