of understanding and positively digging me in the ribs. ‘Is weed, man.’
‘Weed? What on earth should I want with weed? Now if you had seedlings, or even the cuttings of a rose …’
‘I see you’s a humourisk,’ he said.
As a matter of fact, I wasn’t quite so ignorant, for I had read my Sunday papers. But this was the first time I’d seen the stuff.
‘All sames,’ he went on, closing his fingers over the little packet, ‘if you need some charge later in your evenings, come to me. Mr Peter Pay Paul is what’s my name.’
I thanked him remotely, and pushed open the door of the Moorhen’s saloon.
Within, where dark skins outnumbered white by something like twenty to one, there was a prodigious bubble and clatter of sound, and what is rare in purely English gatherings – a constant movement of person to person, and group to group, as though some great invisible spoon were perpetually stirring a hot human soup. Struggling, then propelled, towards the bar, I won myself a large whisky, and moved, with the instinct of minorities, to the only other white face I could see who was not either serving behind the bar, or a whore, of whom there were a great many there, or a person of appearance so macabre as scarcely to be believed. The man whom I addressed was one of those vanishing London characters, the elderly music-hall comical, modelled perhaps on Wilkie Bard, all nose, blear eyes, greased clothes and tufts of hair. ‘Cheerio!’ I said to him.
He eyed me.
‘Crowded tonight.’
‘Yus.’ (He really said ‘Yus’.) ‘More’s the pity.’
‘Oh, you think so? You don’t care for crowds?’
‘Course I do – when they’re rispectable. But not when they’re darkies like what’s here and all their rubbish.’
‘Rubbish?’
He gazed all round the room like a malevolent searchlight and said, ‘Jus’ look for yourself. And to think a year or so ago this was the cosiest little boozer for arf a mile.’
‘But if,’ I said, ‘you don’t like it, why do you come here?’
‘Ho! They won’t drive me out! They drove out me pals, but they won’t drive me.’
‘Drove them?’
‘They left. Didn’t care for it as it got to be ever since the Cosmopolitan opened opposyte.’
‘That’s the dance hall?’
‘Yus. They let those darkies overrun the dance hall, but they haven’t got a licence there. So what did they do? Came trooping over the road for drinks like an invasion, and turned this place into an Indian jungle.’
‘And the landlord let them?’
‘He can’t refuse. At least, he did try to for the sake of his regulars, but when he saw all the coin they dropped on to his counters, he gave up the fight, and me pals all had to move on. But not me. This is my pub and I’m staying in it till something happens and they all get thrown out again.’ And this outpost of empire stared at me with neurotic, baleful zeal.
A juke-box that had been blaring out strident three pennyworths now stopped. I edged my way over to an argumentative group around it, one of whom, a hefty, vivid-looking Negro, was shouting out what sounded rather like:
‘Ooso, man. See molo keneeowo p’kolosoma nyamo Ella Fitzgerald, not that other woman. See kynyomo esoloo that is my preference.’
The speaker was wearing pink trousers, a tartan silk shirt bedecked with Parker pens, and a broad-brimmed hat ironed up fore and aft like a felt helmet. A watch of gold, and silver chains, dangled on his gesticulating wrists.
A smaller man beside him, an ally apparently, turned to the others and said, ‘Is best let Mr Cannibal have his own choice of record if someone will please give him a threepence bit.’
No one offered, and I ventured to hand the giant a coin.
‘Oh, this is nice,’ said the smaller man. ‘Here is this nice personality who gives Mr Cannibal his tune!’ He took the coin from me with two delicate fingers, put it in the juke-box, then said smiling wide, ‘So I offer you a cigarette? And then maybe you offer me a light in your own turn?’
I took the Pall Mall, and held out my Ronson to his own. His fingers encircled it as if to guard the flame when, hey presto! the lighter was flicked from my hand, and this person had scurried through the throng towards a farther corner.
I looked about me and saw amiable laughing faces whose eyes dropped politely when mine caught theirs. I began to make my way through them towards the