This Thing Of Darkness (30 page)

Everyone, it seemed, had something to sell. There were knife-grinders and pot-welders and women selling huge blocks of cocoa. There were toy theatres with hand-drawn characters cut and pasted on to cardboard, their owners peddling seats in the street at a penny a ticket. There were jugglers, conjurors and microscope exhibitors. There were men offering tickets to dogfights, cockfights, even ratfights. There were dancing bears, performing apes, and a model of the battle of Waterloo pulled by a donkey. There were baked-potato men, men offering plum duff ‘just up’, pudding stalls, egg stalls, shoe-cleaners and beggars by the score. Starving lynch mobs might well have been roaming the fields of southern England demanding reform, but here within its heavily policed boundaries, London pursued its pushing, shoving, shouting commercial life without shame, without hindrance, without distraction.

And then there were the children. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of them, begging, offering themselves up for work holding horses, fetching taxis, opening doors, or simply performing cartwheels for a halfpenny. ‘D’you want me, Jack? Want a boy?’ came the clamour of shrill voices as every passer-by was besieged. There were black, unwashed climbing boys, their brushes standing to attention against their shoulders like rifles. There were silent, diseased children curled in corners, the ones who would not live long, wasting away in pale misery. There were proud, red-jacketed boys chasing after carriages, collecting fresh horse manure as it fell and placing it in roadside bins; bunters, scooping up dog excrement for the tanning trade; and crossing sweepers, clearing paths through the ordure for gentlemen wishing to cross the street. There were nimble children easing silently between the crowds, risking the gallows by picking pockets. There were drunken children, leaning against the long mahogany bars of the myriad gin palaces, slumped beneath serried ranks of green-and-gold casks, fumbling with their pipes, or challenging each other to meaningless, swaying punch-ups. These people are multiplying, thought Bennet. They are multiplying indefinitely.

Surprisingly, it was York who spoke first. ‘So many people,’ he said simply.

‘So many
people,’
echoed Fuegia.

‘There are one and a half million people in London. When I was a boy it was just over one million.’
These figures mean nothing to them,
he realized.
I must find another way to express it
. ‘There are more people in this street, now, than in the whole of Tierra del Fuego. In this one street. Do you understand me? That is why this is the biggest city in the world.’

The colours of Oxford Street’s inhabitants were so vibrant, so dazzlingly, tastelessly lurid: there were scarlet breeches, candy-striped waistcoats, lime green petticoats and lemon yellow riding jackets. The races that sported these extravagant clothes came in all shades as well: there were Africans and Indians and Spaniards and Chinese and Jews and Malays and West Indians. Any fears he might have entertained as to the conspicuousness of his charges, Bennet realized, were groundless; a Fuegian Indian in a pink coat, even though he might stop the traffic in Walthamstow, would not merit a backward glance on Oxford Street.

The palette on which this kaleidoscopic array had been daubed was jet-black. The buildings on either side were thick with soot and grease. Fallen soot had blended with horse manure to create a three-inch layer of soft black mud in the middle of the road, through which the crowds surged heedlessly. The air was thick with a cloying yellow mixture of seacoal dust and water vapour, which insinuated itself into eyes, ears and noses, and worked relentlessly to dampen the garish extremes of colour in its clammy shroud. Jemmy kept to the new raised wooden pavement until it ran out, then hopped carefully from one dry patch to another, in a vain attempt to keep his shining boots unspattered. He dabbed at his increasingly sooty pink sleeves with a crisp white handkerchief, faintly distressed mewling sounds coming from under his breath.

‘Don’t worry, Jemmy, it will wash off,’ Bennet reassured him.

Blackest of all were the narrow alleys that led off Oxford Street, from which no light at all seemed to emanate. There were only glimpses to be had of the subterranean creatures who inhabited these worlds: painted women with swollen features, ragged Irishmen with uncombed, waist-length hair, canine children, wolfish dogs. Round white eyes peered from desperate black faces. Windows were stuffed with rags or paper, the window-frames themselves loose and rotten.

‘Is it a cave?’ said Fuegia, transfixed.

‘Don’t go in there,’ said Bennet, grabbing her arm to hold her back, a gesture that sensibly went unchallenged by York Minster. ‘Those are the rookeries. Where the St Giles blackbirds live. The black men. And the Irish. It’s dangerous. You must not go down any of the bye-streets.’

To distract her, he shelled out fourpence for four tickets to see ‘The Smallest Man in the World’, with his fellow exhibit ‘An Enormous Fat Woman’; followed by a further tuppence to look through the viewfinder of a kaleidoscope, a contrivance that sent Jemmy into raptures.

Finally, in the centre of Oxford Street, the narrow overhanging buildings and patchwork windowpanes of the last century opened out into a wide circle of pale, graceful stone.

‘This is Oxford Circus. This is modern London,’ Bennet explained. ‘And that is Regent Street.’

To the south ran two elegant lines of white pillars, so new as to be barely stained by coal dust, in a curving Doric colonnade. The buildings behind them soared skywards in blinding white stucco.

‘It is a new construction, built by Mr Nash, running from Regent’s Park at the north of London, down to Waterloo Place at the far south. It is lit up by gas at night, like a starry sky. It is said to be the most beautiful street in the world. On the west are the streets of the nobility and the gentry. On the east is Soho, where the mechanics and traders reside. They had to knock down a hundred lanes and alleys, and a thousand shops and homes, to build it. And there will be other grand streets like it. Old London is being torn down, the London I was born in. In its place they are building a new, modern city, a beautiful city of wide roads and circuses and parks. London will become the most beautiful city in the world.’

‘The most beautiful city in the world,’ breathed Jemmy. York looked blank. Fuegia stared at a crimson dress in a nearby shop window. Jemmy was the only one of the three to have taken Bennet’s little speech to heart.

By some unspoken common consent, the crowds promenading up and down Regent Street were of a different class from those who thronged Oxford Street. There was money on display, both in the shop windows and on the customers’ backs. Two men whose blue swallow-tail coats and top hats gave them away as policemen no doubt had a part to play in keeping the pickpockets away, but that could not have been the only factor: it was as if old London had been fenced in by the new street, as if all that gaily coloured squalor was slowly being squeezed by the advancing metropolis, with its stern, clean, white lines.

They walked down to Waterloo Place, keeping a block to the west of the Haymarket’s prostitutes and litter, then headed east to Charing Cross, where another huge construction site marked the final remains of the old Hungerford Market. A low growl from York indicated that something was amiss. Jemmy and Fuegia looked confused. Bennet turned to see what had agitated his companion so, but he could see nothing. York was frozen in the same pose he had adopted back in Plymouth Sound, to signal his aggressive intent towards the paddle-steamer. One or two passers-by were starting to stare. Finally, Bennet looked up, and located the source of the challenge: a stone lion atop Northumberland House. He placed a gentle hand on York’s forearm, just as it dawned upon the Fuegian that the creature had not moved for several seconds. He relaxed.

They went to see the new market at Covent Garden, where classical colonnades had once again marched across acres of ramshackle sheds and flimsy stalls; they saw pineapples that had been brought from overseas by fast ships; they joined the crowds staring at daffodils and roses out of season, and fuchsia plants from the other side of the world. Then they went down to the river to see the new London Bridge, five elegant arches confidently spanning the river, overlooking its shamed predecessor, which sat rotting and disused a hundred feet downriver.

‘King William and Queen Adelaide opened this bridge only last month,’ explained Bennet, leaning over the parapet. ‘There used to be houses on the old bridge. And they used to put bad men’s heads on spikes there. They don’t do that any more.’ His mind leafed back to the day when his father had taken him, as a child, to see the heads of the Cato Street Conspirators. His father was dead now.

‘They’re building a tunnel under the Thames as well. Do you see over there, to the right?’ He indicated the Southwark side of the river. ‘Look. New factories. There’s a steam flour mill. And there’s the Barclay’s Brewery - there are giant steam engines in there, and vats of beer, each one as big as a house. And there’s a factory where meat and soup are sealed into tin canisters.’

He looked down at the rickety, lopsided warehouses beneath the bridge, the crowded pubs almost spilling into the water, the flocks of ragged mudlarks and the foul-mouthed watermen in their numberless ferry-boats; then across once more at the factories advancing inexorably up the Surrey shore, black smoke trailing eastward in their wake; and he felt a pang of regret for the London of his childhood, mingled with a surge of pride for the new metropolis rising all around him.

‘Some people say they shouldn’t spend so much money on building the new city. They say it should be given to the poor people instead. But the more money they give to the poor people, the more children the poor people have, and the more poor people there are.’

‘London is the most beautiful city in the world, Mister Bennet,’ said Jemmy gravely. ‘One day I will build some city like London in my country. There will be big streets, and factories making canisters. I will call this city New London.’

‘Cities like London don’t just spring up overnight, Jemmy,’ said Bennet. ‘It takes thousands of years of gradual change. The old London that they’re knocking down - once that was new London, and it swept away what went before it. Now it is old London, and it is weak and rotten, and it will lose its mortal fight. Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but the people down there in the mud with their rushlights and their sailboats will get weaker, little by little. And the people over there, with their gas lamps and their steam engines, will get stronger, little by little. And slowly, with each succeeding year, the people over there will encroach towards the heart of the city, and the people in the mud will give way, and London herself will end up bigger and stronger as a result. That is how great cities are created.’

‘But, Mister Bennet,’ said Jemmy, ‘I do not want to be in mud. I want to be one of the people with steam engine. You can teach me.’

 

They ate at a little dining house on the Strand, for discretion’s sake in a curtained booth lit by an oil lamp, where Bennet’s natural cheeriness reasserted itself over a plate of chops, devils, bread and pickles. The Fuegians wolfed everything they could lay their hands on, as they always did, as if their lives depended on it. After dinner they bought outside shilling seats on the new omnibus to Vauxhall Gardens, where Bennet took them to see the iceberg. This proved to be something of a damp squib, as the three seemed not in the least surprised to find a large iceberg adrift in the middle of a South London park.

‘Go ahead and touch it,’ said Bennet, prompting.

‘Big ice,’ said Fuegia.

‘Mister Bennet, we have many big ice in my country,’ said Jemmy.

‘No, but it’s not real. It’s made of wood. Go and touch it.’

Jemmy walked over and touched the iceberg. It was warm. Jemmy looked confused.

‘Sir John Ross has sailed to the Arctic, to find the North West Passage. That’s at the other end of the world from Tierra del Fuego, but just as cold. So they have built an iceberg here to give people an idea of what the North Pole looks like.’

Jemmy appeared none the wiser.

It was at this inopportune moment that Black Billy, the celebrated black street violinist who had lost one leg to a French cannonball in his Navy days, approached to offer the party a tune. Pink feathers bobbled from his jester’s hat, his good leg was encased in aggressively blue-and-white striped breeches, and a nautical jacket completed the ensemble. Fuegia, taking fright, screamed and grabbed York’s leg. The three began to hoot, hiss and make faces. The appearance of a painted clown on stilts behind Black Billy merely added to the Fuegians’ trepidation; Bennet thought it best to beat a hasty retreat.

‘They were entertainers. Street entertainers,’ he grumbled, as they sat on the omnibus clattering back towards Regent Circus. ‘They aim for you to enjoy yourself. The Vauxhall Gardens are
pleasure
gardens.’

Jemmy could not rid his mind of the spectre of the black man in the woods. Bennet shook his head in theatrical resignation.

On the way they passed yet further trenches and construction sites, where the innards of the city had been laid open for all to see. Exposed wooden pipes criss-crossed each other in the moist earth, like a decayed forest of fallen trees.

‘They are building pipes to bring gas light and washing water into gentlemen’s homes.’

‘Light and water? In a pipe?’

Jemmy tried hard to take it all in. He tried to remember his own family home back at Woollya, but it all seemed so long ago.

As dusk gathered they found themselves back on Oxford Street, where they ate a supper of fried fish in oily paper, with ginger beer. A gentle drizzle was falling, and Jemmy stared with undisguised envy at the clinking metal pattens under the ladies’ shoes, which protected the blacking from the mud and the wet. Carts splashed by, bearing huge advertisements for theatres and shows; women sang maudlin ballads on street corners, collecting tins at their feet. The square gas lamps on their wrought-iron posts had been lit, and every shop window was illuminated by a hundred candles. The ever-present coal-damp mist settled on London for the night, flaring yellow in the lamps’ buttery glaze and softening the pinpricks of candlelight. It was a gorgeous effect, as if all the stars in a black velvet sky were overlaid with the golden halo of the setting sun. Fuegia, wide-eyed and entranced, began to dance in the street with slow, intense, happy movements, her arms twirling out and away from her body.