Various Flavors of Coffee Read Free

of pies and pastries; flower sellers thrust lupines and marigolds into your hands; pipes and cigars add their pungent perfume to the mix. A man cooking Yarmouth bloaters at a brazier waves one, speared on a fork, under your nose. “Prime toasters,” he cries hoarsely, “tuppence for a toaster.” Immediately, as if in response, a chorus of other shouts rises all around. “Chestnuts, ’ot, ’ot, a penny a score... Blacking, an ’aypenny a skin... Fine walnuts sixteen a penny.. .” yell the costermongers’ boys. “Here’s your turnips,” roars back a farmer on a donkey cart. Knife-grinders’ wheels shriek and sparkle as they meet the blades. Cadgers offer penny boxes of lucifers, their hands mutely outstretched.And on the outskirts of the crowd—always, always—shuffle the spectral figures of the desti-tute: the shoeless, breadless, homeless, penniless, waiting to take whatever chances might come their way.
    If we ride the underground railway from Baker Street to Waterloo, we will be sharing the narrow platforms with the hot, wet, sooty steam from the locomotives; if we walk down the grand new thoroughfares such as Northumberland Avenue, built to cut through the slums of central London, we will find ourselves
    amongst a crush of unwashed humanity—since each fine avenue is still surrounded by tenements, and each tenement is a rookery containing up to a hundred families, all living cheek-by-jowl in a fetid stew of sweat, gin, breath and skin. But the day is fine: we shall walk.Though many eye us as we hurry through the back streets of Covent Garden, searching for an exposed handkerchief or a pair of gloves to relieve us of, only the teenage whores in their cheap, gaudy finery speak as we pass, murmuring their lascivious saluta-tions in the hope of fanning a momentary spark of lust. But there is no time for that—no time for anything; we are already horribly late. Perhaps after all we will take a cab; look, there is one now.
    As we clatter down Drury Lane we become aware of a faint odor, hardly pleasant, which creeps up these side streets like a poisonous fog. It is the smell of the river.True, thanks to Bazalgette’s sewers the Thames is no longer responsible for a stink of rotting waste so foul that Members of Parliament were once forced to souse their curtains with sulphate of lime; but sewers are only effective for those whose modern lavatories are connected to them, and in the tenements great putrid cesspits are still the norm, leak-ing their malodorous ooze into London’s underground streams. Then there are all the other smells from the industries clustered, for reasons of access, along the waterfront. Roasting hops from the breweries—that’s pleasant enough, as is the scent of exotic botani-cals from the gin distilleries; but then comes a reek of boiling horse bones from the glue factories, of boiling fat from the soap makers, of fish guts from Billingsgate, of rotting dog-dung from the tan-neries. Small wonder that those with sensitive constitutions wear nosegays, or keep brooches filled with eucalyptus salts fixed to their lapels.
    As we approach the Port of London, we pass beneath great towering warehouses, high and dark as cliffs. From this one comes the rich, heavy smell of tobacco leaves, from the next a sugary waft of molasses, from another the sickly vapors of opium. Here the
    going is sticky from a burst hogshead of rum; here the way is blocked by a passing phalanx of red-coated soldiers. All around is the chattering of a dozen different languages—flaxen-haired Germans, Chinamen with their black hair in pigtails, Negroes with bright handkerchiefs knotted round their heads. A blue-smocked butcher shoulders a tray of meat; after him comes a straw-hatted bos’n, carrying a green parakeet in a cage of bamboo. Yankees sing boisterous sail-making songs; coopers roll barrels along the cobbles with a deafening drum-like cacophony; goats bleat from their cages on their way to the ships.And the