Once aground, but now afloat,
Walk in, boys, and wet your throat,
says the sign of the “Ship” at Brixham, South Devon.
The “Cat and Mutton” inn, near the Cat and Mutton Bridge of the Regent’s Canal, and facing London Fields, formerly had a pictorial sign with the inscription on one side, slightly misspelled,
Pray puss, do not tare,
Because the mutton is so rare,
and on the other,
Pray puss, do not claw,
Because the mutton is so raw.
The “Cat and Mutton” is nowadays just a London “public,” and the neighbourhood is truly dreadful. You come to it by way of the Hackney Road and Broadway, over the wide modern bridge that now spans the silvery waters of the Regent’s Canal, just where the great gasometers and factory chimneys of Haggerston rise romantically into the sky and remind the traveller, rather distantly, of Norman keeps and cathedral spires. How beautiful the name of Haggerston, and how admirably the scene fits the name!
Broadway is a market street, with continuous lines of stalls and uninviting shops, where only the bakers’ shops and the corn-chandlers are pleasing to look upon and to smell. The new and fragrant loaves, and the white-scrubbed counters and brightly polished brass-rails of the bakers look cleanly and smell appetising, and the interesting window-display of the corn-chandlers compels a halt. There you see nothing less than an exhibition of cereals and the like: to this chronicler, at least, wonderfully fascinating. Lentils, tapioca, “bullet” and “flake,” blue starch and white, haricot beans, maize, split peas, and many others. Split peas, the amused stranger may note, are, for the “best,” 1½d. a pint, the “finest”—the most superlatively “bestest”—2½d., while rice is in three categories: “fine,” “superior,” or merely—the cheapest—“good.”
The neighbourhood is dirty, despite the enamelled iron signs displayed by the borough authorities from every lamp-post—“The Public Baths and Wash-houses are now open.” It is, in fact, a purlieu where the public-houses are overcrowded and the baths not places of great resort.
The “Cat and Mutton” appears to do a thriving trade. That it is not beautiful is no matter. On the side of the house facing the open space of “London Fields” the modern sign, in two compartments, is seen, picturing a cat “tearing” a shoulder of mutton lying on the floor, and again “clawing” a suspended joint. The spelling is now orthodox.