Remembering Babylon: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

Mrs. Hutchence and Leona move Gemmy into a small, sparse room—though cheerfully painted—and Leona tends to the injuries he sustained during the attack. However, Gemmy feels panicky and restless in the room, both because of the sense of enclosure and the smell of a small chest, made from foreign wood, which gives him the feeling of “his spirit being touched and interfered with.” The scent draws him back into distant memories, his “maggot stage,” when as a tiny child he and many other toddlers lived on the floor of a timber mill. He was kept there to sweep sawdust, surviving by eating the oily grime that collected at the base of the machines until, at five or six years old, he was taken away and became “Willet’s boy.”

The room in Mrs. Hutchence’s house sets Gemmy into a different kind of sleep, “a sleep that belonged to a different life and produced different demons; the kind that live in rooms.” Gemmy dreams of Willet, who is the first human he can remember and who turns Gemmy from a maggot into a boy. Everything in Gemmy’s world, including himself, belongs to Willet and exists to serve Willet. “He is Willet’s boy, as the boots are Willet’s boots.” Willet alternates between beating Gemmy or giving him “slobbery kisses.” Gemmy cannot imagine that any other life exists.

Willet is a rat-catcher, using Gemmy, some ferrets, and a dog as the tools of his trade. Willet is also a collector of stolen and discarded keys, and Gemmy often wonders what they open. He often dreams of stealing one of the keys, finding the box that it opens, and hiding in it until Willet finds the box and claims him. They work together, six days a week, flushing rats out of Regent’s Park’s ponds, and Gemmy finds small joys amidst the crowds of people. Seeing all the other “street urchins,” Gemmy is grateful to belong to someone. Gemmy has to handle rats often during the day, so his arms and ears are riddled with bite marks and sores, and at night he dreams of being consumed by them.

One night when Gemmy is 11 or 12 years old, after Willet has fallen asleep, drunk, Gemmy lights the little room they live in on fire out of a sudden desire to assert himself and his buried “resentments.” Though Gemmy tries to wake Willet to show him what he has done, Willet is still unconscious and the fire spreads. Gemmy, in a panic, climbs out the window and runs until he no longer recognizes any of the streets, climbing a rope and tumbling into a lidless crate where he decides to take shelter.

Though Gemmy expects Willet to find him and wake him, he is instead woken by a sailor, and Gemmy discovers that he fell asleep aboard a ship that is now sailing through the ocean. Gemmy spends the next two years of his life on ships, moving from one to the next as crews and captains tire of his presence, until one crew simply throws him overboard.

Gemmy is thus returned to the present, sickened and tormented in Mrs. Hutchence’s little room. He thinks often of the McIvors, whom he misses terribly even though he sees Janet often, and of the pages that George and Mr. Frazer wrote about Gemmy’s life. In time, Gemmy becomes convinced that the pages are the keys to his suffering, to releasing the demons of his past that were magically contained in the letters written on the paper. He decides that he must retrieve them.