The Detective Branch

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He had been looking for his mother among the prostitutes and brothels of the Ratcliff Highway when they had seized him; two pairs of hands that had clasped his coat at the shoulder and lifted him clean off his feet.

A week later, he had been taken to a gloomy building in the shadows of the giant dome of St Paul’s which he later discovered was an orphanage. He hadn’t known at the time that he was an orphan. He hadn’t known what an orphan was.

The dormitory where he and fifty other boys slept, two or three to a bed, was cold and damp. The wind blew right through it and even though they huddled together under a thin blanket for warmth, it was never enough. That first night had been the worst; he hadn’t snivelled or cried like some of the boys but he had been so cold that he hadn’t been able to stop shaking. Every hour bells would chime and it was difficult to sleep. Occasionally they whispered to one another under the blanket, even though talking at night was strictly prohibited. They lied about their circumstances and what had brought them there; the truth, for most of them, was too painful to bear. Nobody said what they all knew to be true: that they had no one; they had been abandoned and were alone in the world.

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