anywhere have been presented to our assemblages of wounded in the Old
Rec. Singers, musicians, actors and actresses have come and given of
their best. Miss Hullah's Music in War Time Committee (that delightful
body), and Mr. Howard Williams's parties, are perhaps our greatest
regular standbys. Certain sections of the public know Mr. Howard
Williams's name as a famous one in other fields of activity: to
thousands of soldiers it is honoured as that of the man who tirelessly
organised scrumptious tea-parties, pierrot shows, exhibition boxing
contests, nigger troupe entertainments--a list of jollifications,
indoors in winter and in the open air in summer, infinite in variety and
guaranteed never once to fall flat. A curious Empire reputation, this of
Mr. Williams!
Yesterday, for instance, a nigger troupe visited the hospital. To be
exact, they were the Metropolitan Police Minstrels ("By Permission of
Sir E.R. Henry, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., C.S.I., Commissioner"); but no member
of the audience, I imagine, could picture those jocose blackamoors, with
their tambourines and bones, as really being anything so serious as
traffic-controlling constables. That their comic songs were accompanied
by a faultless orchestra was understandable enough. One can believe in a
police band. One is not surprised that the police band is a good band.
To believe that the ebony-visaged person with the huge red
indiarubber-flexible mouth who sings "Under the archway, Archibald," and
follows this amorous ditty with a clog dance is--in his washed
moments--the terror of burglars, requires unthinkable flights of
imagination. As I gazed at this singular resurrection of Moore and
Burgess and breathless childhood's afternoons at the St. James's
Hall--the half circle of inanely alert faces the colour of fresh
polished boots--the preposterous uniforms and expansive
shirt-fronts--the "nigger" dialect which this strange convention demands
but which cannot be said to resemble the speech of any African tribe yet
discovered--I found that by no effort of faith or credulity could I
pierce the disguise and perceive policemen.
It is at least twenty years since I met a nigger minstrel in the flesh.
Vague ghosts of bygone persons and of piquant anachronisms seemed to
float approvingly in the air: the Prince Consort, bustles, the high
bicycle, sherry, Moody and Sankey, the Crystal Palace, Labouchere, "Pigs
in Clover," Lottie Collins, Evolution, Bimetallism: hosts of forgotten
images, names and shibboleths came popping out from the brain's dusty
pigeon-holes, magically released by the spectacle of the nigger troupe.
Yes, I was indeed switched into the past by Mr. Bones, Massa Jawns'n and
the rest. And yet the present might have seemed more emphatic and more
poignant. One felt, rather than saw, an audience of several hundred
persons in the dim rows of chairs. And laughing at the broad witticisms
of the niggers, or enjoying their choruses and orchestral
accompaniments, one forgot just what that half-glimpsed audience
consisted of; what it meant, and how it came to be here assembled.
Of course when the lights were turned up in the interval, one beheld the
usual spectacle: stretchers, wheeled chairs, crutches, bandaged heads,
arms in splints, blind men, men with one arm, men with one leg: rank on
rank of war's flotsam and jetsam, British, Australians, New Zealanders,
Newfoundlanders, Canadians, come to make merry over the minstrels: in
the front row the Colonel and the Matron, with officer patients; here
and there an orderly or a V.A.D.; here and there a Sister with her
"boys." It was a family gathering. I descried no strangers, and no one
not in uniform--unless you count the men too ill to don their blue
slops: these had been brought in dressing-gowns or wrapped in blankets.
No mere haphazard audience, this, of anybody and everybody who chooses
to pay at a turnstile! Entrance to this hall is free ... but the price
is beyond money, all the same.
A family party it was, decidedly. Thick fumes of tobacco smoke uprose
from it. (Shall we ever abandon the cigarette habit, now?) Orderlies
continued to arrive and stow themselves discreetly in corners: by some
strange providence each orderly had found that for a while he could be
spared from ward or office. Staff-Sergeants, Sergeants,
Corporals--mysteriously they made time to leave their various
departments. Even a bevy of masseuses (those experts eternally on the
rush from ward to ward) had peeped in to see the nigger minstrels. And
everybody was pleased: every jest and every conundrum got its laugh,
every ballad its applause. Not that we ever "give the bird" to those
who come to amuse us. Offer us skill in any shape or form--pierrots,
niggers, pianist, violinist, conjurer, ventriloquist, dancer, reciter:
any or all of these will be appreciated warmly.
Yesterday, for the nigger minstrels, there were no empty chairs. Until,
in the midst of Part II ("A Laughable Sketch"--_vide_ the
programme--wherein female rôles were doubly coy by reason of the
masculinity of their falsetto dialogue and remarkable ankles) a
messenger stole hither and thither, whispering to the orderlies, who
promptly tiptoed from the room.
A convoy of new arrivals demanded our presence.
The silent ambulances were gliding up to the entrance of the hospital.
Orderlies, fetched from their jobs and from the entertainment, lined up
in the rain to take their places in the quartettes of bearers who lifted
out the stretchers. The Assistant Matron, standing in the shelter of the
door, checked her list; the Medical Officer handed out the ward tickets;
the lady clerks from the Admission and Discharge Office took the
patients' particulars. And the bathroom became very busy.
As I started to wheel a much-bandaged warrior to his ward, the
recreation-room door opened and a burst of music-cum-essence-of-nigger
emerged on his astonished ears. I was a little doubtful as to whether
our new guest would not think his reception somewhat flippant in key.
The poor fellow was visibly suffering, and the sound of tambourines and
comedians' guffaws seemed a scarcely proper comment on his condition. I
might have spared myself these misgivings. "Say, chum," he interrogated
me feebly, "what's that noise?" "Nigger minstrels, old man."
"Golly!--and have I got to go straight to my bed?"
Alas, he had to. It would be long before he could be well enough to be
taken to one of our entertainments. But, had he been given his way, he
would have gone direct from his fatiguing overseas journey into the Old
Rec. to join the family party and chuckle at Mr. Bones and Massa
Jawns'n.... No doubts assailed _his_ mind as to whether it was right to
"waste bed-space" on mere frivolities. A nigger minstrel show was to him
a deal more important, in fact, than his wound. And perhaps, in
instinct, he was not far wrong.
XII
THE COCKNEY
Before I enlisted I was lodging in a house which it was occasionally
convenient to approach by a short cut through an area of slumland. One
night when traversing this slum--the hour was 1.30 a.m.--I was stopped
by a couple of women who told me that there was a man lying on the
ground in an adjacent alley; they thought he must be ill; would I come
and look at him?
They led me down a turning which opened into a narrow court. This court
was reached by an arched tunnel through tenement houses. The tunnel was
pitchy black, but I struck matches as I proceeded, and presently we came
upon the object of my companions' solicitude--a young soldier, propped
against the wall and with his legs projecting across the flagstones.
The women had, in fact, discovered him by tripping over those legs in
the darkness.
They were slatternly women, but warm-hearted; and when I had managed to
arouse the gentleman in khaki and hoist him to his feet (for the cause
of his indisposition was plain--and he had slept it off) they called
down blessings on my head and overwhelmed our friend with sympathy which
he did not wholly deserve and to which he made no rejoinder. Nor did he
vouchsafe any very lucid answer when I asked him whither he was bound. I
was prepared to pilot him--but I could hardly do so without knowing
towards which point of the compass he proposed to steer, or rather, to
be steered. "I know w'ere I wanter go," was all I could get out of him.
Very well; if he knew his address, it was no concern of mine; he could
lead on; I would act as a mere supporter. In this capacity, with my arm
linked firmly in his, I brought him forth from the tunnel to the street
(he had no wish, it seemed, to go through the tunnel into the court),
and here we bade farewell to the ladies.
"Which way now?" I inquired. My charge responded not, but crossed to a
corner and meandered up one of those interminable thoroughfares which
lead out of London into the suburbs. Trudging with him and helping him
to sustain his balance, which was not as stable as could be wished, I
plied him with mildly genial conversation and at last elicited a few
vague answers. These were couched in the cockney idiom, but I caught a
faint nasal twang which led me to suspect that the speaker had come from
the other side of the Atlantic. Yes--he told me he had just arrived from
Canada.
We had proceeded a short distance when on the further side of the street
I descried a golden halo which outlined the silhouette of a coffee
stall. It occurred to me that a cup of hot coffee would be a good tonic
to disperse the last symptoms of my friend's indiscretion, so I
deflected him across the road, and we brought up, together, alongside
the coffee-stall's counter.
Lest the reader should be unacquainted with that unique creation, the
coffee-stall, I must explain that it is nocturnal in habit, emerging
from its lair only between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. It is an
equipage of which the interior is inhabited by a fat, jolly man (at
least according to my experience he is always fat and jolly) surrounded
by steaming urns, plates of cake, buns of a citron-yellow hue, pale
pastries, ham sandwiches and packets of cigarettes. The upper panels of
one of its sides unfold to form a bar below and a penthouse roof above,
the latter being generally extended into an awning. The awning is a
protection for the customer not against the sun--a luminary from whose
assaults the London coffee-stalls have little to fear--but against the
rain. Thanks to these awnings, and the chattiness of the fat, jolly man,
and the warmth exhaled by the urns, and the circumstance that the public
houses are shut, our coffee-stalls are able to sell two brownish
beverages, called respectively coffee and tea, which otherwise could
hardly hope to achieve the honour of human consumption.
Fate has guided me on many midnight pilgrimages through the town, and I
have imbibed, sometimes with relish, the liquids alluded to; I have also
partaken of the pallid pastry and the citron-yellow buns. I am therefore
in a position to write, for the benefit of persons less well informed, a
treatise on coffee-stalls. This I shall refrain from doing. The one
point it is necessary for me to mention is that the fat, jolly man,
being deplorably distrustful, does not supply casual customers with
teaspoons. You may have a cup of alleged tea (one penny) or a cup of
alleged coffee (one penny); a dollop of sugar is dropped into the cup;
the fat, jolly man gives the mixture a stir-round with a teaspoon; then
he places the cup before you on the bar; but the teaspoon is still in
his grasp. I dare say he would lend you the teaspoon if you requested
him to do so; but unless you have that audacity he prefers to keep the
teaspoon on his side of the bar, out of harm's way. This may seem
strange, when you perceive that the teaspoon is fashioned of a metal
unknown to silversmiths and might be priced at threepence. But even a
threepenny teaspoon is a souvenir which some collectors would not
despise.
Presumably regular customers receive teaspoons, for teaspoons lie in a
heap on the fat, jolly man's side of the counter. This was the case at
the coffee-stall before which the young soldier and I ranged ourselves.
And the heap of teaspoons seemed to exercise a curious fascination upon
the soldier. He continued to stare at them for some minutes after I had
set in front of him his cup of coffee. Then he stared at the fat, jolly
man, who was cutting slabs from a loaf. He stared for a long time,
making no reply to my remarks.
Rain began to patter on the awning--it had rained earlier in the
night--and I became aware of a figure, lurking in the background on the
pavement, beyond the awning's shelter, but within the radius of the haze
of light projected therefrom. It was a wretched, slinking figure, that
of an elderly man with bleared eyes and a red nose: one of those pariahs
who haunt cabstands and promote the cabs up the rank when the front
vehicle is hailed. This special specimen of his breed appeared to be a
satellite of the coffee-stall proprietor: perhaps he helped to tow the
stall to its berth. Whatever might be his function, he lingered on the
outskirts of the ring of light, watching us; and the young soldier, in
his slow scrutiny of the stall and its surroundings, caught sight of
him, and stared stolidly, as he had stared at everything else.
I was in the act of drinking my coffee when the soldier suddenly leant
across the counter, picked up a spoon, turned, and threw it at the
derelict whose face wavered on the edge of the lamplight's circle. The
victim of this extraordinary attack dodged the missile, then grovelled
after it in the gutter. Meanwhile the fat man (instantaneously ceasing
to be jolly) gave vent to an angry protest.
"Wotcher do _that_ for? Chuckin' my spoons abart! Drunk, that's wot you
are!"
"Ain't drunk!" said the soldier.
"Wotcher chuck my spoon at 'im for, then? 'E ain't done you no 'arm."
"Yus 'e _'as_," was the soldier's surprising retort.
"No 'e ain't."
"Yus 'e _'as_."
"No 'e 'ain't. 'E ain't done you no 'arm."
To which the derelict chimed in (he had retrieved the spoon and now
advanced timidly with it under the awning): "I ain't done _you_ no
'arm"--a husky, whimpering chorus to his fat patron.
The soldier fixed the derelict with a fierce glare. "Yus you _'ave_," he
reiterated.
I was wondering how the dispute might develop, but evidently my ear is
unattuned to the nuances of these dialectics. The soldier's glare and
the soldier's tone must have betrayed themselves to the two other men as
factitious; the derelict, anyhow, lost his nervousness and, approaching
nearer, scanned the soldier with dim, peering eyes; then broke into a
joyous grin and exclaimed:
"Lumme, if it ain't ol' Bert!"
And the fat man, leaning on his counter, and likewise examining the
soldier, cried, "Ol' Bert it is!"
"Knew you in two ticks," grunted Bert. "Same ol' 'Arry." (This was the
derelict.) "Same ol' 'Erb." (This was the fat--and once again
jolly--man.)
Explanations ensued. Bert, the young soldier, was a native of these
parts. He had emigrated to Canada five years previously. To-night, _en
route_ for the front, he had returned. Earlier in the evening there had
been ill-advised libations; he had started for his home, felt sleepy,
sheltered from the wet in a tunnel quite familiar to him, and there been
discovered by the ladies and roused by myself. Arrived at the
coffee-stall he had recognised in its proprietor a former pal and
another former pal in 'Arry the derelict. To throw the spoon at 'Arry
was merely his playful mode of announcing his identity.
I left the trio reviewing the past and exchanging news of the present.
My services, it was clear, would no longer be required by the prodigal.
He and his mates gave me a hearty good-night.
I did not guess how intimate was soon to be my association with the
Berts and 'Arries and 'Erbs of the world. I was to be their servant, to
wait upon them, to perform menial tasks for them, to wash them and dress
them and undress them, to carry them in my arms. I was to see them
suffer and to learn to respect their gameness, and the wry, "grousing"
humour which is their almost universal trait. In my own wards, and
elsewhere in the hospital, I came in close contact with many cockneys of
the slums. Even when one had not precisely "placed" a patient of this
description, the relatives who came to him on visiting days gave the
clue to the stock from which he sprang. The mother was sometimes a
"flower girl"; the sweetheart, with a very feathered hat, and hair which
evidently lived in curling pins except on great occasions, probably
worked in a factory. These people, if the patient were confined to bed,
sat beside him and talked in a subdued, throaty whisper. But I have seen
the same sort of patient, well enough to walk about, meet his folks on
visiting afternoons at the hospital gate. There is a crowd at the
hospital gate, passing in and going out; hosts of patients are waiting,
some in wheeled chairs and some seated on the iron fence which fringes
the drive. The reunions which occur at that gate are exceedingly public.
Our East Ender is perhaps accustomed to publicity; his slum does not
conceal its feelings--it quarrels, and makes love, without drawn blinds,
and privacy is not an essential of its ardours. Be that as it may, these
meetings at the hospital gate, which are not lacking in pathos, have
sometimes manifested a tear-compelling comicality when the actors in the
drama belonged to the class which produced Bert.
In a higher class there is restraint and a rather stupid bashfulness. I
have seen a wounded youngster flush apprehensively and only peck his
mother in return for her sobbing embrace. That is not Bert's way. He
knows--he is not a fool--that his mother looks a trifle absurd as, with
bonnet awry, she surges perspiringly past the sentries, the tails of her
skirt dragging in the dust and her feet flattened with the weight of
over-clad, unwholesome obesity they have to bear. But he hobbles sprily
to meet her, and his salute is no mere peck, but a smacking kiss, so
noisy that it makes everyone laugh. He laughs too--perhaps he did it on
purpose to raise a laugh: that is his quaint method; but the fact
remains that, whatever his motive, he has managed to please his mother.
She is sniffing loudly yet laughing also, and one could want no better
picture of human affection than this of Bermondsey Bert and his
shapeless, work-distorted, maybe bibulous-looking mother, exchanging
that resounding and ungraceful kiss at the hospital gate. I have heard
Bert shout "Mother!" from a hundred yards off, when he spied her coming
through the gate. No false shame there! No smug "good form" in that--nor
in the time-honoured jest which follows: "And 'ave you remembered to
bring me a bottle of beer, mother?" (Of course visitors are not allowed
to introduce alcohol into the hospital--otherwise I am afraid there is
no doubt that mother would have obliged.)
In one of our wards we harboured, for a while, a costermonger. This
coster, an entertaining and plucky creature who had to have a leg
amputated, received no callers on visiting day: his own relatives were
dead and he and his wife had separated. "Couldn't 'it it orf," he
explained, and with laudable impartiality added, "Married beneath 'er,
she did, w'en she married me." As the lady was herself a coster, it was
plain that here, as in other grades of society, there are degrees,
conventions and barriers which may not be lightly overstepped. "Sister,"
however, thought that the patient should inform his wife that he had
lost his leg, and prevailed on him to send her a letter to that effect.
A few days later he was asked,
"Well, did you write and tell your wife you had lost a leg?"
"Yus."
"I suppose she's answered? What has she said?"
"Said 'm a liar!"
Her retort had neither disconcerted nor offended him. He was a
philosopher--and, like so many of his kind, a laughing philosopher. When
he was sufficiently recovered from his operation to get about on
crutches he was the wag of the ward. He took a special delight in those
practical jokes which are invented by patients to tease the nurses, and
devoted the most painstaking ingenuity to their preparation. It was he
who found a small hole in the lath-and-plaster wall which separates the
ward from the ward's kitchen. Through this hole a length of cotton was
passed and tied to the handle of a mug on the kitchen shelf. At this
period, owing to the Zeppelin raids, only the barest minimum of light
was allowed, and the night nurse, when she entered the kitchen, went
into almost complete darkness. No sooner was she in the kitchen and
fumbling for what she required than a faint noise--that of the cup being
twitched by the cotton leading to the mischievous coster's bed--arose on
the shelf and convinced her that she was in the presence of a mouse. She
retreated, and perhaps if any convalescent patient had been awake she
would have enlisted his aid to expel the mouse; but in the ward the
patients were, as one man, snoring vociferously. It was this slightly
overdone snoring, at the finish, which gave birth to suspicions and
caused the trick to be detected.
The night nurses do not have a placid time of it if their patients
are at the stage of recovery when spirits begin to rise and
the early slumber-hour which the hospital rules prescribe is not
welcome. String-actuated knaveries, more or less similar to the
mouse-in-the-kitchen one, are always devised for the plaguing of a new
night nurse. Sometimes in the dead of night, when utter silence broods
over the ward, the gramophone will abruptly burst into raucous music:
its mechanism has been released by a contrivance which gives no clue to
the crime's perpetrator. The flustered nurse gropes her way down the
ward and stops the gramophone, every patient meanwhile sitting up in bed
and protesting against her cruelty in having awakened them by starting
it. Half an hour after the ward has quietened, the other gramophone
(some wards own two) whirrs off into impudent song: it also has been
primed. Nurse is wiser on future occasions: she stows the gramophones,
when she comes on duty, where no one can tamper with them. Even so, she
may have her nerves preyed upon by eerie tinklings, impossible to locate
in the darkness; these are caused by two knives, hung from a nail fixed
high up in the rafters. By jiggling a string, which is conducted over
another rafter and down the wall to his pillow, the patient makes the
knifeblades clash. Sometimes two strings, leading to different beds,
complete this instrument of torture. After a determined search, nurse
finds one string, and, having cut it, flatters herself that she has got
the better of her enemies. Not a bit of it. She has scarcely settled in
her chair again before the tinklings recommence. The second string is in
action; and as she hunts about the ward for the source of the melody in
the ceiling, muffled convulsions of mirth, from the dim rows of beds,
furnish evidence that her naughty charges are not getting the repose
which they require and to ensure which is part of the purpose of her
presence.
A nurse who happens to be unpopular never has these pranks played upon
her. They are in the nature of a compliment. Nor do they occur in a
ward where there is a patient seriously ill. It is impossible to imagine
war-hospital patients acting inconsiderately towards a distressed
comrade. This observation renders all the more amusing the scandalised
concern which I once beheld on the demure physiognomy of a visiting
clergyman when he gathered the drift of certain allusions to a case on
the Danger List.