There is a
street running from Shaftesbury Avenue into Oxford Street, which was
once the village of St. Giles, one of the dozens of hamlets
swallowed up by the great maw of London, and it still looks like a
hamlet, although it has been absorbed for many years. We constantly
happen on these absorbed villages, from which, not a century ago,
people drove up to town in their coaches.
If you wish to see another phase of life, go out on a Saturday
evening, from nine o'clock on to eleven, starting on a Beecham's
Pill 'bus, and keep to the poorer districts, alighting occasionally
to stand with the crowd in the narrower thoroughfares.
It is a market night, and the streets will be a moving mass of men
and women buying at the hucksters' stalls. Everything that can be
sold at a stall is there: fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, crockery,
tin-ware, children's clothing, cheap toys, boots, shoes, and sun-
bonnets, all in reckless confusion. The vendors cry their wares in
stentorian tones, vying with one another to produce excitement and
induce patronage, while gas-jets are streaming into the air from the
roofs and flaring from the sides of the stalls; children crying,
children dancing to the strains of an accordion, children
quarrelling, children scrambling for the refuse fruit. In the midst
of this spectacle, this din and uproar, the women are chaffering and
bargaining quite calmly, watching the scales to see that they get
their full pennyworth or sixpennyworth of this or that.
Pages:
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52