Ian Sansom - Flaming Sussex

‘ I’ll tell you what, I’ll even give you a bag to carry it away in. ’

‘ Pretty foreign birds! Pretty foreign birds! ’

It was as good as a trip to the circus, or a day at the seaside. Traders were dressed to attract attention. There was a man singing ‘Cohen the Crooner’; a tall black man with a walking stick yelling, ‘I gotta horse! I gotta horse!’; and ye olde traditional English organ grinder with ye olde traditional English monkey. There was kosher restaurant after kosher restaurant: Felv’s, Strongwaters, Barnett’s. Entertaining and enticing as it all was, my only aim was to get away and to clear my head. Buying a dog, bagels or placing a bet were most definitely not part of the plan. Other people had other plans.

‘Hey! Hey! Hey, mate! Hey, hey! Buy a dog to keep you warm?’ offered a man with a couple of shivering puppies nestling under his overcoat. He thrust the pups towards me. They were either extremely friendly or more than a little starved, licking frantically at my fingers in the hope of finding some trace of food there, their tails wagging.

‘Look at that! They like you, mate. I could ’ave sold ’em ten times over this morning, but I want ’em to ’ave a good ’ome, see.’

‘No, thank you,’ I said, handing the puppies back and going to step round him.

‘For you, because they like you, I’ll do a special price.’

‘No, thank you,’ I said.

‘What, what’s the matter, mate? Not good enough for you?’ he said, blocking my way.

‘No, I just—’

‘These are bloomin’ good dogs, these. You sayin’ there’s somethin’ wrong with ’em?’

‘No, no.’

‘Full pedigree, these.’ Not only were they not full pedigree dogs, they were nowhere near half, a quarter, or one-eighth pedigree. ‘I’ve got their pedigree right ’ere if you want to see it.’ He patted his pockets.

Which made me think of my wallet. I checked in my jacket pocket – and was delighted to find it still safely there. Smiling with relief, I turned, triumphant, only to see the Limehouse chap approaching fast through the crowd.

A popular novelist might describe the Limehouse chap as swarthy and menacing, but this hardly did him justice. In the warmth and welcome of the East End pub the night before he had seemed the perfect drinking companion: garrulous, generous, good company. In the cold light of day I could see that he was in fact the sort of chap who looked as though he’d recently done some serious damage to good company and was intent upon doing exactly the same again, except worse, the sort of chap whose middle name would have been trouble, if he’d been the sort of chap who had a middle name, which I rather doubted. Even among the rather shady figures of Club Row, he stood out in the crowd like a dark silhouette.

Petticoat Lane: The People’s Piccadiily

Pushing past the puppy-seller – ‘You fuckin’ nark,’ he called after me as I went, a traditional East End greeting – I ducked down, squeezed between some cages and slipped into a shop.

THIS, I remember thinking, this sort of indignity, is exactly what I could do without. This was what I was trying to avoid. Running around London, running around the country, always running, always hiding, always skulking. It was not the life I wanted to live.

As luck would or wouldn’t have it, this particular skulk-hole was a tailor’s – a tiny tailor’s shop, not much bigger than someone’s front room, which I guessed was exactly what it was.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ asked a jolly round-faced man behind the counter, glasses perched on his rather sweaty forehead, waistcoat tightly buttoned over his belly, tape measure loose round his neck, tailor’s chalk in one hand, cigarette in the other. Behind him two young Mediterranean-looking men were at enormous sewing machines, hammering away, hard at work, surrounded by swatches of fabric and vast lengths of cloth, piles of brown paper and, hanging everywhere, what appeared to be half-made garments. The place was like a fabric abattoir.

I glanced out of the window behind me. The Limehouse chap might still appear at any moment, in which case I’d be trapped in this tiny place, unable to escape. I looked at the tailor, with an expression that if not entirely pleading was certainly seeking understanding, and the tailor looked at me, and at my suit, with an expression that switched from curious to concerned to calculating.

It had been a relatively mild autumn and the moths from Morley’s cottage had recently been making significant inroads into all my clothes, including this – once fine, now faded and moth-scarred – blue serge suit. Morley, of course, was something of an expert on the clothes moth, Tineola bisselliella , and on the many and various methods of deterrent: mothballs, camphor wood, bay leaves, cloves, lavender, conkers and all the other standard home remedies. But whatever the deterrent, the little larvae always seem to find a way through. You can wash and you can scrub, you can scatter mothballs far and wide, but again and again the moths will come, they will mate, the females will look for a nice warm place to lay their eggs, the eggs will hatch into larvae, and destruction will ensue. There was and there is, it seems, no solution to moths. Morley’s article on the clothes moth, published in the now long-since defunct Home Notes in August 1939, is titled ‘Eternal Vigilance: The War Against Moths’, and makes for depressing reading. ‘Eternal vigilance is required,’ Morley would often say: it was one of his favourite phrases. ‘Eternal vigilance. Or all is lost.’

Glancing at my suit for a moment, the tailor said nothing.

Then, ‘Sugar lump, my friend?’ he asked.

He indicated a bowl of sugar lumps on the counter top.

‘No, thank you,’ I said, again looking nervously behind me, and again he followed my gaze, then slowly took a sugar lump from the bowl, popped it in his mouth and crunched down on it with surprising force – chromsht, chromsht, chromsht – finishing it off with relish.

‘Sir is desperate; for a new suit, perhaps?’

I couldn’t possibly afford a new suit, even here. My suit was the suit I had bought when I inherited some money from my parents.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. ‘I am desperate for a new suit.’

‘Then sir has come to the right place.’

I glanced again quickly outside.

‘Perhaps I can just use your changing room for a moment?’ I said, and gestured towards a tiny cubicle on the left, hung with a heavy, faded moss-green curtain.

The tailor shook his head. ‘No, no, no, sir. In order to fit the suit I would need to measure you up properly, in private. Total privacy. If you need a new suit.’

‘I really need a new suit,’ I said.

‘Good. Then come. Come. Quick.’

He lifted a part of the counter top, kicked open a hinged door in the counter and let me through, past the men at the sewing machines, who paid us no attention whatsoever, and through a door into a windowless kitchen-cum-fitting room, piled high with yet more fabric and pattern paper, which almost obscured the two vast, ancient, weirdly ornate full-length mirrors set on either side of the space, which gave the room the appearance of decayed imperial chaos.

‘Thank you,’ I said.