PETTICOAT LANE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3899, 4 December 1928, Page 10

PETTICOAT LANE.

A FRAGMENT OF OLD LONDON.

By

Nellie M. Scanlan.

LONDON, October 12. Petticoat Lane! See it, find it, feel it, smell it, this little bit of the Orient tucked away in Old London. It lies near Aidgate, this narrow winding lane; you catch its aroma on the breeze as you turn the corner. Sunday morning in Petticoat Lane, with its stalls and barrows, its hustling crowd, its touch of the East! Pickled eels first assail your nostrils, pungent pickled eels. Overlapping this come wafted coughdrops, piled high like tiny black bricks, surrounded by bottles of strange liquid that gave birth to these curative cubes. A wrinkled old woman i? shovelling them into little paper bags at sixpence a time. Boots, furs, beads, and platoons of gaudy tweed caps. An Indian, hung with silken scarves, tries to interest me in his wares. A man offers French postcards —six for tuppence —in sealed envelopes. A gawky youth slips him two pennies, and sneaks away to look at the risky enclosure. A Japanese, calm, immobile, polite, mixes a perfume of the East. It vies with the kippers across the way, but the kippers win by half a length. But come closer, and you will get a whiff of the essence he brews, solemnly, measuring it drop by drop. ' Elbowing your way, inch by inch, through floods of youths with gay knotted scarves about their throats instead of collars, bargaining for coats, selecting ties; men laden with bedroom china, women carrying fish, and bulging with boots. A momentary pause till the tide sweeps on, then caught in it, you are hurried along. You pause again later, in a backwater, beside Carl the Corn King. This is not a pleasant sight—the patient, an old, old man, his feet peppered with corns bared to the autumn sun. King Carl gloats over them, a splendid crop on which to demonstrate his skill. Hurriedly I move on. An Egyptian, in flowing robes, looks at the toughened palm of a young man, and writes upon a pad: “You had poor health until you were 12 years old, but you will be healthy until you are 45. Yon will marry. Your are more generous than firm-willed.” The youth takes the slip of paper, and a shilling changes hands. A Cockney Jew stands behind a stall of glass and china, and the great Australian adjective is a frequent embellishment to his exhortation to buy. “ Gor blimey, I could smash the . . . vase and get more money for the pieces. Have another .... Y'es, I'll change it if it’s cracked, but Gor blimey, don’t you crack the . . . . thing goin’ ’ome. Real cut glass, feel the weight of the . . . bowl.” No one is shocked; no one is amused. It is mere conversational embroidery to his racy Cockney patter. In the long ago, before Petticoat Lane became respectable, it was said, that they would steal the shoes off you at one end and sell them to you again at the other. A genial policemen pushes his way through the crowd, an alert eye here and there. Of course, you keep a firm grip on your purse, fasten your fur very firmly, grip your umbrella, but this is no cut-throat, slit-purse alley to-day, just a fragment of Old London with a lingering tang of the East.