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THE NIGHTS OF LONDON
H.V. Morton
First published 1926
Tenth Edition 1938
NOTE
With the exception of 'Our Last Inn' , which has not appeared elsewhere, these glimpses of London after dark were first published in the columns of the Daily Express.
H. V. M.
London
October1926
Printed by Jarrold & Sons, Ltd., Norwich
The full streets beckon : Come, for toil has burst his bars,
And idle eyes rejoice, and feet unhasting go.
O let us out and wander the gay and golden night.
—Laurence Binyon, ' London Visions
NIGHT in London.
We are off again on more adventures. Before us lies the mystery of dark London, of London under the glow of lamps; London under moon and stars; London under fretful, dull skies. Before us, also, lies danger—the awful danger of repeating a story that has been well told already. You must leave this to me and hope for the best. I promise not to drag you through that inevitable night on the Thames Embankment or the equally ancient night in a doss-house. I will try to take you as little as I must in the well-worn footsteps of other night-errants. I may not do half so well. I do not know; for the night of London is a dark puzzle in which it is possible to find almost anything.
When night falls over London ancient and primitive things come to our streets; for night is sinister, dramatic; it brings with it something of the jungle. Beasts of prey and great cities alone in nature remain awake when darkness comes; the one in search of death, the other in search of an extra hour of life.
The very quality of the darkness in a great city like London is itself a study. The darkness of Pall Mall is different from the darkness of Bishops-gate; the lights of Piccadilly are different from the lights of the Edgware Road. And the men and women who move slowly through the streets of London at night, complex in motive, freed from work, moving for once at the bidding of their own wills, their faces bloodless in the pale stream of lamplight, gliding past in waves, a concentration of all those unknown things that have made great cities since Babylon a mystery and a heartache.
* * *
No man, I think, can say that the words 'Night in London' leave him entirely unmoved. To the student of human nature they act like a whip on the imagination, for night in London is a brief period of infinite possibility. Dickens placed strange people in strange places, but Stevenson placed strange people in ordinary places, and thus enlarged the possibilities of romance and gave life a new terror—or a new thrill. No matter how often life proves to us that pale ladies in deep sorrow (and limousines) do not glide to the pavement edge and whisper, " Follow this car and save me! " yet at night we are almost persuaded that adventures in which fate has cast us as the hero lie just round the next corner. This rarely happens; but it explains why some people get into trouble at night!
There is in the heart of the darkness an allurement that calls, promising that somewhere in this respite from day is a release from routine, telling us that the world is free to us.
* * *
Night life is the last social habit to be developed by a city. It is only since the growth of the West End, the invention of gas and the establishment of a police force that London has had the opportunity and the audacity to plunge into the night.
Roman London must have been deadly dull after dark; Saxon London duller still. The curfew which announced the official night of Norman London must have acted as a damper on any gaiety that happened to survive the Conquest. The law of the Middle Ages assumed that any man who walked the streets at night was bent on evil (which was probably true); Tudor London developed a little patch of vice and villainy on Bankside, but it is not until the Georgian Age that we observe the first Nights of London. Beyond the walls of the City had grown up the West End with its squares, and it is in this new London that we see for the first time the night hawk sitting behind the yellow windows of St. James's Street staking his estate on a throw of the dice.
I suppose no age devotes itself to nocturnal gaiety till its women dress for dinner. Mrs. Dick Whittington, I feel sure, had no evening gowns. She wore her best gown trimmed with miniver indiscriminately at noon or night; for a 'riding' along Chepe or for a State banquet.
In the Georgian Age, however, white shoulders flashed through the tinted dusk of Ranelagh and Vauxhall. In the new West End the torches of the link men grew pale in the dawn as a tired beauty was borne in her sedan chair from a rout.
The night life of the Georgians was the brilliant effervescence of the privileged few. Behind the wildest party was always the old London problem of getting home, complicated in that age by the solemn thought that Dick Turpin might be waiting with his pistols cocked behind a hedge in Mayfair. Still that did not deter them: our forefathers contrived to have a marvellous time by candlelight. We should feel a kind of reflected glory in gout.
The lights of London grew brighter in the next century till they blazed relentlessly on a boiled shirt in a hansom cab. We are now almost in modern times. The London of the Georgians had been naughty; the London of the staid Victorians became wicked; that, at least, was her reputation; and they say that where smoke is there is generally fire. Night crowds, not made up of lords and ladies but of ordinary Londoners, filled the Strand, for years the most famous street in the world, which handed over its supremacy to Piccadilly almost in our own times and fell into position as a kind of connecting link between the staid old city on the hill and the giddy young West End.
Old men who drink port have told me, when warmed up, how beautiful London was at night in those days of side whiskers and plaid trousers and Ouida. They have described to me the unforgettable sensation, unknown to this age, of waiting outside a stage door with a bunch of flowers. The Georgian night was sustained by port; the Victorian by champagne; this was the age of Clicquot. A series of sharp explosions and a barrage of corks went up in the Strand restaurants every night as grandfather leaned single-mindedly towards his favourite ballet girl.
Now the nights of London through which we shall journey in the following pages are free to all men. The cheap restaurant, the tube train, the omnibus, have packed the West End at night. The desire to extract just a little more from life than Nature intended, confined during the eighteenth century to the quality and during the nineteenth to the man with money, is now shared by the millions of London. The bright lights call them night after night, if only to saunter for an innocent hour in the slow, exciting crowds.
This, then, is our stage. It is an interesting one. By day we can say that London obeys a master; by night she is her own mistress. She is not bound to stay up after dark; in fact the doctors say that it is very unwise.
* * *
Something more.
Among the eight millions which are London in its Greatness are thousands of men and women who sleep by day and work by night in order that we may eat new bread for breakfast, drink fresh milk, read our newspaper, and be in the position to slip unwelcome letters behind the clock before we begin a new day.
How often do we think of these children of the London night—these work-o'nights—who sleep in hushed homes with blinds closed against the daylight and sally forth at dark to perform work that upholds so much uneasiness in our lives?
What manner of people are these owls of London, and how do they like living behind the back of the sun?
I will go through the silent streets of London and discover them to you. I will describe them and their opinions and their tasks; for these are our companions in London of whom we know little, of whom we think less. . . .
But look, a little half-moon lies over the Thames! The stage is set.
Let us go out into dark streets.
The Dead City
TWO o'clock in the morning at the Bank. . . .
Arc lights burn over empty streets. It is so cold, so quiet. The Lord Mayor of London asleep behind the Corinthian columns of his dark, island house; the lieutenant in charge of the Bank Guard (soothed by traditional port) asleep opposite behind the eyeless frontage of Soane's stone money-box; the constables of the Royal Exchange asleep in the suburbs, their cocked hats on the bed-posts, their silver, Elizabethan bears above white sheets . . . dreaming of Gloriana, perhaps, who made them, or of scrubby little office boys who live on apples and leave the cores to plague their lives.
This is the Bank: the busiest scene by day in London; by night the most desolate, most forlorn! A forest has at night a hidden life; even the Sahara and the Libyan desert seem to pulse with a queer vitality under the stars, but the City of London, made by man and deserted by its creator, dies each night. Dead as Timgad, it seems; as uncanny in its shuttered trance as some lost city of old times discovered standing in silence under an indifferent moon.
I stand by the Duke of Wellington, gripped by the silence of this so recently crowded stage, feeling in some small way the horror of being the last man left on earth.
A black tom-cat of great girth and dignity comes down from Cheapside into Poultry with an air which suggests that he is the managing director of London, Limited. He alone treads roads which a few hours since would have meant annihilation; leisurely he comes, as if savouring the solitude, as if purring in the silence. He stands a moment lost in thought, and then slowly crosses the road— Cheapside to his tail, the Royal Exchange to his whiskers, the Bank to his left, the Mansion House to his right—the only living thing in the core of London's sleeping heart!
In the desolation of the Bank at two a.m. he is an event.
'Puss-puss,' I whisper.
He considers me and rejects me in the manner of cats. What right have I to be messing about in the coverts scaring the quarry? He walks to the Royal Exchange, and is lost round a corner. I wonder whether he will hunt the rat over those stones from Turkey on which London found her fortune.
A taxicab spins across from Queen Victoria Street; one of those curious unbalanced motor-sweepers releases its brushes and hums beside the kerb in Poultry, going slowly on into the lamplit solitude like an ugly garbage beetle.
* * *
I meet a policeman in Cornhill; another one in Gracechurch Street.
London must have felt like this during the Great Plague; these silent locked buildings and these dead avenues! A square mile of solitude where once was such throbbing life, where London behind her wall lived and slept, married, died, and was buried. There can be no such things as ghosts, or the empty City of London would be full of thin, mistlike clouds every night, clouds with faces in them, peering, wondering.
Who could resist going on past the Monument to London Bridge?
London Bridge deserted, twin rows of lamps over the dark river, and—such a heart-catching beauty of London lost in a faint night mist, picked out with pin stars of light, the Thames in movement round the jutting piers, barred with gold fish scales of lamplight, and, to the right, a great splendour of grey spires, and dark stones. . . . London asleep! No sound but that of a stray, petulant siren downstream; no movement in all London but an approaching red tug light on the Thames, the rush of lit water and a sudden puff of steam from the Cannon Street railway bridge; a white cloud lit with red flame for an instant and then lost. . . .
This is the time to see London, to love London, to make promises to London, to pray to London, to plead with London; for London now, grotesquely, seems all yours in loneliness, for once in the twenty-four hours harmless, unable to hurt or bless . . . lost in a dream.
* * *
I go down Lower Thames Street, where the cats are all in love, sitting crouched low, face to face, whirring inside with savage sonnets, advancing, retreating, eye to eye. I come to the Tower of London, which lifts grey walls and bastions in the night. One small window only is lit; a tiny square of gold high up in a turret. The mind fastens to it. I think of a knight hurriedly arming in the stone room and his horse ready below. ... I think of a yeoman warder with neuralgia! Such a speculative little window in a London night!
I creep to the wicket gate and peer in at the sleeping Tower of London. A shadow at the gate moves. I see the light run on steel:
'Who goes there?'
The Tower is awake : that is the discovery of a City night! The Tower is as it always was : a fortress locked with a password, locked by the King's keys, slipping back into medievalism every night prompt at ten.
'Who goes there?'
In the voice of the sentry at the wicket gate is the Voice of our London coming down, with a slight touch of indignation, over eight hundred splendid years.
When the 'Tubes' Stop
THE last train had flung its golden chain into the mouth of the tunnel. Piccadilly Station was now closed. The moving staircases were not moving, the lifts were not lifting, the 'Book Here' signs were all lies (for you could not book anywhere) : and over the ninety-six miles of tube track was a silence as of death. It was almost one a.m.
I stood in the desolate Piccadilly Circus Station watching a musical cleaner sweep up the litter of a day's tube crowd to the tune of 'Yes, Sir, She's My Baby.' Such a queer litter : reams of silver paper, bits of biscuit, chocolate, cigarette packets, envelopes, the heel of a white satin dance shoe, and —unspeakably disreputable and riotous—an old umbrella that had snapped somewhere. I thought of the things you see on the floor of a monkey's cage in the Zoo What an unfair reminder of so many thousands of delightful people now in bed. . . .
It was sad and lonely. The advertisements, to my weary, one a.m.-ish eyes, were insolent; the thought of drinking vermouth was in itself intolerable; the idea of spending a holiday in Scotland entirely loathsome.
* * *
Two whistling bill-posters arrived with a ladder, a bucket, and a roll of paper. They went to the edge of the platform.
'Is the juice off yet, Bill?'
'No,' replied Bill.
'Gimme a fag.'
They waited. A group of workmen carrying leather bags from which protruded the blunt noses of large hammers stood together at the platform's end, their attention divided between the acetylene lamps which they carried and the railway lines. This interest in the lines is characteristic of all who inhabit the tube stations when the last train has gone by. Men look at the rails as a dog looks at a sleeping cat—a will-it-bite expression! A foreman climbed down to the track, fixed a metal shoe to one conductor rail and...
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