Fowlers End Read Free

Covered Wagon. Ever see it? I’d revive it if I could get a copy that wasn’t all scratched up to bloody buggery—make a few streamers like latest!!!, thrilling!!!!—and show it again. Remember? It’s about the Pilgrim fathers, so they emigrate to America in a covered wagon. What do they see? A crap heap full o’cowboys and Indians. But are they downhearted? No! Miv a packet seeds and a shovel, up comes a gold mine in California. A proud heritage. That’s how I felt when I opened the Pantheon. I cried miv joy. That’s how I want you should feel—like a covered wagon Friday and Saturday night miv the wild Indians. Peace and quiet in the wilds; the takings put away, all Sunday to yourself. The County Council, the bastards, they won’t allow Sunday opening— Yes, everyone in the biz knows Sam Yudenow, and there’s men fifty years’ experience in the trade would pay me to work for me. Only one thing I ask: if you got the idear in your ‘ead that Fowlers End is Mayfair, get it out again. Because, confidentially between us, it’s nothing of the kind. “But come and look at the ‘all.”

    There is a psychologists’ variation of the game of hide-and-seek: someone conceals a small object in a large room, and you have to find it. You do this by linking arms with the other man and walking as it were casually round and round with him. As you get closer and closer to the concealed object the man who has hidden it, by subconscious muscular contraction, will tend to pull you away. You concentrate your search, therefore, where the pull-away is strongest. In a manner of speaking, this is how you find Fowlers End—by going northward, step by step, into the neighborhoods that most strongly repel you. The compass of your revulsion may flicker for a moment at the end of the Tottenham Court Road, especially on a rainy March morning. You know that to your right the Euston Road rolls away, filthy and desolate, blasted by the sulphurous grit that falls forever in a poisonous shower from the stations of Euston and St. Paneras. Take this road, and you find yourself in a hell of flop-houses, mephitic furnished apartments, French-letter shops, hopeless pubs, and sticky coffee shops. Here, turn where you like, there is an odor of desolation, of coming and going by night. On the left-hand side of this heartbreaking thoroughfare, the foxholes, rat traps, and labyrinthine ways of Somers Town beyond which the streets run like worm holes in a great chase northward again to Camden Town. But you know that if you cross the street you will wander forever in the no man’s land that he’s between here and the God-forgotten purlieus of Regent Square and the Gray’s Inn Road.
    Even so, since morbid curiosity encourages you to go on, you reason: No. There is a catch in this somewhere. Here are rag-and-bone shops, junk shops, houses of penance for unmarried women. Something worth looking at. So you go back. The left-hand branch of the crossroads leads past Warren Street toward the Marylebone Road in which there are clinics, blind blocks of flats, a Poor Law institution, a town hall, and whatnot. To your left, off the Marylebone Road, the Borough of Marylebone, full of whispering mews and streets of houses that were jerry-built in the eighteenth century and won’t fall down—a place of mysterious back-doubles, redolent of drains and of human interest in general. That won’t do, either, you say to yourself. There is Hope here. The city is trying to nudge me away from my objective. Say you don’t go as far? You may turn into Albany Street, where the barracks are; and Albany Street leads to the monotonous Outer Circle of Regents Park, where a short walk will take you, again, to Camden Town.
    At this you feel a slight repellent urge in your elbow, and know that you are “getting hotter.” Why, then, since right-and-left and left-and-right both lead to Camden Town, so must the middle way, which is the Hampstead Road. Here the city becomes urgent in