East London

by Walter Besant

This restoration of the garden to the people is a great feature of modern attempts at civilization; it seems terrible that there should be no place anywhere for children to play except the streets, or for the old people to sit except in the public house. London is now dotted with parks, chiefly small and covered with gardens. Nearly all the churchyards have been converted into gardens; the headstones are ranged along the walls; they might just as well be taken away; one or two “altar tombs” are left. The rest of the ground is planted with flowering shrubs—lilac, laburnum, ribes, the Pyrus Japonica, and the like; the walks are asphalted, and seats are provided. Nearly all the year round one may see the old people walking about the paths or sitting in the sun; part of the ground is given to the children. It is difficult, indeed, to exaggerate the boon conferred upon a crowded city by these breathing-places, where one can be quiet. The summer amusements of the people, you will observe, are not all made up of noisy crowds and musical trippers; add the summer evening walk in the park and, all the year round, the rest in the garden that is a disused burial-ground.

For the children there is the day in the country. Every summer day long caravans of wagons filled with children, singing and shouting as they go, drive along the roads to the nearest country place, or excursion trains crammed with children are carried off to the nearest seaside places. They run about on the seashore, they bathe, they sit down to a tea of cake and buns, and they are taken home at night tired out but singing and shouting to the end. This summer “day out” is the one great holiday for the children; they scheme to get put on the lists of more than one excursion; they look forward to it; they count upon it. Every year vigorous appeals are made in the papers for help to send the children away upon their annual holiday; these appeals are of course pitched extravagantly high; they talk a conventional jargon about the little ones who grow up without ever gazing upon a green leaf or a tree. Rubbish! There is not a street anywhere in London where a garden, if it is only a disused burial-ground, is not accessible if the children choose to go there. Mostly the very little ones prefer the dirt pies in the gutter, but even for them the wagonette comes now and then to carry them off for the whole day to the grass of Victoria Park. Still, it is a very great thing that they should, once at least in the year, be carried away into real country and have a glimpse of meadows, woods, and cows and sheep.

When they grow older they are still better off. It is quite common now for young men who carry on the Settlements and the boys’ clubs to get the lads under their care to save up week by week until they have amassed the sum of five shillings. On this capital, with management, they are enabled to get a week’s holiday by the seaside. It is a glorious time for them. A convenient place is found; it must be on the seashore; it should be quite free from any town or village; there must be no temptations of any kind; the lads are there to breathe fresh air and life, quite cut off from any suggestion of town life. They sleep, every boy in his own rug, on dry, clean straw in a barn, which is also their refectory, their lecture-hall, their concert and their singing-room. On the seashore there are boats for them; they row and sail and they go deep-sea fishing; they bathe every day, and they have swimming matches; on the sands they run races; in the evening they sing, they box, they look at dissolving views, and they lie down on the straw to rest. Their food is plain; it consists principally of boiled beef and potatoes, with cocoa and coffee and bread and butter. Of course this magnificent holiday demands a head and leader and obedience. But there is hardly ever any hitch or breakdown or row among the lads.

The hopping, considered as an amusement, should be placed next, but we have already shown the place it takes in the year of the factory girl. It is indeed amusement to all concerned, especially if the weather be fine; it is amusement with profit; the hoppers come home with a pocket full of money; they have left their pasty cheeks in the country, and they bring back rosy cheeks and freckled noses and sunburned hands, with the highest spirits possible. The hopping, I confess, is not always idyllic. Last autumn it was reported that Maidstone Gaol was filled with hoppers charged with being disorderly; their camps might be conducted with more care for cleanliness; London roughs should not be allowed to come down on Sunday and mar this Arcadia. But the complainant, a well-known clergyman of the district, spoke with moderated condemnation. A more careful classification of the families in each encampment, he thinks; some check on the Sunday drink, which now flows at the sweet will of the people; some hindrance to the incursion of the Sunday rough; a more careful system of inspection—these things would go far to remove all reproach from the hopping. Meantime, as a proof of the substantial results of the work the roadway outside the principal station for their return was this year observed to be strewn with the old boots discarded by the hoppers when they bought new ones on their way home.

The river Lea, which, according to some, is the natural boundary of East London,—but it has leaped across that boundary,—is part of the summer amusements. The stream at its mouth, where it is a tributary to the Thames, is a black and murky river indeed. Higher up above the works it is a pleasant little river, winding along at leisure through a broad, marshy valley. The ground is soft and easy to be worked, the incline is so gradual that it might easily and at small expense be made an ornamental stream, moderately broad and able to carry racing boats, flowing beside gardens and under summer-houses and between orchards from its source to its mouth. Instead of this, it has been mercilessly divided into “cuts,” channels, and mill-streams running off at wide angles, joining again lower down, separating again into other cuts and channels, again to unite. On its way it receives the refuse of mills, the refuse of towns; it passes Ware and Ryehouse, Tottenham, Clapton, and Hackney; its course unfortunately lies for the most part through a broad level of soft earth—marshy and low—which permits these cuttings and humiliations. It is accused of being a sewer; young men row upon it; boys bathe in it, but with remonstrance and complaint. The stream is, it must be confessed, in its lower reaches, offensive. Sore throats are caught beside its banks; sometimes people write indignantly about it to the papers. There is a little fuss, summer passes, in the winter no one goes near the river Lea, things are forgotten, and all goes on as before.

It is not possible for a river to flow for thirty miles without having lovely stretches and picturesque corners. The Lea, with all its drawbacks, does possess these inevitable lapses into beauty. But in these pages we cannot stop to point them out. Where the Lea is beautiful it is outside the widest limits assignable to East London. Where the Lea is ugly, dirty, and disreputable, it used to form the eastern boundary to East London.

In the brief sketch of the summer amusements I have said nothing of the bicycle. Now, all the roads outside London are on Saturday and Sunday dotted with the frequent bicycle. It goes out in companies of twenty and thirty; it goes out by twos and threes; it goes out singly. On one Sunday twenty-five thousand bicycles were counted crossing one bridge over the Thames and making for the country beyond. And it seems that there are none so poor as not to afford a bicycle. The secret is, I believe, that a second-hand bicycle, or a bicycle of the last fashion but one, or a damaged bicycle, may be purchased of its owner for a mere trifle, and these lads learn very quickly how to repair the machine themselves.

But the summer all too quickly draws to an end. By the middle of September twilight falls before seven. There are no more evening spins ten miles out and back again; by the end of October twilight falls at five; then there are no more Saturday afternoons on the road. The weather breaks, the roads are heavy, the bicycle is laid aside for the next four months, perhaps for more, because the cold east wind of early spring does not make the roads pleasant except for the hardiest and the strongest. The winter amusements begin. For the factory girls and the dockers we have seen what they are: the street first and foremost; always the street, imperfectly lit, the pavement crowded; always the street, in which the girls march up and down three or four abreast. Their laugh is loud, but it is not forced; their jokes and their badinage with the lads are commonplace and coarse, but they pass for wit; they enjoy the quick pulse when all the world is young; they are as happy as any girls in any other class; they need not our pity; youth, if it has enough to eat and its evening of amusement, is always happy.

They have, then, the boulevard without the café, the street with the public house and the invitation from youth, prodigal of its pence, to step in and have a drink. In addition, they have the music-hall and the theater. For some there is the club; but only a few, comparatively, can be persuaded to go into the club for an hour or two every evening. Most of them have no desire for a quiet place; they are obliged to be quiet in the factory; at night they like to make up for the day’s long silence.

So with their companions, the casual hands, the factory lads, the Hooligans, the children of the kerb, they rejoice in the days of their youth.