A London Mosaic

by Walter Lionel George

Her thick mouth is tight closed; her stays are tight; her mind is tight. She is fair and square, and will give her husband value for his money, but somehow one feels it a pity that all she will give him is value.

Those girls are part of a certain reckless gaiety that pervades Whitechapel. I like Whitechapel Road; the streets that run off it are indeed tragic with dirt and desolation, but the road itself, which is the pleasure-house of the inhabitants, is full of vitality. At all times it is thickly peopled, mostly with foreign Jews of all types, many of them scrubby little men with beards, who gesticulate in groups at street corners, and argue with their co-religionists. Some are in a state of offensive prosperity. Those Jewish crowds are more alive than the average London crowd; their eyes shine more, as if they were more capable of conceiving desire. They are at their most intense before the many open-air stalls, where you may buy boots and clothing, flowers, toys, and books, and music, and furniture, and every food you know, and some you do not; and teasers for ladies, and surprises for gents, and penny boxes of tricks that will make you popular at a social evening, and collections of jokes of ancient lineage. It is a wonderful show; it is, in many ways, more wonderful than Williamson’s Bonanza in the Brixton Road, because it is cheaper, because a penny goes farther, and thus the penn’orth is more hotly desired. All that points to another side of the poor, the side Mr Galsworthy never sees: their joys.

It is true that the joyous side of poverty is much less evident than the unhappy side; this because the pleasures of the poor are either localised within their own homes (instead of outcropping in restaurants), or because they are confined every year to a limited number of delirious days. Also, the places in which they live are mostly so abominable that it is difficult for men of our sort to understand that delight may dwell in a slum a little more easily, and a little longer than love in a cottage.

The slums are so evident to our eyes; they are everywhere. For instance, there is an unexpected little slum in the middle of Mayfair, round Shepherd Market and Shepherd Street. I believe the whole place is insanitary and should be pulled down (I have no love for the picturesque). It is surprising to think that the inhabitants of Mayfair must now and then go through the little, cramped market with the small, dirty houses, yet fail to discover that here, between Curzon Street and Piccadilly, stands a knot of public-houses at one of which, perhaps, Sam Weller was asked to take part in a swarry of boiled mutton; the hypothetical investigator from Grosvenor Square would be surprised to find out that here one can buy a shirt for 3s. 6d., sweets by the ounce, underclothes for 2s. 11d., and that for 2d. a hungry man can purchase a meat pie. It is like that all over London, in Belgravia, in Marylebone, just as in St Giles’s. They have not quite slain St Giles’s, the street-improvers, and there still is charm in Seven Dials, where once seven little public-houses stood at seven little corners, and each public-house had a dial. You told the time by tossing up or averaging. And now there is but one dial left, and it has lost its hands. (Hush, my soul! Do not let the spirit of Mr E. V. Lucas invade thee.)

SHEPHERD’S MARKET

There is more truth in the frank slums over the river. I once enjoyed the services of a supernumerary postman, who frequently came to my house to make experiments on the garden, to put up shelves, to interfere with the gas, or to drown kittens. In the end he went too far, for he attempted to cure the ball-cock of some obscure disease, and it responded to his treatment by flooding the kitchen three feet deep. But before that tragic day (you should have seen my cat swim), I visited him in Rotherhithe, because, among his many supernumerary trades, he numbered that of vine grower. Against the back of his house in West Lane he had, indeed, managed to grow a splendid, muscular-looking vine, which produced great quantities of grapes; these grapes, when eaten, reproduced what is probably the flavour of vitriol, but he was very proud of them, and ate them, and he kept his vine in condition by occasionally watering its roots with a bucket of bullock’s blood. He received this free, because he kept the slaughterer’s books in his spare time. But all this is by the way, and there are many respectable old gentlemen who do all these things and are thought none the worse of; as everybody knows, lunacy in the poor is originality in the rich. What was interesting about the supernumerary’s home was the breadth of West Lane, that is really a dingy square of bare earth planted with trees whose every sooty leaf whispers: ‘Oh! had I the wings of a dove!’ It is a square of crumbling Georgian frontages not devoid of a certain splendour. That discovery is one of the keys to the condition of the poor. You find this not only in Rotherhithe, but in Clapham, in Brixton, in the New Kent Road; here and there, behind the board of a photographer, where are exposed pictures of young men with all their hair brushed off their foreheads, and of young girls with all their hair brushed into their eyes, you see a beautiful old house with a porch of the Adams type. Many of these streets, such as Old Kent Road, such as Tooley Street, have become wholly commercial, have turned into long lines of gray warehouses and decaying side streets, haunted by many children; some, like Jamaica Road, and most of Bermondsey, have entirely fallen into the hands of the grayest commerce, but here and there you are bound to find a still splendid Georgian house, looking rather like a distressed Irish lady, who does her best to keep her transformation combed, and to maintain the traditions of the Ballymullins of County Mayo. These houses are in the hands of the poor, which means that, originally intended for prosperous people with several servants, they have been cut up into tenements; this also means that the stairs have not been mended since the days of William IV.; that Queen Victoria came to the throne, and married and mourned, that Disraeli passed reform bills while no bathrooms were put in; that the tap went on running in the backyard, where Georgian wealth used to fill the jugs; it means that the old house has lost most of its glass, and is running with mice and stinking with beetles; that the drains have been left by the local to a higher authority. Part of the tragedy of the poor is that few houses have been built for them, and that they have to adapt themselves to houses discarded by the rich, which are not meant for them, which are not usable by them. The rooms are so large that the poor cannot afford them unless they overcrowd them; or they have tiny windows because they were limited by the old window tax. There is only one thing to do for them, as is the case with most institutions: blow them up.

Will the superman be bred by the L.C.C.? I do not know, but I am sure that the superman will not be bred in any numbers in the middle of the stench of the past. Evil and old are almost synonyms, and I confess that I like better the vulgarity of the suburban street, with its concrete that pretends to be stone, and its plaster beams that pretend to be wood, its wooden pillars that pretend to be marble. I like it better, with its bay windows, so built that no article of furniture will fit it, with its awful ingle nooks, its sham gables and its sham dormer windows, than the awful old Georgian houses near Lamb’s Conduit Street, where, crowded together under a ceiling still flecked with gold, on which naked cherubs sprawl, a dozen Russian furriers sit and scratch. For the hideous modern house can at least be clean; it is small; it is washable; a through draught can be arranged; a very little it opens the window on life.

In the sense of housing we have never housed our poor; hardly anywhere, up to 1900 or so, have we done anything but run up rude brick boxes as shelters, or adapt the dwellings of the rich. Hence, I believe, a stricken, scrofulous generation. Yes, I know there is a charm about all this black filth, as if, indeed, flowers did sprout from dunghills. It is the charm of contrast, it is singularity. You feel it in every poor region. You feel it at the Elephant and Castle, for instance, though why the Elephant should alone be famous, while at the two opposite corners sit the Rockingham and Alfred’s Head, equally great public-houses, I do not know; you feel it in the rowdiness of London Road, and in a sort of ‘none-of-your-lip’ air that hangs over Newington Causeway. You feel it still more in Deptford; indeed, Deptford is a pitiful place, all gray stone and gray slate, but the smell of the sea hangs about it, and as it lies along the docks, often above these slate roofs, above the timber stacks of strange wood, you see the tangled masts and cranes cut out against the sky, patterns evidently designed by Nevinson. I remember once seeing on the shoulder of an old woman who kept a stationer’s shop, a gorgeous parrot. It had a yellow and blue body, scarlet feathers in its tail, a bill of ebony, and eyes like molten gold. It sat on her shoulder, thinking of things old as the willow pattern. The parrot looked out upon Deptford High Street, through the flaming topaz of its eyes at the young men who passed now and then, sun-burnt starvelings of the merchant service, in blue jerseys; the sailors rolled and the parrot thought, and in the heat the East breathed from the logs of mahogany and sandalwood. But under all that, under all that theatrical charm was buried the same old thing, the bad old house made to fit the bad new time.

Yet, the poor are not as unhappy as they look. They do not, in the accepted sense, live a life of pleasure, but to say that they have no pleasures, or can have none because they are poor, is a mistake. The poor have cheap pleasures, pleasures which many of us do not care for, and they take no part in what we choose to call pleasures. If I were compelled to say something sweeping, I should say that the rich have less pleasures than the poor; they are free from more pains, but that is not the same thing. The pleasures of the poor reside much more than do ours in animal comforts; whereas the rich take a good dinner and its wines as a matter of course, the poor make a feast of a joint or a gallon of beer. Things such as these, food, drink, warmth, second-class travelling, arm-chairs, extra blankets, translate themselves, not into the mere satisfaction of needs, but into recognisable pleasures. It is so in the whole field of their amusements, the cinema, the music-hall, the football and cricket fields, where many watch matches, and a few play them; it is so in regard to bank holidays, to journeys to Southend or Margate, to bathing, to visiting the Chamber of Horrors, to being photographed. All these things matter more to the poor than they do to the rich, and you will realise that this is true, if you recall that you have never met an underpaid clerk or a working girl who did not passionately look forward to holidays. On the other hand, you are all familiar with the state of mind of a well-to-do family, who solemnly discuss one May evening, ‘Where shall we go in August?’ When the poor discuss where they shall go to in August, and most of them mean on August Bank Holiday, they do not come together in the spirit of profound misery and grim hostility that characterises the respectable classes. They do not go away because they must go away in August, nor must they go away in August because everybody goes away in August: it costs them something to go away. The holiday is a treat, and is not a part of the household budget estimated for in every income. I need not stress this, but we all know that when estimates are prepared one must put in rent, rates, taxes, doctor, dentist, chemist ... holidays. That is not pleasure. But it is pleasure when Alf tells Ethel that he has had a rise, and that they can this year rise to Cromer instead of Ramsgate. The difference is still more remarkable if we recall the ‘thank-God-that’s-over’ attitude of the rich when, at last, their holiday is done, and the beneficent train pants into Paddington or Victoria. I have known many poor young men and women, and never met one who had not enjoyed a perfect holiday. I have met some who had passed seven days in a mackintosh, and even then had enjoyed a perfect holiday.