The Journal of Dora Damage(29)

When I left him, I walked due north-east through unfamiliar streets, through heckles and shouts, for close to an hour, to Clerkenwell, where I found my way to James Wilson, fabric merchants. Emboldened by Diprose’s favourable receipt of my cloth bindings – or rather, his lack of complaint – I was going to investigate whether it would be worth our binding the Bible in weave rather than in hide, to save a few pennies. The smell of dyes and fabric treatments got up my nose in the warehouse as I fingered the samples of cambrics and buckrams. I stroked the leather-look cloths, and listened as the assistant told me how suitable they were for use on everything from books to bonnets, curtains to coffins, but the prices startled me.

‘You want cloth, you gotta pay for cloth, love,’ he told me. ‘It’s the Yankees. The cotton famine. There ain’t no cotton to be had, scarce as honour right now. What you are, then? A hat-maker? A seamstress?’

‘My husband’s a bookbinder. Too busy to come out today. Apprentice is sick, you know what it’s like.’

‘Well what’s he doing sending you ’ere then, when he could’ve told you ‘isself and saved you the journey? Didn’t he know? What’s he been using all this time, then? Papyrus?’ He chuckled at his own joke while I flushed at my ignorance. Damages was not an industrial binders mass-producing cloth bindings. ‘It’s worse than the bloody Crimean, now, I’ll tell you,’ he went on. ‘See this. This is best quality Charles Winter-bottom cloth. Used to be seven pence a yard. In the war, it cost you four shillings sixpence. Now you can’t get it for less than six shillings. Why else do you think they’ve all had to go back to binding in plain boards? Nothing to fret about. They’ll become historic artefacts in a few years, them books.’

But I realised, as I mulled over bindings becoming casualties of war, and the prospect of Damages suffering the same fate, that I also had been frightened to go where I really needed to go. It was safe for me, a woman, to buy cloth. Leather was different; the tanneries terrified me.

But I set off again, this time due south-east, through the heart of the City, and over London Bridge. Each strike of my feet on the pavement was sending aches up through the very bones of my legs, and I was weary, and in need of a sit-down. The houses were miserable here, and as much in a state of disrepair and despair as their inhabitants. The closer I got to the broad, low tannery buildings, the more the cobbles beneath my feet were stained gules, and matted with clumps of fur, trod-in gristle and wool, like a peculiar red and brown moss.

This bloody carpet thickened underfoot as one neared the source of the vile smell, which had a pungency that stirred the guts with the fearsome rawness, not of death, but of the slow, putrid rot that follows. It stuck to the wheels of the wagons and vans, and to the wooden clogs of the workmen; one dared not slip, for fear of closer contact with the decaying, deathly slime. There were rickety wooden bridges over the series of tidal streams that condemned this district of London to its awful trade, providing sufficient new – one could not say clean – water twice daily for the tanners and leather-dressers. And where the river did not reach, pools of greasy brown water bubbled menacingly with poisonous gas, like pustulous, open wounds, and reeking of putrefying animal. Small boys with red legs squatted amongst them with sharpened sticks, scavenging for meat, which I hoped they would sell to the cat-meat man, and not the pie-man. Wandering amongst them were some older boys carrying buckets of dog turds, to take to the tanneries to cleanse the skins once they were out of the lime-pits; they’d get eight pence for a bucket of pure. The boys’ faces were sunken, their noses pinched, as if they had been bred to minimise the mephitic air entering their bodies.

I walked past the warehouse of Felix Stephens, for I knew we owed him, and found the sign of Select Skins and Leather Dressings. I hesitated at the door, then sidled in, to find thousands of hides stacked ceiling-wards, and a considerable number of men shouting prices, writing notes, and exiting briskly with rolls of leather under their arms.

‘You lookin’ for summink?’

‘I am,’ I said with false confidence. The man’s voice may have been youthful, but his skin was as leathered as his wares, and his arms as strong as an ox. I told him my purpose, and he pulled out for me several fine moroccos, some pigskin, and some calf, and let me peruse them all.

‘What’s this?’ I asked, pointing at a line running across the hide.

‘Prob’ly a vein. Too reg’lar to be a scar.’ He pulled out some inferior hides from another stack, and showed me flay marks, fighting scars, trap scars.