Now that my sister’s visit was over, now that Martyn had come and gone, foot troubles were straightened out, London explored, and now that I was comfortably settled in Mrs. Dodds’ boarding house for students in Bulstrode Street, it seemed that things were shaped for steady, hard work.
Besides all-day Life Class at the Westminster School of Art, I joined night classes—design, anatomy, clay modeling. Against London I was not quite so rebellious, though I did not like life in a great city.
I made a few friends in the school and some in the boarding house. Wattie was out in India. I plunged into work, not noticing that my face had become pasty; but, because I was always tired, I pushed and goaded myself harder. It was a long way I had come to get what London had to give. I must make the best of it, learn all I could.
I knew London well—not the formal sights only, but I knew her queer corners too. Mrs. Denny and Mrs. Radcliffe had shown me national astonishments, great sights, picture-galleries, Bank of England, British Museum, Mint, Guildhall, Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, and Windsor. I had canoed with Fred and his mother up the Thames and down. London had instructed, amazed, inspired, disgusted me. The little corners that I had poked into by myself interested me most. My sight-showers would have gasped had they known the variety and quality of my solitary wanderings. It would have puzzled them that I should want to see such queernesses.
The orthodox sights I found wearing. The Zoo I never tired of, nor of Kew Gardens, St. Paul’s, the Abbey cloisters. I took endless rides on bus-tops, above the crowd yet watching intently the throngs of humanity. I went into the slums of Whitechapel, Poplar, and Westminster and roamed the squalid crookedness of Seven Dials, which is London’s bird-shop district, entering the dark stuffiness of the little shops to chirp with bird prisoners, their throats, glory-filled and unquenchable, swelled with song even in these foul captive dens.
There was Paternoster Row too—the street of books, Lincoln Inn Fields—the world of Dickens, haunted by Dickens’ houses, Dickens’ characters, as St. Bartholomew’s Smithfield was haunted by smell of fire and the burning flesh of martyrs. From the “gods” of the great theatres I saw Shakespeare’s plays, cried over Martin Harvey in The Only Way, roared over Charlie’s Aunt, saw Julia Neilson in Nell Gwyn. That play I saw first from the “gods”; afterwards I saw it from stalls with swell friends from home. I liked it best from the “gods”, distance dimmed the make-up, the sham. In the “gods” it was vision and carried me away.
So I looked at London from different sides, mostly hating it; cities did not sit on me comfortably. There were a few little tag ends I loved, insignificant things that most Londoners scorned, but the oldness and history of it made little appeal to me.
There were fifty-two women and girls in Mrs. Dodds’ boarding house, every kind of student and all nationalities. Once I counted fourteen countries dining at one table of sixteen souls. Sometimes nationalities clashed but not often. Many foreigners were here to learn English. They learnt squabble English and slang as well as the pure language in our boarding house.
We had two large sitting rooms; one was talkative and had a piano, the other was silent for writing and study. Occasionally I went into the silent room and always got into trouble for drawing caricatures and rhyming, not for talking. Another student would look over my shoulder, see some of our queer ones—giggles were forbidden in the silent room. I would be ejected. But, being out at classes most nights, the sitting room students were not bothered by me much.
The few private rooms at Mrs. Dodds’ were small and very dismal. The other rooms were very large and were divided into cubicles by red and yellow curtains.
The girl in the cubicle next mine was a North Country farm girl, jolly and wholesome. We drew back the dividing curtains, so making our cubicles one, and had fun. We kept a big box of goodies and had feasts, making cocoa on a spirit lamp after night-school. My cubicle had a private window—windowed cubicles cost a shilling a week extra. There was a curtained alley down the middle of the big room; a window was at one end of the through alley, the door with a ventilator over it at the other.
There were five cubicles in our room. Three of us were permanent, the other two cubicles were let to transients. It was amusing to wonder who would come next into the transients’ cubicles. We had a Welsh singer, a German governess, a French mademoiselle, some little Swedish girls. Often we had two Scotch sisters in the spare cubicles. They quarrelled over the shutting and opening of the public ventilator in the aisle and sneaked on each other when one thought the other asleep. Each had to stand on her bed to reach the hook of the ventilator using her umbrella handle. Stealthily, stealthily they sneaked, but the other always heard—clash! whack! whack! whack! went umbrellas over the curtain tops!
“Ye hurrt me,” Little Scot would whimper.
“A’ meant ta,” Big Scot would reply.
Bed springs squeaked impatiently, the three permanents were disturbed. Three “shut-ups!” came from their cubicles.
The food at Mrs. Dodds’ had no more variety than a calendar. You knew exactly what the kitchen saucepans were doing without the help even of your nose. Sunday’s supper was the peak of misery. The maids were out; we helped ourselves to the everlasting monotony—same old cold ham, same salad, same cake, same sliced pineapple. Why couldn’t the salad have been other than beet-root and lettuce? Why must the cake always be raspberry slab? Why not another canned fruit than pineapple? Everyone who could wangle an invite to sup out on Sunday wangled.
When it came to bed time, one cubicle would brag, “I had roast beef and Yorkshire.”
Groans!
“I had duck and green peas,” from another cubicle.
More groans.
“Must you gloat over your greed!” from a cubicle who had suppered at home. Bedclothes dragged over heads, there was savage, “goody-hungry” quiet.
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