London (132 page)

“Every one of them’s a cockney. That’s for sure.”

Harry Dogget was a cockney and proud of it. People might disagree about where the term came from. Some said it meant a bad egg; others that it meant an idiot; others yet claimed something else. Nor could anyone quite say how or when it came to be applied to the Londoners – though Harry had heard it was not much used before his grandfather’s day. But one thing everyone agreed on: to qualify as a true member of this notable company, you have to be born within the sound of the great bell of St Mary-le-Bow.

Admittedly, that sound might have been carried some distance on the wind. Most of the inhabitants of Southwark, across the river, would claim to be cockneys and people living out in places like Spitalfields, east of the Tower, would usually reckon they were cockneys too – unless, as was often the case, they preferred to be thought of as Huguenots. And westward, out along Fleet Street and the Strand to Charing Cross, Covent Garden and Seven Dials nearby, men like Harry Dogget, hearing the peal of the old bell on a still Sunday evening, would nod and say: “I’m a cockney all right, and no mistake.”

Nor was it surprising that the London cockneys should be famous for their wit. Hadn’t men – old English, Viking, Norman French, Italian, Flemish, Welsh, God knows what else besides – been living by their wits in the port of London for centuries? Sharp-eyed market-traders, loud-mouthed watermen, tavern-keepers, theatre-goers, steeped in the salty, subtle and vulgar tongue of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the street people of London were swimming naturally, from their birth, in the richest river of language that the world has ever known. No wonder then that the quick-witted cockneys loved to play games with words; and, as people have from the earliest times, they liked to make rhymes.

Harry would tell his children, as soon as they could talk: “Holy Friar: that means a liar. Loaf of bread: that’s your head. Rabbit and pork: a lot of talk. So stop rabbiting on and use your loaf. Field of wheat,” the lesson would continue, “that’s the street.” Then with a grin: “What’s cobblers’s awls?”

“Balls!” his children would cry.

“No,” he would respond, serious as a preacher. “They are the little spikes what is used by the makers of shoes for the piercing of holes in the leather. Right?”

“Cobblers!” the children would happily shout.

And so as Mrs Dogget staggered down the stairs, Harry muttered: “Here’s ‘Trouble and Strife’.” He meant his wife.

She was flushed bright red already, as she reached her waiting family; but it was not through any exertion. The trouble with Mrs Dogget was Aristotle – in other words, the bottle. And the contents of the bottle was Needle and Pin.

And that meant gin.

Mother’s ruin, they also called it, but it was more like family ruin. For God knows how many a family in London had suffered because of it. The trouble was that the clear spirit was so cheap to produce, and when Dutch King William had introduced this drink, so popular in his native Holland, the poorer classes in the towns had soon become so addicted that, by now, it was the greatest curse of the times. “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence,” the saying was; and Mrs Dogget, alas, spent more than tuppence on many a day. “A little bit of comfort,” she would call it, whenever she began, and there was nothing, it seemed, you could do to stop her.

She was a small, round woman. The drink had made her eyes puffy, but through the two slits remaining, it was clear that she could see well enough. Harry Dogget accosted her firmly, but not unkindly.

“Oysters again?” The catch in the Thames Estuary had become so huge that oysters were one of the cheapest items on the market stalls.

“Needle and pin,” one of the elder children remarked.

“But I gave you a shilling this morning,” Dogget pointed out. “You can’t have drunk all that, old girl.”

And now, fighting red though she was, Mrs Dogget looked genuinely puzzled.

“I didn’t spend but tuppence,” she muttered, frowning.

“So who had it then?” he demanded, while all the children shook their heads.

Though, had he looked more closely, he might have detected a faint smile of complicity pass between the two seven-year-olds. For Sam and Sep knew very well. And they had no intention of telling anyone.

Seven Dials was a funny sort of place. Seven streets, none important, had apparently decided to meet there. At the centre of the intersection, a Doric pillar of stone with a railing round it, on top of which pillar was a clock, rather remarkable for having seven identical faces, one pointing at each little street. Lying as it did, just east of Covent Garden, where there was now a daily flower market, and only a five-minute walk from Piccadilly, it ought by rights to have been a respectable location. But the seven streets lacked the moral character of their neighbours and preferred instead to lapse, all together, into a common sink of genial depravity.

If you wanted to find the cheapest gin, you came to Seven Dials. Gin Lane, some called the area. If you wanted female company, not too bad-looking and quite likely not diseased, go down to the clock and you’d encounter a dozen women on the way, not so much regular prostitutes as the wives of working men, ready to earn a little on the side. And if, by chance, you wanted your pockets picked, why you could walk down any one of the seven streets and someone would be sure to oblige you.

But to Sam and Sep, Seven Dials was a friendly place. They had been born there after all, in a courtyard tenement not a minute from the Dials. Everybody knew them. And even those whose tempers might be uncertain, or habits dangerous, were unlikely ever to trouble Sam and Sep. After all, their father was Harry Dogget: a man of some importance.

There had always been street-sellers in London – the men and women with basket or barrow who hawked their goods from door to door; but nowadays there were more than ever. The reasons were simple enough: an ever-growing population; and the increasing conversion of the old street stalls into regular shops.

Poor people did not frequent the new shops. Things cost more in there and besides, few shopkeepers encouraged these ragged folk to defile their premises and put off their better customers. The humble street vendors would go on their perpetual rounds, therefore, their cries and shouts filling the air so that often it seemed as if some great and noisy market had decided to up sticks and form a procession. “Hot pies!” “Buy my fat chickens!” “Oranges and lemons!” “Cherry ripe!” Or some, like the muffin man, would simply ring a bell. The hubbub was amazing.

But of all the street-sellers, the very princes of these cockney traders were the costermongers. And Harry Dogget was a costermonger.

The name originally came from “costard”, a type of large apple, and “monger”, a seller. A costermonger like Harry Dogget owned his own, splendidly painted barrow, and his own donkey to pull it. He sold fish, fruit and vegetables, depending on the day and season. The greatest costermongers were the unofficial rulers of each area, keeping order amongst the other traders and passing their position down from generation to generation in cockney monarchies. And though just below this ultimate élite, Dogget the costermonger was not a person to be trifled with. Fair in his dealings, the first to crack or to see a joke, generally liked – and by the women too, it was well known – with the same red kerchief always tied loosely round his neck, Harry Dogget was only medium-sized but very square.

“He hit me one time,” the two boys had once heard a sturdy butcher confess. “Mind, I asked for it.”

“What was it like?” someone had asked.

“I’d rather,” the butcher said thoughtfully, “be kicked by a dray-horse.”

Indeed, Harry would have been a fortunate man – if it wasn’t for Mrs Dogget.

“It’s not that she costs so much,” he would explain, “but she don’t bring nothing in neither.” A man in his position, even a costermonger, expected his wife to add in some way to the family income.

Everything had been tried to wean her off the gin. Ordinary tasks, like taking in laundry, remained unfinished. One spring he had tried taking her out to Chelsea and Fulham for a week. People from the West Country and even from as far afield as Ireland would work in the huge market gardens owned by Mr Gunter out there. But she had still managed to find gin, become drunk and smashed into a greenhouse. That summer, Harry thought he had found a solution when a friend who worked at the Bull brewery in Southwark had suggested Mrs Dogget and the children go out for the weeks of hop-picking in the big Bocton hop-fields in Kent. “I don’t think she could get any gin out there,” he had suggested. But Mrs Dogget had refused to go. “Stuck better than a mussel on a rock, she is,” Harry sighed. And that was that.

Sometimes he would wonder if it could be his fault. Had he driven her to drink? Was it his other women? But he didn’t think so. Whatever her faults, Mrs Dogget had always been easy-going. As for his occasional lapses, he fancied she might not be guiltless in that respect herself. “Some get driven to drink,” he concluded. “She just took to it.” But whatever the cause, it meant that Harry, even with his barrow, could never really get ahead; and it caused him to warn his children, all too often:

“You must look sharp now, and learn to look after yourselves.”

Which was exactly what Sep and Sam were doing.

Sometimes Sep worried about Sam’s stealing. “The Bow Street Runners will get you,” he would caution.

It was just the previous year that Henry Fielding, who as well as writing such novels as
Tom Jones
, was also a magistrate, had set up the first attempt at a proper London police force, which operated out of Bow Street near Covent Garden.

Sam only laughed at his brother. “You don’t have to look out for me,” he would say.

The two boys were not identical twins, but very alike, with the same shock of white hair and the webbed fingers which, though they had skipped Harry Dogget, had been passed down from the costermonger’s father. Sam was the jollier of the two, always ready to joke; Sep was inclined to be more serious. Like all the other children, they were always busy. While the eldest boy helped his father with the barrow, however, and their sisters either kept the house or went into domestic service, the twins worked together, picking up odd jobs, running errands – anything to get a little cash which they carefully hid from their mother. But Sam, being bolder, had branched out into outright crime. His method was cunning.

For the last eighteen years, the most splendid theatre in London had been the new one at Covent Garden. When the audience came out after dark, besides the ranks of sedan chairs for hire, there would also be a crowd of fellows with lamps on sticks – the link-men – offering to guide those who preferred to walk home through the unlit streets. Many a gentleman, deciding to patronize the cheerful little boy standing among them and finding himself five minutes later deprived of his money by some ruffian near Seven Dials, would have been surprised indeed to discover that despite his apparent terror and tears during the assault, a calm and cynical Sam would collect his reward from the robber the following morning.

“The Runners won’t trouble with me,” he’d reassure Sep. “Anyway, they couldn’t prove nothing.”

When it came to his other line of theft, however, Sep joined him gladly. They stole from Mrs Dogget. It wasn’t, they agreed, really even stealing. After all, it was only their rightful share of the family’s money. If they didn’t take it, they knew where it would go.

“Better us,” Sam said, “than Needle and Pin.”

If asked what he needed the money for, Sam at least could answer precisely. He wanted to be a costermonger like his father; and since his elder brother was going to inherit the barrow, he needed money to set himself up and buy his own. Street-sellers were not licensed; there was no guild, so you could start when you wanted as long as the senior costermongers let you. “I’ll do more trade than him by the time I’m fifteen,” he had sworn with a grin. And until he was five Sep had supposed that he wanted the same thing. Until, that was, he had made an exciting discovery.

There were a number of great events that marked the year in Georgian London. Most, of course, had been going on for centuries: Christmas, Easter, May Day, and the great water procession for the new Lord Mayor. But during Harry the costermonger’s childhood a new, though more modest attraction had also been added. It was a boat race, run at the very start of August: six boats competed, each rowed by a single waterman, from London Bridge upstream to Chelsea for a prize of a rich coat and a solid silver badge. It had been set up by the will of a comedian and theatre manager. But the thing that seemed truly wonderful to young Sep was the name of this benefactor of the watermen. For it was Thomas Dogget. His own family name. And Dogget’s Coat and Badge Race was watched by all London.

“Is it something to do with us?” little five-year-old Sep had eagerly asked his father when he had first been taken to watch.

“’Course it is. That was my old Uncle Tom,” the costermonger had cheerfully lied. Whether Thomas Dogget, who had originally come from outside London, was even remotely connected to his own humble family, Harry had not the faintest idea, but it amused him to see the little boy flush with pride.

From that moment, however, in Sep’s mind, the river and its watermen had acquired a completely new significance. A costermonger, of course, was a fine thing to be; but how could it compare with the glory of the river – the river where Doggets, he felt, truly belonged? Hardly a day went by when he did not dream of joining the colourful fellows on the water. And rather to his surprise, when he had confided this to his father one day, the costermonger had encouraged him. Not only was the waterman’s life a pretty fair one, Harry informed him, but there was another side to it he had not realized.

“You could be a fireman as well,” he explained.

It was the insurance companies who had started the fire brigades. Realizing that the simplest way to limit claims was to put the fires out wherever possible, each company had its own cart with water barrels, buckets and even primitive pumps and hoses. The policy holder was issued with a metal badge bearing the company’s name and insignia, which was fixed on the front of the house so that the firemen could identify it as theirs; if you did not display the badge, they would leave your house to burn. As firefighters, the insurance companies hired the Thames watermen, who were always fit and ready for anything. Dressed in bright company livery, with stout leather helmets, Sep often saw the firemen with their engines racing through the streets. The crews from the Sun Insurance Company seemed to him the most glamorous.