Chapter 1- Cockroaches for breakfast
One bleak winter night, in the back streets of London, a tiny baby was left on the steps of an orphanage. There was no note, no name, no clue as to who this little person was. Just the potato sack in which she was wrapped, as snow fell around her. In Victorian times, is was not uncommon for new-born babies to be abandoned outside orphanages, hospitals or even homes of upper-class folk. Their poor, desperate mothers hoped their children would be taken in and given a better life than their birth families could provide. However, it was hard to imagine a worse start in life for this baby than at WORMLY HALL: Home for Unwanted Children. Twenty-six orphans lived there, all crammed into a room that should have slept eight at the absolute most. The children were locked up, starved and beaten. On top of that, they were forced to work day and night. They had to assemble gentlemen's pocket watches from tiny pieces until they were blind. All children were painfully thin, with filthy rags for clothes. The orphans' faces were black with soot, so all you could see in the gloom were their hopeful little eyes.
