SKETCHES OF LONDON.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 180, 1 August 1925, Page 21

SKETCHES OF LONDON.

(By ISABEL MAUD PEACOCKE.) PART I. EROS IN PICCADILLY. In the throbbing heart of Piccadilly, whero the streams of traffic flow from dawn to dark, and from dark to dawn again, stood Eros a-tiptoe, the lovesome boy, poised delicately, high above the passing throngs, alert, with drawn bow, eternally vigilant for lovers. Below his airy perch the water purled and pattered in the atone basin of the fountain, a soothing monotone, heard sometimes, sometimes lost in the throb and hum and whirr of myriad wheels. The little fat dolphins with their curled tails wreathed about the base of his column sprayed the rounded bronze cheekß of the smiling sea-babies bending over them with a rain of silver. And every morning came the flower girls with their baskets full and fragrant to group themselves about the fountain's base and girdle Eros with a' lovely ring of colour and perfume. . . Like votive offerings at the font of a shrine great balls of yellow primroses, plucked fresh and dewy in country lanes, gold daffodils in hosts, violets breathing fragrance, lilacs white and purple, longstemmed roses, crimson, pink and creamy, swinging great censers of sweetness were heaped about th© shrine of Eros, the boy-god. And pausing there by the fountain when the sun shone, in the shadow of its sanctuary, and lulled by the sylvan tinkle of falling water and the dewy fragrance of massed blossoms, one might close one's eyes and be beguiled into tliifiking that one wandered in flowery meadows by a murmuring stream —that the roar and throb of London was but the far-off tumult of some mighty sea; somewhere, one fancies, a cuckoo is calling, "Cuckooi Cuckoo!" But that wa3 yesterday. To-day alas! Gilbert's lovely fountain is no more, torn down to meet the demand for a new underground system. The disconsolate flower girls, dislodged, huddle with their flowery burdens around the base of an electric light standard. Eros is offered a temporary home in the Tate Gallery, lovely Eros, gallant boy, but comfortably housed among the pale marbles of that classic company will he not pine for his flower girls and their dewy offerings, for the caress of the pale London sunlight, or the lash of the rain on his slim body, for tho roar and beat.of the traffic-tideb that surged •bout bim so long, for the music of his fountain? Eroa alas! Around thy ruined shrine ■till clings the ghost of the fragrance of old, the ghost of melody of tinkling water. Somewhere, one fancies, Eros Is galling, "Alas! Alas!" , LONDON BEGGARS. ** Hark! Hark! the dogs do bark, Tbe beggars are coining to town."And they come in their hundreds. At every street corner in London they stand, the maimed, the halt and the blind, and the merely "sturdy indigent, ea£h, as the law demands, carrying on sonvi legitimate "trade," as a thin cloak to their appeal to charity. In Piccadilly a blind Jnan tapping eerily with his stick chants monotonously, "Pity the-blind! Pity the blind!" And in Oxford Circus a brother in blindness murmurs voiceless prayers, rattling his tis cup suggestively. A returned soldier* with one arm wears a placard declaring, "Np work—no penBion," and turns the handle of a dolorous Etreet piano, while in every byway seedy individuals lift up the ruins of onceexecrable voices in song. . Little old women in battered black bonnets and rusty shawls nod in doorwayß over their trays of matches, and old men in fed woollen mufflers and threadbare overcoats offer bootlaces for sale •with a listless air of non-expectancy. Here by the steps of St. Martin's and in every part of the city where the foottraffic thins sufficiently crouches the " screever " or pavement-artist to make his chalk drawings—the ever popular prince in red, blue and- yellow; the King and Queen; battleships; still life'in the shape of bananas, grapes and apples; country cottages, wind-mills— sometimes with surprising skill. His ragged cap lies invitingly in the foreground and usually a legend n faultless script runs across the pavement; "my Sole means of living. 1 '; "I am a disabled soldier"; knows this is not the work I would choose"; "The little you give mc will never be missed"; and so on. s -J The placards, too, iell their tale, false or true. An old man clean and smiling sits on his camp stool every morning in a crowded thoroiighfare, a box upon his knees, a placard round his neck, *' Too old to work at ninety"; a young man in a shabbily-respectable coat is selling matches—his label says "An exofficer." ... If true ... a pity 'tis, 'tis true. ... ■_ The street toy-merchants, balloonfellers, and men flower-sellers might perhaps resent being classed among the beggars, but they help to swell the ranks of the importunate and in some streets one has to run the gauntlet of these pavement merchants, all urging their more or less rubbishy wares in hoarse voices, and somehow the sight of a burly young man on a street corner holding a tiny dog or clockwork monkey on a string, or offering a bunch of primroses for sale > looks rather grotesque than pitiful. / "The fruits of unemployment," say the Socialists. . . "The results of the dole," says the taxpayer. . . . But there it is.

THE LONDON FLOWER GIRL.

Underneath the gaslight glitter, Stands a little fragile girl. As she cries in accents pleading, "Won't you buy my pretty flowers." The flower girl of London. Ah! My ■hattered illusions. I never saw a flower girl under forty. They are not fragile, their feet are not bare, nor their "accents" pleading, nor their clothing picturesquely ragged, with shawls about their sweet sad faces.. - They are sturdy, solidly-built women, and their faces are as hard and respectable as their severe black straw hats; they wear black dresses and spotless aprons, and they are neat and tidy and prosperous looking, and suggestive of "savings" in the bank, and their eyes do not fill with tears as they timidly offer/you a bunch of violets. They are distinctly not timid. If anyone feels timid 1 it is yourself as you attempt- to point' out, as tactfully «•

may be, the preponderance of wilted primroses in the bunch offered as "fresh this mornin'." ' "Not fresh," says th* flower girl, in "accents" at once hoarse and shrill. "Wot—not fresh. W'y, gor struf, dearie/ they're picked this mornin*. Look at 'em." (With an expert flick she conceals the wiltedrblobiris under the fresher ones.) "No better in London, an' cheap— cheaper'n Covent Garden, dearie. Struf —primrowses on'y sixpence the bunch— luvly primrowses—or vi'lets, dearie. Come on now; a sjiillin' the lot—finest in London. Tike' a bunch 'ome; tike the lot—'levenpence the bunch—a bat gain, laidy—a gift, that what it is; they're all tied up nice and proper. Thank-yer, dearie. Sweet vi'lets, primrowses, liivly in London." You had no intention of buying flowers that morning; you wished to buy hate or groceries or anything ✓else than flowers, and would have small parcels to carry and .lowers would be distinctly a nuisance in a crowd, and besides you had decided to economise in flowers until they, became cheaper—oh,'you had a dozen good reasons why you. should not buy flowers that morning.;. .'.'But the flower-girl's tactics are irresistible, and helpless, hypnotised, talked down, you find yourself in the crowded Strand with most of the flower-girl's" stock-in-trade in your hands, while che -has turned her attention to another victim with her raucous voice at full pitch? She calls you "dearie" and her hoarse voice is wheedling, but in the end she has your perfectly good money and you have some doubtfully fresh flowers and an irritated conviction' that there has been "a-catch'in it somewhere."

Oh no! The flower-girl is not "fragile."