Part 6

The old recreation room is fitted with a permanent stage for theatricals and concerts. It is also our "Movie Palace." (I think our hospital was the first to instal a cinematograph as a fixture.) During the morning the floor area is dotted with miniature billiard tables--which are never for a moment out of use. In the afternoon these are removed; some hundreds of chairs replace them; and at 4.30 we begin an entertainment--music, a play (we have had Shakespeare here), lantern slides, films, or what not. Those entertainments, which have continued unbrokenly since the hospital began to function in 1914, constitute the outstanding feature of the "good time" enjoyed by 3rd Londoners. The "Old Rec." and its crowded concerts will be a memory cherished by hosts of fighting men from the homeland and from overseas.

In the original hospital plan--drawn up before the war--the Old Rec. (which is a part of the main school building) was marked down to be a ward of forty beds. Its structure, its internal geography, and the sheer impossibility of providing it with the essential sanitary conveniences, would make it unsuitable to be a ward of four beds, let alone of forty. On this account its allotment for recreation purposes would be excusable. But the Old Rec. and the New Rec. too, for that matter, justify their superficial waste of bed-space on other--and unanswerable--grounds. It is a mere matter of common sense to arrange some centre to which the patient can repair and employ his leisure when he is sufficiently well to potter about though not well enough to be discharged from hospital. Instead of idling in his ward and disturbing the patients who are still confined to bed--and who, often, are urgently in need of quietness--the convalescent departs to one or other of the recreation rooms, morning and afternoon, where he can make as much noise as he likes and where he can meet and fraternise with his comrades from every front. (What exchanging of stories those recreation rooms have witnessed!) On the one hand, then, the seriously ill patient is not annoyed by the rovings in the ward of the walking patients; and on the other the walking patients are not irked by the necessity for keeping quiet at a period when returning health stimulates them to a wholesome desire for fun. Both kinds of patients, thus, may legitimately be said to get better more quickly than they would have had a chance to do were it not for the recreation rooms. It is within the writer's knowledge that the medical staff of the hospital, on being consulted as to the "bed value" of the recreation rooms, unanimously agreed that their existence reduced the average sojourn of the hospital's inmates by a definite "per day" ratio: that ratio, so far from showing a bed-space waste, worked out at a per-annum gain of bed-space equivalent to a ward--if such a colossal ward could conceived!--of upwards of 300 beds. So much for a point which might not appear to be worth detailed explanation, but which has here been glanced at in order that critics (for, unbelievable though it sounds, there have been curmudgeons to growl of spoiling the wounded by too much pleasure) may be answered in advance. The recreation rooms are a paying investment both to the hospital and to the State. This is our trump card in any "spoiling the wounded" controversy--though I dare say that most of us would not, in any case, care twopence whether the concerts and films and billiards were an investment or an extravagance: nothing would stand in the way of our ambition to provide the now proverbial "good time" for all the guests of the 3rd London.

Scores of concerts of an excellence which would have been noteworthy anywhere have been presented to our assemblages of wounded in the Old Rec. Singers, musicians, actors and actresses have come and given of their best. Miss Hullah's Music in War Time Committee (that delightful body), and Mr. Howard Williams's parties, are perhaps our greatest regular standbys. Certain sections of the public know Mr. Howard Williams's name as a famous one in other fields of activity: to thousands of soldiers it is honoured as that of the man who tirelessly organised scrumptious tea-parties, pierrot shows, exhibition boxing contests, nigger troupe entertainments--a list of jollifications, indoors in winter and in the open air in summer, infinite in variety and guaranteed never once to fall flat. A curious Empire reputation, this of Mr. Williams!

Yesterday, for instance, a nigger troupe visited the hospital. To be exact, they were the Metropolitan Police Minstrels ("By Permission of Sir E.R. Henry, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., C.S.I., Commissioner"); but no member of the audience, I imagine, could picture those jocose blackamoors, with their tambourines and bones, as really being anything so serious as traffic-controlling constables. That their comic songs were accompanied by a faultless orchestra was understandable enough. One can believe in a police band. One is not surprised that the police band is a good band. To believe that the ebony-visaged person with the huge red indiarubber-flexible mouth who sings "Under the archway, Archibald," and follows this amorous ditty with a clog dance is--in his washed moments--the terror of burglars, requires unthinkable flights of imagination. As I gazed at this singular resurrection of Moore and Burgess and breathless childhood's afternoons at the St. James's Hall--the half circle of inanely alert faces the colour of fresh polished boots--the preposterous uniforms and expansive shirt-fronts--the "nigger" dialect which this strange convention demands but which cannot be said to resemble the speech of any African tribe yet discovered--I found that by no effort of faith or credulity could I pierce the disguise and perceive policemen.

It is at least twenty years since I met a nigger minstrel in the flesh. Vague ghosts of bygone persons and of piquant anachronisms seemed to float approvingly in the air: the Prince Consort, bustles, the high bicycle, sherry, Moody and Sankey, the Crystal Palace, Labouchere, "Pigs in Clover," Lottie Collins, Evolution, Bimetallism: hosts of forgotten images, names and shibboleths came popping out from the brain's dusty pigeon-holes, magically released by the spectacle of the nigger troupe.

Yes, I was indeed switched into the past by Mr. Bones, Massa Jawns'n and the rest. And yet the present might have seemed more emphatic and more poignant. One felt, rather than saw, an audience of several hundred persons in the dim rows of chairs. And laughing at the broad witticisms of the niggers, or enjoying their choruses and orchestral accompaniments, one forgot just what that half-glimpsed audience consisted of; what it meant, and how it came to be here assembled.

Of course when the lights were turned up in the interval, one beheld the usual spectacle: stretchers, wheeled chairs, crutches, bandaged heads, arms in splints, blind men, men with one arm, men with one leg: rank on rank of war's flotsam and jetsam, British, Australians, New Zealanders, Newfoundlanders, Canadians, come to make merry over the minstrels: in the front row the Colonel and the Matron, with officer patients; here and there an orderly or a V.A.D.; here and there a Sister with her "boys." It was a family gathering. I descried no strangers, and no one not in uniform--unless you count the men too ill to don their blue slops: these had been brought in dressing-gowns or wrapped in blankets. No mere haphazard audience, this, of anybody and everybody who chooses to pay at a turnstile! Entrance to this hall is free ... but the price is beyond money, all the same.

A family party it was, decidedly. Thick fumes of tobacco smoke uprose from it. (Shall we ever abandon the cigarette habit, now?) Orderlies continued to arrive and stow themselves discreetly in corners: by some strange providence each orderly had found that for a while he could be spared from ward or office. Staff-Sergeants, Sergeants, Corporals--mysteriously they made time to leave their various departments. Even a bevy of masseuses (those experts eternally on the rush from ward to ward) had peeped in to see the nigger minstrels. And everybody was pleased: every jest and every conundrum got its laugh, every ballad its applause. Not that we ever "give the bird" to those who come to amuse us. Offer us skill in any shape or form--pierrots, niggers, pianist, violinist, conjurer, ventriloquist, dancer, reciter: any or all of these will be appreciated warmly.

Yesterday, for the nigger minstrels, there were no empty chairs. Until, in the midst of Part II ("A Laughable Sketch"--_vide_ the programme--wherein female rôles were doubly coy by reason of the masculinity of their falsetto dialogue and remarkable ankles) a messenger stole hither and thither, whispering to the orderlies, who promptly tiptoed from the room.

A convoy of new arrivals demanded our presence.

The silent ambulances were gliding up to the entrance of the hospital. Orderlies, fetched from their jobs and from the entertainment, lined up in the rain to take their places in the quartettes of bearers who lifted out the stretchers. The Assistant Matron, standing in the shelter of the door, checked her list; the Medical Officer handed out the ward tickets; the lady clerks from the Admission and Discharge Office took the patients' particulars. And the bathroom became very busy.

As I started to wheel a much-bandaged warrior to his ward, the recreation-room door opened and a burst of music-cum-essence-of-nigger emerged on his astonished ears. I was a little doubtful as to whether our new guest would not think his reception somewhat flippant in key. The poor fellow was visibly suffering, and the sound of tambourines and comedians' guffaws seemed a scarcely proper comment on his condition. I might have spared myself these misgivings. "Say, chum," he interrogated me feebly, "what's that noise?" "Nigger minstrels, old man." "Golly!--and have I got to go straight to my bed?"

Alas, he had to. It would be long before he could be well enough to be taken to one of our entertainments. But, had he been given his way, he would have gone direct from his fatiguing overseas journey into the Old Rec. to join the family party and chuckle at Mr. Bones and Massa Jawns'n.... No doubts assailed _his_ mind as to whether it was right to "waste bed-space" on mere frivolities. A nigger minstrel show was to him a deal more important, in fact, than his wound. And perhaps, in instinct, he was not far wrong.

XII

THE COCKNEY

Before I enlisted I was lodging in a house which it was occasionally convenient to approach by a short cut through an area of slumland. One night when traversing this slum--the hour was 1.30 a.m.--I was stopped by a couple of women who told me that there was a man lying on the ground in an adjacent alley; they thought he must be ill; would I come and look at him?

They led me down a turning which opened into a narrow court. This court was reached by an arched tunnel through tenement houses. The tunnel was pitchy black, but I struck matches as I proceeded, and presently we came upon the object of my companions' solicitude--a young soldier, propped against the wall and with his legs projecting across the flagstones. The women had, in fact, discovered him by tripping over those legs in the darkness.

They were slatternly women, but warm-hearted; and when I had managed to arouse the gentleman in khaki and hoist him to his feet (for the cause of his indisposition was plain--and he had slept it off) they called down blessings on my head and overwhelmed our friend with sympathy which he did not wholly deserve and to which he made no rejoinder. Nor did he vouchsafe any very lucid answer when I asked him whither he was bound. I was prepared to pilot him--but I could hardly do so without knowing towards which point of the compass he proposed to steer, or rather, to be steered. "I know w'ere I wanter go," was all I could get out of him. Very well; if he knew his address, it was no concern of mine; he could lead on; I would act as a mere supporter. In this capacity, with my arm linked firmly in his, I brought him forth from the tunnel to the street (he had no wish, it seemed, to go through the tunnel into the court), and here we bade farewell to the ladies.

"Which way now?" I inquired. My charge responded not, but crossed to a corner and meandered up one of those interminable thoroughfares which lead out of London into the suburbs. Trudging with him and helping him to sustain his balance, which was not as stable as could be wished, I plied him with mildly genial conversation and at last elicited a few vague answers. These were couched in the cockney idiom, but I caught a faint nasal twang which led me to suspect that the speaker had come from the other side of the Atlantic. Yes--he told me he had just arrived from Canada.

We had proceeded a short distance when on the further side of the street I descried a golden halo which outlined the silhouette of a coffee stall. It occurred to me that a cup of hot coffee would be a good tonic to disperse the last symptoms of my friend's indiscretion, so I deflected him across the road, and we brought up, together, alongside the coffee-stall's counter.

Lest the reader should be unacquainted with that unique creation, the coffee-stall, I must explain that it is nocturnal in habit, emerging from its lair only between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. It is an equipage of which the interior is inhabited by a fat, jolly man (at least according to my experience he is always fat and jolly) surrounded by steaming urns, plates of cake, buns of a citron-yellow hue, pale pastries, ham sandwiches and packets of cigarettes. The upper panels of one of its sides unfold to form a bar below and a penthouse roof above, the latter being generally extended into an awning. The awning is a protection for the customer not against the sun--a luminary from whose assaults the London coffee-stalls have little to fear--but against the rain. Thanks to these awnings, and the chattiness of the fat, jolly man, and the warmth exhaled by the urns, and the circumstance that the public houses are shut, our coffee-stalls are able to sell two brownish beverages, called respectively coffee and tea, which otherwise could hardly hope to achieve the honour of human consumption.

Fate has guided me on many midnight pilgrimages through the town, and I have imbibed, sometimes with relish, the liquids alluded to; I have also partaken of the pallid pastry and the citron-yellow buns. I am therefore in a position to write, for the benefit of persons less well informed, a treatise on coffee-stalls. This I shall refrain from doing. The one point it is necessary for me to mention is that the fat, jolly man, being deplorably distrustful, does not supply casual customers with teaspoons. You may have a cup of alleged tea (one penny) or a cup of alleged coffee (one penny); a dollop of sugar is dropped into the cup; the fat, jolly man gives the mixture a stir-round with a teaspoon; then he places the cup before you on the bar; but the teaspoon is still in his grasp. I dare say he would lend you the teaspoon if you requested him to do so; but unless you have that audacity he prefers to keep the teaspoon on his side of the bar, out of harm's way. This may seem strange, when you perceive that the teaspoon is fashioned of a metal unknown to silversmiths and might be priced at threepence. But even a threepenny teaspoon is a souvenir which some collectors would not despise.

Presumably regular customers receive teaspoons, for teaspoons lie in a heap on the fat, jolly man's side of the counter. This was the case at the coffee-stall before which the young soldier and I ranged ourselves. And the heap of teaspoons seemed to exercise a curious fascination upon the soldier. He continued to stare at them for some minutes after I had set in front of him his cup of coffee. Then he stared at the fat, jolly man, who was cutting slabs from a loaf. He stared for a long time, making no reply to my remarks.

Rain began to patter on the awning--it had rained earlier in the night--and I became aware of a figure, lurking in the background on the pavement, beyond the awning's shelter, but within the radius of the haze of light projected therefrom. It was a wretched, slinking figure, that of an elderly man with bleared eyes and a red nose: one of those pariahs who haunt cabstands and promote the cabs up the rank when the front vehicle is hailed. This special specimen of his breed appeared to be a satellite of the coffee-stall proprietor: perhaps he helped to tow the stall to its berth. Whatever might be his function, he lingered on the outskirts of the ring of light, watching us; and the young soldier, in his slow scrutiny of the stall and its surroundings, caught sight of him, and stared stolidly, as he had stared at everything else.

I was in the act of drinking my coffee when the soldier suddenly leant across the counter, picked up a spoon, turned, and threw it at the derelict whose face wavered on the edge of the lamplight's circle. The victim of this extraordinary attack dodged the missile, then grovelled after it in the gutter. Meanwhile the fat man (instantaneously ceasing to be jolly) gave vent to an angry protest.

"Wotcher do _that_ for? Chuckin' my spoons abart! Drunk, that's wot you are!"

"Ain't drunk!" said the soldier.

"Wotcher chuck my spoon at 'im for, then? 'E ain't done you no 'arm."

"Yus 'e _'as_," was the soldier's surprising retort.

"No 'e ain't."

"Yus 'e _'as_."

"No 'e 'ain't. 'E ain't done you no 'arm."

To which the derelict chimed in (he had retrieved the spoon and now advanced timidly with it under the awning): "I ain't done _you_ no 'arm"--a husky, whimpering chorus to his fat patron.

The soldier fixed the derelict with a fierce glare. "Yus you _'ave_," he reiterated.

I was wondering how the dispute might develop, but evidently my ear is unattuned to the nuances of these dialectics. The soldier's glare and the soldier's tone must have betrayed themselves to the two other men as factitious; the derelict, anyhow, lost his nervousness and, approaching nearer, scanned the soldier with dim, peering eyes; then broke into a joyous grin and exclaimed:

"Lumme, if it ain't ol' Bert!"

And the fat man, leaning on his counter, and likewise examining the soldier, cried, "Ol' Bert it is!"

"Knew you in two ticks," grunted Bert. "Same ol' 'Arry." (This was the derelict.) "Same ol' 'Erb." (This was the fat--and once again jolly--man.)

Explanations ensued. Bert, the young soldier, was a native of these parts. He had emigrated to Canada five years previously. To-night, _en route_ for the front, he had returned. Earlier in the evening there had been ill-advised libations; he had started for his home, felt sleepy, sheltered from the wet in a tunnel quite familiar to him, and there been discovered by the ladies and roused by myself. Arrived at the coffee-stall he had recognised in its proprietor a former pal and another former pal in 'Arry the derelict. To throw the spoon at 'Arry was merely his playful mode of announcing his identity.

I left the trio reviewing the past and exchanging news of the present. My services, it was clear, would no longer be required by the prodigal. He and his mates gave me a hearty good-night.

I did not guess how intimate was soon to be my association with the Berts and 'Arries and 'Erbs of the world. I was to be their servant, to wait upon them, to perform menial tasks for them, to wash them and dress them and undress them, to carry them in my arms. I was to see them suffer and to learn to respect their gameness, and the wry, "grousing" humour which is their almost universal trait. In my own wards, and elsewhere in the hospital, I came in close contact with many cockneys of the slums. Even when one had not precisely "placed" a patient of this description, the relatives who came to him on visiting days gave the clue to the stock from which he sprang. The mother was sometimes a "flower girl"; the sweetheart, with a very feathered hat, and hair which evidently lived in curling pins except on great occasions, probably worked in a factory. These people, if the patient were confined to bed, sat beside him and talked in a subdued, throaty whisper. But I have seen the same sort of patient, well enough to walk about, meet his folks on visiting afternoons at the hospital gate. There is a crowd at the hospital gate, passing in and going out; hosts of patients are waiting, some in wheeled chairs and some seated on the iron fence which fringes the drive. The reunions which occur at that gate are exceedingly public. Our East Ender is perhaps accustomed to publicity; his slum does not conceal its feelings--it quarrels, and makes love, without drawn blinds, and privacy is not an essential of its ardours. Be that as it may, these meetings at the hospital gate, which are not lacking in pathos, have sometimes manifested a tear-compelling comicality when the actors in the drama belonged to the class which produced Bert.

In a higher class there is restraint and a rather stupid bashfulness. I have seen a wounded youngster flush apprehensively and only peck his mother in return for her sobbing embrace. That is not Bert's way. He knows--he is not a fool--that his mother looks a trifle absurd as, with bonnet awry, she surges perspiringly past the sentries, the tails of her skirt dragging in the dust and her feet flattened with the weight of over-clad, unwholesome obesity they have to bear. But he hobbles sprily to meet her, and his salute is no mere peck, but a smacking kiss, so noisy that it makes everyone laugh. He laughs too--perhaps he did it on purpose to raise a laugh: that is his quaint method; but the fact remains that, whatever his motive, he has managed to please his mother. She is sniffing loudly yet laughing also, and one could want no better picture of human affection than this of Bermondsey Bert and his shapeless, work-distorted, maybe bibulous-looking mother, exchanging that resounding and ungraceful kiss at the hospital gate. I have heard Bert shout "Mother!" from a hundred yards off, when he spied her coming through the gate. No false shame there! No smug "good form" in that--nor in the time-honoured jest which follows: "And 'ave you remembered to bring me a bottle of beer, mother?" (Of course visitors are not allowed to introduce alcohol into the hospital--otherwise I am afraid there is no doubt that mother would have obliged.)

In one of our wards we harboured, for a while, a costermonger. This coster, an entertaining and plucky creature who had to have a leg amputated, received no callers on visiting day: his own relatives were dead and he and his wife had separated. "Couldn't 'it it orf," he explained, and with laudable impartiality added, "Married beneath 'er, she did, w'en she married me." As the lady was herself a coster, it was plain that here, as in other grades of society, there are degrees, conventions and barriers which may not be lightly overstepped. "Sister," however, thought that the patient should inform his wife that he had lost his leg, and prevailed on him to send her a letter to that effect. A few days later he was asked,

"Well, did you write and tell your wife you had lost a leg?"

"Yus."

"I suppose she's answered? What has she said?"

"Said 'm a liar!"