London - Edward Rutherfurd [462]
Poor people did not frequent the new shops. Things cost more in there and besides, few shopkeepers encouraged these ragged folk to defile their premises and put off their better customers. The humble street vendors would go on their perpetual rounds, therefore, their cries and shouts filling the air so that often it seemed as if some great and noisy market had decided to up sticks and form a procession. “Hot pies!” “Buy my fat chickens!” “Oranges and lemons!” “Cherry ripe!” Or some, like the muffin man, would simply ring a bell. The hubbub was amazing.
But of all the street-sellers, the very princes of these cockney traders were the costermongers. And Harry Dogget was a costermonger.
The name originally came from “costard”, a type of large apple, and “monger”, a seller. A costermonger like Harry Dogget owned his own, splendidly painted barrow, and his own donkey to pull it. He sold fish, fruit and vegetables, depending on the day and season. The greatest costermongers were the unofficial rulers of each area, keeping order amongst the other traders and passing their position down from generation to generation in cockney monarchies. And though just below this ultimate élite, Dogget the costermonger was not a person to be trifled with. Fair in his dealings, the first to crack or to see a joke, generally liked – and by the women too, it was well known – with the same red kerchief always tied loosely round his neck, Harry Dogget was only medium-sized but very square.
“He hit me one time,” the two boys had once heard a sturdy butcher confess. “Mind, I asked for it.”
“What was it like?” someone had asked.
“I’d rather,” the butcher said thoughtfully, “be kicked by a dray-horse.”
Indeed, Harry would have been a fortunate man – if it wasn’t for Mrs Dogget.
“It’s not that she costs so much,” he would explain, “but she don’t bring nothing in neither.” A man in his position, even a costermonger, expected his wife to add in some way to the family income.
Everything had been tried to wean her off the gin. Ordinary tasks, like taking in laundry, remained unfinished. One spring he had tried taking her out to Chelsea and Fulham for a week. People from the West Country and even from as far afield as Ireland would work in the huge market gardens owned by Mr Gunter out there. But she had still managed to find gin, become drunk and smashed into a greenhouse. That summer, Harry thought he had found a solution when a friend who worked at the Bull brewery in Southwark had suggested Mrs Dogget and the children go out for the weeks of hop-picking in the big Bocton hop-fields in Kent. “I don’t think she could get any gin out there,” he had suggested. But Mrs Dogget had refused to go. “Stuck better than a mussel on a rock, she is,” Harry sighed. And that was that.
Sometimes he would wonder if it could be his fault. Had he driven her to drink? Was it his other women? But he didn’t think so. Whatever her faults, Mrs Dogget had always been easy-going. As for his occasional lapses, he fancied she might not be guiltless in that respect herself. “Some get driven to drink,” he concluded. “She just took to it.” But whatever the cause, it meant that Harry, even with his barrow, could never really get ahead; and it caused him to warn his children, all too often:
“You must look sharp now, and learn to look after yourselves.”
Which was exactly what Sep and Sam were doing.
Sometimes Sep worried about Sam’s stealing. “The Bow Street Runners will get you,” he would caution.
It was just the previous year that Henry Fielding, who as well as writing such novels as Tom Jones, was also a magistrate, had set up the first attempt at a proper London police force, which operated out of Bow Street near Covent Garden.
Sam only laughed at his brother. “You don’t have to look out for me,” he would say.
The two boys were not identical twins, but very alike, with the same shock of white hair and the webbed fingers which, though they had skipped Harry Dogget, had been passed down from the costermonger’s father. Sam was the jollier