Even as I write Piccadilly is changing. Eros, attended by the ghosts
of undergraduates, has stepped from the pinnacle, thus evacuating the
post of honour from which he has gazed upon the follies of our
fathers, those wicked men who used to wait outside stage doors with
bouquets before sneaking off somewhere to dine with a real actress.
Ah, those must have been good days....
So before the circle is squared, which seems quite unnatural, I wish
to write about the flower "girls." Early in the morning, long before
the first pair of silk stockings had been sold in Regent Street, the
"girls" dipped their violets in the Fountain and camped out on the
steps. What a perfect picture they made. It always seemed to me
that some unknown admirer of Phil May was secretly subsidizing them,
paying for them, working, maybe, to stamp on the national mind a
sharp memory of plaid shawls tight over plump shoulders, apple-red
faces beneath black straw hats. In the spring they brought the first
real news to the West End with their laughing primroses, big tight
gold bunches of them; and the Fountain was a joy to behold.
"Vi'lets pennigabunch."
That was, of course, long ago. I believe they are sixpence or more
now; but the old cry from the Fountain has been remembered all over
the earth wherever men have thought of Piccadilly.
The flower "girls" of Piccadilly presented to London the most
marvellous study in polite indifference. Here they were in
occupation of the very centre of the world with the feminine beauty
and elegance of every country always before their eyes. They
remained unaffected. They were the only women in London moving in
fashionable London circles who did not care a hang for the changing
mode. They had sold violets to women in bustles; they had seen
skirts sweep the ground, they had seen the dawn of the leg, from the
hobble skirt to the knee skirt. Never once in their history did they
show the instinct of their sex to imitate.
These middle-aged women who are always "girls" have become
international. American women said: "Why, they're just sweet,"
Frenchwomen thought they were almost chic, and sometimes a grey old
man, sickened by the degeneracy of these times, would wander up from
the direction of Pall Mall to buy a buttonhole just to hear himself
called "dearie," and to know that there was still something in London
that had not changed. They were Victorian London.
When I heard that Eros was to disappear and that the "girls" were to
be moved away I had the same kind of shock that a Roman under the
Empire might have suffered if a friend had moved his thumb in the
direction of the Palatine Hill and had remarked: "Have you heard?
The Old Man's sacked the Vestal Virgins!"
Preposterous! The "girls" were our vestal virgins--they kindled each
day memory of a fast-vanishing London.
* * *
I found one in Piccadilly the other day. She had taken up a stand on
a street refuge, from which she could command sight of her former
pitch.
"No, dearie," she said. "Piccadilly's gorn to the dorgs, strite it
'as. Life ain't what it was, nor never will be agin with this
squarin' of a plice what was meant to be a circus. It ain't right.
Who'd 'ave thought we should leave the Fountain--ever. Some say we
can go beck there when they've done messin' it about, but I don't
believe it. I'm Mrs. Wise I'm am. There ain't no green in my eye....
"And this job ain't what it once was--not by half. No, dearie! In
the old days every kebbie had his buttonhole, and no gent was dressed
unless he had one too. And the drivers of the old horse omnibuses!
They were rare customers--nice, pleasant men, too, who liked to pass
the time of day with you and talk. Now there's no time for talk or
flowers."
She nodded enigmatically.
"Young men don't like to be seen carrying flowers to-day, but I can
tell you their fathers didn't mind--and better men they were, if I'm
any judge of a man, and I ought to be, seeing I've been sat in
Piccadilly Circus all me life...."
Then she said something that sent a chill to my heart:
"My gels ain't going to waste their lives sitting here, I can tell
you. Emma going into pickles, and Maud, she's in millinery."
This, of course, is the end! A flower girl's calling is hereditary.
It descends through the distaff side. The next generation of "girls"
are, it appears, going into commerce, and there will be none to
follow on.
It is sad. If I were a millionaire I would subsidize them and buy a
hansom cab and an old pensioned cab-horse to stand there too.
* * *
For in the fret and change of these days the flower "girls" of
Piccadilly looked so permanent with the surge of London round them,
the crowds from the ends of the earth, so indifferent to change, so
typical of an easier day, as they sold their flowers in that whirl of
gladness and sadness, beauty and ugliness, which is the heart of
London; ... the heart of the world.
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