No gracious courtesy here! A woman with a child in her arms was no
longer a queen. Children were cheap, and sometimes it was as much as I
could do to save myself from being pushed off the pavement.
The air seemed to smell of nothing but ale and coarse tobacco. And then
the noise! The ceaseless clatter of carts, the clang of electric cars,
the piercing shrieks of the Underground Railway coming at intervals out
of the bowels of the earth like explosions out of a volcano, and, above
all, the raucous, rasping, high-pitched voices of the people, often
foul-mouthed, sometimes profane, too frequently obscene.
A cold, grey, joyless, outcast city, cut off from the rest of London by
an invisible barrier more formidable than a wall; a city in which the
inhabitants seemed to live cold, grey, joyless lives, all the same that
they joked and laughed; a city under perpetual siege, the siege of
Poverty, in the constant throes of civil war, the War of Want, the daily
and hourly fight for food.
If there were other parts of the East End (and I am sure there must be)
where people live simple, natural, human lives, I did not see them that
day, for my course was down the principal thoroughfares only.
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