The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper Read Online Free Page A

such occasions I felt that only the intervening fence saved my father from savage reprisals at the hands of the trippers. I learned to view with excited anticipation the advent of strange parties to our neighbour’s field.
    My father was a doctor who, no doubt, considered he was exercising wise foresight in renting a house in what appeared to be a rapidly expanding district. But in spite of this his practice was, I now know, but a small one for many years; not until relatively late in life was he ever free from grave financial anxiety.
    Our house was built on the plan held, in those days, to be convenient. It contained three reception-rooms and a comparatively large number of bedrooms of small size, the builder, presumably, being determined to make adequate provision for the results of the procreative enterprise common at that period. As our household was limited to myself and my parents, a large proportion of the rooms was never used.
    The lower front room on the left-hand side of the entrance-hall, or “passage,” was utilized by my father as a surgery; the room behind it which communicated by folding-doors was fitted up as a dispensary. Into this room I was strictly forbidden to enter under any circumstances, but secret violation of orders had shown me that it contained shelves bearing innumerable bottles of varying size and fascinating appearance. The not unpleasant smell which proceeded from this Blue Beard’s chamber permeated the whole of the lower floor and could occasionally be detected in the upper rooms.
    My father, as I first remember him—if such a definite term can be applied to so indefinite a thing as the gradually dawning perceptions of a child—was a tall, thin man, wearing a fair moustache which extended into “mutton-chop” whiskers. Later he adopted gold-rimmed spectacles, for his eyes were weak and his sight was probably affected by his habit of poring over a microscope during his periods of evening leisure. When I cast my mind back to those very early days I picture him crouching over the recently cleared tea-table, one side of his face red from the reflected light of the fire, the other green from the illuminated shade of an oil-lamp standing beside the microscope down which he was peering. Or I see him fiddling with small tweezers and little circles of almost incredibly thin glass, or with a glass tube, drawing up drops of dirty-looking water from a collecting-bottle which, to my eye, contained nothing else but green weed. When, these drops being placed in a reservoir slide under the microscope, I was sometimes invited to look, I would never believe that the strange, moving creatures which swam across my field of vision had come from the bottle. My father’s proficiency in producing these things from nothing at all astonished me and yet, somehow, it did not carry with it increased feelings of pride in him; in some curious way I acquired the idea that the talent he displayed in this magical procedure was one inherent in all adults.
    My father’s microscopic hobby coloured the Sunday morning walks which I took with him into the country lanes near our house. A favourite walk was to a place called Clay Hill, and my father always carried with him on these occasions a telescopic walking-stick which I considered a miracle of ingenuity. To the extended end of this he would attach, by means of a screwed-on ring, a collecting-bottle and this he would dip into any pond or ditch which lay along our course, transferring the “catch” to one of the other bottles bulging in his pockets. He wore on these walks, in place of his professional top-hat, a cap with ear-flaps tied above the crown with tape: this headgear he persisted in assuming in spite of the protests of my mother who considered it to be unseemly for a man in my father’s “position” to go out on a Sunday morning in such a thing.
    My mother’s frequently expressed views as to what was, or was