October 24
Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St. Paul’s, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.
Near Reilly’s Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with the inscription in both French and English: “This is easy to draw but hard to earn.” A baby’s funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge among Pink’s jam wagons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.
In the St. Catherine’s Way there is one part like a deep railway cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of warehouses and business establishments—a wonderful sight; and everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge, paused to feed the seagulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel—for market prices—but instead someone had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a cat’s rear and tail with anatomical details.
In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular literature—one brochure entitled “Suspended for Life” to indicate the terrible punishment meted out to ⸻, a League footballer. The frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles’ throats! Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, “Anything on this stall lent for 1d.” A news vendor I heard exclaim to a fellow-tradesman in the same line of business—
“They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then passe on.”
Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Koch’s The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays was displayed prominently beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.
In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for Taverns with “snacks at the bar,” and the chestnut roasters, with their buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling L’Indépendance Belge or pamphlets entitled, “Why We Went to War.”
In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.
Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ. …
Returned to the Library and read the Dublin Review (article on Samuel Butler), North American Review (one on Henry James) and dined at seven. After dinner, read: Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster, and the New Statesman. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. Tomorrow Fifth Symphony of Beethoven.