It was a little Naples, in its color, its smells, its dirt. Across the courtyards Italian women stretched their “washing”; and blue petticoats and scarlet bodices, and silk scarves for women’s hair gave vivid color to these London alleys. The women, as beautiful as Raphael’s Madonnas, sang at their washtubs, surrounded by swarms of bambini.
Here, under a baker’s shop kept by an Italian padrone, slept o’ nights the little organ grinders and hurdy-gurdy boys, who used to wander through the London suburbs and far into the countryside, to the delight of English nurseries from which coppers were flung down to these grubby, dark-eyed urchins with little shivering monkeys in their coat pockets or on their music boxes. They were the slaves of the padrone and had to bring him all their earnings and get beaten if they did not bring enough, before they slept in the cellars of this London slum, among the black beetles and the rats.
In one back yard lived a gray bear, belonging to two wanderers from the mountains of Savoy, and I used to hear the rattle of his chains before they led him out on his hind legs with a big pole between his paws.
Above a big yard crowded with piano organs sat, in a little room at the top of a high ladder, a fat old Italian who put the music on the streets. He sat before an open organ case with a roll of cartridge paper into which he stabbed little holes, which afterward made the notes played by a spiked cylinder when the organ grinder turned his handle. It was he who selected the tunes, thus conferring immortality on many poor devils of musicians who heard their melodies whistled by the errand boys to this music of the streets, and became famous thereby. But it was the fat old Italian at the top of the tall ladder who was the interpreter of their genius to the popular ear of the great public of the streets and slums. He put in the trills, and the “twiddley bits,” stabbing with his bradawl on the cartridge roll, as though inspired by the divine afflatus, while his hair, above a massive face and three chins, was all curls and corkscrews, as though crotchets, and quavers, semiquavers, and demi-semiquavers, arpeggios and chromatics were thrusting through his brain.
In other yards were men all white from head to heel, who made the plaster casts of Napoleon and Nelson, Queen Victoria and General Gordon, Venus and Mercury, and other favorite characters of history, sold by hawkers in Ludgate Hill and other haunts of high art at low prices. They also made the casts of classical figures for art schools and museums.
In the back yards, the basements and the slum kitchens was another profitable form of industry which was a monopoly of Italians in London in the pre-war days. That was the ice cream trundled through the streets with that alluring call to youth, “Hokey-pokey penny a lump!” From surroundings appallingly free from sanitary supervision came this nectar and ambrosia which the urchins of the London streets found an irresistible temptation.
It was a careless word on the subject of this lack of sanitation in the ice-cream factories which nearly ended my career as a journalist before it was fairly begun. Requiring some additional photographs for the second instalment of some articles I was writing for a magazine—the first, almost, that I ever wrote—I went one Sunday morning to Italy in London with an amateur photographer. We went into one of the courtyards where I had made friends with some of the pretty washerwomen, but I was no sooner observed by a few of them than, as though by magic, the courtyard was filled with a considerable crowd of those whom the Americans call “Wops.”
They came up from the basements where they slept as many as forty in a cellar—organ grinders, ice-cream vendors, bear leaders, waiters. I was obviously the object of passionate dislike. They surrounded me with violent gestures and torrential speech, not one word of which did I understand. At first I was mildly curious to know what all this noise was about, but I saw that things were serious when several young men began to flash about their clasp-knives. Help came at a critical moment. Three London “Bobbies” appeared on the scene, as they generally do, in the nick of time.
“Now, what’s all this about?”