The only place where you could sell an elephant, a were-wolf, or your
second best aunt without attracting the slightest curiosity is Club
Row, a Sunday market famous throughout the eastern regions of London.
Turn out of Shoreditch along the Bethnal Green Road and presently you
see a large cloth-capped crowd. You approach.
A dramatic, sinister man who lost his razor early last year detaches
himself and sidles up to you with his right hand suspiciously hidden
in the breast of his coat. Is he an anarchist? Just as you expect
him to bring out a bomb and cry "Down with Civilization," he quickly
produces a six-ounce pom and whispers in a voice like a rusty door
hinge: "Come on, half a dollar!" Other dog men approach. They offer
handfuls of pups, or they submit dogs of larger growth which sit
round in a circle looking up at you questioningly, hopefully. You
want to buy the lot. Then an Airedale bites a collie and you find
yourself the centre of a splendid battle, from which you escape into
the heart of the mob.
Here life is magnificent. Thousands of things are happening at once
in Oriental variety. This is what Bagdad was like in the days of the
Caliph. This is what the Mouski in Cairo is like to-day. As you
stand wedged between people who hold sacks that writhe and cluck, a
man waves a couple of buff Orpingtons in your face and pushes past to
stand himself a glass of jellied eels. An elderly parrot-like old
lady is marooned helplessly, with a green aloof-looking parrot,
exactly like herself, perched on her hand. Pigeons coo, hens cackle,
cockerels crow, dogs bark, canaries sing, and you gain the impression
that anything--anything--is yours for "half a dollar."
I was interested in the little groups round contortionists,
catch-penny men, and herb doctors. We have driven these mediæval
characters from more polite places, and it is almost with a thrill
that east of Aldgate Pump you find yourself in the hearty atmosphere
of a fair as old as England. One man, who said that his face was as
well known as the dome of St. Paul's, walked rapidly up and down with
a mysterious paper packet over which he held a pair of dental
forceps. Every one wanted to see what marvellous thing he would pick
out of the packet at the psychological moment. All the time as he
walked backwards and forwards he talked, of indigestion and other
things with Elizabethan frankness. He discussed food as if it were a
revolver.
"If the steak repeats, if the onions repeat, if the pudding repeats,
if cheese repeats...."
Then, working up to his climax, he dived the forceps into the packet
and produced a beautiful heliotrope-coloured pill!
Did he sell any? He did!
Under a railway arch a young man with a faint Scottish accent had
been handcuffed and chained. Round his neck he wore a steel collar;
on his head a steel cap which, he said, was "an exact replica of the
cap used for capital punishment throughout the United States of
America." (Thrill in the audience!)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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