The Real East End. Burke Thomas

is no mistaking their effect. The curling alleys, the interlocking courts, the beetling gables and solitary lamps, the blank walls and lakes of silent darkness and the river’s black majesty, do create an atmosphere of impending event. Darkness here is true darkness, opulent and velvet. Its beauty is not destroyed, as in the West, by multitudes of arc lamps and glittering night-signs. Lamps, away from the main streets, are few, and night here may be felt in its natural quality. Cities and places are best seen at night. By day a city is engaged in its affairs, but at night it has time to talk to you. And at night vision is restricted to the immediate. One can see only a part, and the part, properly seen, is always greater than the whole. There is no obtrusion of the commonplace whole to distract the attention; there are no clear-cut landmarks of the obvious. There is your visual radius, and beyond that, marked only by melting shadows, the unknown world. At daylight, this unseen and unknown will be merely a mile of Commercial Road or Whitechapel Road or Cambridge Road—explored and known; but at night it is uncharted space in which the part stands out individual and arresting. Within one’s little night-bound radius one can truly see the East End; and every corner seems to hold its story.

      Fog, too, may be known here in something of its full strength, and in all hues—from white through cobweb grey, yellow and purple to a black more black than darkest night. It has a way of coming suddenly, up from the river, and in a few minutes the aspect and character of the streets are changed, and a rushing multitude of people is transformed into a crawling mass of phantoms. You are going about your affairs at the street’s natural pace, and the rhythm of the traffic is at full swell, when, with scarcely a hint of trouble, all honest noise is muted into furtive murmur. The lamps, quickly lit, are no more than glow-worm sparks; human creatures are twisted into shapes of menace; the main streets become sightless gorges, and the shortest alleys stretch into infinitude. Your natural dramatic townscapes have become, in a brief space, melodramatic; and if you wish to know what fog can really be, and the dumb baseless terror it can inspire, you should experience it here. The general night atmosphere of impending event becomes, with fog, impending catastrophe. Darkness is kind, but fog is wicked.

      There is the darkness of the riverside, and the darkness of Stepney, the darkness of Limehouse and the darkness of Spitalfields. Each has its quality and its peculiar accompanying life. You may wander about these parts, through the winding and doubling alleys, and see little save varying hues of darkness and lighted windows and shadow falling upon shadow; but you will hear much. You will hear many accents and many tongues and many musics. You will hear gramophones and wireless in Stepney, and the rich Cockney accent. By the river you will hear pianos and concertinas and the hooting of tugs and the ripple of chains. In Limehouse you will hear the liquid accents of Canton and the mournful sound of reed instruments, and in Spitalfields you will hear the guttural Yiddish and old songs of Russia. In the darkness of Stepney you can feel the ordinary London home. By the river you can feel the port and the sea and the sea’s wanderers. In the darkness of Limehouse and Spitalfields you can feel the spirit that troubled the air around the waters of Babylon.

      As places are better seen at night, so these things are more keenly to be felt at night than at day. Night brings not only cessation of labour, but a calm of its own, to which the neighbourhood of the river and the docks lends fluency; and in this calm the elusive spirit of place can rest and make itself known. Side streets and courts are no longer side streets and courts, but great gulfs of Night. Within those gulfs the movements of human creatures cease to be human and become spectral. From out of them come now and then to the keen ear the muffled vibrations of deep experience. Under mist or moonlight these groupings of courts and alleys and straggling streets become sternly beautiful and potent with awe. They have lived long, and have housed their millions. They have known birth and death, love and lust, suffering and joy; they have acquired something from all their creatures, wholesome and sinful, and have given something of themselves. In the bald daytime they are dumb; they are mere rows of houses; only at night do they give some hint of all that they have been and are. But the hint is nothing more than an awareness of the ache of life; that ache which is with us in pleasure as in pain, and which here is the ache of simple poor people living out simple lives as workers, wanderers, exiles and housewives. In this dramatic country and under this brooding darkness they sleep, each kind with its separate dream, and give the night a more poignant quality than the night of any other London quarter knows. Midnight darkness here is charged with everything of the strange and the awesome. It is useless to tell yourself that these alleys are inhabited by quiet, simple, working people, who have to be abed in order to be at work at six o’clock in the morning. Your skin knows better. They are inhabited by all man’s desires and thronged with whispers. There is melancholy in the fall of a shadow; grief in the single pale gas-gleam which makes the darkness more awful than utter darkness. The spell of grue is upon you, and you know again the night-fears of childhood.

      MIDNIGHT IN LIMEHOUSE CAUSEWAY

      Nothing, I think, has held a larger place in my imaginative life than this country. I love other parts of London more, but the East End, for me, has always been all cities crystallized. Long before I knew it, it was part of my mind. When I was seven years old, and attending my first school, I sat beneath a large-scale wall-map of London, and even then the place-names—Ratcliff, Isle of Dogs, Shadwell, Limehouse, Spitalfields—fascinated me, as Trebizond and Samarkand fascinate others; and the street-names ran in my mind like a recondite rune. I would repeat them to myself in bed—Goodman’s Stile, Gracie’s Alley, Sweet Lilac Walk, West India Dock Road, Amoy Place, Juniper Street, The North-East Passage, Kent and Essex Yard, Salmon Lane, Cinnamon Street, Coverley Fields, Ropemaker’s Fields, Oriental Street, Cuba Street, Frying-Pan Alley, Elbow Lane, Green Bank, Maize Row, Cotter’s Green, Drood Yard, Flower-and-Dean Street, Folly Wall, Blue Anchor Fields, Island Row, Three Colt Street, Havanna Street, Canton Street, Mutton Walk, Houndsditch, Drum Yard, Irish Court, Malabar Street, Silver Street, Gold Street, Assam Street, Manilla Street, Ocean Street, Cadiz Street, Glasshouse Fields, Tobago Street, Wapping Wall. Though I had never seen them I knew these streets in dreadful dreams and pleasant imaginings. In sleep, I met lovely sweethearts in Flower-and-Dean Street. I had heart-tearing escapes in Drood Yard, and dare-devil adventures in Frying-Pan Alley. Nightmares brought me hideous minutes in Elbow Lane, and in Gracie’s Alley I played the heroic saviour. When, later, while still a child, I made actual acquaintance with Spitalfields and Shadwell, they became the setting of my earliest and most ardent experiences. So much so that if ever, far away from London, I think unwittingly of London, it is those winding streets and clotted courts that I see and those meagre companies of lamps. I first saw them with the eyes of boyhood and only at night; thus they made an impression which twenty years of daylight acquaintance have not been able to eradicate. There, for the first time in my life, a girl turned at a corner and smiled at me, a drunken man at an upper window roared at me. There I first realized the magic of a street organ playing in the darkness. There I saw Rabbis, and for the first time saw foreigners from distant lands, and there I first felt the poetry of lamplight and the splendour of ships and the greatness of rivers. In time it became for me a land where stories could be picked from the air, or snatched, as I have said, at every corner. In the crowding and various life of this quarter, they grow in dozens, where the stereotyped life of “betterclass” districts yields scarcely one. And they should, for all the folk tales of all the seven seas have been carried here and told upon the evening air; tales of Russia and Roumania and Palestine; tales of India; tales of Scandinavia, tales of Cathay, tales of ships and storms, and tales of London and of the English countryside.

      And tales are still to be gathered here, though they seldom appear in the local Press. They are not to be gathered by busy news-gatherers. They await the idle ear. Every ship has its news, no longer strange, perhaps, but still news; news of things seen in other cities and of the events of the passage. In the inner parts, around Whitechapel, there are foreigners with whispered news of how they entered London without passport. In the coffee-shops and lodging-houses there are newcomers with tales of Russia and of Poland and Germany, and of the domestic or economic disaster which led them to pack up and seek new fortune in London. There are men in hiding. There are tales to be heard from aged Cockneys who have seen Stepney grow to what it is, and who knew the Highway when it was what it was. There are old