Rotting Hill

by Lewis, Wyndham

  Epilogue

  Post-General Election exchange of notes between Mark Robins and Charles Dyat

  3 March, 1950.

  MY DEAR MARK,

  Your “Pick the winning side” argument is only effective if the side you support is at the moment winning. With a majority of merely seven in the House of Commons you have to find a new argument, don’t you? What is it?

  CHARLES.

  DEAR CHARLES,

  Like most Tories you seem to forget that the Election was won by the Socialist Party. You will yet be disagreeably surprised by what can be done with a majority of seven. But you seem to mistake me for a recruiting-sergeant. If I were one, however, I should not be interested in you as a recruit. I should tell you to go and join some other army. Meanwhile I suggest you find some other correspondent.

  MARK.

  6. Mr. Patrick’s Toy Shop

  The business of the stories and sketches of which this book is composed is, first, the life of the Hill, of Rotting Hill. You must always supply, in your imagination, the jaded bustle of this key locality, the lumbering torrent of trucks and taxis and buses, the parasites, parade before the bored D.P.s staring out of the café windows of our overcrowded polyglot hill. Next is the big background of the city, which swells around the hill. Beyond that is the island of which the city is the capital: after that the rest of the earth—full of sub-machine-guns and atomic bombs, the grasping Yankee and the treacherous Israelite, the Russian Bear and the French Frog: an earth covered with Iron Curtains and other nightmarish features. To write of the Hill, the city must hang there like a backcloth in a play, with its theatres, cathedrals, palaces and Parliament.

  The Hill is covered with houses, as is everything else as far as the pigeon’s eye can reach, as it stands in our roof-gutter digesting our bad bread-crumbs, except for Hyde Park and the adjacent Gardens. In a sense there is no hill, for a hill you cannot see is not there. You must not think of it as prominent like the hill of Montmartre. Certainly on the west and south it is a long drop down from it, and you know it is a hill if you approach it from those directions. Even another steep little hill is stuck on top of Rotting Hill, but even that has no vista. For that its height is insufficient. So submerged in bricks and mortar, stucco and stone, is our Hill, that it would be better to say that it was once a hill, where sheep grazed, above the marshes of the Thames.

  London is as unplanned as a bush landscape, having multiplied itself like things in nature do. No Baron Haussmann came to its help, or was ever wanted apparently by the English, to arrest the suburban and sub-human, welter, to compose a city. The Circus, that is London’s Etoile, Piccadilly, is pathetically eloquent of something that just is not there.

  It is the social mutations that are my subject; first upon our Hill, but equally as the potent dissolvents affect the ten millions-odd persons in London and the forty millions-odd otherwise on the island—that big coal-mine on which they are marooned, encompassed by the Atlantic and other waters: trading for food, machinery and whisky, tweed suits, and coal when the miners will work: heedless breeders, as the food grows scarcer, as though fifty millions was not thirty too many upon any sort of island.

  The shops of Rotting Hill are still well enough stocked, there are provisions for the rentier spending his capital and for persons with good jobs. There is less food than there was two or three years ago, and two years hence there will be much less. The sidewalks are obstructed by hobbling women crippled by living in unheated winter rooms, and perhaps because of draughty undergrounds if they were driven there by the air-war, or surface shelters—war-rot got in their joints. For these the shops have much less food. England is busy (or its old politicians are) killing off its middle-class dowagers and superfluous women—it has doomed them to privation, England that is old itself and a little mad; and it looks with a fish-cold eye upon its pensioned workers, men and women. So to move with reasonable expedition along the narrow pavements of Rotting Hill is impossible, because of the overplus of invalids of both sexes, but mostly women.

  Mr. Patricks is a mighty salesman, a pocket-Selfridge. He functions in the busiest part of Rotting Hill, strategically placed close to stations and bus stops, where the over-populated Hill discharges itself and refills itself again daily, rivalling any hectic centre of business in London. Thousands pass his door, buzz round his kiosk, where a member of his staff is always stationed, swarm inside for this and that. He stocks everything from paper-kites to shoelaces, from “Die Welt” to ice-cream. When sweets came off the ration he ordered tons of chocolate. It was the only instance of defective judgement I know of where this remarkable man is concerned, for chocolates and other sweets went on the ration again almost at once. As his brother-in-law said, with anything so irrational and unpredictable as the Food Ministry one never knows where one is. I still felt that Mr. Patricks ought to have known sweets would not stop off the ration long. But he is excitable. When he smells profit he pounces, with the rashness of a terrier. As the boxes of chocolate were being brought in, two days after the ration had been reimposed, and I watched him eyeing them, I laughed. At once he laughed too.

  Physically, Mr. Patricks is quite tireless, as nimble as a monkey, as merry as a sardonic grig. This little spectacled Yorkshireman—for he is no Londoner and proud of it—has brought into the relaxed atmosphere of Rotting Hill the exasperated vitality of the great steel city, his place of origin. And his toy, newspaper, stationery, tobacconist trade is terrific.

  His toy shop is the youngest child of Mr. Patricks’ brain. It is in that he is at his best, though he rushes everywhere and does everything. He sells toys and is himself like a wound-up toy, which works ten hours a day and in fact only stops its mad rush when you lay it down on a bed. That is the sort of toy it is.

  In personal appearance he is a small-size Everyman, drab and unnoticeable. When you know him, however, Everyman expands, puts on spiritual weight. In the case of Mr. Patricks he becomes a little well of explosive vitality. You do not have to lower a bucket into it, it bursts and spits gaily up in your face—so do not let us call it a spring but a tiny geyser. And there is no bad temper in his face.

  His countenance is that of Jean-Paul Sartre without the wall-eye, of a sallow tan: you have to add horn-rims and a slight scrubby moustache. But with these modifications, he comes very near to Sartre, so much so that I sometimes even have the illusion of a wall-eye (unless one of his eyes does actually shoot off and stare skywards, I couldn’t swear that it didn’t). There is often, too, an anguished look. It is the existential mask. Lastly the hair is ruffled like a schoolboy’s. That is Sartre-like, too.

  Of all his Sartrian attributes it is perhaps his corrugated forehead which is the most important. It stamps him more than anything: it is the ruffled surface, ploughed up and graved by the restless contriving beneath, as much as his trousers which are always horizontally creased by his ceaseless violent locomotion. So we have a facial index of the strain involved in conducting a high-pressure petty trade, as much as big business: making good buys from smart Jewish travellers—computing the number of paper-windmills that will sell in a trimester, or toy dartboards in a twelvemonth—working out why the public would buy American Parker pens when you never knew if it was a smuggled article, but now that it is plentiful, oh, what a buyers’ market! (the solution, of course, not public perversity, but because everybody stocks them): computing, too, how the baby-slump will affect the purchase of individual articles, knocking some out, bolstering others—guessing right as to the true nature of the slump itself—considering Cripps’s health, as that regards a slackening of the pressure on tobacco. But I do not suggest that Mr. Patricks watches bulletins re Cripps’s condition as would a good stockjobber: but he is no rabbit darting in and out of its hole. He is an intelligent agent.

  This Sartre-faced petit bourgeois (as Sartre would call him) rushes into the office with a haggard look, a fountain-pen lying in the palm of his hand: stops in front of his big brother-in-law, and looks up into his e
yes. “Her son has sent it back,” he says. “Oh!” says Tom Carr. “He has, has he!” “Yep. Says she wants something that will go through a carbon.” They both gaze at the pen, and then at one another, emptily. Mr. Patricks asks: “Shall I give her a Blacknose?” Tom is silent. Puzzled, I observe: “But this one would carry perfectly well through a carbon.” Tom smiles. “That,” he says, “is the point.” He shrugs his big Scottish shoulders. “It would be impossible to convince her that it would. Her son is in Wales. He says you can’t get a carbon with it. If you say you can, she says you’re a cheat and a liar.” He looks at me for a moment with a blackness charged with meaning. “No other pen sells,” he observes pointedly, “for the same price.”

  Ten minutes later I stooped over a copy of The Leader, looking at du Maurier’s illustrations to “The Moonstone”, at the magazine counter. Mr. Patricks held up one of his giddy rushes to squeeze my forearm and to half-whisper “I got another ten bob out of her!” looking down the shop at her. The Sartre corrugations are gone—he is the schoolboy who has snatched an apple from a tree under the farmer’s nose, or rung a housebell and skipped to the corner to observe the householder poke his head out and look angrily up and down the street. Many business magnates perpetuate I think the sports of childhood, just as general officers do. Mr. Patricks’ beer would taste sweeter that night. He played Indians and took the scalps of the stupid. But he was not mercenary.

  Now, for London Mr. Patricks feels all the typical contempt of the industrial North: contempt for courtiers and money-jugglers, for Threadneedle Street and Birdcage Walk, for Lombard Street and Mayfair. Cockney humanism he scorns as soft. As unclassconsciousness, a bad voter, the creature of another, unregenerate day, of donkey barrows and Pearly Kings—and Pearly Kings of course would be, as he saw it, satellites of the authentic fairy-tale anachronism whose image and superscription adorned the money in his till. He is sarcastic but tolerant of such things. He knows that peers all hired their robes and coronets from Moss Brothers who stocked the required fancy-dress—his brother-in-law had told him: and all that goes on there he regards as typical of London. The arch-spivs in hired regalia at coronations, and the Lord Mayor in his fairy-tale coach, with powdered footmen, completes his picture of this spiv metropolis. His politics are not aggressive, though he does not hide them. When, in a by-election, the socialists gained Hammersmith, his brother-in-law told me they had lost a lot of customers. People came in with long faces exclaiming, “What do you think about Hammersmith! “To which they would answer, “What have we got to think about? Our party has, of course, got in again.” After a horrified stare, customers would bolt out of the shop. It did seem to me that for a day or two the shop was a little empty: though some customers, I think, would merely go to the Irish House at the corner, have a stiff whisky, and come back and buy a socialist steam-roller (rolling both ways a dozen times) for little Freddie, or a half-ounce of labourite snuff.

  “Spiv” is a sound Mr. Patricks enjoys making. When he is dealing in sociological generalities—which he rarely has time to do—“the spiv” plays an important part. This is, of course, because most of his customers are spivs: and they are the spivs of all nations, what is more. There are female spivs as well as male spivs. There is a shrill old Frenchman, for instance, who Mr. Patricks says is in the black market in quite a big way: he is always accompanied by two dogs, one named Josephine and the other Napoleon (alas, the latter is stonily indifferent to the former). Business acumen is admired by Mr. Patricks, but this old French rascal is an adept at wasting the shopman’s time without any adequate financial return. He and his dogs track him down, even if he retires into the office. Napoleon will enter the office and bar his exit to the basement stairs, eyeing his trousers significantly. He once bought a fountain-pen, changed it six times for cheaper and yet cheaper pens every time, and ended up with a ball-pen at seven and sixpence which he always brought in for repairs. Mr. Patricks hates Napoleon and Napoleon hates him—and if the Corsican does not end by taking a piece out of his calf I shall be very surprised.

  When he knows you Mr. Patricks will roll a cigarette, and the city in which he has lived and traded for seventeen years is a subject he is by no means indisposed to touch on. He does not speak about the costers or the Crown: that was my gloss, though it is altogether faithful to his thought. What he will tell you is that London is “not creative”: his forcible Yorkshire accent caresses the word “cre-a-tive”. “What does it make?” he will urgently enquire of you. And he answers his own question: “Nothing!” (In Sheffield, which the Patricks family have lived in since it was a hamlet, everyone is engaged in “creation”, that is understood, or in catering and caring for heroic “creators”.) He demands disparagingly, his brow a ploughed field of brown furrows—“But what do they do here after all? They’re a lot of spivs—well, isn’t that what they are?” And I know of course that he looks upon me as a spiv of sorts: I have much too much time on my hands, to hang about toy shops and to look at newspapers—though he does catch signs of my name or face, in the latter sometimes—not to merit the epithet. “They’re all fiddling, aren’t they?” To which one is obliged to assent—to “fiddle” being to break the law. “All are trying to sell to somebody else, something the law says they mustn’t sell, or trying to swindle someone out of money they did not make. They’re parasites on the rest of the country, that’s what they are! London is not the head of England is it? If it were destroyed the rest of the country would get on better without it!” And he will switch off the diatribe to turn and cry to some hovering customer, so as perhaps to make him jump, “Yes, Madam! What can I do you for?” and to proceed to sell something he has not made at possibly a thoroughly spiv price. But he has the wit to recognize the inconsistency and he would laugh with you at himself, if you were to point it out.

  Before Mr. Patricks became a shopkeeper he was an engineer. When young he worked with the Yanks in engineering outfits in Caracas and elsewhere in that region: he knows what it is to “create” where nature—the great Spiv—is at its most disordered, violent, and uncreative. As a loyal socialist he is, I think, neutral regarding the “intellectuals”, the brain-trusters, ruling us at present: but from his brother-in-law, who is franker, I know that they both would rather have plainer men. They would rather have simple non-intellectual fellows who were not such insanely orthodox taxers, and left cigarettes alone. But Mr. Patricks would not confide in an “educated man”. He has a sort of pudeur about that side of his politics.

  On the way to Mr. Patricks’ shop is the chemists, Willoughs Brothers. I am not deserting Mr. Patricks in favour of Willoughs Brothers, I merely stop there to buy a pair of nail scissors. A conversation I had with Mr. Willoughs indirectly involves the politics of the master shopkeepers I have been writing about, and touches on his birthplace.

  If I shall be dwelling for a moment upon quite trivial things, nail-scissors and toilet accessories, let Socrates “great mountain asses,” be my precedent. I am often reminded of Cleanthes complaint, in the Symposium, for men’s snobbery with regard to common things is only successfully challenged, at times, by the painter: the writer is seldom allowed to get away with a pedestrian subject-matter (however elevated his motive may be), the equestrian is exacted. The most august problems of politics, however, are implicit in a simple pair of nail-scissors, as I have just discovered, and the housewife’s sugar cube leads one irresistibly to the tragedy of the entire Caribbean area, as a loaf of bread of dirty grey—half-way to black—holds the story of a lost or rapidly vanishing civilization within its dry bran-laden crust. Yesterday a whole world of small everyday objects we took for granted: whereas today they have swollen until they have taken on portentous dimensions. A card of safety-pins or a man’s utility shirt hardly can be described as pedestrian, and I beg their pardon.

  Willoughs Brothers are across the road from the public clock in Rotting High Street: they have been there as long as the clock, which ticked out the landed society at the Repeal of the Corn Law
s, and ticked in the Liberal era, which conducted to the Welfare State. I stepped in and crossed the shop to Mr. Willoughs. I asked him if I might see some nail-scissors. Mine have for some time been defective: but as practically everything is that way, I have grown used to the waste of time involved in using them. The nails do not cut, they fold over the blade of the scissors. The blades far from kissing, keep as far apart from one another as possible. I explained the position to Mr. Willoughs.

  When I went up to him, that almost ham druggist, a stock white-haired Hollywood feature-player, blanched in the service of Esculapius, bent his eyes upon me gravely: for he saw that service, which he was ever ready to bestow, was about to be solicited. When he had heard my—oh, my desideratum, he coughed lightly and said “Well!” As he looked at the ceiling, he expelled in a short quiet bark some tired air from his lungs. Then he eyed me with a scrupulous man’s dramatic frustration. “I am waiting, Mr. Lewis, for another consignment of French scissors,” he said briefly. “French scissors?” I enquired, genuinely surprised. “Yes,” he answered shortly, “I don’t know when I shall get them though. Perhaps next week.” “Where else round here,” I enquired, “do you think I am likely to find some?” “I don’t know. But I don’t recommend you to buy any scissors in Rotting Hill, Mr. Lewis. They’re English. And they’re not good! All the English scissors I have had have been bad!”