Which made me think of my wallet. I checked in my jacket pocket – and was delighted to find it still safely there. Smiling with relief, I turned, triumphant, only to see the Limehouse chap approaching fast through the crowd.
A popular novelist might describe the Limehouse chap as swarthy and menacing, but this hardly did him justice. In the warmth and welcome of the East End pub the night before he had seemed the perfect drinking companion: garrulous, generous, good company. In the cold light of day I could see that he was in fact the sort of chap who looked as though he’d recently done some serious damage to good company and was intent upon doing exactly the same again, except worse, the sort of chap whose middle name would have been trouble, if he’d been the sort of chap who had a middle name, which I rather doubted. Even among the rather shady figures of Club Row, he stood out in the crowd like a dark silhouette.
Petticoat Lane: The People’s Piccadiily
Pushing past the puppy-seller – ‘You fuckin’ nark,’ he called after me as I went, a traditional East End greeting – I ducked down, squeezed between some cages and slipped into a shop.
THIS, I remember thinking, this sort of indignity, is exactly what I could do without. This was what I was trying to avoid. Running around London, running around the country, always running, always hiding, always skulking. It was not the life I wanted to live.
As luck would or wouldn’t have it, this particular skulk-hole was a tailor’s – a tiny tailor’s shop, not much bigger than someone’s front room, which I guessed was exactly what it was.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ asked a jolly round-faced man behind the counter, glasses perched on his rather sweaty forehead, waistcoat tightly buttoned over his belly, tape measure loose round his neck, tailor’s chalk in one hand, cigarette in the other. Behind him two young Mediterranean-looking men were at enormous sewing machines, hammering away, hard at work, surrounded by swatches of fabric and vast lengths of cloth, piles of brown paper and, hanging everywhere, what appeared to be half-made garments. The place was like a fabric abattoir.
I glanced out of the window behind me. The Limehouse chap might still appear at any moment, in which case I’d be trapped in this tiny place, unable to escape. I looked at the tailor, with an expression that if not entirely pleading was certainly seeking understanding, and the tailor looked at me, and at my suit, with an expression that switched from curious to concerned to calculating.
It had been a relatively mild autumn and the moths from Morley’s cottage had recently been making significant inroads into all my clothes, including this – once fine, now faded and moth-scarred – blue serge suit. Morley, of course, was something of an expert on the clothes moth, Tineola bisselliella, and on the many and various methods of deterrent: mothballs, camphor wood, bay leaves, cloves, lavender, conkers and all the other standard home remedies. But whatever the deterrent, the little larvae always seem to find a way through. You can wash and you can scrub, you can scatter mothballs far and wide, but again and again the moths will come, they will mate, the females will look for a nice warm place to lay their eggs, the eggs will hatch into larvae, and destruction will ensue. There was and there is, it seems, no solution to moths. Morley’s article on the clothes moth, published in the now long-since defunct Home Notes in August 1939, is titled ‘Eternal Vigilance: The War Against Moths’, and makes for depressing reading. ‘Eternal vigilance is required,’ Morley would often say: it was one of his favourite phrases. ‘Eternal vigilance. Or all is lost.’
Glancing at my suit for a moment, the tailor said nothing.
Then, ‘Sugar lump, my friend?’ he asked.
He indicated a bowl of sugar lumps on the counter top.
‘No, thank you,’ I said, again looking nervously behind me, and again he followed my gaze, then slowly took a sugar lump from the bowl, popped it in his mouth and crunched down on it with surprising force – chromsht, chromsht, chromsht – finishing it off with relish.
‘Sir is desperate; for a new suit, perhaps?’
I couldn’t possibly afford a new suit, even here. My suit was the suit I had bought when I inherited some money from my parents.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. ‘I am desperate for a new suit.’
‘Then sir has come to the right place.’
I glanced again quickly outside.
‘Perhaps I can just use your changing room for a moment?’ I said, and gestured towards a tiny cubicle on the left, hung with a heavy, faded moss-green curtain.
The tailor shook his head. ‘No, no, no, sir. In order to fit the suit I would need to measure you up properly, in private. Total privacy. If you need a new suit.’
‘I really need a new suit,’ I said.
‘Good. Then come. Come. Quick.’
He lifted a part of the counter top, kicked open a hinged door in the counter and let me through, past the men at the sewing machines, who paid us no attention whatsoever, and through a door into a windowless kitchen-cum-fitting room, piled high with yet more fabric and pattern paper, which almost obscured the two vast, ancient, weirdly ornate full-length mirrors set on either side of the space, which gave the room the appearance of decayed imperial chaos.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘No need to thank me, sir,’ said the tailor, who proceeded to measure me up for a suit I did not want and could not afford while discussing cut, buttons and what he referred to as ‘suitage’.
Measurements completed, ‘And when would sir like to collect his suit?’ he asked.
I rather suspected that he knew I had no intention of coming to collect my suit. I also rather suspected that he had no intention of making me a suit.
‘I can come—’
‘We can have it ready in a week, sir.’
‘Well. A week, then,’ I said.
‘By which time the coast should be clear,’ he said.
‘The coast?’
He nodded out towards the front of the shop.
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘We do require a small deposit, of course, sir, for this special sort of service.’
‘Of course.’
I turned away and checked my wallet. Farthings, ha’pennies, thrupenny bits – and two ten bob notes. It was everything I had.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have—’
I turned back to find the tailor, plus the two Mediterranean lads, grinning, blocking the door.
‘We’ll take whatever you do have,’ said the tailor, leaning over and plucking the ten bob notes from my wallet.
I had entered the shop in order to avoid losing money to a merciless-looking thug: I’d ended up losing money to some harmless-looking hustlers.
I had enough money left to buy a cup of tea – and perhaps make a couple of phone calls, which I duly resolved to do. I was getting out.
The tailor and the two men turned and left,