Across from the dim archway of the Architectural Museum was a tiny grocer shop owned and run by Widow Simpson, a woman mild-voiced and spare. The little shop was darkly over-shadowed in the narrow street by the Architectural Museum. Pinched in between the grey of the street and the black of the interior, goods mounted to the top of the shop’s misty window, pyramids of boxes and cans which Mrs. Simpson sold across a brown counter under a flickering gas jet, sold to ragged children and draggled women who flung their money upon the counter with a coppery clank.
Mrs. Simpson’s trade was “penny”. She handed goods to children unwrapped but for the “lydies” she wrapped in old newspapers. At the back of the little shop was a door with a pane of glass inset. This door led into Mrs. Simpson’s “Tea-room for Students”. Here students, who wanted an entire light meal or to supplement their carried lunches, hurried at noon across Tufton Street, hatless, hungry and in paint-spotted pinafores.
The small Tea-room was centred by a round table on which stood a loaf, potted meat, jam, apples, biscuits, cheese and butter cut into ha’penny portions. In the middle of the table stood a handleless delft cup. Business was run on the honour system. You ate a penny’s worth, hurled a penny into the delft cup, ate another penny-worth and hurled in another penny. Anyone mean enough to cheat Mrs. Simpson was very low.
Mrs. Simpson trusted us about the food but not with her “cats and her kettles”. On either side of the bars of the grate fire were black hobs and on them sat copper kettles. On the floor before the fire was a spread of cats, black, tortoise-shell and tabby, so close packed that they resembled an immense, heaving fur rug. No foot-gear but Mrs. Simpson’s old felts could judge its placing among tails and paws. So Mrs. Simpson herself filled the great brown teapot over and over from the kettles. No one else was allowed to for fear they might scald a cat.
When a kettle was empty Mrs. Simpson picked her way among students and cats to a tiny door in the corner and climbed two steps. On the first step she “shoo’d”, on the second she “hist” and was answered by a concerted meowing. In her bedroom Mrs. Simpson kept special cats, along with the great jugs of fresh water drawn from some public tap in the district. The jugs were ready to refill the tea kettles and the cats to dart to alley freedom.
The Tea-room boasted two chairs and a stool. Mrs. Simpson usually lunched some dozen or more students. The first three got the chairs and stool, the next six sat on the floor, the remainder squirmed a foothold among the sitters and stood. It took planning to reach the food and to make sure it found its way into your mouth before somebody’s elbow jogged and upset it.
The Tea-room window was never open. It looked into a small yard, piled with “empties”. This place was the cats’ opera-house and sports-field. It was very grimy, a vista of dim congestion, that filtered to us through a lace curtain, grey with the grime of London.
Mrs. Simpson’s was a cosy, affectionate institution, very close to the Art School’s heart. From Mr. Ford down to the last student every one spoke gently of the little, busy woman, faded, work-worn cockney. There was a pink ridge prominent above her eye-hollows. It was bare of eyebrows. Above the ridge was a sad-lined forehead. The general drag of her features edged towards a hard little walnut of grizzled hair, nobbed at the rounding of her skull.
Even in that slum setting there was something strong, good and kindly about Mrs. Simpson that earned our respect, our love. The men-students helped her “stock-take” and shamble through some crude form of bookkeeping. When the chattering, paint-daubed mob of us pressed through the shop into the little back-room Mrs. Simpson’s smile embraced us—her young ladies and gentlemen—as sober and as enduring as the Abbey’s shadow.
We were the last shred of respectability before Westminster slummed. The Abbey had flung us over the Dean’s Yard wall into Tufton Street. Too poor for the Abbey, too respectable for the slum, the Architectural Museum and the art students hovered between dignity and muddle.
0 comments