London - Edward Rutherfurd [460]
They stood, a little apart, aware only of each other’s presence; they spoke quietly, so as not to attract attention.
“You will come?”
“At eight. You are sure he will not be there?”
“Certain. He is at the House of Lords now. Then he goes out to supper and cards.” She sighed. “He never changes.”
“Plays for damnably low stakes as well,” Meredith remarked. “I’ve never got more than five pounds off him at the club.”
“At eight then?”
“Of course.”
She made him a little nod of her head and moved on as though she had hardly deigned to notice him. But her heart was secretly dancing.
It was oysters for supper over at Seven Dials. Harry Dogget surveyed the gaggle of children before him. They all looked like street urchins, which they were. The two seven-year-old boys, Sam and Sep, were both barefoot and smoking long pipes; but it was common enough for children to smoke in Georgian London.
“Oysters? Again?”
The children nodded and somewhat nervously indicated the stairs. Dogget cast up his eyes. They all knew what this meant. As if in answer, there was a muffled bang from the room above; and then the floorboards announced, with several irregular but apparently heartfelt creaks, the imminent arrival of Mrs Dogget or, as Harry appropriately called her, “my Trouble and Strife”.
Harry Dogget sighed. But still, he thought, things might have been a lot worse. At least the children were shaping up well, even if, truth be told, he couldn’t be sure exactly how many of them there were. One thing though, he reassured himself, as a thud announced that Mrs Dogget was about to attempt the stairs:
“Every one of them’s a cockney. That’s for sure.”
Harry Dogget was a cockney and proud of it. People might disagree about where the term came from. Some said it meant a bad egg; others that it meant an idiot; others yet claimed something else. Nor could anyone quite say how or when it came to be applied to the Londoners – though Harry had heard it was not much used before his grandfather’s day. But one thing everyone agreed on: to qualify as a true member of this notable company, you have to be born within the sound of the great bell of St Mary-le-Bow.
Admittedly, that sound might have been carried some distance on the wind. Most of the inhabitants of Southwark, across the river, would claim to be cockneys and people living out in places like Spitalfields, east of the Tower, would usually reckon they were cockneys too – unless, as was often the case, they preferred to be thought of as Huguenots. And westward, out along Fleet Street and the Strand to Charing Cross, Covent Garden and Seven Dials nearby, men like Harry Dogget, hearing the peal of the old bell on a still Sunday evening, would nod and say: “I’m a cockney all right, and no mistake.”
Nor was it surprising that the London cockneys should be famous for their wit. Hadn’t men – old English, Viking, Norman French, Italian, Flemish, Welsh, God knows what else besides – been living by their wits in the port of London for centuries? Sharp-eyed market-traders, loud-mouthed watermen, tavern-keepers, theatre-goers, steeped in the salty, subtle and vulgar tongue of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the street people of London were swimming naturally, from their birth, in the richest river of language that the world has ever known. No wonder then that the quick-witted cockneys loved to play games with words; and, as people have from the earliest times, they liked to make rhymes.
Harry would tell his children, as soon as they could talk: “Holy Friar: that means a liar. Loaf of bread: that’s your head. Rabbit and pork: a lot