London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories; Mystery fiction
Having no idea where the church of St Peter was situated, I took a cab
through Newington to a point halfway along the Walworth Road, that great
artery of Transpontine London, and there alighted. Some of those who
read these lines may know that road, one of the busiest in the whole
metropolis. Even on a Sunday evening, when the shops are closed, the
traffic in that broad thoroughfare never ceases. From the overcrowded
districts of Peckham and Camberwell, districts which within my own
memory were semi-rural, this road is the main highway to the City, and
while on week-days it is crowded with those hurrying thousands of daily
workers who earn their bread beyond the river, on Sunday evenings those
same workers take out their wives and families for a breath of air on
Camberwell Green, Peckham Eye, or some other of those open spaces which
have aptly been termed "the lungs of London." Only the worker knows the
felicity of the Sunday rest. People of means and leisure may talk of
the pleasure and brightness of the Continental Sunday, but for the
worker in the great city it would be a sad day indeed if the present
custom were altered. It is now a day of rest; and assuredly rest and
relaxation are required in the ceaseless, frantic hurry of the life of
London's toilers. The opening of places of amusement would be but the
thin end of the wedge. It would be followed, as in France and Italy, by
the opening of shops until noon, and later, most probably, by the
half-day working of factories.
The leisure of the English Sunday was well illustrated in the Walworth
Road, that centre of lower and middle-class life, on that evening, as I
walked alone until, by direction, I entered a narrow, rather
uninviting-looking turning, and proceeding some distance came to a
large, old-fashioned church with pointed spire, surrounded by a
spacious, disused burying-ground, where the gravestones were blackening.
The bell, of peculiarly doleful tone, was quite in keeping with the
character of the neighbourhood, for the houses in the vicinity were
mostly one-storied, dingy abodes, little more than cottages, let out in
floors, many of their inhabitants being costermongers and factory hands.
The old church, cracked and smoke-blackened, was a substantial and
imposing relic of bygone times. Once, as was shown by the blackened,
rain-stained tombstones in God's-acre, the residents in that parish were
well-to-do citizens, who had their rural residences in that quarter; but
during the past half-century or so a poor, squalid parish had sprung up
in the market gardens which surrounded it, one of those gloomy,
miserable, mean, and dreary districts wherein life seems so full of
sadness, and disease stalks hand-in-hand with direst poverty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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