PERRITON MAXWELL
The switchman at Walthamstow.
For twenty-six years old Tom Cumbers had held his job as switchman at the Walthamstow railroad junction where the London-bound trains come up from Southend to the great city. It was an important post and old Tom filled it with stolid British efficiency. A kindly man who felt himself an integral part of the giant railroad system that employed him, old Tom had few interests beyond his work, his white-haired wife, his reeking pipe and the little four-room tenement in Walthamstow which he called home. The latter was one of the thousands of two-storied rabbit-hatches of sooty, yellow brick, all alike and all incredibly ugly, which stretch, mile upon mile, from Walthamstow toward London's tumultuous heart.
The workshops near Epping Forest.
An appalling tragedy of the war.
Within a radius of four dun miles, just on the nearer edge of Epping Forest—the scene in a forgotten day of Robin Hood's adventurings—a section of these huddling homes of the submerged, together with a street of trams and some pathetic shops, constitute this town of Walthamstow. It is a sordid, unlovely place, but for some ten thousand wage-strugglers it is all of England. There are workshops hereabout in which one may mingle one's copious sweat with the grime of machinery and have fourteen shillings a week into the bargain—if one is properly skilled and muscular and bovinely plodding. Walthamstow is not the place where one would deliberately choose to live if bread could be earned elsewhere with equal certainty. But for all its dirt and dullness it has a spot on the map and a meaning in the dull souls of its inhabitants, and here, within half an hour's train travel of the Lord Mayor's Mansion and the golden vaults of the Bank of England, transpired on the sweltering night of which I write, one of the most witless and appalling tragedies of the present war. Forever memorable in the hitherto colorless calendar of Walthamstow will be this tragedy in the second year of Armageddon.
An ordinary hot night.
News of the war.
Beyond the stenchful heat-stress of it, there was nothing up to half-past eleven to mark this night as different from its fellows of the past. From eight o'clock till ten the small activities of the town centered chiefly about its tramway terminus, its smudgy station, its three or four moving-picture theatres, and its fetid pubs. On the pavements, in the roadways and at every crossing, corduroyed men yawned and spat, and slatternly women, most of them with whimpering infants in their arms, talked of shop or household cares and the frailties of their neighbors. Some, more alive to the big events of a clashing world, repeated the meagre news of the ha'penny press and dwelt with prideful fervor on the latest bit of heroism reported from the front. Now and again an outburst of raucous humor echoed above the babble of cockney tongues. The maudlin clamor of "a pore lone lidy 'oos 'subing 'ad desarted 'er" failed to arouse anyone's curiosity. Ladies in their cups are not a rarity in Walthamstow. In side streets, lads in khaki, many of them fresh from fields of slaughter "somewhere in Flanders," sported boisterously with their factory-girl sweethearts or spooned in the shadows. Everywhere grubby children in scant clothing shrilled and scampered and got in the way. Humidity enveloped the town like a sodden cloak and its humanity stewed in moist and smelly discomfort.
Street lamps out.