Some things, such as umbrellas, suitcases, trousers, boots,
bedsteads, and hats, both male and female, can become so old that it
would be a decency could they disintegrate and vanish into thin air.
Nothing can be quite so old and dissipated as an umbrella. But, no;
the effortless Nirvana which these things have earned is denied them;
they are spread out on the cobbles of the Caledonian Market (North
London) every Friday, in the hope that their pitiful pilgrimage may
continue.
When I walked into this remarkable once-a-week junk-fair I was deeply
touched to think that any living person could need many of the things
displayed for sale. For all round me, lying on sacking, were the
driftwood and wreckage of a thousand lives: door knobs, perambulators
in extremis, bicycle wheels, bell wire, bed knobs, old clothes, awful
pictures, broken mirrors, unromantic china goods, gaping false teeth,
screws, nuts, bolts, and vague pieces of rusty iron, whose mission in
life, or whose part and portion of a whole, Time had obliterated.
It seemed that all the queer things in all the little shops in
London's by-streets had been poured out in a last desperate effort of
salesmanship, while on every hand, above the Oriental clamour of
stall-holders and the negative remarks of the public, rose the
all-prevailing cry:
"Come on, ma, take it for sixpence ... four-pence? ... twopence? All
right, then I'll give it you...."
I must say, however, that I never observed this threat carried into
execution.
As I walked between the aisles of junk I remembered the story of a
friend who went to this market out of curiosity, and came away
unexpectedly in a taxicab with a priestess. He had bought a mummy
for ten shillings. And well can I believe it. I longed for
something like this to happen to me, for that is how life should go.
When you look forward to a thing, or search for it and find it, you
are invariably disappointed because your mind has had time to
experience it and possess it and tire of it long before it comes.
But the joy of sudden, unexpected things seldom fails. I have always
envied J., not his priestess, because she smelt like a French
third-class carriage and had to be buried at night, but his meeting
with her. That must have been wonderful. He was walking along
thinking about door knobs or bell wire when he saw her: "My God, a
mummy! Man or woman? Woman! How romantic! Probably she was
beautiful and young! She used to shake a sistrum at Karnak beside
the Nile and wear a lovely pleated skirt and nothing underneath...."
For a second, perhaps two--anyhow just long enough to hand over a
ten-shilling note--I think he loved her as much as you can love a
mummy, and although his affection waned in Bloomsbury when he had to
help her out of the taxi, it must have been worth it just for the
sharp delirium of that meeting--he ardent, romantic; she a bit glazed
and fish-like in more ways than one, but eternally feminine, though,
as it were, canned.
I walked on trying not to expect that anything so wonderful would
come my way. Near the entrance a man offered me someone's skeleton
for seven-and-sixpence, and when I said "No" he put down the box in
which it is kept and remarked to his wife: "Now, don't put your foot
through the skull, Emma." At the next stall a young mother was
buying a cradle festooned in dusty black lace.
I watched a man buy three dentist's door plates for three and
sixpence, and the dealer generously threw in a bowler hat that looked
like the hero of a hundred brawls.
Then, here and there among the dense, moving crowds of women in
search of cheap saucepans, and those odd lengths of cloth which women
of all classes accumulate, I saw the dealers from the more
fashionable districts looking for something for five shillings to
sell later in the West End for five pounds. There were also numbers
of treasure-seekers, men and women--smart, well dressed--collectors
of antiques, nosing round like setters for Chippendale chairs,
Japanese prints, Chinese jade, and Queen Anne silver.
Half the collectors in London make it a point to visit this place
every Friday in search of loot; and they walk round like pirate Kings
ready to pounce on the instant.
Most curious and sad to look upon were the old shoes, poor
down-at-heel, crinkly-toed things, standing dressed by the right on
their last parade, some with a remote Jermyn Street look about them,
others all that remains of someone's ancient corn-ridden aunt. Among
a pile of boots which looked as though they had walked every yard of
the road to ruin, I saw, tall and upright, a pair of women's riding
boots, proud still in their decline. I also saw a pair of gold
dance-slippers, somehow naked and ashamed.
A large woman was turning this way and that a slim little bride's
dress with the faded orange blossom still sewn on it. A white veil
went with it, gashed and torn. The fat woman moved on, lured by a
decayed washstand, and onward still to flirt a moment with an old
brass bedstead. I saw other hands--big coarse hands--pulling this
forgotten little bride's dress about, pawing it. What a pity it
could not melt away and save itself from this supreme insult!
* * *
In a corner lying on a sack I saw an Egyptian antiquity. I pounced!
"How much?"
A young man answered me with an Oxford accent.
"Fifteen shillings, sir."
I wondered what on earth this superior person was doing there
standing back behind a sack spread with antiques. Was it his hobby,
or was it a bet?
"I think," went on the Oxford voice, "you will agree with me that the
hieroglyphs were added at a later period. Perhaps during the
Ptolemaic age, though I think the figure is much older, possibly
Eighteenth Dynasty."