8.05 from Wells ran thirty-five minutes late, and I suffered the ennui of sharing a carriage with Mr Hagerty, the Blakeney surveyor, all the way to Piccadilly. A dull man in a dull employment to which he is admirably suited, presiding over the placement of new traffic lights and pedestrian walkways, he seldom leaves the vicinity of Norfolk, and I had to suffer his foolish blatherings for the best part of two hours about the great Adventure of visiting the metropolis. He has been there on two occasions in the last eight years, and every detail is imprinted on his bovine, provincial memory. I learned more than I could endure of his sister’s delightful home in Peckham Rye, the wonders of its indoor plumbing and drawing-room gramophone, her husband’s fulfilling hobby of visiting racetracks – not horses, mind, but Bugatti automobiles – and returning home with printed catalogues of motor cars over which he pores for hours of acquisitive greed. I learned of Hagerty’s forays into music halls and cinemas, which he finds racily modern, his encounters with London policemen with whom he likes to converse regarding their experiences of riots and affray in the General Strike, his plodding notations of London fashions – ‘I saw a man wearing shoe-spats in Regent Street, and it were only lunchtime,’ he said wonderingly – and his prurient fascination with urban vice. Like English tourists returning from Paris forty years ago, he dilates upon the ‘sinfulness’ of London with that mix of condemnation and shivery excitement that marks the furtive voyeur. If only he knew the grubby truth about the poor girls whose lives I seek to better! Perhaps he feels on safe ground employing the word ‘sin’ with me, anent the moral shortcomings of city behaviour. He expects some answering repertoire of clucking disapproval about the frightful times we live in, and hopes for salty anecdotes about my colourful female charges. If so, he was disappointed. I avoided any yellow-paper revelations of sordid liaisons, and recommended he visit the lovely side chapels of Southwark Cathedral for inspiration. We were both, I think, glad to see the back of each other when we parted at Piccadilly Station and he shambled off carrying his theoloditic paraphernalia, like one of Hardy’s overambitious sons of toil stumbling into the heady glare of Christminster.
I was met with a show of hostility from Mrs Parker at the lodging house. Dolores and Jezzie had both called to see me on Sunday night, at midnight, then again at 1 a.m., to seek moral guidance and, discovering I was from home, voiced their disapproval to my landlady, as she stood (I can imagine the ghastly sight all too clearly) in her mildewed shift and berated them for calling at an hour when, she said, ‘good Christian folk should be slumbering’. She has a charmingly Victorian turn of phrase. I tried to make her see that the impulse towards confession, the redemptive nature of simple talk, knows no time or formal appointment. But Mrs P was adamant. ‘I would not admit a gentleman caller at such an hour,’ she stated flatly, ‘and nor would I let the likes of them wake up the household with their big voices and their brassy boots when everyone’s in bed. I’ve told you six times before, Rector,’ she bleated, ‘I don’t know what ministry they’re expecting at such an hour, but it’s got to stop.’
No matter. Monday is my day for Holborn. I cut some sandwiches (hard-boiled egg and tomato, ham and lettuce), packed them into my pilgrim’s scrip with two apples, distributed supplies of salve, ointment, surgical spirit, tissues, soap, shampoo, etc., in my Pharmacy Pockets, included Bible pamphlets 103, 112 and 149, Dream of Gerontius plus theatre tickets in my Literature Pockets, updated files on Elsie, Marina, Bridie, Lily, Sandra, Esther and Matilda in the Needy Cases Pocket, and set off.
Unusual crowds around the British Museum, summer tourists, idle road-builders work-shy in the morning sunshine, a brace of school parties, forty or fifty young scholars milling about in their uniforms. Fell into conversation with a crowd of youngsters headed for Tutankhamun exhibits who benefited, I felt, from my extemporised dilations on the Egyptian cult of worship and burial. Charming young teacher, no more than twenty-four, auburn curls, fetching dimple, was puzzled at first by my interest in her brood but responded to my little sermon on the misguided heathen fixation on Golden Sepulchres vs the Life Eternal.
One girl, charming blue eyes, shining teeth, asked about mummies and the binding of bodies – were they so apparelled, she asked, in order to meet their Maker in robes of white rather than black funeral shrouds? At a loss, momentarily, I explained they were so bound as to keep the late lamented from putrefaction while journeying homeward to Heaven’s door. Why, she asked, did not Christian burial ‘think also of wrapping up the dead so they’ll look their best’? I told her of the Four Last Things and the certain hope of resurrection, body intact, at the Day of Judgement. ‘But what will my body be like by then?’ she wailed. Her teacher, the dimpled one, took me aside and said that the poor child recently lost her uncle and should not be encouraged to brood on such things. I desisted, only telling her, as she was led away, that we will all met again, reconstituted in body and soul, looking as we did at our best in this life.
Passed down Museum Street, wondering if my explanation was theologically sound. When we meet again, all these Christian souls now disporting themselves in these sunlit thoroughfares, shall we all look as we look now? The teacher will never appear better than in her current incarnation. Nor the blue-eyed scholar, with her finely enamelled incisors. I myself will return on that awful day looking, I presume, as I do now, in my fifty-five-year-old prime. But others? It remains a puzzle. One for the Stiffkey pulpit, perhaps. Made note in Notebook 6 from Stationery Pocket.
Looked in at Museum Tea Rooms, but nothing. Glanced through windows of George’s Café in Coptic Street, received insipid wave from poor, defeated-looking Catherine, but I was not disposed to enter. Too awkward. One tries to provide pastoral aftercare, but I cannot stand bleatings about ‘lack of custom/why am I here/my life is slops and insult/O woe is me that I am not on the Hippodrome stage/you promised me this, you told me that’ etc. There is no fathoming the mystifying ingratitude of the Saved.
Walked to Southampton Row, looked in at Gerry’s Fishmonger’s and spoke with Sally Anstruther. ‘It’s a living, Harold,’ she said, ‘if you can stand gutting a sinkful of pollock at eight in the morning, but it’s not what I had in mind. There’s tea and biscuits at eleven. I’m not saying I’m not grateful. I just wish I didn’t always go home reeking of salt cod. Nothing will shake it off. They make fun o’ me in the Princess Louise.’
I pressed some Wrights Coal Tar soap into her hand and told her to pray for strength. ‘A present?’ she said. ‘I haven’t had nobody buy me soap since my mum died.’ Her buxom young frame seemed to heave with emotion. I have always been moved by the rural-milk-maid type, especially when seen in disarray, with a ringlet of sweaty blonde hair falling over one eye. Small, yet bursting with goodwill, her generous hips suggesting a natural disposition to child-rearing, Sally will do well when she finds a husband among the fish-loving customers of Bloomsbury, one who will not mind her daily delving in piscine entrails, when he is guaranteed each night the God-given delights of her unsheathed bosom.
I told her of my enquiries at the labour exchange for a position as lady’s maid in Chelsea, and she perked up appreciably. Gerald, the boorish owner, interrupted our sweet embraces and told her to get back to filleting the haddock or whatever duties she had to endure that morning, and I went away rejoicing. A delightful, almost-fulfilled woman with, at nineteen, a real future ahead of her.
Turned into Theobald’s Road, where motor carriages and omnibuses are more plentiful than I have ever seen them. Will everyone soon own a motor car? In Doughty Street, I paused at number 48, Chas Dickens’s house in 1837, the place where he wrote the latter part of Pickwick Papers, all of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby and the beginning of Barnaby Rudge, and all in two and a half years. It opened to the public five years ago, and is a place of wonder to me. Such concentration and energy! I look at his first-floor study, the writing table, the lock of his hair, the ‘Dingly Dell Kitchen’ with its pewter plates and warming pans, the reading desk he valued so much it accompanied him on his travels to America when he was nearing the end of his labours. One naturally imagines him alone, writing day and night to produce such prodigious masterpieces of imagination, busily inflamed with social concern, as if that were all his occupation in this tiny cell. But here was also the
