As the Crow Flies Read Online Free

would stop turning his head to ask: “‘Ow
many, Granpa?” “‘Ow much, Granpa?” “Is Mrs. Ruggles good for credit, Granpa?”
And only after he had paid back every penny of his debt on the new barrow and
been left with hardly any spare cash to talk of did he begin to realize just
how good a costermonger the old fellow must have been.
    For
the first few months they earned only a few pennies a week between them and Sal
became convinced they would all end up in the workhouse if they kept failing to
cough up the rent. She begged Charlie to sell Granpa’s old barrow to raise
another pound, but Charlie’s reply was always the same “Never” before he added
that he would rather starve and leave the relic to rot in the backyard than let
another hand wheel it away.
    By
autumn 1916 business began to look up, and the biggest barrow in the world even
resumed enough of a profit to allow Sal to buy a second-hand dress, Kitty a
pair of shoes and Charlie a third-hand suit.
    Although
Charlie was still thin now a flyweight and not all that tall, once his
seventeenth birthday had come and gone he noticed that the ladies on the corner
of the Whitechapel Road, who were still placing white feathers on anyone wearing
civilian clothes who looked as if he might be between the ages of eighteen and
forty, were beginning to eye him like impatient vultures.
    Charlie
wasn’t frightened of any Germans, but he still hoped that the war might come to
an end quickly and that his father would return to Whitechapel and his routine
of working at the docks during the day and drinking in the Black Bull at night.
But with no letters and only restricted news in the paper, even Mr. Salmon
couldn’t tell him what was really happening at the front.
    As
the months passed, Charlie became more and more aware of his customers’ needs
and in turn they were discovering that his barrow was now offering better value
for money than many of its rivals. Even Charlie felt things were on the up when
Mrs. Smelley’s smiling face appeared, to buy more potatoes for her
boardinghouse in one morning than he would normally have hoped to sell a
regular customer in a month.
    “I
could deliver your order, Mrs. Smelley, you know,” he said, raising his cap. “Direct
to your boardinghouse every Monday mornin’.”
    “No,
thank you, Charlie,” she replied. “I always like to see what I’m buyin’.”
    “Give
me a chance to prove myself, Mrs. Smelley, and then you wouldn’t ‘ave to come
out in all weathers, when you suddenly discover you’ve taken more bookie’s than
you expected.”
    She
stared directly at him. “Well, I’ll give it a go for a couple of weeks,” she
said. “But if you ever let me down, Charlie Trumper... “
    “You’ve
got yourself a deal,” said Charlie with a grin, and from that day Mrs. Smelley
was never seen shopping for fruit or vegetables in the market again.
    Charlie
decided that following this initial success he should extend his delivery
service to other customers in the East End. Perhaps that way, he thought, he
might even be able to double his income. The following morning, he wheeled out
his Granpa’s old barrow from the backyard, removed the cobwebs, gave it a lick
of paint and put Kitty on to house-to-house calls taking orders while he
remained back on his pitch in Whitechapel.
    Within
days Charlie had lost all the profit he had made in the past year and suddenly
found himself back to square one. Kitty, it turned out, had no head for figures
and, worse, fell for every sob story she was told, often ending up giving the
food away. By the end of that month Charlie was almost wiped out and once again
unable to pay the rent.
    “So
what you learn from such a bold step?” asked Dan Salmon as he stood on the
doorstep of his shop, skullcap on the back of his head, thumbs lodged in the
black waistcoat pocket that proudly displayed his half hunter watch.
    “Think
twice before you employ members of your own family and never assume