Porter for Leader

Jenny Diski

• London: A Social History by Roy Porter
  Hamish Hamilton, 429 pp, £20.00, October 1994, ISBN 0 241 12944 3
• A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650-1750 by Peter Earle
  Methuen, 321 pp, £25.00, April 1994, ISBN 0 413 68170 X

Rose was my next-door-neighbour-but-one when I lived in the furthermost reaches of Camden – three steps and one foot off the pavement and I was alienated in Islington. Rose was in her eighties and her husband had just died. I popped round to have a cup of tea and found her sitting in her darkened front room as glum as an old wife and new widow might be expected to be. ‘It’s terrible,’ she said. I nodded silently; even when tragedy isn’t surprising, it’s a bugger. ‘The bulb’s gone,’ she said, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Just like that. Bang! I haven’t got a new one, and anyway I get dizzy if I don’t have both feet on the ground. First him, now this. They say things go in threes. Gawd knows what’s going to happen next.’ Rose was a real Londoner. She’d lived in the same place since she was a child and told me once when we were chatting outside the corner shop, how she remembered the herds of cattle thundering up York Way from King’s Cross to the slaughterhouses in Market Road. ‘You could feel the ground shake under your feet well before you could see them. It was always dangerous crossing that road,’ she’d say, standing on the kerb, eyeing the cars and lorries as they streamed past.

Vol. 16 No. 23 · 8 December 1994 » Jenny Diski » Porter for Leader (print version)
Pages 12-13 | 2522 words