A Kid for Two Farthings Read Free Page A

if you started in the middle where the herring-women fished salted herrings out of barrels with red hands, dipped them in water and cleaned and sliced them thinly with long thin knives. From there you walked up to Alf, the singing-bird man, then cut round the back, coming through to the other end where the dogs were. But if there was something you wanted to buy it was much better to start at one end by the singing birds and walk through, looking carefully at every stall.
    Alf, the singing-bird man, came to Mr Kandinsky for repairs, so he knew Joe and always spoke to him, even if he was busy selling someone a canary. Alf was against day-old chicks as pets. He pulled his light brown overall coat down, pushed his cap back from his eyes and told Joe when he bought Kandinsky, ‘You ain’t doing that chick no favour, Joe, taking him away without his mother, alone; he doesn’t know how to give a peep-peep yet; putting him in a box with a drop of water and a handful of straw. That rotten day-old chick man should be put in a box himself, the louse, selling chicks to anyone with a sixpence. A chick like this needs his mum or a special hot-box; he don’t just grow up any old how any old where; he must have special care; he shouldn’t catch cold.’ Alf turned to a fat lady with a big grey fur round her neck. ‘That canary, lady,’ he said, ‘is such a singer I should like to see better.’
    ‘He don’t appear to be singing much just now,’ the lady said, taking a handful of potato-crisps from a bag and crunching them. ‘Tweet-tweet,’ she said to the canary, spitting a few little bits of potato-crisp at him, ‘tweet-tweet.’
    ‘Here, Oscar,’ Alf said, because all his birds were sold with their right names on small red certificates. He whistled softly to the bird. Oscar turned his bead eyes towards Alf, listened for a moment, and then began to sing.
    ‘Lovely,’ the fat lady said, finishing the crisps and brushing her fur. ‘How much for the bird?’
    ‘That Oscar,’ Alf said afterwards, ‘I had him nearly a year.’ And he started to whistle softly to a dark gold canary.
    Near Alf ’s stall there was a jellied-eel stand with a big enamel bowl of grey jellied eels, small bowls for portions, a large pile of lumps of bread, and three bottles of vinegar. There were also orange-and-black winkles in little tubs, and large pink whelks. People stood around shaking vinegar on to their eels and scooping them up with bread. A little thin man in a white muffler served them and sometimes dropped a large piece of eel on the ground. Behind the stand a very fat man with a striped apron and an Anthony Eden hat waved a ladle in his hand and shouted, ‘Best eels, fresh jellied; buy ’em and try ’em.’ Over the stand a red, white and blue banner flapped. ‘The Eel King’, it said. The King himself never served.
    Opposite the Eel King was a red barrow with dark green water-melons, and a white enamel table-top with halves and slices of melon and a large knife. Joe pretended he couldn’t make up his mind whether to buy some jellied eels or a slice of melon. He watched people eating eels and shaking vinegar on them, and then looked back at the large wide slices of red melon with glossy black seeds bursting from them.
    In the end he bought a twopenny slice of melon and pretended it was jellied eels, scooping the red flesh with his teeth and saying ‘Blast’ and ‘Bloody’ when the seeds dropped to the pavement. Some of the seeds he saved so that when they were dry he could crack them between his teeth and get the thin nuts inside.
    While he scraped the thick skin of the melon, Joe watched the Indian fortune-teller who wore a turban and sold green, yellow and red perfume in small bottles. Whenever a woman bought a bottle of perfume the Indian looked at her strangely. ‘A little moment, dear lady’, he said, ‘a little moment while I look into the bowl.’ He looked darkly into a large glass bowl which turned purple or