It is because of the organs, I think, that I chiefly loved Clerkenwell.
Organs have been part of my life ever since I was old enough to sit up
and take notice. Try to think of London without organs. Have they not
added incalculably to the store of human happiness, and helped many
thousands over the waste patches of the week? They have; and I heap
smouldering curses upon the bland imbeciles of Bayswater who, some time
ago, formed themselves into a society for, I think they called it, The
Abatement of Street Noises, and stuck their loathly notices in squares
and public streets forbidding street organs to practise there. Let
house-agents take note that I and a dozen of my friends will never,
never, never take a house in any area where organs or street vendors or
street cries are prohibited. They are part of the very soul of London.
Kill them, and you kill something lovely and desirable, without which
the world will be the sadder. That any one should have the impudence to
ask for money for the carrying out of such a project is merely another
proof of the disease of the age. They might as well form a society and
appeal for funds for suppressing children from laughing or playing in
the streets. They might as well form a society for the strangulation of
all babies. They might as well.... But if I go on like this, I shall get
angry. Thank Heaven, organs are not yet suppressed, though, after the
curtailing of licensed hours, anything is possible. In that event, it
really looks as if America were the only country in which to live,
unless one could find some soft island in the Pacific, where one could
do just as one jolly well pleased.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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