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The Journal of Dora Damage(19)



So in and out my toes went again that morning, only this time the hem under which they went was edged with a slightly worn but still fine green ribbon, which contrasted with the pale floral cambric. I married Peter in this dress; it was the only decent dress I had kept from Huggitty, as if I knew I would need to look proper again one day, and it had a matching bonnet that caught the worst of the drizzle. I had left a note, assuring Peter I would not be gone long, but I did not state my destination. With luck Lucinda might not even wake before I returned.

I paid my ha’penny and scurried over Waterloo Bridge once more. It was still dark. I did not look over at Lambeth Marshes, but kept my eyes on my worn leather boots lined with The Illustrated London News, going in and out beneath my green hem. How hopeful the colour seemed, how fresh and spring-like. I was such the innocent.

Occasionally I would glimpse the steamboats puffing underneath me, crowded with clerks on their way to Essex Street Pier, or Blackfriars Bridge Pier, or St Paul’s Wharf, or Old Shades Pier by London Bridge, where they would disgorge their sombre-suited cargo. The air was oily on my skin: the breath of London.

The lamplighters were doing their rounds with their ladders, turning off the stopcocks at each lamp-post, and the pavements were already full of tradesmen, footmen, clerks, all wrapped up in thick cloaks. A few women were amongst them: maidservants in couples, wives tottering next to their tradesman husbands, the odd gentlewomen mantled and veiled to obscurity, with maids in tow. All were in pairs; I felt conspicuous on my own. I was stared at with impunity, especially by the men. Women are experts at the cross-gaze; why do men have to look directly? Was I overdressed in my finest, or not smart enough? Did I look like a lady’s maid who had done away with her lady, or a prostitute, even? For, unaccompanied, I became a public woman, a term I used to reserve for those whose coquettish walks, kiss-me-quick ringlets, and slightly-too-trim trimmings sought to be noticed, and paid for. Oh, for an escort on to whose arm I could cling, to allay my fellow street-goers’ curiosity and render me invisible.

Straight up Wellington-street I went, with studied nonchalance and directness of purpose, past Somerset House on my right and Duchy Wharf down to my left, and all the way up to the top where the road was bisected by the Strand. Then I turned right, trembling but determined, and increasingly immune to the gaze of men. I was crossing paths with journalists and hacks from The Illustrated London News, which had its headquarters hereabouts, and doctors from King’s College, which I was just now passing. Through the shoppers I went, the gentlemen on fast business, the trolleys, crinolines, crossing-sweepers, hawkers, urchins, wheel-barrows, all weaving in and out of the irate, tedious crawl of carriages, cabs and buses. The noise was deafening: the iron-shod wooden wheels of the carriages rattling over the cobbles, the drivers of the omnibuses shouting their destinations, the thwarted haste of the red newspaper express, and at last I was anonymous, irrelevant, obliterated in the thickness of the crowds.

Soon I reached the church of St Mary-le-Strand, which marked the junction with Holywell-street. The traffic was at a complete standstill here, for the Strand branched into two strandlets, one of which was the narrow, dark Elizabethan lane of Holywell-street and its tortuous mesh of alley-ways, where I was headed. I could not see above the suited backs of the crowds ahead of me, so I raised my eyes heavenwards, to the overhanging tenements, the lofty gables and deep bay windows, under which hung wooden shop signs and figures, including a large carved half-moon which betrayed the mercery past of the street. The old lath-and-plaster houses huddled and skulked just like the people below, deprived of light and air but rich in dirt and disease.

At one junction with a fetid alley-way leading off into an unwelcoming labyrinth, I had to wait at a lamp-post to let people past. A notice was glued to it announcing the imminent demolition of Holywell-street and a blessed proposal of a new, straight thoroughfare to blast through the meandering pestilence and decay of this metropolitan anachronism, and bring order and circulation to the unregulated, crumbling relics of a bygone age. A gap appeared in the crowd, but before I started to move on again, I noted the sign was dated ‘July ’52’. It was the first sign I had of quite how tenacious Holywell-street was, how long it would hold out against the city-planners’ drive for light, air and hygiene for all, how it determinedly clung to its own filth.

At another pause in my journey, I spotted a small grey plaque marking the site of a holy well, which once provided succour for pilgrims bound for Canterbury, its curative water giving them a taste of the holy wonders to await them at their destination and in the next world. As I inhaled the stale air I thought ruefully of my mother’s death, and I fingered her hair-bracelet.