have tolerated in life, smiling at the loud-mouthed humourists on the sweet stalls as they shout their wares and keep a smart eye on small boys whose acquisitive instincts are stronger than their ethics â and only when they think the price is fair do these people buy, for they have little money to spend and none to waste.
At half-past eleven I stood alone on the river bridge. The streets were almost deserted. The cinemas were closed, the shops dark and the inns silent. One by one the cars and cycles had departed. The last omnibus rumbled down the street, over the bridge and into the darkness.
In the square a few people remained, gossiping groups of stallholders who had just finished packing their unsold wares into their vans. Soon they were gone. The river reflected a feeble light from the star-smothered sky and a cold wind ruffled the dead grasses along its banks. A cat sat reflectively in the roadway, making up its mind to some feline purpose, and then disappeared into the shadows.
Above me the illuminated face of the clock in the tower of the town hall hung in the darkness like a genial moon and a silence settled over March, a silence broken now and then by the sibilant chatter of locomotives from the railway and marshalling yards that give so many March men employment and yet remain apart from its real life.
As I turned away a last car dashed over the bridge, the white column of the war memorial gleamed for a moment in the glare of its headlights and then March, the weekend Mecca of the fen-workers, slept as deeply as the rich encompassing fenlands.
CHAPTER 9
ALL THE WAY, PLEASE
The fare on a London General Omnibus from the Oxford Street corner of Tottenham Court Road to the end of the Number Twenty-four route at Hampstead is threepence. I know of no other journey so cheap and so interesting, and although at one time I travelled the route often and at those hours when the working crowds were packing the buses in their hurry to get to their homes, I never felt able to sit the whole while and read my evening paper. Those who travel much on buses, tubes and trains over the same journey, begin to develop a fine sense of their whereabouts at any moment during the journey, although their eyes have never left their papers. There must be some sense of combined sound, speed and time which enables a man infallibly to rise at the right moment and walk swaying down a tube compartment to step on to his correct platform, all the while reading the evening paper. To some degree I must have developed this sense. I could always feel when the bus passed certain points of the route and at those moments I would down my newspaper and let my eyes confirm my growing sense.
There is little opportunity for conversation on a bus. Even if there were, there would probably be as little of it as there is on our trains. We are not a talkative race, we are too self-conscious, and while we may long to ask questions ourselves of strangers, that does not stop us from privately condemning those who ask them of us. The result is that train travel, especially, becomes a book-guarded monotony which must be endured that we may earn the epithet âreservedâ from foreigners who mistake our absurd shyness for something much finer and less blameworthy. To sit in a tube compartment, surrounded by silent people, some reading, and most just staring blankly before them pretending to be unaware of each otherâs existence, is to be irresistibly, but not altogether unaccountably, reminded of cows. On buses this strangeness is less obtrusive. Conversation is wisely left to the conductor.
There was always a scramble for the Twenty-four. We would watch for it as it came up the Charing Cross Road, spy its number amidst the mass of traffic held up by the lights and then, as it came sailing across, run beside it along the pavement, jostling, elbowing and fighting in a friendly way to get a place by the step. Some of the more daring travellers would board
At half-past eleven I stood alone on the river bridge. The streets were almost deserted. The cinemas were closed, the shops dark and the inns silent. One by one the cars and cycles had departed. The last omnibus rumbled down the street, over the bridge and into the darkness.
In the square a few people remained, gossiping groups of stallholders who had just finished packing their unsold wares into their vans. Soon they were gone. The river reflected a feeble light from the star-smothered sky and a cold wind ruffled the dead grasses along its banks. A cat sat reflectively in the roadway, making up its mind to some feline purpose, and then disappeared into the shadows.
Above me the illuminated face of the clock in the tower of the town hall hung in the darkness like a genial moon and a silence settled over March, a silence broken now and then by the sibilant chatter of locomotives from the railway and marshalling yards that give so many March men employment and yet remain apart from its real life.
As I turned away a last car dashed over the bridge, the white column of the war memorial gleamed for a moment in the glare of its headlights and then March, the weekend Mecca of the fen-workers, slept as deeply as the rich encompassing fenlands.
CHAPTER 9
ALL THE WAY, PLEASE
The fare on a London General Omnibus from the Oxford Street corner of Tottenham Court Road to the end of the Number Twenty-four route at Hampstead is threepence. I know of no other journey so cheap and so interesting, and although at one time I travelled the route often and at those hours when the working crowds were packing the buses in their hurry to get to their homes, I never felt able to sit the whole while and read my evening paper. Those who travel much on buses, tubes and trains over the same journey, begin to develop a fine sense of their whereabouts at any moment during the journey, although their eyes have never left their papers. There must be some sense of combined sound, speed and time which enables a man infallibly to rise at the right moment and walk swaying down a tube compartment to step on to his correct platform, all the while reading the evening paper. To some degree I must have developed this sense. I could always feel when the bus passed certain points of the route and at those moments I would down my newspaper and let my eyes confirm my growing sense.
There is little opportunity for conversation on a bus. Even if there were, there would probably be as little of it as there is on our trains. We are not a talkative race, we are too self-conscious, and while we may long to ask questions ourselves of strangers, that does not stop us from privately condemning those who ask them of us. The result is that train travel, especially, becomes a book-guarded monotony which must be endured that we may earn the epithet âreservedâ from foreigners who mistake our absurd shyness for something much finer and less blameworthy. To sit in a tube compartment, surrounded by silent people, some reading, and most just staring blankly before them pretending to be unaware of each otherâs existence, is to be irresistibly, but not altogether unaccountably, reminded of cows. On buses this strangeness is less obtrusive. Conversation is wisely left to the conductor.
There was always a scramble for the Twenty-four. We would watch for it as it came up the Charing Cross Road, spy its number amidst the mass of traffic held up by the lights and then, as it came sailing across, run beside it along the pavement, jostling, elbowing and fighting in a friendly way to get a place by the step. Some of the more daring travellers would board
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