The Elf Service, Episode 2

In which The Elf Service is inaugurated

All over the city children post letters to Santa Claus and they go undelivered and unanswered. Until Irving Jefferson founds the Elf Service, that is. The Elf Service is the story of charity, journalism and mayhem, the extraordinary story of an extraordinary young man, his extraordinary plan to make Christmas happen for the children of his city and all the extraordinary ways in which that plan goes extraordinarily wrong.

Maddie Sharp of the Argus newspaper was very much of the opinion that the story of the city post office and its basement of undelivered letters to Santa Claus was a bit of fluff. Seasonal colour. She filed her copy and promptly forgot about it. She was in the bar long before the copy editors had finished hacking it down and the compositors had finished setting it up.

She was sprawled asleep on the sofa in her tiny apartment, where she had collapsed on getting home, as the presses in the basement of the Argus rolled and thundered, even more loudly than she was snoring.

And at five in the morning on the 1st of December, as she was finally stumbling to bed by way of the medicine cabinet, some of the children she wasn’t thinking about were gathering outside the loading bay at the back of the Argus building.

Unseasonably warm it might have been the day before, but the weather was changing, and it is always cold in the still hours before dawn. The children were not warmly dressed and they stamped their feet and blew on their hands as they waited. Waited for the papers: these were the Newsies, the children who sold the newspapers on the streets, and frequently made the news themselves. Ragged, unruly and formidable.

One of them, a skinny girl with two pigtails of bright red hair, started to tell a story of how one morning this time the previous year it had been so cold that she had found a drunk who had frozen to death in the night.

She mimed how he had been frozen in the act of taking a drink from the bottle in his hand - like this - with the last drops of beer ice on his lips, golden and sparkling.

And the worst thing - and here the assembled children moved in closer as her voice dropped - the worse thing is that that meant she hadn’t realised he was dead. She had tried to rouse him, grabbing hold of his hand.

“And it was so cold, his hand,” she said, dropping down as if stooping to that body once again, “That I couldn’t let go of it. I was frozen to him, just like that bottle. Never mind how I pulled, I couldn't get loose. This way and that, stuck tight and burning, you know how it does?” They did know, they murmured, “So I put my back to it, didn’t I, because Lizzie doesn’t give up, and I gave the hardest pull I could and there was a snap and over I went, right there on my bahoochie on the cold ground next to this dead frozen guy.”

The crowd gasped in grisly relish.

“And there was something in my hand,” she held up a closed fist and they craned in to look at it, “And I can’t get my fingers open because they’re froze to it and I have to pry them apart and you know what that snap noise was?”

The crowd had a glorious, gruesome idea that they did.

“It was the sound,” she holds out her fist, “Of his frozen finger snapping off!”

And she opens her fist to reveal her thumb folded over inside it, and the crowd recoils and some of the smaller kids cry out in fright. Then the older kids laugh at them and the smaller ones object that no they didn’t scream and absolutely no one notices that the bundles of newspaper have started to be thrown out onto the dock above them.

Almost no one. One small boy in a battered army officer’s cap, so far too big for him that he has had to stuff it with newspaper to fit it on his head, has climbed up there and even now is pushing bundles of papers off of the pier into the waiting arms of a solid boy with a swollen black eye below.

By the time the other children realise what is happening, the large boy has a stack of bundles that he can’t see over, and when the crowd rushes him he simply charges straight through them, sending smaller ones flying.

Meanwhile the red-headed girl has helped the small boy in the military cap down off the dock with three more bundles between them and they’re off after the bigger boy, leaving the rest of the children to fight over the rest of the first edition.

All this means that when Irving Jefferson arrived at the City Main Post Office to start his first day as official handler of letters to Santa Claus, there on the pavement were the newsies with the morning’s papers; and there on the front page, bottom left hand corner, was him.

“Hey,” he said to the whip-thin girl with the red pigtails, “That’s me, there: Irving Jefferson.”

“Did they spell it right?” said the girl and then, at the top of her voice, “City appoints Santa Claus! This guy right here, the official Santa Claus! Read all about it!”

“You’re quite the barker,” said Jefferson, struggling to be heard, because the top of the girl’s voice is quite hard to get over, “Don’t over pitch it though - I’m not Santa Claus yet.”

“Listen,” said the girl, “You might be the news, but I make it.”

“Not the editor or the Argus?” said Jefferson, amused, “Not the reporters? Not,” he squints at the byline, “…Miss Madeleine Sharpe?”

“They just write the words,” said the girl, then, “Santa Claus revealed! Exclusive! Your kids will ask, you should know the answer! The real name of Santa Claus! Exclusive!

“See?” she said as she took the change from passers by, “How many of them do you think are going to read the story? How many of them are even buying a newspaper? But all of them heard me, don’t you think?”

“I imagine most of the city heard you,” said Jefferson.

“That’s the news they’ll remember,” said the girl to Jefferson, and then bellowed at the crowd, “Real Santa Claus right here in the city! The actual one!

“‘Did you hear the Argus found the real Santa Claus?’ they’ll say to the wife,” she continued to Jefferson, “‘He lives here in the city, they found him’ - you might do something and somebody might write it up, but the news, what the city knows, what the city tells itself, that’s me, that what I do, that’s my business,” and she yelled out again, “Christmas exclusive! Santa Claus’ secrets revealed! Read all about it!”

“You interested,” said Jefferson, struggling to be heard again, “In any other business? Making a little more news?”

“If there’s money in it,” said the girl, “I’m interested.”

“Come and see me,” said Jefferson, “I’ve got an office in the basement here.”

And off he went to it.

It wasn’t much of an office. In fact, it wasn’t an office at all. Three cabinets of pigeon holes had been pushed together to make a cubby hole and in the middle of them was a stained old desk with legs that were all different lengths, with a blotter covered in unseemly doodles and a battered wire tray. And in that tray was a single letter.

Jefferson picked it up.

“Dear Santa,” it said, “I know that it is not yet Christmas but I know you are a busy man so I want to be early. It is good to be early, not late. The landlady says you are too busy for the likes of me and that I am not like to get any presents for Christmas, but all I want is a doll. It does not have to be one of the ones that talks or anything. I hope you are not too busy. I love you, Santa. Midge, Floor 5, the yellow building.”

A postal worker pushed past the desk to get at a pigeon hole.

“Only one?” said Jefferson, waving the letter at him.

“So far,” said the worker, rocking the desk as he edged back out, “There’ll be more. Oh, there’ll be more.”

And he disappeared into the maze of shelves.

“There will be, if I have anything to do with it,” said Jefferson.

In the lull between the morning and lunch editions, the Newsies presented themselves at the offices of Irving Jefferson. Well, three of them did: the girl with red hair, the small boy in the army cap, and the large boy with the black eye. 

“Nice office,” said the girl, “They really rolled out the red carpet for you, huh?”

“From small acorns,” said Jefferson.

“What are acorns?” said the girl pulling over a sack of mail and sitting on it, the boys standing in attendance on her like a small, grimy, royal court.

“We know who you are, Irving Jefferson, envelope opener for Santa Claus,” she said, waving her last remaining copy of the morning edition at Jefferson, “So you should know who we are. This is Captain Blood,” she indicated the smaller boy, who seemed extremely pleased with his unlikely sobriquet, “on account that he is the brains of the operation, and this is Wilson,” the big, impassive boy with the shiner, “who is the muscle.”

“And what are you?” said Jefferson.

“Mister,” said the girl, “I am the operation. Lizzie. Tin Lizzie, they call me, because of my hair.”

Jefferson seemed about to ask for an explanation of this, but Lizzie evidently had no time for niceties.

“Now,” she said, “To business. Which is?”

“You are newsies,” said Jefferson, “You sell newspapers on the street.”

“This,” said Lizzie, “We know.”

“So you also know what it is that I am doing here at the post office.”

“This we also know,” confirmed Lizzie.

“And you also know the city pretty well,” said Jefferson.

“And we are beginning to wonder when you are going to tell us something we don’t know,” said Lizzie.

“Well, let’s see how you do with this one,” said Jefferson, getting up and picking the letter out of his in-tray, “Floor 5, the yellow building. Where would you suppose that is?”

“In the new town,” said Lizzie, “All the buildings there are kind of yellow.”

“No,” said Captain Blood, eagerly.

“Yes they are,” said Lizzie rounding on him, “They look yellow to me. What are you, blind?”

“No. I mean yes, but no,” said the Captain

“Make your mind up,” said Lizzie.

“It says the yellow building,” said Captain, “In the letter. The not a, right, mister? Doesn’t it? Like it’s one on its own, right?”

“It does,” said Jefferson, “It's a good point.”

“Market,” said Wilson, suddenly, “Down the bottom.”

“That’s right!” the Captain slapped Wilson on the shoulder but the larger boy barely seemed to notice, “Down the bottom of Market! There’s a big yellow tenement block, right? Isn’t there? Opposite the cow?”

“Used to know someone who lived behind the cow,” said Lizzie ruminatively, “Right under the udders.”

Jefferson was bewildered for a moment and then remembered the giant poster of a cow that hung over the buildings at the far end of Market.

“So you think,” said Jefferson, waving the letter at them, “That if I was to send you to look for a child called… Midge… on the 5th floor of the yellow building, then you’d know where to find them?”

“Market,” said Wilson again.

“This is the business,” said Jefferson, “See, my job is to find these children who write to Santa Claus. That means I need people who know the city, who know kids and know how to find them.”

“These things also, we know” said Lizzie.

“Yes, you do,” said Jefferson, “You are precisely the people I need. What do you say, will you help?”

“What’s it pay?” said Lizzie.

“We can negotiate,” said Jefferson.

“Then pending the satisfactory outcome of negotiations,” said Lizzie, relishing the words, “We’re in.”

“Excellent,” said Jefferson, “Then you may consider yourselves officially enrolled as Santa’s elves. Hey, wait a minute,” he paused, staring over their heads, “That’s what we are, isn’t it? Santa’s elves. That’s what we’ll call it: The Elf Service! What do you think?”

“Corny as all get out,” said Lizzie, appreciatively, “It’ll sell. I like it.”

Maddie Sharp was perhaps mistaken to think she could safely forget about Irving Jefferson and his schemes.