THE GREENGROCER'S--FETTER LANE
Two or three years ago, there was a certain greengrocer's shop in Fetter
Lane. The front window had been removed, the better to expose the
display of fruits and vegetables which were arranged on gradually
ascending tiers, completely obstructing your vision into the shop
itself. Oranges, bananas, potatoes, apples, dates--all pressed together
in the condition in which they had arrived at the London docks, ballast
for the good ship that brought them--carrots and cauliflowers, all in
separate little compartments, were huddled together on the ascending
rows of shelves like colours that a painter leaves negligently upon his
palette.
At night, a double gas jet blew in the wind just outside, deepening the
contrasts, the oranges with the dull earth brown of the potatoes, the
bright yellow bananas with the sheen of blue on the green cabbages! Oh,
that sheen of blue on the green cabbages! It was all the more beautiful
for being an effect rather than a real colour. How an artist would have
loved it!
These greengrocers' shops and stalls are really most picturesque, so
much more savoury, too, than any other shop--except a chemist's. Of
course, there is nothing to equal that wholesome smell of brown Windsor
soap which pervades even the most cash of all cash chemist's! An
up-to-date fruiterer's in Piccadilly may have as fine an odour, perhaps;
but then an up-to-date fruiterer is not a greengrocer. He does not dream
of calling himself such. They are greengrocers in Fetter
Lane--greengrocers in the Edgware Road--greengrocers in old Drury, but
fruiterers in Piccadilly.
Compared, then, with the ham and beef shop, the fish-monger's, and the
inevitable oil shop, where, in such neighbourhoods as these, you buy
everything, this greengrocer's was a welcome oasis in a desert of
unsavoury smells and gloomy surroundings. The colours it displayed, the
brilliant flame of that pyramid of oranges, those rosy cheeks of the
apples, that glaring yellow cluster of bananas hanging from a hook in
the ceiling, and the soft green background of cabbages, cauliflowers and
every other green vegetable which chanced to be in season, with one last
touch of all, some beetroot, cut and bleeding, colour that an emperor
might wear, combined to make that little greengrocer's shop in Fetter
Lane the one saving clause in an otherwise dreary scheme. It cheered you
as you passed it by. You felt thankful for it. Those oranges looked
clean and wholesome. They shone in the light of that double gas jet.
They had every reason to shine. Mrs. Meakin rubbed them with her apron
every morning when she built up that perilous pyramid. She rubbed the
apples, too, until their faces glowed, glowed like children ready to
start for school. When you looked at them you thought of the country,
the orchards where they had been gathered, and Fetter Lane, with all its
hawkers' cries and screaming children, vanished from your senses. You
do not get that sort of an impression when you look in the window of a
ham and beef shop. A plate of sliced ham, on which two or three flies
crawl lazily, a pan of sausages, sizzling in their own fat, bear no
relation to anything higher than the unfastidious appetite of a hungry
man.
That sort of shop, you pass by quickly; but, even if you had not wished
to buy anything, you might have hesitated, then stopped before Mrs.
Meakin's little greengrocer's stall in Fetter Lane.
Mrs. Meakin was very fat. She had a face like an apple--not an apple
just picked, but one that has been lying on the straw in a loft through
the winter, well-preserved, losing none of its flavour, but the skin of
which is wrinkled and shrivelled with age. On a wooden chair without
any back to it, she sat in the shop all day long, inhaling that healthy,
cleanly smell of good mother earth which clung about the sacks of
potatoes. Here it was she waited for the advent of customers. Whenever
they appeared at the door, she paused for a moment, judging from their
attitude the likelihood of their custom, then, slapping both hands on
her knees, she would rise slowly to her feet.
She was a good woman of business, was Mrs. Meakin, with a capable way of
explaining how poor the season was for whatever fruit or vegetable her
customers wished to purchase. It must not be supposed that under this
pretence she demanded higher prices than were being asked elsewhere.
Oh--not at all! Honesty was written in her face. It was only that she
succeeded in persuading her customers that under the circumstances they
got their vegetables at a reasonable price and, going away quite
contented, they were willing to return again.
But what in the name, even of everything that is unreasonable have the
greengrocery business and the premises of Mrs. Meakin to do with the
City of Beautiful Nonsense? Is it part of the Nonsense to jump from a
trade in candles before the altar of St. Joseph to a trade in oranges in
Fetter Lane? Yet there is no nonsense in it. In this fairy story, the
two are intimately related.
This is how it happens. The house, in which Mrs. Meakin's shop was on
the ground floor, was three stories high and, on the first floor above
the shop itself, lived John Grey, the journalist, the writer, the driver
of the pen, the at-present unexplained figure in this story who offered
his gift of generosity to St. Joseph, in order that the other
as-yet-unexplained figure of the lady in the heavy fur coat should
gratify her desire to light the last candle and place it in the
sconce--a seal upon the deed of her supplication.
So then it is we have dealings with Mrs. Meakin and her greengrocery
business in Fetter Lane. This little shop, with such generous show of
brilliant colours in the midst of its drab grey surroundings, is part of
the atmosphere, all part of this fairy-tale romance which began on the
eighteenth of March--oh, how many years ago? Before Kingsway was built,
before Holywell Street bit the dust in which it had grovelled for so
long.
And so, I venture, that it is well you should see this small shop of
Mrs. Meakin's, with its splashes of orange and red, its daubs of crimson
and yellow--see it in your mind's eye--see it when the shadows of the
houses fall on it in the morning, when the sun touches it at
mid-day--when the double gas jet illuminates it at night, for you will
never see it in real life now. Mrs. Meakin gave up the business a year
or so ago. She went to live in the country, and there she has a kitchen
garden of her own; there she grows her own cabbages, her own potatoes
and her own beetroot. And her face is still like an apple--an older
apple to be sure--an apple that has lain in the straw in a large roomy
loft, lain there all through the winter and--been forgotten, left
behind.