Murder
The whimpering of a young boy sitting on the floor of a damp & dirty archaic institution in 1800's London. Is interrupted by the jingle of the cell key are barely indistinguishable from the insane groans of the patients. The voices in his head make him wish he was dead his name was Joseph he'd been put in the asylum because his mother couldn't afford to feed him after his father died...
Joseph was the son of Maureen, Mo for short and Arthur Pake, Irish catholic migrants circa 1863. He was born into a very poor family in hard time. They lived in a small one-bedroom end of Terrence house just off the main road just after a bridge that crossed a river that runs at the back of the house that leads to the mills. Not far from the mills they were built for the mill and workhouse workers but they were squalid conditions it was a dirty, cramped house.
Joseph's family house was a two down, one up it had a kitchen with a wood burning stove for all their hot water for bathing in a tin bath and their heating for the whole house there was one other room on the ground floor level that was the bedroom at the front of the house that was his room It's contents barely recognizable from that of squatters just hemp sacks and straw for a bed on the floor and his parents main bedroom upstairs there was an outside the toilet with a coal shed the back yard was paved with York stone slabs that backed onto the bank of the themes but it was better than the house they had on the side of a windy hill in Ireland where they struggled to make a living farming and pay the land owner his rent for nothing more than a cattle shed with a new born baby Joseph was only a few months old when they came over the same year of the potato blight which forced them over the water if only they had kept going they could have had a better chance for a life in the sun .
Joseph’s dad worked in the workhouses in the city and when he wasn’t being worked to death he was in the taverns where he drank his hard earned money away, and more he didn't have. His mum Mo was a whore and much more.
Joseph was often left for most of the night on his own by the time he was five dressed in rags for clothes out begging for pennies and stealing fruit from the market stalls he had become a little urchin but he was self sufficient for his young years the city had made him hard. His mother tried to keep things together she wasn’t a bad person she had to work in the night Joseph's dad was supposed to looking after him threw the night. During the day she would nurse him and bathe him it was mostly just Joseph and Mo. Arthur was never there, for the better really as when he was home he would steal Mo’s money for ale and other women if he wasn’t raping or beating her.
They had all come over from Ireland during the potato famine when Joseph was just a baby they were evicted from their land which was owned by an English land owner they came across on a ship to London as a young family for a new life. Arthur was frustrated at failing to provide a good life for his family upon their arrival in England and had turned to the drink some years after arriving.
Maureen worked hard, not wanting to depend on Arthur. This was her chance to give her child a good start in life but things never turn out how you want them. She had worked in the taverns since arriving in London but earned more working as a whore than as a barmaid it’s not what she wanted to but some of the other girls who worked there got her in to it and some of her punters were nicer then her husband kinder some had even offered to take her away from it all but she stayed for her son Joseph and her husband who was still her husband she was raised to make do the women of Ireland were made of sterner stuff and she was no quitter. What she didn’t earn she would steal from merchants passing through whilst they lay drunk but satisfied in a post orgasmic sleep. She would steal their purse of coins from their fancy clothes, which were strewn around the grotty room that Mo rented for business she did what she needed to do to survive in a busy city getting more overcrowded by the day but they were just more mugs for the taking
