From '67 to '79
I only drank one glass of wine.
From '79 to '84
I felt that I could do with more.
From '84 to '96
I found how hard it is to mix.
From '96 to Nineteen-odd
Quod:
MISS STIPP OF PLOVER'S COURT
[Sidenote: H.B.]
In a neighbourhood of narrow streets and tunnelling alleys, where there are few lamps and the policemen go two and two, where all day long you see fierce-eyed women hooded with shawls coming out of greasy street-doors with jugs in their hands, and where all day long sullen men stand at the dark entry to court and alley with pipes in their mouths and their hands in their pockets, and where the little children "awfully reverse our Saviour's words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Hell"—in this dark, dangerous riverside neighbourhood, with its foul odours and its filthy gutters, lives one of the most defenceless women who ever came into human existence.
I knock at a door in Plover's Court, and a half-dressed, half-starved, and wholly dirty child, with no boots to her feet, opens to me; and when this miserable heir of the ages, after she has stared at me like a famished animal, learns that I wish to see Miss Stipp, she bids me "go up." The narrow passage is hung with two lines of washing; and, pushing through the avenue formed by these dank garments, I catch sight in the stone-paved kitchen beyond of a big-headed, whitewashed-looking infant sprawling on the floor collecting soap-suds, and a woman in the midst of voluminous steam working her arms about in a dripping wash tub.
The stairs up which I make my difficult way are strung with washing as far as the first bend. The dampness of the atmosphere has converted the dust and grime on banisters, wall, and stairs into a muddy dew. The little doll's-house of a place reeks with the suffocating odour of gas, fried fish, onions, and steam. In one of the two rooms on the first floor, the door of which stands open, I see—and myself am seen, not to say scowled at, by a couple of pipe-smoking navvies, three or four ragged children, and a little rabbit of a flat-chested woman whose complexion and the colour of her garments bear a striking resemblance to moleskin, and whose thin hair is twisted up in front and held comfortably in its place by a single steel curling-pin which seems to occupy the whole breadth of her forehead.
My rap on the panel of the other door is soon answered by a shrill, cracked voice like the sputtering of a cheap phonograph, and opening the flimsy door I find myself in a tiny topsy-turvy chamber, with all its furniture dragged out of place, a pail of water in the centre of the floor, a piece of scrubbing-soap on the table, and an unwrung house-flannel soaking on the seat of a wooden chair. There is a nice, old-fashioned, round-fronted chest-of-drawers with brass handles in the room, but the most striking detail of its equipment is a stumpy and amazingly abrupt bedstead against the wall, which is just big enough for a big doll. The bedclothes of this eerie little cot are thrown back, and in the centre of the rumpled mattress, in the hollow made by my heroine's recumbent form, curled up in a sublime indifference to the puffing and blowing of its mistress on the hearth, lies a shabby, emaciated, and disgusting cat.
At first I suppose Miss Stipp—Miss Emma Jane Stipp—who is polishing the grate, to be kneeling on the hearthstone; but when a bird-like claw is stretched out to me, and the shrill, cracked voice says, "I'm dirty, but hearty; sit down and enjoy yourself," I observe that the little dwarf is actually standing on the hearthstone, although her big head does not come within several inches of the mantelpiece. Indeed, with her twisted feet crossed over one another, so that the left foot appears to be kicking and worrying the right foot, in order to take its place, and the right foot, which turns upward, appears to be trying to creep away from its enemy, as though it wanted to crawl up that enemy's leg to laugh at it from the mocking vantage of its own knee—the little old lady walks up and down on the hearthstone, her hand blacking and polishing the grate as she goes, just as you may see another lady walking up and down and taking the air on her doorstep.