The Streets Page 5

Doogheno or dabheno?

  JO PROVED AS good as his word, and in the following weeks I came to regard his presence at my side as a kind of lucky charm. He would either take an hour off in the forenoon, leaving his barrow with some street Arab, or else, if he wasn’t too fatigued, go door-to-door with me after market hours. It wasn’t all plain sailing – wariness and hostility still glinted in some of the faces that answered my knock – but most of Somers Town’s tenantry seemed quite willing to cooperate once they realised I didn’t pose a threat. Nearly all of them knew Jo by sight, and must have assumed that I was just his eccentric friend from out of town. When we had completed a day’s stint, I would repair with Jo to a taproom or eating house and ask him to clarify this or that bit of local slang I might have misunderstood.

  It is true what they say about language: the best way to master it is to be always amongst those who speak it. Even without Jo’s help I was becoming more adept in the argot simply by constant association with hawkers, costers, shop people. I noted down fewer phrases now, because so many of them had taken up residence in my head. Whenever I played at cards in the Brill Tavern I could understand the chat flowing across the table and no longer puzzled over the stakes – couters and ewif-gens and flatch-ynorks were common currency to my ears. I believe I can identify the moment I became a ‘natural’ speaker of back slang. There was a phrase Jo unfailingly used when talking to his fellow costers about the market. If he arrived late and found his mates already at work, or if he happened to encounter someone he hadn’t seen for a while, he would say, ‘A doogheno or dabheno?’ meaning, Is it a good market or a bad one? One afternoon, arriving at his stall later than usual, I said, almost unknowingly, ‘A doogheno or a dabheno?’ Jo, who had often chaffed me for my awkward mimicking of coster language, didn’t even look up from peeling his apple. ‘Dab,’ he said, with a little shake of his head. He hadn’t even noticed! I took great heart from this.

  My continuing investigation of the neighbourhood, on the other hand, gave me no such cause for cheer. That the dwellings of the poor were insanitary, and overcrowded, and unsafe, I already knew. That they were home to all manner of vice and degradation I also knew. What shocked me was discovering how much the tenants paid for the privilege of living there. Renting was the custom, of course; the vast majority had no home to call their own beyond the next Monday, when the rent fell due. In the dosshouses – ‘the kips’, Jo called them – rooms were occupied on a relay system with two or three tenants using the same bed for eight hours at a time. It was squalid, and cheap. But weekly renters paid between 2s 3d for a single room and around 7s 6d for a three-room lodging. By my calculation, this meant that a quarter and sometimes as much as half of their income was eaten up by rent. Something was amiss. When I came to London in search of a berth I had seen lodgings in Marylebone and Regent’s Park offered for 8s per week – but those were decent, comfortable places, with views, not the broken slums of Somers Town. Even my modest abode, in Islington, was but seven shillings a week for rooms that looked almost luxurious in comparison with the tenements on Clarendon Street or Hampden Street.

  It became clear that somebody must be making a great deal of money on property that was barely fit for human habitation. But when I asked this or that tenant who their landlord was, I was returned only blank looks. Nobody knew. All that concerned them was being able to pay ‘the man’ when he came round on Monday morning. Jo was no more able to enlighten me on the subject than anyone else.

  ‘I pays me sister, an’ she pays the rent man. That’s all I know about it.’

  ‘Yes, but who owns the property? There must be a landlord.’

  He shrugged; he was not in the slightest bit interested. I had not yet seen his home, so it was impossible to judge whether his rent was fair or not. Eventually, after some pestering by me, he agreed to find out the name of his landlord. In the meantime, I continued to butt my head against this wall of ignorance. When I did chance to meet an actual rent collector, he swatted me away as he might have done a louse (an insect which, by the way, enjoyed a widespread occupancy in the tenements of Somers Town). ‘What’s it to yer?’ he replied on my asking his employer’s name. I explained my work on Marchmont’s paper, and why the local rents were of interest to me. Before I had even finished speaking he turned his back and walked off. I suspected he would not take kindly to being followed.

  Late one morning, towards the end of March, I was going door-to-door, alone, at the north end of Charrington Street when a second-floor window opened and a man stuck his head out. ‘Oi!’ I retraced my steps along the terrace. It was a house I had already knocked at and received no reply. The man was leaning on the sill, watching me. ‘You the feller who’s been askin’ about the rents?’

  I admitted that I was, and he told me to ‘wait there’ before disappearing from the window. Moments later the front door opened and a thickset man with close-cropped hair issued forth, his air slightly too forthright to make me feel quite at ease. Without Jo for company I was still conscious of my standing as an intruder; I had not yet suffered bodily harm by ‘poking my nose’ into others’ affairs, but I knew that it entailed some risk. The man was on his doorstep, candidly scrutinising me. I decided to put on a bold face.

  ‘I had assumed the house was empty – nobody answered my knock.’

  ‘It’s a Monday. I thought you might be the rent man. I won’t answer when he calls.’

  ‘I see. You have an objection to him?’

  His lips emitted a little sardonic pfff. ‘I’ve an objection to payin’ for a house that’s fallin’ to bits.’

  I nodded. ‘Would you allow me to . . . look for myself?’

  He stood aside, and I passed up the step and into the hallway. The man, whose name was Brampton, led me upstairs, where he lived with his family on the second floor. They rented two rooms, one a bedroom for him and his wife, another for his three young children – a relative luxury. This was a Regency terrace which, through neglect and overcrowding, had forsaken its erstwhile gentility and joined the downward slide towards slum living. Mr Brampton was bitterly aware of this decline, pointing out the damp which had seeped upwards through wainscoting, old plaster and exposed laths. He was a carpenter by trade, and took particular offence at the jerry-building that had kept the place upright for the last few decades.

  ‘Look ’ere,’ he said, showing me a great bulge in the front-room ceiling, as if some giant had sat upon it and left an impression of his backside. The window frames were rotten, and the sills bowed from the damp. ‘I ain’t payin’ ’em another penny till I see the repairs they promised. I’ve been at ’em for that long, an’ still there’s nothing done.’ I could not doubt the justice of his complaint, but on whom devolved the responsibility of this repair work? Who was the landlord?

  Brampton sighed in weary disgust. ‘Who knows? The people I’ve dealt with are from the vestry – they run the place.’

  He was referring to the St Pancras Vestry, a cabal of local tradesmen who supervised the district’s amenities and services. I had already gathered it was not a popular administration.

  ‘A bunch of blackguards, every damned one,’ said Brampton with feeling. ‘They let these houses sink into rack and ruin. They refuse to build baths and wash houses, they ignore the broken drains. They’d see us drop dead before they did anythin’ to help.’

  ‘Who is the head of this vestry?’

  ‘Moyles. Walter Moyles. You know him?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He runs the Victory pub. A loud feller, lots of big talk – you know the sort.’ I could see a vein throbbing in Brampton’s neck; just the mention of this individual was darkening his mood. He watched me as I scribbled down the name in my notebook. ‘What, you takin’ up the matter at the Vestry Hall?’ I heard the sardonic note in his question.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I replied. He squinted at me, apparently surprised that I was speaking in earnest. ‘In the meantime I will be reporting on this negligence to my guvnor.’r />
  ‘Good luck,’ he scowled, though I sensed an interest beneath his gruffness. That he had no expectation of receiving help acted as a spur to my better instincts. As we took the staircase down to the hall, I noticed that the walls had been recently whitewashed, and remarked on it to him.

  ‘That’s their idea of improvement. No matter as the houses are filthy and unsafe – they just patch ’em up with whitewash and cheap wallpaper.’ He stopped me on the stair, and held up his finger – which he then proceeded to work into a crack in the wall. The damp plaster crumbled away like cheese. When he spoke, his tone had changed to simple resignation.

  ‘A whited tomb – that’s all this place is.’

  Jo had heard of Moyles, and he knew the Victory off Phoenix Street – there wasn’t a pub in Somers Town he didn’t know. But when I suggested we paid a visit there, he pulled a face. I was given to understand that it was not an establishment famed for its friendliness, and strangers asking questions were likely to be given short shrift. Oh, so he was afraid to accompany me there? I said, teasing him. But Jo didn’t respond to my light-hearted tone.

  ‘Trust me, all the villains in town drink there,’ he said, unsmiling.

  So I decided to seek out Moyles in his official role as head of the St Pancras Vestry, which assembled (I learned) every other Friday at midday. The Vestry Hall itself was located in a draughty red-brick building on Pancras Road whose shabby, ill-repaired aspect was surprising; municipal bodies generally convened amidst pillared marble and panelled oak, places far superior to the neighbourhood whose affairs they managed. Later I realised that most vestrymen resided far outside the boundaries of Somers Town, and that consequently there was no urgency to make pleasant a venue so little used by any of them. The hall today held a large crowd, nonetheless, as Jo and I found seats, and a mood of expectation was abroad. However supine and ineffectual the vestry was reputed to be, their parishioners were out in force. What they hoped to gain from it I couldn’t immediately say. The board, seated behind a long desk on the rostrum, were an unlovely collection of paunchy, squirish businessmen who either talked amongst themselves or were absorbed in reading a newspaper. As we settled, one of their number was droning through a report apparently with the express intention of putting his listeners to sleep.

  At my side Jo yawned silently. Once the droner had finished there came a long sequence of footling exchanges about the difficulty of calculating the vestry’s income and expenditure: nobody could supply a definitive view one way or the other. Now I yawned. The business had snailed along for a further half-hour when Jo, unexpectedly alert, nudged me out of my stupor. ‘That’s ’im,’ he whispered, as a tall, powerfully built man with Gladstone whiskers and a casual air of command rose from his chair. From the long table a secretarial voice piped up: ‘Quiet, please, for Mr Moyles, who is going to speak on the subject of drinkers’ and publicans’ rights.’ Moyles proceeded to talk, in a booming and faintly Irish-accented voice, about the latest proposals by Parliament to have pubs closed on Sunday and to prohibit sales of alcohol to children under the age of thirteen. The first, he said, was an outrage upon the liberties of the working man, who should be allowed to drink whenever he wanted. The second proposal was just as wrong-headed, he claimed: better that children should carry out beer and spirits from the pub than their mothers, ‘who would otherwise be neglecting their duties in the home’.

  This counterblast against Parliament encouraged a good deal of nodding and ‘hear, hear’-ing amongst the vestrymen, but down in the stalls you could feel a distinct restlessness. Private interest masquerading as piety was not what they had come to hear. At the front a man stood up and said, without preamble, ‘When do you intend to address the maintenance problem? We got people living like pigs in a sty just cos you lot dither over paying for repairs.’ His words were met with a kind of supportive lowing from the assembled, amongst whom I now spotted Mr Brampton, my aggrieved carpenter from Charrington Street. Moyles, in the firing line, looked unruffled, and turned the question over to a Mr Porteous, head of the vestry sanitary committee. This rotund gentleman replied that he had got wind of ‘irregularities’ in the drainage system and the upkeep of certain houses, and had consulted the landlords about ‘setting things right’.

  ‘So the matter is in hand?’ said Moyles. Porteous replied that it was, and Moyles nodded his satisfaction.

  ‘But when are these repairs to be made?’ persisted the man in the stalls.

  Moyles spread his palms in complacent surrender. ‘That will be taken up with the individual landlord.’ More grumbling met this, which I took as my cue. Jo looked startled as I stood up and cleared my throat.

  ‘Sir, if that is the case, may I suggest that you and Mr Porteous lose no more time in improving the dilapidated condition of the houses on Hampden Street?’

  Moyles stopped and squinted in my direction. He looked confused. ‘I beg your pardon? What has this to do with the present business?’

  ‘I believe it is quite pertinent. You indicated that the matter of repairs is to be decided between the head of the sanitary committee, Mr Porteous, and the landlord. In the case of Hampden Street, sir, that landlord is you.’

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Moyles’s features had passed through confusion and were darkening towards displeasure. ‘That is a private matter –’

  ‘On the contrary, it is a public matter,’ I replied. ‘I visited the Records Office on Euston Road only yesterday, and found your name entered as landlord on properties in Hampden Street, in Drummond Crescent, in Clarendon Square. That being the case, I see no reason why you should delay in addresssing the legitimate complaints of your tenants.’

  By now the rising jeers of indignation amongst the parishioners had swollen into a roar of mutiny, drowning out the vestryman who was attempting to call the meeting to order. Catcalls shrilled in the air, feet drummed on the wooden floor. RESIGN! RESIGN! came the cries, and Moyles, no longer sure of his authority, had retreated to his place at the desk.

  What happened next bore the appearance of spontaneity, and I flattered myself to think that my little intervention had provoked it. But the likelihood was that someone had planned it all along. An enterprising coster had wheeled a barrow up the aisle to the front, just as if it were another market day and the Vestry Hall his favourite pitch. Mr Porteous, now apoplectic, stood up and shouted, ‘Get that thing out of here!’ which was probably the wrong note to strike in the circumstances. Cackles honked through the room. People stood up and joined the coster at his impromptu stall: Brampton yelled out, ‘You want to know what it is to live in a pigsty? – here!’ and within seconds a missile sailed over the heads of the vestry board and landed splat against the wall. A tomato. The next instant a chaotic fusillade of fruit and vegetables coloured the air, and Porteous and his colleagues were shielding themselves from the onslaught. I thought of the village stocks, back home, where wrongdoers used to offer target practice. Moyles, I noticed, was the last of them to hold steady at the rostrum, glowering like Zeus about to hurl his thunderbolt at the impious mortals; but instead he was forced to duck another tomato, and, dignity forfeit, he scrambled off himself.

  A few minutes later the double doors of the hall creaked open and – cool eslop! – a file of policemen poured in. The crowd’s blood was up, however, and having seen off the vestrymen they faced about and started pelting the blues. Jo, laughing hysterically, grabbed my sleeve and cried, ‘Davie, let’s skedaddle!’ We ran, half crouching, down the side aisle, dodging between the bobbies and a vegetal barrage that showed no sign of drying up. As we gained the outer entrance we saw more of them hurrying towards the hall, and Jo, who nursed an instinctive loathing of the police, steered us into the scuff of locals who were streaming up the narrow lane north towards Camden.

  Once we were clear of the place he turned to me. I heard amusement, and the smallest scintilla of admiration, in his tone. ‘What a riot – an’ you started it!’

  I reflected with satisfac
tion – I confess it – on my endeavouring to uncover the identities of the landlords, though it had required no great feat of investigative brilliance. Anyone could visit the Records Office and ask to consult the dusty old ledgers, which catalogued (in very close print) the leaseholds of every house in the parishes of St Pancras and Somers Town. Anyone could – but it seemed that nobody had. When my eye first fell upon W. W. Moyles written in a clerk’s hand I felt surprise; then, as his name began to recur on one page after another, my blood quickened. Did anyone else suspect that this gentleman – his name painted on the Vestry Hall’s board of honour – was also one of the neighbourhood’s most prosperous slumlords? He was not alone, either; several of his vestry colleagues, including Mr Porteous, were listed as owning property in the parishes. No wonder they had looked so pleased with themselves: the racket must have seemed foolproof. The tenant would make a complaint to the vestry about the squalid condition of his lodgings, or some other nuisance – vandalism, violent neighbours. The vestry would pass on the complaint to the sanitary committee, who in turn were supposed to enforce the landlord’s duty to make his property safe. But if that landlord was himself a vestryman and sanitary inspector, and could keep his anonymity intact, he would effectively be rendered unaccountable. A tenant might as well present his grievance to the pigeons that strutted up and down the Brill.

  I felt my chest puffing like a turkeycock as I hurried down to Salisbury Square to file that day’s report. If I could get the story down by four o’clock they might use it for publication the next day. And what a story to tell! As luck would have it, Marchmont himself was in the building that afternoon, and without even pausing to talk to the copy-taker I made a beeline for his office. His door was ajar, and I saw Rennert talking quietly and rather gravely with him; he stopped very suddenly at my knock.

  ‘Mr Wildeblood,’ said Rennert coolly. Marchmont looked at me but said nothing, and I had an intuition that the two of them had been arguing: the air in the room seemed to bristle around them. ‘You have a report, I presume.’