The Camden Tales

49 - Wicked

⚜️ THE FIFTH TALE ⚜️

We are all young once, going through our first experiences and learning what life has to offer. Many of those experiences are common to one another, while many are not.

Our journeys start in different places, and rarely, if ever, do they begin perfect. To assume that someone should think and feel the same as another, is to be ignorant of the divergent and colourful nature of humanity.

We are products of our environments and only human kindness can bridge the voids that stretch between us. To discover where something is rooted in order to reach it, we must first gain understanding of what flourishes from it, for better or for worse.

-=₪ June 1904 ₪=-

Lyme Street / Camden Town / 6.03am

It was a fair-sized room on the third floor of the poor and packed tenement building on Lyme Street. Many families lived in single rooms such as this and the Solomons were no exception.

They had a small fireplace for heating water and drinks, mostly sweetened tea. A sink, which was better described as a large bucket, in which Mrs Solomons washed laundry for a living, which also doubled as a bathtub on Saturdays. There was an old table with plain wooden chairs where they frequently sat, and a few cupboards and drawers. The cupboards mostly housed dishes and cooking items, while the small drawers had a few clothes. There were also two beds, one Mrs Solomons shared with her youngest son of three years, Ollie, and a second in which Alf of fifteen slept alone.

Mrs Sofia Solomons was a mother to five children. Her eldest Aron was now twenty-five and had joined the army when he turned eighteen, each month he sent home a portion of his wages to help support his mother and youngest brothers. Sofia's only daughter, Sarah, was twenty-three and had recently announced that she and her new husband, Henry, were expecting. They lived a few roads away in their own single room on the ground floor of a terrace house.

Then there was Benji, the middle child who was now twenty and somewhat problematic. The family didn't see him too often as he had a tendency to drift in and out of their lives, sometimes staying at his sister's and sometimes returning home to Lyme Street, but mostly not seen at either. Alf was grateful it wasn't too frequent, because when Benji turned up it meant a night on the cold, hard floor with a thin blanket.

That wasn't the only reason, however. Alf also despised listening to his drunken brother regale him with stories of local girls he had bedded, father's he had angered, what he had stolen from the unsuspecting families and later sold at market. Alf found his brother's boasting of the good food he had enjoyed, and the decent clothes he dressed in, distasteful. Never did Benji share with his siblings or help support his mother with what he stole from others and Alf had even caught Benji stealing from their mother, on more than one occasion. He took everything for himself and gave nothing to his kin.

Their father, Alfred Solomons Senior was a man that Alf had barely ever seen since his birth, or at least not that he could recall, but their mother insisted that Ollie had the same father, which meant by Alf's calculations Alfred Sr hadn't returned home in four years. All he knew of his father were stories told to him by his older siblings who mostly spoke of their father poorly.

All with the exception of Benji who seemed to find his father's antics amusing and celebrated his father's intelligence and wisdom of the world. Benji believed their father had the right idea about it all; to deceive, to cheat and rob and desanctify all that was holy.