My Autobiography

separate, Mother going in one direction to the women’s ward and we in another to the children’s.
How well I remember the poignant sadness of that first visiting day: the shock of seeing Mother enter the visiting-room garbed in workhouse clothes. How forlorn and embarrassed she looked! In one week she had aged and grown thin, but her face lit up when she saw us. Sydney and I began to weep which made Mother weep, and large tears began to run down her cheeks. Eventually she regained her composure and we sat together on a rough bench, our hands in her lap while she gently patted them. She smiled at our cropped heads and stroked them consolingly, telling us that we would soon all be together again. From her apron she produced a bag of coconut candy which she had bought at the workhouse store with her earnings from crocheting lace cuffs for one of the nurses. After we parted, Sydney kept dolefully repeating how she had aged.
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Sydney and I quickly adapted ourselves to workhouse life, but in an overcast sadness. I remember little of incident, but the midday meal at a long table with other children was a warm and expectant affair. It was presided over by an inmate of the workhouse, an old gentleman of about seventy-five, with a dignified countenance, a thin beard and sad eyes. He elected me to sit next to him because I was the youngest and, until they cropped my head, had the curliest hair. He called me his ‘tiger’ and said that when I grew bigger I would wear a top hat with a cockade and would sit at the back of his carriage with my arms folded. This honour made me very fond of him. But a day or so later a younger boy appeared on the scene with curlier hair than I had and took my place beside the old gentleman, because, as he whimsically explained, a younger and curlier-headed boy always took precedence.
After three weeks we were transferred from Lambeth Workhouse to the Hanwell Schools for Orphans and Destitute Children about twelve miles out of London. It was an adventurous drive in a horse-drawn bakery van, and rather a happy one under the circumstances, for the country surrounding Hanwell was beautiful in those days, with lanes of horse-chestnut trees, ripening wheat-fields and heavy-laden orchards, and ever since the rich, aromatic smell after rain in the country has always reminded me of Hanwell.
On arriving we were delivered to the approbation ward and put under medical and mental observation before entering the school proper; the reason was that amongst three to four hundred boys a subnormal child or a sick one would be unhealthy for the school as well as being in an unhappy situation himself.
The first few days I was lost and miserable, for at the workhouse I always felt that Mother was near, which was comforting, but at Hanwell we seemed miles apart. Sydney and I graduated from the approbation ward to the school proper, where we were separated, Sydney going with the big boys and I with the infants. We slept in different ward blocks, so we seldom saw each other. I was a little over six years old and alone, which made me feel quite abject; especially on a summer’s evening at bed-time during prayers, when, kneeling with twenty other little boys in the centre of the ward in our night-shirts, I would look out of the oblong windows at the deepening sunset and the undulating hills, and feel alien to it all as we sang in throaty off-key voices:
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens: Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O, abide with me.
It was then that I felt utterly dejected. Although I did not understand the hymn, the tune and the twilight increased my sadness.
But, to our happy surprise, within two months Mother had arranged for our discharge, and we were dispatched again to London and the Lambeth workhouse. Mother was at the gate dressed in her own clothes, waiting for us. She had applied for a discharge only because she wanted to spend the day with her children, intending, after a few hours outside together, to return the same day; Mother being an inmate of the workhouse, this ruse was her only means to be with us.
Before we entered our private clothes had been taken from us and steamed; now they were returned unpressed. Mother, Sydney and I looked a crumpled sight as we ambled out through the workhouse gates. It was early morning and we had nowhere to go, so we walked to Kennington Park, which was about a mile away. Sydney had ninepence tied up in a handkerchief, so we bought half a pound of black cherries and spent the morning in Kennington Park, sitting on a bench eating them. Sydney crumpled a sheet of newspaper and wrapped some string around it and for a while the three of us played catch-ball. At noon we went to a coffee-shop and spent the rest of our money on a twopenny tea-cake, a penny bloater and two halfpenny cups of tea, which we shared between us. Afterwards we returned to the park where Sydney and I played again while Mother sat crocheting.
In the afternoon we made our way back to the workhouse. As Mother said with levity: ‘We’ll be just in time for tea.’ The authorities were most indignant, because it meant going through the same procedure of having our clothes steamed and Sydney and I spending more time at the workhouse before returning to Hanwell, which of course gave us an opportunity of seeing Mother again.
But this time we stayed at Hanwell for almost a year – a most formative year, in which I started schooling and was taught to write my name ‘Chaplin’. The word fascinated me and looked like me, I thought.
Hanwell School was divided in two, a department for boys and