The Lure of Old London Part 1

The Lure of Old London.

by Sophie Cole.

PREFACE

People who are kind enough to read my stories sometimes tell me they like them on account of their London atmosphere. This is rea.s.suring, because London is, to me, what "King Charles' head" was to "Mr. d.i.c.k,"

and when my publisher suggested that I should write this volume I mounted my hobby-horse with glee.

The objects of the journeys recorded were chosen haphazard. With a myriad places clamouring for notice, and each place brimful of interest, one takes the first that comes, reflecting that what one doesn't see to-day can be seen to-morrow, regretful only that, no matter how many to-morrows may remain, there will not be enough to exhaust the charms of London. London has moods for each hour and surprises round every corner.

It may be the enchantress, or the "stony-hearted step-mother," but one part it can never play--that of the bore. "Strange stories," says Walter Thornbury, in his introduction to "Old and New London," "about strange men grow like moss in every crevice of the bricks." To people the streets with the shades of those "strange men" is a fascinating pastime which I owe, in large measure, to the guidance of that wonderful and inexhaustible book.

If, in this humble little volume of my own, I dared aspire to do anything more than please myself, it would be to share with some lovers of London those moods of curious happiness which one finds in the haunts of London's ghosts.

CHAPTER I

When the Countess of Corbridge sent the quarterly cheque for fifty pounds to her brother, the Hon. George Tallenach, she always addressed the envelope to Carrington Mansions, Mayfair. As a matter of fact, the Honourable George lived in Carrington Mews, Shepherd Market, and derived a certain ironic pleasure from the contemplation of his sister's sn.o.bbishness. But then the Honourable George had never acted up to the traditions of his family. His Bohemianism, coupled with an inability to settle down to any calling, had been the despair of that family ever since he was ploughed at Oxford. And now, at the age of sixty-five, he was a pensioner on the bounty of the Countess of Corbridge, living in a workman's flat in Carrington Mews, an adept in the art of poetic loafing, an inveterate gossip and roamer of the streets, a kindly old vagabond with well-brushed shabby clothes, a clean collar and a spotless pocket handkerchief, the love of London in his bones, and of his fellows in his heart.

Mrs. Darling, the pensioned widow of a night watchman, who lived in the flat below, was in the habit of rendering the Honourable George small services. It was she to whom he applied in any domestic emergency--she mended his socks and kept his handkerchiefs a good colour, sewed on his b.u.t.tons, and inculcated a policy of thrift towards the end of the quarter when funds were getting low.

Such a period was imminent now, and when Mrs. Darling brought in a pile of snowy handkerchiefs and deposited them on the table this warm September morning, the Honourable George, faced with the prospect of three lean weeks, propounded to her a scheme he had devised for a cheap form of enjoyment.

"Mrs. Darling," he began, "I have noticed with regret your lamentable ignorance of the place in which you live."

"Me ignorant of Shepherd Market. I don't think!" declared Mrs. Darling indignantly. "I 'aven't lived in it for thirty-five years for nothink.

Why, there isn't a shop or a person I----"

"Not so fast, Mrs. Darling. I was referring to London as a whole, of which Shepherd Market is as a needle in a haystack. And your knowledge even of the Market and its surroundings is purely superficial. I suppose you are not aware that Shepherd Market is the place where the fair, which gave Mayfair its name, was held up to the middle of the eighteenth century, and that the Market itself is nearly two hundred years old. No doubt you are also in ignorance of the fact that Kitty Fisher lived in Carrington Street: Kitty, the celebrated courtesan who married John Norris and gave herself up to repairing two dilapidated fortunes, thus proving the inaccuracy of the statement that the leopard cannot change its spots, and challenging the baseness and the scurvy malevolence of those 'little scribblers' who accused her of having 'neither sense nor wit, but only impudence'."

"Well, sir, I must admit I _didn't_ know all them things."

"Of course you didn't; but cheer up, it isn't too late to learn. What d'you say to our having some outings together? Suppose we make a start this afternoon? London's at its best on these calm autumn days."

"What, _me_ and _you_?"

"Yes--why not?"

"'Spose we met any of yer grand friends? Me, in my ole plush coat I've 'ad this ten years. It's true I got a new 'at, ten and eleven at Selfridge's bargain bas.e.m.e.nt, but a hat ain't everythink."

"No, you certainly want more than that. But clothes, also, aren't everything. It's your company I hanker after, Mrs. Darling. I seek a virgin mind on which to make first impressions. I'm tired of people who _know everything_. In seeing things through your eyes I shall----"

But Mrs. Darling interrupted the speaker to remark with a scandalised air that there wasn't much of the virgin about _her_, seeing she'd been married thirty-three years, and a widow too, not to speak of being the mother of four children.

This drew forth from the Honourable George a charge of frivolity coupled with a long-winded explanation of his newly conceived idea, and an equally long-winded explanation of the benefit Mrs. Darling might derive from it. The listener, who had been standing first on one leg, then on the other, her mind racked by a suspicion that the potatoes would be reduced to pulp, made a reckless promise at the first pause, and then beat a precipitate retreat to her flat below.

"'E gets worse and worse," she meditated, as she strained off the potatoes--just in time. "Talk about balmy--if this don't take the bun!

But if it gives 'im any pleasure, it won't do me no 'arm. I'll go this once, just to pacify 'im. I bet 'e won't ask me again!" and Mrs.

Darling's smile had a quality of grim humour.

The Honourable George, always a favourite with the opposite s.e.x, had had many love affairs of a more or less light nature, loves of a day, a week, or a month. But existing with, and surviving these ephemeral distractions, was "Agatha," the woman he had always meant some day to ask in marriage. Owing, however, to the Honourable George's thriftless habits, that day had never arrived, and "Agatha," who had allowed all her birds in the hand to escape in favour of that elusive bird in the bush, was at the age of sixty still a spinster, finding her interests in church work, dogs, and other people's babies. At regular intervals she had letters from George. George, who was apt to ride rough-shod over her well-bred susceptibilities with his racy comments on people and things.

George, who shocked her and saved her from old maidishness, whose letters came into the prim little country house with a refres.h.i.+ng breath of Bohemianism, providing an antidote to dry rot, and a healthy interest in men and things outside her narrow circle. The following letters are those particular ones which gave the account of his peregrinations with Mrs. Darling.

CHAPTER II

CARRINGTON MEWS, SHEPHERD MARKET, _13th September_.

Dear Agatha,--I've got a new pal! Her name may have appeared in my letters before, in connection with the histories of my neighbours in the other flats, the mending of my vests and pants, and cheap lunches at home when she provides me with a portion of her beef-steak pie for ninepence. Her name is Darling, which necessitates the painstaking use of the "Mrs." for fear of a misunderstanding. She is a widow, and a person of kindly sympathies but limited intelligence outside the domain of domestic affairs. She is c.o.c.kney to the finger tips, yet London, to her, is as unexplored and as unknown as one of the stars. The temptation, when one day I realised this, was irresistible. Obviously, it was meant that _I_ was destined to take the work of her education in hand, and to-day we made a start with our immediate surroundings.

It seems hardly credible that Mrs. Darling never went out to buy a pound of potatoes that she did not pa.s.s "Ducking Pond Mews" in Shepherd Street, yet it had never occurred to her to wonder how it got its t.i.tle, much less to make any effort to find out. She said she supposed there had been a pond there, some time, and when I told her it was what, in contemporary papers, was described as "an extensive basin of water," she said, "A penny plain and tuppence coloured". Mrs. D. is very averse to anything of the nature of "side" in conversation, and so I did not go on to quote the article which spoke of a "commodious house and a good disposure of walks". I thought, though, it would interest her to know that, by payment of the small sum of twopence, lovers of a certain polite and humane sport could in those old days witness the torture of the duck when it was put in the pond and hunted by dogs who were driven in after it. Also that Charles II and some of his n.o.bility were in the habit of frequenting those sports.

She said she wasn't a bit surprised. She never had thought much of royalty; all the same, it didn't do to believe everything you were told.

This was a trifle discouraging, and we walked on in silence for a few minutes, pausing to glance down East Chapel Street, where is the many-paned window of the "Serendipity" shop, with its old coloured prints and the original editions of seventeenth-century poets, bound in vellum; then on to the East Yard, which exists exactly as it was in the old coaching days.

Do you know, Agatha, that I live in one of the most unique spots in London? We are hemmed in by an aristocracy of houses, places and people, yet we are as far apart from it all as if the walls of Jericho came between. There's no approaching by degrees. One steps through one of those low arches in Curzon Street into this quaint little island of loiterers in the twinkling of an eye. A world of cobbled-paved streets, _culs de sac_, devious by-ways, and shops which in their meditative unconcern seem to trust in Providence to send them customers. A world from which one sometimes awakens in Piccadilly with a feeling of having slept as long as Rip Van Winkle himself.

I suggested the wax effigies at Westminster Abbey with diffidence. To my relief, however, the old lady received the proposal favourably, and on our way I imparted to her a dark intention which I had cherished for years. It was to spend a night in the Abbey. I should choose the warmest night in summer, and I should go provided with a packet of sandwiches and a flask of whisky. Imagine the thrill on a moonlight night, when the figures on the tombs in the long aisles would be like creatures on a stage frozen into stone at some moment of dramatic intensity. Pointing, beckoning, warning, praying, weeping and exhorting. "The dust of the dead"--a fine phrase that. One would see it rise like incense in the moonbeams, and the vast silences would be thick with whispered thoughts.

Perhaps now and again there would come a sound which had nothing to do with the dead--the footfall of a watchman.

Mrs. Darling asked if it had occurred to me that the watchman might give me in charge. I a.s.sured her that I had not left such a contingency out of my calculations. I should well tip the watchman, and a drink out of my flask on top of the tip would make a friend of him for life. No doubt he would be glad of a talk to relieve the monotony of his job, and the talk of a night watchman in Westminster Abbey would be worth listening to. He could tell me something of those suspected secret places which are not shown to visitors. He might even let me see them for myself. He would know the Abbey as it is impossible for the ordinary public to know it. The ordinary public no more knows the Abbey than does a person, who stands on the kerb to watch the King pa.s.s on his way to some State function, know the man inside the King. The Abbey should be seen when the voices of glib guides, and the shuffling footsteps of visitors bored with sight-seeing, have ceased. Then, when the echoes of the last footsteps have died away, when the last door has banged, and the last key been turned in the last lock, _then_ the Abbey puts aside its mask and communes with its dead. What a strange silence that must be, when the thoughts of kings and queens, statesmen and warriors, poets and priests, fill every corner of the ancient building with their noiseless vigilance!

Mrs. Darling said that, even if I escaped being taken to the police station, I should certainly get an attack of rheumatism, but I explained that sensations invariably have their price, and that I shouldn't grudge paying for this particular one.

We left the daylight of the Broad Sanctuary for the gloom of the vast interior, and I suggested that we should explore the chapels before doing the wax effigies in the Islip Chamber.

As we walked down the north transept the old lady asked me if it was true that "Old Parr" was buried in the Abbey, and I took her to read the inscription on the stone in Poet's Corner. "Old Parr's" qualification for hob-n.o.bbing with the elite in art and literature lies in the fact that he died at the age of 152, and lived in the reigns of ten sovereigns, an achievement great enough, it was considered, to earn him the right to such distinguished burial. How came it, I wonder, that this solitary human being was endowed with such powers of resistance to natural decay? There must have been something weird about that old man.

Taylor, the poet, in his description of him, says:--

"From head to heel, his body hath all over A quick set, thick set, natural, hairy cover."

Was Old Parr a throw-back to our ancestor the ape?

Mrs. Darling said he must have outlived all his relations and been very lonely, and to rea.s.sure her I mentioned that if he outlived old ties he also made new ones, marrying his second wife (only his second) at the age of 120, and having by her one child.

Mrs. D. retorted that he ought to have been ashamed of himself, which struck me as inconsistent. Parr's first wife had no doubt been dead a great many years, and all those years he had presumably been waiting for the end which never came. When, at the age of 120, he found himself still alive, and still hale and hearty, he would begin to think it was about time to accept things as they were and start life all over again.

That my thoughts in Poet's Corner, by the way, concerned themselves with "Old Parr" to the exclusion of Garrick, Johnson, Thackeray, d.i.c.kens, Coleridge, and Spenser, the "Prince of Poets," must have been Mrs. D.'s fault.

I prefer Monday for a visit to the chapels, not because one saves sixpence, but because I never follow in the footsteps of a guide without a humiliating sense of being one of a hungry mob of chickens round the man with the bag of grain. It is much more exciting to go pecking about on your own, and on Mondays you can loiter unmolested where you will, and for as long as you will.

The north aisle of Henry VII's Chapel, where Queen Elizabeth is buried, invariably draws me, and I led the way there, first. Strangely enough, it is often empty, and always quiet. One's thoughts of Elizabeth mingle curiously with those of her hated half-sister, "b.l.o.o.d.y Queen Mary," who is buried below Elizabeth, and who was, according to Sandford, "interred without any monument or other remembrance".