LONDON'S BIT OF THE EAST.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18640, 18 December 1928, Page 8

LONDON'S BIT OF THE EAST.

PETTICOAT LANE ON A SUNDAY MORNING. LONDON, October 28. Petticoat Lane! See it, find it, feel '*• smell it, this little bit of the Orient tucked away in old London. It ies near Aldgate. this narrow winding lane; vou catch its aroma on tne 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 comes wafted, coughdrops, pile high like tiny black bricks, surrounded by bottles of strange liquid that gave birth to these curative cubes. A wrinkled oirl woman was 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 with French postcards—six for tuppence —in sealed envelopes. A gawky youth slips him two pennies, and sneaks away to look at the saucy ladies with nothing on. 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 close, and you will get a whiff of the essence he brew's, solemnly measuring it drop by drop.

Corn-King and Fortune Teller. Elbowing vour way, inch by inch, through floods of youths with gaj knotted scarves about their throats instead of collars, bargaining for coats, selecting ties, men laden with bedroom china, women carrying fish, and buying 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 fine nop on which to demonstrate his skill. Hurriedly I pass on. .si An Egyptian in flowing robes, looks at the toughened palm of a >’^ n S man, and writes upon a pad: xou had poor health until you were twelve years old, but you will be healthy until you are forty-five. \ ou will marry. You are more generous than firm-willed. The youth took the slip of paper, ana a shilling changed hands.

The Australian Adjective. A Cockney Tew stands behind a stall of glass and china, and the great Australian adjective is a frequent embel lishment of his exhortation to buy. “Gor blimev, I could smash the —— vase and get more money for the pieces. Have the other one. Yes, I’ll change it if it’s cracked, but Gor blimev, don’t crack the thing going ’ome. Real cut glass, feel the weight of the bowl.” No one is shocked, nor amused. It is mere conversational embroidery to his raev Cockney patter. In the long ago, before Petticoat Lane became respectable, it was said that they would steal vour shoes off at one end and sell them to you again at the other. A genial policeman pushes his way