The Little Match Girl Strikes Back

Chapter One

THE BORROWED SLIPPERS

Once upon a snowy New Year’s Eve, a story began. It was called The Little Match Girl and was sold, beautifully bound between chestnut-hard covers, at bookshops across the land. The story itself was so sweet and sad, people would snivel into their hankies upon reading it, and soon it became famous the world over. It made the man who wrote it very rich indeed, though I don’t suppose he’d ever met a real match girl in his life. If he had, he’d have known we weren’t all pretty things with fair curls and tiny, freezing hands, and that most of us were fed up with being hungry all the time. We didn’t want people feeling sorry for us; we wanted a fair chance at a decent life, and to one day be able to tell our own stories, from our own mouths. This author hadn’t done his research, not properly. If he’d bothered to talk to one of us, he’d know that even little match girls have names.
   My mam had called me Bridie, short for Brigid, the only Irish patron saint who was a woman, and a brave, bold one at that. It was also my grandmother’s name. She’d died back in Ireland, so I never met her, but I had red hair just like hers, Mam told me. And the same bony knees and gruff laugh, and a way of stringing words together that made people stop and listen, which helped when it came to selling matches. I had her surname, too: Sweeney.
   So, that’s me, Bridie Sweeney. I’m a match girl, just like in the world-famous story, though my version has a far better ending. But there’s no need to rush on, when you have the rest of my tale to hear first.
   I lived with my mother and little brother, Fergal, in a drafty room above a pawnshop in London’s East End. The shop was in a tiny court, flanked on all sides by grime-streaked buildings in which other families, just like ours, lived and worked. All day and night, you’d hear fighting and crying and, sometimes, a bit of singing. When the sun shone, the space between the buildings was strung with laundry that never quite got dry. It amazed me to think that Queen Victoria herself lived in this same city, only a mile or so to the west. I bet she never wore damp underclothes or got nibbled by rats in the night. But that was London for you: home to the very richest and the very, very poorest.
   Luckily, though our living space was small, there were only three of us to share it. My father was long gone—a deckhand on a visiting ship, so Mam told me, and a gentle soul who’d cried more than the baby he’d left her with when he set sail back to Spain. We never saw him—or his tears—again.
   As soon as I was old enough to yell “MatCHES!” I was put out on the streets to sell them. Near the docks, where we lived, the competition was fierce. Us street sellers outnumbered the rats, which was no mean feat. Thankfully, I learned the business quickly, and if I do say so myself, I was soon one of the best match girls around.
   “You could sell flames to a fireman, you could!” Mam would say with a laugh.
   Part of me was proud to be good at what I did. But that didn’t stop me from dreaming of bigger, better things. Top of the list was not being hungry all day, every day. A close second was for the match factory to pay their workers a proper wage.
   For we were all in the match trade, Mam, Fergal, and me. My brother, at six years old, should’ve been in school. But, as had been the case when I was his age, paying the rent was our priority. And so Mam often kept Fergal out of school to work at making matchboxes. Hunger made us all fast learners. Once Fergal had collected the paste, wood, paper, and red Lucifers labels from the factory, he’d spread it all out on the kitchen table and not move from his seat for ten hours straight. On a good day he’d make one hundred matchboxes and earn just two measly pennies for his work.
   What I never understood was that he liked going into the factory, despite it being as grim a place as you could find. But Fergal insisted he’d made a friend there—an older boy called Kip.
   “He’s got a very nice fat pet dog,” Fergal told me, which, as he was smitten with all animals, would’ve made the world of difference to my brother.
   All told, gluing matchboxes wasn’t really hard work: that happened on the factory floor itself where women, like our mam, stood at benches for fourteen hours at a time and kept working until the poisons they dipped the matches into made their teeth fall out.
   Selling matches on the city streets, I at least got some air, even if it was syrup-thick city air that made your chest tighten and your nose-pickings turn black. London’s streets swarmed with barrow boys, crossing sweepers, beggars, bruisers, lords, do-gooders, ladies holding their skirts above the muck, each and every one of them needing candles to read by, a stove lit, a soothing puff on a pipe. You couldn’t get anywhere in this life without a light, and for that light, you needed a match. Walking the cobbles, yelling, “Flames for a farthing!” I was certain people needed my matches as much as
   I needed their coin. It wasn’t just about a little box of wooden matches: I was selling them comfort, possibilities, hope.
   “Mine are magical matches,” I’d insist. “One strike and you’ll be in a better place. I guarantee it!”
Like they had for my grandmother, the words tripped easily off my tongue. I’d spin stories of far-off lands where no one ever felt cold, of lights that never dimmed, of flames the color of rainbows.
   “These matches, my friends, will transform your life!” I’d tell the passersby.
   Many would shake their heads and walk on. Those with children in tow might slow down briefly before dragging their charges on. Plenty more would buy my matches. And some poor souls, hope sparking in their exhausted faces, clearly wanted to believe what I said: that these matches would change things for the better.
   I wasn’t daft enough to believe it myself, though. Not then.