Ma found herself in a dark, dark place. It was the belly of a huge blue whale…”
“Ma escaped from the tribe of cannibals, which wasn’t easy as they had already gobbled up her left leg…”
“Boom! Ma had thrown the bomb into the Thames just in time, so no one was killed. It was all in a day’s work for a secret agent. The end.”
When that night’s story finished, the other orphans would cry out…
“Another!”
“We don’t want to go to sleep yet!”
“PLEASE, ELSIE, JUST ONE MORE!”
One night, the children cheered so much at Elsie’s story that they woke up Mrs Curdle.
“NO! MORE! STORIES!
YOU! NASTY! LITTLE! BEAST!” raged the woman, beating Elsie with a broomstick on every word. The pus-sodden stocking she stuffed in the girl’s mouth only half muffled her screams.
“ARGH! ARGH! ARGH!”
The beating was so severe that Elsie wasn’t sure she was going to survive. Her little body was black and blue with bruises, and the girl knew she had to escape or die.
Elsie loved all the rats and pigeons that would find their way inside
Elsie had noticed how the rats got into the orphanage by scuttling along a leaky pipe that came down from the ceiling.
One thing that set Elsie apart from her fellow orphans was her feet. Elsie didn’t have ordinary feet. She had monkey feet.
The advantage of having long, thick toes that could grip like fingers was that it made climbing easy-peasy. So one night, when everyone else was asleep, Elsie scaled the pipe to see where the rats scrambled in. Just as she had thought, there was a small rat-sized hole at the top of the wall.
After that, every night after candles out, Elsie scaled the pipe, using her monkey feet. Once at the top, she would scrape away at the brickwork with her fingernails. Night after night she scraped and scraped, making the hole bigger and bigger.
SCRATCH! SCRATCH! SCRATCH!
Eventually, the hole was just large enough for Elsie to squeeze her tiny, underfed body through it. However, she couldn’t leave
“Wake up!” she called softly. Little eyes began to appear out of the dark. “I’m going to run away tonight. Who’s coming with me?”
S I L E N C E.
“I said, ‘Who’s coming with me?’”
There were murmurs of, “I’m too scared,” and “Curdle’ll kill us,” and, “They’ll catch us and beat us to death.”
The littlest little’un of the lot was named Nancy. She looked up to Elsie like she was a big sister. Nancy whispered, “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” replied the girl. “Anywhere but here.”
“Please don’t forget about us.”
“Never!”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” said Elsie. “I’ll see you all again one day – I know it.”
“I’m going to miss your stories,” said another orphan, Felix.
“Me too,” added Percival.
“Next time I see you I’ll tell you the greatest story of all.”
“Good luck, Elsie,” said Nancy.
“You’ll always be in ’ere,” replied Elsie, patting her chest.
The girl gave one last shimmy up the pipe with her monkey feet. She squeezed herself through the hole in the wall, and with one final
Elsie ran and ran and ran, as fast as she possibly could. She didn’t dare look back. She was free but alone, and now she had to fend for herself on the streets of London, even though she’d never been outside the orphanage before. The big city was a scary place, especially for a little girl.
Soon enough, though, Elsie taught herself how to steal food from the market stalls. As for a bed, she found an old tin bath to sleep in, and used old newspapers as sheets. In her mind, Elsie pretended that it was a grand four-poster bed fit for a queen.
With no home or family, Elsie was what was known as an “urchin”. Victorian London was teeming with them.
Elsie didn’t look much like a hero.
However, as you will soon discover, heroes come in all
Living
