LONG AGO STORIES

Taranaki Daily News, 15 September 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

LONG AGO STORIES

CHILDREN OF THE DARK. The boy was found on the door step of a large house. The gentleman to whom the house belonged sent him round to the workhouse, and there he was given the name of William Step, because he was found on a step and William was a good name. In the nineteenth century it was quite usual in England to leave babies in all sorts of places, and the workhouse authorities gave them names corresponding with the circumstances in which they were found. When William was six years old he had to earn his living, and, with a number of other children, he was put into a waggon and taken to a coal mine. All these little boys and girls had such names as Christmas, Church, Stile, Field, Lane, Bedford, Huntingdon. When they reached the coal mine, they wCre put into cages and let down into the darkness by ropes. “Where are we going?” whispered William. “Into the dark,” murmured a small girl called Easter. “What shall we do here?” “You listen to me and I’ll tell you,” replied the man in charge. Easter became a trapper. She was five years old, and all day she sat in blackness darker than night and opened and shut a door when she heard a truck coming along. William pulled a truck along iron rails. He had a leather belt round his waist, and to this was attached

a chain which he hooked to the truck. Only children could draw trucks, because the passages were so low that grown men and women could only creep through them. For three years William drew his truck, and then he was set to carry baskets of coal up a ladder to the surface. He had as far to go as if he were climbing from the ground to the top of a church steeple, but it gave him an idea.

“Do you like opening that door, Easter?” he asked the little trapper as he passed with a load. “No,” she replied. “Shall I have to live in the dark for ever?”

“If. you like to get into my basket, I’ll carry you up to the light and tip you out with the coal. Then we can run away and live like the birds. I’ve seen them flying about quite free.”

It was William’s last load. Easter was black as the coal, so nobody noticed her in the dim evening light when William tipped her out. She remained quite still till he joined her, then they ran away. Being accustomed to the darkness, they were not frightened, and when they were too tired to move they went to sleep. When William awoke in the morning he thought he was dreaming. Easter blinked and could not say a word. For the first time in their lives, they saw a garden full of flowers, and Easter began to eat a rose to see if it were real. “I’m hungry but I don’t think we eat in this world,” she said. “I think we do,” said William. “Look, there’s a man all white.”

A gentleman came and looked at them, and, knowing that they were the “children of the dark” whom he had come to help, he had them scrubbed, dressed, and fed, and they lived happily ih his house till they married and had one of their own.

It was William who helped the great Earl of Shaftesbury to make laws which prevented children from working in coal mines.