BOYS BEHAVING BADLY (continued) 

There is, possibly, a message here for modern parents who tend to regulate their children’s lives with the precision of a railroad timetable. Boys, Shillaber implied, have a good heart and an inner virtue that will – or in some cases, will not – find its way to the surface, irregardless of the meddling of grown-ups. Shillaber critic John Reed says the Portsmouth-born writer believed "it is better for them to grow up free and naturally than to attempt to make them miniature adults".

Shillaber’s "human boy" is, of course, always in danger of not growing up at all. Later in The Double Runner Club, two Portsmouth urchins hijack a boat from the wharf for a joyride and, after losing an oar, are carried down the Piscataqua River and into the sea. They sail all-night and, arriving on a foreign shore, knock at the door of a lighthouse keeper. When a woman answers the door, the boys say they have come "From America" and ask if she speaks English. She does. They have landed at the Isles of Shoals, ten miles out. When the boy is returned to his parents in Rivertown the next day, the lighthouse keeper asks them if they were afraid their lost boy had drowned. Not likely, the boy’s parents say, "for one born to be hanged, couldn’t be drowned."

Meanwhile, back at Slatter’s Hill, Portsmouth’s North-Ender gang finally lost the fort after a week-long siege. To regain control from the dreaded Puddledockers, Aldrich’s bad boys were forced to use heavier ammunition – snowballs filled with buckshot, rocks and marbles, then dipped in water and frozen.

Matters grew worse and worse, Aldrich writes. With more and more injured boys, the selectmen of Rivermouth voted to stop the bloody battle and sent a posse of policemen. The attack of the adults forced the surviving boys from both neighborhoods into the fort where they became allies against a common enemy. The police charged again, but could not get within ten feet of the fort before they were repelled. When one adult managed to reach the fort, Aldrich writes, "he was seized by twenty pairs of hands, and dragged inside the breastwork, where fifteen boys sat down on him to keep him quiet."

In the end the adults won. They always do. Time is immutable. Boys grow up. But boys, as Shillaber and Aldrich knew, do not become men easily. The process is a messy one. it took all eight officers of the Portsmouth police force and a number of volunteers to take the fort which was then razed by order of the town council.

But the winter legends of Portsmouth live on, tenuously, in literature. To their dying day, Aldrich writes, the old boys of Portsmouth were heard to say -- "By golly! You ought to have been at the fights on Slatter's Hill!".

Copyright (c) 2004 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.