“Of course, you’d want the use of the kitchen. That’s downstairs,” replied the woman.
“Oh! there’s no kitchen, I see,” Tibbie remarked quickly, seizing that defect as a means of escape from the miserable place. “I’m afraid then they won’t suit us. My husband is always so very particular about having the kitchen on the same floor.”
And then with many regrets we withdrew, and found ourselves once more out upon the pavement.
House after house we visited, some very poor but clean, others dirty, neglected and malodorous. Surely there are no more dismal dwelling-places in England than furnished lodgings in South London. Through the Boyson and Albany Roads, through Villa Street and Faraday Street we searched, but discovered no place where Tibbie could possibly live. Tousled-haired women were mostly the landladies, evil-faced scowling creatures who drank gin, and talked with that nasal twang so essentially the dialect of once-rural Camberwell.
At last in Neate Street, a quiet thoroughfare lying between the Camberwell and Old Kent Roads, we saw a card in the parlour window of a small house lying back from the street behind a strip of smoke-dried garden. On inquiry the landlady, a clean, hard-working, middle-aged woman, took us upstairs, and there we found three cheaply-furnished rooms with tiny kitchen all bearing the hall-mark of the hire system.
The woman, who seemed a respectable person, told us that she had been a parlour-maid in the employ of a lady at Kensington, and her husband was foreman in a mineral-water factory in the neighbourhood.
Tibbie was struck with the woman’s homely manner. She was from Devonshire, and the way she spoke of her own village showed her to be a true lover of the country.
“My husband, Mr Morton, is a compositor on a newspaper in Fleet Street and is always away at nights,” Tibbie explained. “We’ve been married nearly a year. I, too, was in service—a lady’s-maid.”
“Ah! I thought you ’ad been,” replied the landlady, whose name was Williams. “You speak so refined.”
So after re-examining the rooms Tibbie seated herself in the wicker armchair of the little parlour, and leaning back suggested that we should engage the apartments.