Fowlers End (2 page)

“In the first place, everybody’s unemployed—which is the opium of the people rahnd here. The rest, so they work in factories—which is the scum. Rahnd the corner is the Fowlers End Pipe Factory. They make gas pipes, water pipes—d’you foller? Well, all these loafers do, instead of making pipes, they make coshes: so they’ll get a foot of gas pipe and fill it up with lead. One of them threatens you, don’t call the police to give the show a bad name. This is a family theater. Warn him. If he ‘its you to leave a mark, then the law’s on your side. Put the left ‘and rahnd his thvoat, the right ‘
and in the arse of his trousers, and chunk ‘im out. And don’t give ‘im his money back. That is the opium of the working classes. Stand no nonsense if you want to be a showman.... Whereas, there’s a mob kids from school, so there’s a new idear they got. So they get a great big potato and stick it all over miv old razor blades; a bit of string they tie it onto, and right in the face they let you ‘ave it. Discourage ‘em. Threaten to tell their teacher. Lay one finger on ‘em and the N.S.P.C.C. is after us for cruelty to children—and
I’m
the sufferer.... It’s nothing; like a lion-tamer, just be cool
and nobody’ll ‘urt you. Remember, this ain’t the New Gallery in Regent Street, not already, almost.... You got a watch?”

“It’s being mended,” I said, having pawned it to get my last respectable suit from the cleaners. With the change I had bought two tenpenny cigars with gold labels, one of which I now offered to Mr. Yudenow, who, rolling it between his fingers and listening to it, said, “It creckles. That’s the sign of a good cigar. That’s another thing you should learn—you don’t
taste
a good cigar; you
hear
it.... Zize saying—d’you toiler me?—don’t carry a good watch. Get two or three in Cherring Cross Road for a couple bob apiece—not to tell the time miv, but to give the babies to listen to w
hen they start crying and buggering up the show. On a chain, better—I got sued once when some kid swallered
one of my managers’ watch. Miv celluloid, not glass—the little bastards bite—they cut their mouf, and
I’m
the sufferer.... You got diamond rings? Diamond rings you got?” “Not many, I’m afraid.”

“Take my advice, don’t wear ‘em. You cut somebody’s face making peace and quiet, and
I’m
the sufferer. Anyway, it’s a temptation. This ain’t the Opera House, I think you ought to know. One of my managers flashed a ring once, and the yobbos from the pipe factory nearly took it off him. Would have done too, only his finger was too fat. They was ‘alfway through the finger miv a ‘acksaw blade when ‘is screams roused the neighborhood ... and I don’t mind telling you it takes some screaming to rouse this ‘ere neighborhood. Why, rahnd in Godbolt Alley—read about it in the papers?—they pu
t up a new block of working men’s flats miv barf rooms. A Greek barber called Pappas cut up his girl friend in the barf, and put the pieces in a crate. Didn’t have the common savvy to gag her first. Nobody paid any attention. Little tiff, they thought. ‘Come Up and Saw Me Sometime’they called ‘im later. That’s the class of people they are, rahnd Fowlers End. Give ‘em a barf and that’s all they know to do miv it. I don’t mind warning you that, of all the people, these are the out-and-out opium.

“Thieves and drunkards. They’d steal the rings from under their mothers’ eyes. The milk out of your tea they’d pinch. Last time I had the painters in, my worst enemies shouldn’t go through what I went through with these stinkpots. Day and night I watched this ‘ere show, and even so the lousebound lowlifes knocked off a five-gallon drum walnut varnish stain. Drunk it up, the swine. One old woman died from it. It only goes to show you what they are—a lot of rotters. The salt of the earth, mind you, only bad to the backbone. Turn your back five minutes and they strip the place to the bone. You
got to keep on the toes of your feet. Only last week there was trouble in the laventry.
A woman stands up on the wet seat to pinch the electric light bulb and electrocutes herself. That’s show biz for you. You got to keep your eye out for things like that. It’s not their fault. It’s the capitalistic system—too soft with the bastards. Unions! The velvet ‘and in the iron glove I’d give ‘em, miv knobs on. So the way it is nowadays a carpenter won’t pick up a paintbrush, an electrician won’t pick up a gas pipe, a plasterer won’t pick up a ‘ammer.... And there’s something else. Authority! Stand no nonsense from workmen. Give an order and it should be obeyed—one, two,
three! If not, the left arm in the thvoat, the right ‘and in the arse of the trousers, and ‘Good day to you!’You’ll get experience ‘ere, I can tell you that. Believe me, I been in show biz twenty-five years, and you’d be surprised what a good showman can do miv a screwdriver and a bit of elbow grease in a place like this. ‘Do It Yourself is the motto by me. It comes natural after a bit. And always remember this: your audience is like yourself. Who’s your best friend? Yourself. Who’s your worst enemy? Yourself. Who’ve you got to blame always? Yourself. Treat them as such. What are they, after all? The salt
of the earth, the toe-rags!

“I found this place a dump, and I turned it into a little paradise,” said Sam Yudenow, with emotion. “The first pitcher I showed ‘ere was called
The Covered Wagon.
Ever see it? I’d revive it if I could get a copy that wasn’t all scratched up to bloody buggery—make a few streamers like latest!!!, thrilling!!!!—and show it again. Remember? It’s about the Pilgrim fathers, so they emigrate to America in a covered wagon. What do they see? A crap heap full o’cowboys and Indians. But are they downhearted? No! Miv a packet seeds and a shovel, up comes a gold mine in California. A proud heritage
. That’s how I felt when I opened the Pantheon. I cried miv joy. That’s how I want you should feel—like a covered wagon Friday and Saturday night miv the wild Indians. Peace and quiet in the wilds; the
takings put away, all Sunday to yourself. The County Council, the bastards, they won’t allow Sunday opening— Yes, everyone in the biz knows Sam Yudenow, and there’s men fifty years’ experience in the trade would
pay
me to work for me. Only one thing I ask: if you got the idear in your ‘ead that Fowlers End is Mayfair, get it out again. Because, confidentially between us, it’s nothing of the kind. “But come and look at the ‘all.”

There is a psychologists’ variation of the game of hide-and-seek: someone conceals a small object in a large room, and you have to find it. You do this by linking arms with the other man and walking as it were casually round and round with him. As you get closer and closer to the concealed object the man who has hidden it, by subconscious muscular contraction, will tend to pull you away. You concentrate your search, therefore, where the pull-away is strongest. In a manner of speaking, this is how you find Fowlers End—by going northward, step by step, into the neighborhoods that most strongl
y repel you. The compass of your revulsion may flicker for a moment at the end of the Tottenham Court Road, especially on a rainy March morning. You know that to your right the Euston Road rolls away, filthy and desolate, blasted by the sulphurous grit that falls forever in a poisonous shower from the stations of Euston and St. Paneras. Take this road, and you find yourself in a hell of flop-houses, mephitic furnished apartments, French-letter shops, hopeless pubs, and sticky coffee shops. Here, turn where you like, there is an odor of desolation, of coming and going by night. On t
he left-hand side of this heartbreaking thoroughfare, the foxholes, rat traps, and labyrinthine ways of Somers Town beyond which the streets run like worm holes in a great chase northward again to Camden Town. But you know that if you cross the street you will wander forever in the no man’s land that he’s
between here and the God-forgotten purlieus of Regent Square and the Gray’s Inn Road.

Even so, since morbid curiosity encourages you to go on, you reason:
No. There is a catch in this somewhere. Here are rag-and-bone shops, junk shops, houses of penance for unmarried women. Something worth looking at.
So you go back. The left-hand branch of the crossroads leads past Warren Street toward the Marylebone Road in which there are clinics, blind blocks of flats, a Poor Law institution, a town hall, and whatnot. To your left, off the Marylebone Road, the Borough of Marylebone, full of whispering mews and streets of houses that were jerry-built in the eighteenth century and won’
t fall down—a place of mysterious back-doubles, redolent of drains and of human interest in general.
That won’t do, either,
you say to yourself.
There is Hope here. The city is trying to nudge me away from my objective.
Say you don’t go as far? You may turn into Albany Street, where the barracks are; and Albany Street leads to the monotonous Outer Circle of Regents Park, where a short walk will take you, again, to Camden Town.

At this you feel a slight repellent urge in your elbow, and know that you are “getting hotter.” Why, then, since right-and-left and left-and-right both lead to Camden Town, so must the middle way, which is the Hampstead Road. Here the city becomes urgent in its discouragement. It says:
Don’t waste your time—there’s nothing here for you, nothing at all, nothing for anybody. I don’t say it’s bad, mind you. Only I put it to you that you ignore it. It leads to a kind of nowhere, in the long run. Come and have a look at the disused graveyard near Aybrook Street?
But now, having got t
he hang of this little game of reverse-compulsion, you go right on, straight ahead, past the hotels for men only, past the secondhand box-mattress shops, and the bituminous hole-in-the-wall where a man and his wife, black as
demons, sell coal and coke by the pound, until you arrive at the tobacco factory at Mornington Crescent which used to be a Dream Factory because it was constructed in imitation of an ancient Egyptian temple. Here, two colossal plaster cats brood over the mouse-nibbled and rat-gnawed squares off Great College Street, which leads via the observation wards of the lunatic asylums back to Somers Town and Euston again. Between lies a hinterland of working men’s colleges, railway clearing houses, infirmaries, the Working Women’s Hospital, the Urino-Genital Hospital (better known as the Junior Sports
men’s Club), a group of secondhand florists who make up cheap wreaths and crosses, and—between cafes—secondhand clothes shops where old women who mutter behind their hands sell for beer money the night dresses their neighbors have saved to be buried in.

And this will never do, because it leads toward an awareness of life and death, may interest you in something. Even in the thrice-discarded detritus of the lowest of the low hereabout, the most discouraged imagination may find something to peck up and thrive on. On the other hand, behind the cigarette factory lurk those who wait in darkness—men who whistle after girls, and prowl Primrose Hill and Haverstock Hill in furtive groups. They believe that tobacco dust inflames the pudenda of the cigarette-makers, so that all they need do is shout,” ‘Ello, Betsy! Are yer bowels open?’to
make an amorous overture. Here again the city tries to persuade you to stop. But if you know how to interpret a squeeze and translate the flicker of a muscle—having Fowlers End in mind—you will keep your eyes on the Cobden Statue and go ahead up Camden High Street toward the Camden Road, and so to Holloway, where the jail is; and past the allurements of this enclosed space through the perpetual twilight of the Seven Sisters Road, which takes you to Tottenham, where the only attraction is the Isolation Hospital for Infectious Diseases. Do not be led astray by
this; go north to Edmonton and to Ponders End. Who Ponder was and how he ended, the merciful God knows. Once upon a time it was a quagmire; now it is a swamp, biding its time. Further yet, bearing northeast, lies a graveyard of broken boilers and rusty wheels called Slabsbridge, where creatures that once were men live in abandoned railway carriages. Between Slabsbridge and Uttermost there sprawls Fowlers Folly—someone of this name tried to build a tower there in 1790. He believed that the end of the world was at hand. Some vestige of the ruin remains. Only a mile farther on,
where the ground, rising, is a little drier, is Fowlers End.

Here the city gives up the game.

This is it.

Fowlers End is a special kind of tundra that supports nothing gracious in the way of flora and fauna. Plant a cabbage here in this soured, embittered, dyspeptic, ulcerated soil, and up comes a kind of bleached shillelagh with spikes on its knob. Plant a family, a respectable working-class family, and in two generations it will turn out wolves. Fowlers End is barren of everything but weeds. Even the dogs are throwbacks to their yellow-eyed predatory ancestors that slunk in the trail of the sub-men and ate filth. There is a High Street about a hundred yards long, and the most woebego
ne railway terminal on the face of the earth where, with a dismal and sinister smashing and groaning of shunting locomotives, all that is most unserviceable in the way of rolling stock comes in with coal and sulphur, scrap iron and splintery timber, and goes away with the stuff they make in the Fowlers End factories.

As Sam Yudenow said, there is a steel-tube factory and a glass factory. There is a sulphuric-acid factory which looks like a Brobdingnagian assembly of alchemical apparatus out of a pulp writer’s nightmare as it sprawls under a cloud of yellow and black that shudders and stings like a
dying wasp between great hills of green-black and gray-mauve slag. When it rains—which it doesn’t have to, because more water comes out of the ground than goes into it—some of the atmosphere comes down in a saturated solution, so that the hobnails in the soles and the iron crescents in the heels of the boots of the inhabitants are corroded in three days; and then, until they can raise the price of a re-studding job, they have nothing left to argue with but their hands and knees. The top of the War Memorial—the bronze sword of which was stolen and sold for scrap the night before it
was unveiled—is already eroded, so that instead of looking like the ancient Roman gallows it resembles, rather, the old-fashioned English gibbet. Fowlers End got this monument by a bureaucratic error: only four Fowlers Enders died in the first World War, and one of these was shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy in 1916, so that, hard up for names to carve on its Roll of Honor, Fowlers End went over the Hertfordshire border three miles away and helped itself to fifty-six names out of the old graveyard at Ullage. Ever since then there has been bad blood between the people of these two places
. Sometimes, generally on a Saturday night, the young men—women, too, and they are the worst of the lot—make up raiding parties and go out for mayhem and the breaking of windows. They always concentrate on the solar plexus, the seat of the soul, of each other’s community—which is, of course, the local cinema. The men of Fowlers End have bankrupted five successive proprietors of the Ullage Hippodrome and sent several managers to the Bloodford Cottage Hospital with broken bones. As I was to learn shortly after I went to work in Fowlers End, the Ullage men were in arrears. They owed us two roughhouses and w
ere biding their time.