A London Mosaic

by Walter Lionel George

Pecksniff will also, at least I hope so, if he is to be happy, find the Victorian house. It was not a bad house inside, in spite of its vast, incoherent basement, the ell at the back of the drawing-room, and the shameful servants’ bedrooms; it was a roomy house, but there was too much in it for the cockroach and the mouse. Most of Bayswater, Paddington, Kensington, and Marylebone, are Victorian; all depend upon slave labour. Few of those houses can be managed properly on less than three servants; some are still run by one servant assisted by the young ladies, who do the dusting, but the importance of the point lies in this: with one servant they are dirtily run; with two servants they are barely run. They are full of corners, corridors, cupboards; they collect dust, and eat up light. In days when flesh and blood was cheap, when you could easily get young girls to wear the skin off their knees on the steps, the edifice stood up pretty well. But those days are gone; the servant problem is partly due to the Victorian house, which became almost too much to bear when the servants developed enough to understand that there were things they need not bear. What will replace it, we do not yet know. It is too early to talk of a revolutionary change into blocks of flats with common kitchens, common dining-rooms, and common nurseries; all that will come, has come, is extending, but it is not yet general. The first step is the break-up of the Victorian house into maisonettes. You can see this going on all over central London, where two families now share a house built for one. Others are being absorbed by the boarding-house. Briefly, we are packing closer into the old spaciousness, partly because we do not need it for the purposes of ostentation, partly because we cannot afford it.

Still, there is much left of old, bleak London, Highbury Crescent, Warwick Street (Pimlico), Mornington Crescent, and many others. There is, about those places, what there is more proximately about Bayswater, a sense of past comfort, dating back to the days when comfort meant red paper in the hall, brown paint, thick stuff curtains, polished boards, large and straight chairs with hard seats for the young, stuffed seats for the old. Those houses were comfortable in a frowzy way; they were houses in which one ate a great deal, slept a great deal, drank a great deal, and thought within the limits of genteel taste. Little by little people began to stay up later, so had less time to sleep; then, their fathers having drunk too much, they found that their inherited constitutions did not allow of similar excess, while the intrusive foreigner brought in his curious dishes which taught us to eat less, if more peculiarly. Picture galleries were opened on Sunday, concerts were held upon that day; matinees, cinemas, other pleasures, all these things making a continual call upon time and purse, have stolen some of its privileges from the old home, until it ceased to be home in the sacramental sense, a pleasure in itself, and turned into a dormitory. The bleak old houses of London have responded to this movement, by breaking up into maisonettes, converting themselves into boarding-houses and lodgings; there are now few claimants to their five floors; indeed, the five floors grow more and more disliked. To-day, when you walk along a street such as Mornington Crescent, whose gray face wears the inscription: ‘Joy forbidden,’ you are to a certain extent, labouring under an illusion, for the life behind those gray fronts is not gray. It is, more and more, the life of people who have no roots, who have settled for a short time in rooms, whose employment is precarious, whose fortunes are small, people who live on small weekly wages, or even on social piracy, whose presence must cause uneasiness among the portly Victorian ghosts. Inside those houses live few families, because no families of wealth care to live in such districts, while poor families cannot afford the servants to keep such houses clean. So their dwellers are, many of them, adventurers, semi-respectable people who have something to do with the stage, or who are in a sort of way in the city. They never want the windows cleaned, and when they sit down at the Victorian writing-desk with the waggly legs, they care little if it is not dusted: they blow. That is the end of those old houses; to-day, most of them are spinning out the last of their long leases in a truly Victorian way: keeping up appearances, and pretending to be as respectable as ever.

AN ABSENT DESERT
THE CROMWELL ROAD

In South Kensington and Bayswater, the bleakness is less complete, because those districts are dimly in the West End, with a little too much End about it. They are ‘possible’ districts, as the phrase goes among some of us; a ‘possible’ district is one the name of which can be stamped upon one’s note-paper. The tenants of Bayswater and South Kensington number many of the old-fashioned people who like quiet places, comfortable homes, in some cases gardens, but many more are making of those places a jumping-off ground. They pass through Bayswater or South Kensington on the way to Mayfair, Belgravia, and Marylebone; they are already well-to-do, and intend to be better-to-do; in those places they associate with the people who, once upon a time, were very well-to-do and are now less so; those districts are social junctions. But everywhere the boarding-house is gaining ground, and nowhere does one see this so well as in Cromwell Road. Cromwell Road is a remarkable street; its length has, on a warm and hazy day, a quality of eternity. It seems to have no beginning, no end; one might walk for ever along its broad stretch, between those high walls; a prison yard must be like that. This does not mean that I dislike Cromwell Road; far from it; I visit it at least once a week, for purposes of meditation. One can meditate in Cromwell Road, because nothing ever seems to have happened there; it certainly looks as if nothing could happen. It holds no tragedy, no comedy. You pass along the endless series of houses, all of which have four and a half or five and a half floors, the half being accounted for by the servants’ rooms, to which the Victorian builder never accorded a complete floor; they are nearly all alike, having five to nine steps, a porch on pillars, and a flat face; the only difference between one house and another is the age of their lease, the age being revealed by the condition of the paint: some were repainted three years ago, some two years, some recently. White, gray, black, such is their symphony. If you look in at the windows of the dining-room you will generally see a large mahogany table: in the middle of this stands a heavy brass pot; in the brass pot grows a big green fern. Behind the green fern, and always facing the window, stands a colossal sideboard, surmounted by a mirror against which is outlined a tantalus and sometimes, which is very regrettable, a cruet. (You do not see a bottle of salad-dressing in Cromwell Road, but a little farther west you do.) Near the tantalus sometimes dwell a silver cup or two. On one side of the room you discern a mantelpiece, decorated with coloured pots, a large, black marble clock, suitably representing a tomb. There may also be some brass ash-trays and bowls of obviously Indian pattern. The carpet one cannot see, but I feel sure that it is generally a red and blue Turkey. That is old Cromwell Road, grandpapa’s old Cromwell Road, comfortable in its stifled sort of way. Rail as I may at the Victorian period, I have a vague liking for those old solidities, that mean pleasant, saddleback chairs, pipes (not cigarettes), the Spectator, port, and evenings devoted to the reading of travel books and memoirs (not novels). Dull, but solid, and in Cromwell Road one is aware of a certain merit in solidity because it finds itself at the point of flux between the old civilisation and the new.

The new civilisation has already set its teeth into Cromwell Road. The houses are unchanged, but a great many have been bought up and joined together, decorated with stained glass, re-named as hotels. These have fancy pots instead of brass pots, ferns from strange bournes; curtains of lesser conventionality; looking out from a window you no longer see Mary Jane in a pink dress, but a sombre face, which may be that of a musician or a poet; or of a Balkanic waiter stained with political conspiracy. The inhabitants of those hotels are Americans, provincials, people who have grown tired of housekeeping and like to buy it ready-made; they number many widows who behave as if they were conscious of a transitory condition, actors, unattached people of all kinds. These are not the old Cromwell Road people; they are a new type, which you might call the Cromwell light-Roadster, people who drive up in taxis at all times, and even after eleven o’clock. Kensington means nothing to them; not one of them will ever be an alderman. They are breaking up the Cromwell Road, and many of those who read these lines will see Cromwell Road without a private dwelling-house, except that here and there a pair of very old maids, accompanied by some very fat dogs, will stick to the old house. They will groan at the taxis which stop at the Grand Imperial next door, send out an old retainer to warn off the street band, and grumble at the electric underground, just as they grumbled at the smoky steam underground. Then they will die, and the Grand Imperial will extend its possessions.

The Grand Imperial is extending all over London. Not only have hotels, undreamt of twenty years ago, sprung up at unexpected corners near the Strand and over the tube stations, not only have they taken over anything between two and six private houses at a time, but they are buying up site after site: a big one in Piccadilly near Down Street, also the St George’s Hospital site, perhaps. They are extending everywhere, communising life. It is all very well saying that the hotel is a sign of the decadent luxury of the day, but that is not true. In the first place there is in hotels no such thing as decadent luxury; all that the best offer are things such as plenty of light, air, space to move in, electric light when you want it, hot water day and night, a telephone by your bedside, a comfortable common room to write in, a band to amuse you while you have your meals; such like simple, obvious things which make up the ordinary comfort of life. The old-fashioned people look upon this as luxury, but I submit that the facility of having a hot bath when you want it is a natural thing, and one of the first things that a developing civilisation should give us all. Some people seem to think it morally wrong to be comfortable, and it shocks one to think that so many of our best minds should, for so long, have been working out ideas for pleasant and harmonious heating, lighting, cooking, only to be told that they are pampering us. The whole object of civilisation is to pamper us, to get rid of nature. Nature is all very well in the summer numbers of the magazines; it looks very pink and scented with hay, but real nature is rather cold, damp, earwiggy, dark, always ill-drained, and much less healthy than London. The object of civilisation is to reduce the struggle for life, and to make the material side of it pleasant enough to be forgotten. If that is not true, then let us back to the caveman forthwith.

The truth is that hotels are not luxurious and not dear. It sounds dear to pay a pound a day for a bedroom and your board, which is what one paid before the war, but if one reflects that for that pound one also has the use of excellent common rooms, that one pays nothing whatever for all sorts of racking things such as gas, electric light, water rate, borough rate, inhabited house duty, house repairs, that one owes nothing to the sweep, no tips to tradesmen, it is not dear. One has the space one needs to live in, and that is the essence of the old-fashioned opposition to hotel life: it does away with the large number of rooms that people used to think they needed, rooms in which they shut themselves up behind closed windows and drawn blinds. The old-fashioned hate the simplification of life; they do not like to think that people need no longer tie themselves down, define and label themselves: hotels are meant for those who do not go to the Zoo.

BEASTS AT THE ZOO