Part 1

THE HEART OF LONDON

BY

H. V. MORTON

_An ever-muttering prisoned storm, The heart of London beating warm._ John Davidson, "Ballads and Songs"

THIRD EDITION

METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON

First Published ... June 11th 1925 Second Edition ... January 1926 Third Edition ... 1926

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE SPELL OF LONDON THE LITTLE GUIDE TO LONDON THE LONDON YEAR

To S. D. W.

CONTENTS

THE NEW ROMANCE WHERE THE EAGLES SLEEP ORIENTAL (_Petticoat Lane_) SHIPS COME HOME (_The Docks_) TREASURE TROVE (_Caledonian Market_) CENOTAPH ROMANCE ON WHEELS GHOSTS OF THE FOG BATTLE (_Free Cancer Hospital_) BABIES IN THE SUN (_Kensington Gardens_) FACES IN THE STRAND WOMEN AND TEA AN OPEN DOOR (_St. Martin's Church in the Fields_) A BIT OF BAGDAD (_Club Row_) "PRISONERS ONLY" (_Bow Street_) BOYS ON THE BRIDGE NIGHT BIRDS AT THE WHEEL UNDER THE DOME (_St. Paul's_) HEARTBREAK HOUSE MADONNA OF THE PAVEMENT SWORD AND CROSS (_Temple Church_) KNOCKOUT LAND GHOSTS (_Soane Museum_) ALADDIN'S CAVE THAT SAD STONE (_Cleopatra's Needle_) SUN OR SNOW ROMANTIC MUTTON (_Shepherd's Market_) LONDON LOVERS IN UNCLE'S SHOP HORSEY MEN FROM BOW TO EALING MARRIAGE KINGS AND QUEENS (_Westminster Abbey Waxworks_) LOST HEIRS (_Record Office_) FISH (_Billingsgate Market_) HAUNTED (_Old Devonshire House_) ABOUT HOMES IN BONDAGE ROYAL SATIN (_London Museum_) AMONG THE FUR MEN APPEAL TO CÆSAR (_Privy Council_) TONS OF MONEY (_The Royal Mint_) WHERE TIME STANDS STILL MY LADY'S DRESS ST. ANTHOLIN'S NOT FOR WOMEN OUR ROMAN BATH (_The Strand_) LEFT BEHIND (_Lost Property Office_) THE "GIRLS" (_Piccadilly Circus_)

LONDON'S GROWTH

_Here Herbs did grow And Flowers sweet But now 'tis called Saint George's Street._

--An 18th century inscription on a London tavern

NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION

These essays were written day after day, week after week, to keep pace with the relentless machines of the "Daily Express." Since this book was published many kind unknown friends have written to tell me that here they have found something that is London; but they should not thank me: they should thank the great city which, written to death generation by generation, is an undying topic, discovered age by age is still inexhaustible; stripped bare of mystery by many writers has never lost its magic.

H. V. M.

LONDON

_When a man is tired of London he is tired of life: for there is in London all that life can afford._

--Dr. Johnson

THE HEART OF LONDON

The New Romance

When eight million men and women decide to live together on the same spot things are bound to happen.

London, in lineal descent from Thebes and Rome, is one of those queer massings together of humanity which Civilization dumps on a small plot of earth before handing the lease of Destiny, not knowing whether to laugh or cry about it. Great cities are strange inevitable phenomena. It is wrong to compare them with hives, for in a hive the wish of the individual has been sacrificed unquestioningly to the good of the community. Had we ascended from the bee perhaps the greatest happiness we could achieve would be an unspectacular death in the service of the London County Council. But in London, as in all modern cities, it is the individual who counts. Our eight millions split themselves up into ones and twos: little men and little women dreaming their private dreams, pursuing their own ambitions, crying over their own failures, and rejoicing at their own successes.

Fear built the first cities. Men and women herded behind a wall so that they might be safe. Then came trade; and cities grew into lucky bags in which men dipped for profit. Essentially they remain lucky bags to this day. London's millions pour into London and carry off their loot every Friday; but that, thank heaven, is not the whole story. A city develops Tradition and Pride. London has greater tradition and pride than any other city in the world.

So when I ask myself why I love London I realize that I appreciate that ancient memory which is London--a thing very like family tradition for which we in our turn are responsible to posterity--and I realize that I am every day of my life thrilled, puzzled, charmed, and amused by that flood-tide of common humanity flowing through London as it has surged through every great city in the history of civilization. Here is every human emotion. Here in this splendid theatre the comedy and the tragedy of the human heart are acted day and night. Love and treachery, beauty and ugliness, laughter and tears chase one another through the streets of London every minute of the day, often meeting and mixing in the strangest fashion, because London is just a great mass of human feeling, and Man, never clearly labelled "Hero" or "Villain" as in melodrama, is capable of so much moral complexity that you might almost say that good and bad exist in him at the same moment.

Had I been born a few thousand years ago I feel sure that I could have written much the same book about Thebes or Babylon, because the only things that change radically in life are fashions and inventions. The human heart was patented long ago and the Creator has not seen fit to bring out a later model.

After dinner one night a woman fixed large eyes on me and confided that in a previous incarnation she had been Cleopatra. She was my tenth Cleopatra. She told me that there was no romance in modern life, and, looking a little withdrawn as if remembering some Alexandrian indiscretion, she said: "No surprise, no--you know what I mean?--no real poetry."

I always think it best not to argue with queens; but I believe that the surprise, the romance, and the poetry of a modern city are fiercer than they were in the past. The drama of the ancient autocracies was played with so small a cast. The rest was suffering. People with large eyes were never in their past lives anything less than queens or princes, and thus their naturally vivid memories of a small and brilliant circle dim a recollection of the dumb majority beneath their wills. In spite of the supply of desirable lamps in Bagdad the census of owner-drivers must have been quite negligible, so that the average inhabitant must have lived through the romance of those days sitting in the same patch of sun, bitten by insects and trodden on by negroes.

In London, and in the free cities of this modern world, the drama of life widens, the characters increase and the unchanging human heart, no happier perhaps in the long run, beats less timorously than it did, yet leaping in sympathy to the same old loves and fears and hates.

Every day our feelings vibrate to some stray unimportance. Life is full of portentous triviality. Is it not strange that our minds often refuse to recognize some sensation--a word like a worn-out boot--while they react immediately to something so small as to be almost foolish? You may be bored stiff by the front page of the evening paper, but you go home remembering some common thing seen or heard; some little humanity: the sight of a man and a girl choosing a child's cot, two people saying good-bye at a street corner, the quiet hatred in a man's eyes--or the love....

Let us now go out into London.

Where the Eagles Sleep

One o'clock in the City of London. Crowds overflow the pavement into the narrow, twisting road. Young men in striped trousers, ruled like ledgers, black coats sober as a bill of lading, rush or saunter, according to their natures, towards a quick lunch-bar, where a girl with golden hair will give them beer and mutton. Girls, arm-in-arm, discuss those eternal verities--dress, love, and another woman--as they go primly or coyly, according to their nature, towards two poached eggs and a cup of tea. Here and there a large man in a silk hat, who may be a millionaire or a bankrupt, chases the inevitable chop. And the traffic roars, throbs, and thunders.

But behind a tall hoarding that shouts dogmatically of soap and shirts and pills things are quiet. Out of the chaos a great new bank will rise. Workmen sit around in picturesque groups eating. On their knees are spotted handkerchiefs in which lie gigantic sandwiches cut by wives in the early dawn. They carve them with clasp-knives and carry them to their mouths, the clasp-knives upright in their hands grazing their cheeks. They drink from tin cans, and wonder, in rich monosyllables, "wot" will win the three-thirty.

I stand on the edge of a vast pit in which, down through successive strata--brick, tiles, black earth, powdered cement--lies the clay on which London rests. It is a deep, dark hole. It is as if some surgeon, operating on the great body of the city, has bared it to the spine. I look down with awe at the accumulation of nearly two thousand years of known history piled, layer on layer, twenty-four feet above the primal mud.

How amazing to gaze down into that pit where the marvellous record of London lies clear as layers of cream in a cake: Victorian, Georgian, Stuart, Plantagenet, Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman. There it stops, for there it began. Below, nothing but mud and ooze, hundreds of thousands of years of unrecorded Time, century after century written in mud, forest after forest, springing up, dying, falling into decay; and who knows what awful drama of great creatures struggling in green undergrowth and river slime long before the first man climbed a tree on Ludgate Hill and looked round fearfully on that which was not yet London?

A workman clambers into the pit, prods around with a stick, and shouts up to his mate:

"Hi, Bill, here's a bit more!"

And pat-pat-pat on the parapet fall hard, encrusted fragments that look like flat cakes of sealing wax. I pick them up, knock off the caked earth, and find a beautiful little fragment of deep red pottery, one the rim of a delicate vase, another the rounded base of a little cup, and in the bottom something is written: "Fl. Germanus. F." Just that.

What does it mean? It means that I have seen the deep roots of London pulled up, the roots that go right back to Rome. "Fl. Germanus. F." is the trade mark of Flavius Germanus, a potter who lived in the time of the Cæsars, and "F" stands for "Fecit," meaning "Flavius Germanus made it." What a message to receive in modern London behind a hoarding advertising pills, while the traffic roars, throbs, and thunders!

* * *

Every week a sackful of Rome is dug up in the City of London when a new bank is built. For we stand on the shoulders of Rome. Men from the London and the Guildhall Museums watch the excavations like lynxes, collect the little bits of red pottery, the coins, the bits of green and mauve glass, this wreckage of that first London; that far-flung limb of Rome crowning its single hill.

* * *

As I stand there, so modern, such a parvenu, an omnibus ticket still stuck in the strap of my wrist-watch, I hold the cup of Flavius. What do I see? I see the first London and its colonists pegging out their camp. Then Boudicca, blood, fire, a ruin. The second London rises from the smoke, a London old enough to have a story to tell the young men; and round this London they are building a wall.

Gradually, as a vision in a crystal clears and forms out of mist, I see a smaller, colder Rome standing with its marble feet in Thames water. I see rows of wood and red-tile houses running within the walls in straight lines like tents within a castrum; I see the marble capitals under our grey skies, the majestic circular sweep of the theatre, the white gleam of the Forum, the gates with their statues, the baths at the gates, the long straight streets crowded, noisy, varied. I see the shaggy Britons and the Gauls move to a side as the Roman troops come clattering over the stones, their helmets shining, swords at hips; the marvellous short sword that carved out an Empire as a girl might cut a cake.

And the heart of this little English Rome, how did it beat? I imagine that it knew the enterprising business man opening up new markets, the enthusiastic soldier always dreaming of sending the Eagles north, the inevitable Phœnician with his galley at the docks and his shop somewhere in the city, the bad boy sent to colonial London to expiate, and women making the best of it, always three months behind Rome in fashion: wives and sweethearts who had followed their men into barbary. O, the homesickness and heroism of colonization! How many old men must have wept to see their careful vines wilt in the London clay; and I wonder if Londinium Augusta numbered among its inhabitants the optimistic gardener who bored his friends with a vision of olives in a neat Italian row!

There would come a time in this first London when a small boy would say to his mother: "Tell me about Rome!"

And she would sit facing the broad Thames, talking of Italy as a homesick woman in Winnipeg might talk of England:

"Do you see those galleys coming up under the bridge like water beetles? They come from Ostia--from Rome. They bring soldiers and--sometimes people go home in them! Yes, dear, perhaps when you grow up you too will go. The sun always shines there, and it is seldom cold as it is here. When your father was a little boy like you..."

So the tale would go on.

Then I see the market-place, the marvellous mixture of race which Rome drew to her cities: the dark Iberian soldier pressed into service for duty on the Wall, the Gaul, the German, the negro, the merchants with their wares, the amber from the Baltic, the pearls, the perfumes from the East, the brown fingers holding out gold chains as the Roman ladies go by....

What chatter of a six months old scandal as the women walk to the baths; what discussion of Rome's latest _coiffure_, her newest pin, her smartest sandal! At the docks the creak of timber and the straining of a released rope, the "one, two, three" as the oarsmen dip their great blades in the Thames; and a galley goes home with letters to Cæsar from the Governor of London.

Londinium Augusta! There is nothing between her and Verulamium but a straight road through the forest, then another road, more forests, and proud Camulodunum on its hill. Three fortified islands in a green sea. So England takes shapes out of the mists of Time; so London begins.

And I like to think, to round off the picture, that, on a cold night of winter, when brittle green stars glitter in the sky like glass, some grey old wolf creeps to the edge of the Hampstead woods and licks his jaws as he looks towards the first lights of London. Then he yawns and blinks his eyes as a dog blinks and looks away from something he does not understand. So he trots softly among the trees with the instinct that things are different; that--something has happened to the Hill!

Oriental

A young girl with eyes like the fish-pools of Heshbon sits outside a butcher's shop on an upturned crate. Her fingers are covered in rings, and when she laughs she throws back her fuzzy head, exposing her plump, olive-coloured throat, as Moons of Delight have been doing throughout the history of the Orient.

She is beautiful after her kind. In five more years, however, she will look like a side-show. Her lithe grace, her round face, her firm, white neck will be submerged in regrettable tissue. The eye passing over her façade will find it impossible to excavate her recent beauty. She will be like a thin girl who somehow has been merged with a fat woman. She will be "herself with yesterday's ten thousand years,"--and yesterday winning all along the line. That is the burden of the Jewess.

However, at the moment she is ripe as a peach is ripe before it falls naturally into the hand. Were I a Sultan, swaying above the street in a litter, I would roll a lazy eye in her direction, make a minute movement of a jewelled finger, and, later at the palace, I would address her:

"Moon of Great Beauty and Considerable Possibility," I would say, "whither comest them, O Radiance, and who is thy father?"

Whereupon she would spit at me with her eyes and reply:

"Cancher see I'm respectable ... cancher? You're a nice chep, you are, sitting up there dressed like a dorg's dinner and talkin' like thet ... lemme go..."

For though her eyes are the eyes of Ruth among the alien corn, her larynx is that of Bill Sykes. The street in which she sits, shedding this varied atmosphere, is lined on either side by a row of rough booths. It is a mere track between two bright hedges of merchandise. Here the fruit-sellers expose their pyramids of red-gold oranges, their African plums, their pineapples; there the sellers of shoes wait patiently beneath their pendulous racks. The sellers of cloth walk up and down with bright, stabbing colours, daringly mixed, slung across their shoulders, and the drink merchants, with their cooling brews--never absent from an Oriental market--stand beside their ample golden globes.

Through this lane of bright colour moves the crowd--the women young, straight, and mostly beautiful in a dark, passionate way; the old women fat and round; the men sallow, bearded, and incredibly wrinkled. Among them crowd the abject creatures so well known in the East, who clutch a handful of vegetables or three inferior lemons with which they try to undersell the regular merchants.

Where is it? It might be Cairo, Bagdad, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Tunis, or Tangier, but, as a matter of fact, it is Petticoat Lane in Whitechapel--a penny ride from Ludgate Hill!

As I walked through Petticoat Lane I thought that if we had a sunny climate this part of Whitechapel would become one of the famous show-places of the world. Here you have the East without its lepers, without small-pox, without the flies, without the impertinent stinks. This is the scene of rich and amusing variety which, were it only a few thousand expensive miles from London, under a blue sky, would attract the attention of the artist and the traveller.

The attitude towards commerce is as old as barter. I saw a neatly bearded woman, whose brown coat looked as though it was draped over a barrel, go up to a fishmonger, standing beside two gigantic codfish and a number of smaller fish.

"How much?" asked the woman, indicating a nice group of still life.

"Six shillings," replied the fishmonger, with a keen glance from small, black eyes.

"One and ten," remarked the woman, reflectively turning a plaice upside down and prodding it with a fat finger.

Whereupon a singular change took place in the fishmonger's aloof attitude. He was insulted, outraged. Suddenly, picking up a plaice by the tail, he said with a threatening gesture:

"I'll wipe it acrost yeh face!"

The customer was not outraged as a woman would have been in Oxford Street; she just shrugged her fat shoulders, as she would have done in Damascus, and moved away, knowing full well that before she had retreated very far she would be recalled--as she was. After a brisk argument she bought the fish for two and fourpence and they parted friends!

I have seen exactly the same drama played on a carpet in Alexandria.

* * *

What strange foreign eatables you see here: vile-looking messy dishes, anæmic cucumbers, queer salted meats, varied sausages of East European origin, the inevitable onion, and, of course, olives. Smoked salmon has customers at ten shillings a pound.

But the people are more interesting than their surroundings or their food. Such gnarled, lined faces, such live eyes, such a patriarchal air. That is the old orthodox generation. The new? Such smartish young semi-Englishmen prospering in trade on an education for which the old generation has starved itself. They can pronounce their w's and their th's. They have an eye on Hampstead or even on the Golden West. The daughters of Israel, powdered and rouged, flit with their dark, and often alluring, eyes from dressmaker's shop to dressmaker's shop, pert and self-assured, well dressed even in their working clothes.

This rift between the old and the new generations is the first thing that strikes you. There seem several hundred years between them. What tragedies does it conceal, what human stories? Many an old man nodding over his crowded counter has sent a son to the 'varsity. This is not fiction, and those will not believe it who do not understand that Israel has always given over its heart to its children. If the elements of domestic tragedy are not here, where are they?--for Israel, scattered in its wanderings and oppressed, never lost the Tables of the Law, never forgot the old things, never became quite deaf to the sounds of tents in a wind; but now the old men can say to their children: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways."

* * *

In a narrow street full of jewellers' shops I saw a bent old patriarch gazing into a window at a nine-branched candlestick; on the opposite side of the road came a young girl in her sand-coloured silk stockings and her tight black coat, swinging a silver bag--very far from the flocks and herds was she! Again I saw a limousine stop at a tiny shop. An old woman ran out, a young man leapt from the car to meet her, and when he kissed her there was joy shining in her eyes. Joseph? The modern Prodigal Son?

* * *

I caught a penny omnibus back to England with the feeling that I might have spent two hundred pounds and seen less of the East, less of romance, and much less of life.

Ships Come Home

In the grey dawn liners from the Seven Seas slip into the docks of London; and men and women gather there to meet friends. Some even meet their sweethearts. They are the lucky ones. It was not yet light. Dawn was a good hour away, and it was very cold. I was travelling away from London towards Woolwich in a jangling, dirty workman's train. On the platform at Fenchurch Street I had noticed several other people obviously on their way to meet friends, but they had been assimilated in the gloom of the long train; and I was glad, for I was enjoying myself in a carriage full of dock workers: a carriage that reeked of smoke and manly conversation. The train ploughed wearily on through the darkness, stopping at stations.... Stepney East.... Burdett Road.... Bromley.... Canning Town.... Bleak, unfriendly places under their pale lights. More early Londoners stormed the carriage at each station and split pleasantries rather like roadmen hitting a spike:

"Goo' mornin', Bill...."

"It ain't a goo' mornin'. It's a blinkin' cold mornin'!"

The laughter could not have been louder if the retort had been made by a judge or a king!