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The Docks of London by Virginia Woolf
4 Whither, 0 splendid ship', the poet asked as he lay on the shore and
watched the great sailing ship pass away on the horizon. Perhaps, as he
imagined, it was making for some port in the Pacific; but one day almost
certainly it must have heard an irresistible call and come past the North
Foreland and the Reculvers, and entered the narrow waters of the Port of
London, sailed past the low banks of Gravesend and Northfleet and Tilbury,
up Erith Reach and Barking Reach and Gallion's Reach, past the gas works
and the sewage works till it found, for all the world like a car on a parking
ground, a space reserved for it in the deep waters of the Docks. There it
furled its sails and dropped anchor.
However romantic and free and fitful they may seem, there is scarcely a
ship on the seas that does not come to anchor in the Port of London in time.
From a launch in midstream one can see them swimming up the river with
all the marks of their voyage still on them. Liners come, high-decked, with
their galleries and their' awnings and their passengers grasping their bags
and leaning over the rail, while the lascars tumble and scurry below —
home they come, a thousand of these big ships every week of the year to
anchor in the docks of London. They take their way majestically through a
crowd of tramp steamers, and colliers and barges heaped with coal and
swaying red sailed boats, which, amateurish though they look, are bringing
bricks from Harwich or cement from Colchester — for all is business; there
are no pleasure boats on this river. Drawn by some irresistible current, they
come from the storms and calms of the sea, its silence and loneliness to
their allotted anchorage. The engines stop; the sails are furled; and
suddenly the gaudy funnels and the tall masts show up incongruously
against a row of workmen's houses, against the black walls of huge
warehouses. A curious change takes place. They have no longer the proper
perspective of sea behind them, and no longer the proper space in which to
stretch their limbs. They lie captive, like soaring and winged creatures who
have got themselves caught by the leg and lie tethered on dry land.
With the sea blowing its salt into our nostrils, nothing can be more
stimulating than to watch the ships coming up the Thames -= the big ships
and the little ships, the battered and the splendid, ships from India, from
Russia, from South America, ships from Australia coming from silence and
danger and loneliness past us, home to harbour. But once they drop anchor,
once the cranes begin their dipping and their swinging, it seems as if all
romance were over. If we turn and go past the anchored ships towards
London, we see surely the most dismal prospect in the world. The banks of the river are lined with dingy, decrepit-looking warehouses. They huddle on
land that has become flat and slimy mud. The same air of decrepitude and
of being run up provisionally stamps them all. If a window is broken, broken
it remains. A fire that has lately blackened and blistered one of them seems
to have left it no more forlorn and joyless than its neighbours. Behind the
masts and funnels lies a sinister dwarf city of workmen's houses. In the
foreground cranes and warehouses, scaffolding and gasometers line the
banks with a skeleton architecture.
When, suddenly, after acres and acres of this desolation one floats past an
old stone house standing in a real field, with real trees growing in clumps,
the sight is disconcerting. Can it be possible that there is earth, that there
once were fields and crops beneath this desolation and disorder? Trees and
fields seem to survive incongruously like a sample of another civilisation
among the wall-paper factories and soap factories that have stamped out
old lawns and terraces. Still more incongruously one passes an old grey
country church which still rings its bells, and keeps its churchyard green as
if country people were still coming across the fields to service. Further
down, an inn with swelling bow windows still wears a strange air of
dissipation and pleasure making. In the middle years of the nineteenth
century it was a favourite resort of pleasure makers, and figured in some of
the most famous divorce cases of the time. Now pleasure has gone and
labour has come; and it stands derelict like some beauty in her midnight
finery looking out over mud flats and candle works, while malodorous
mounds of earth, upon which trucks are perpetually tipping fresh heaps,
have entirely consumed the fields where, a hundred years ago, lovers
wandered and picked violets.
As we go on steaming up the river to London we meet its refuse coming
down. Barges heaped with old buckets, razor blades, fish tails, newspapers
and ashes — whatever we leave on our plates and throw into our dust bins
— are discharging their cargoes upon the most desolate land in the world.
The long mounds have been fuming and smoking and harbouring
innumerable rats and growing a rank coarse grass and giving off a gritty,
acrid air for fifty years. The dumps get higher and higher, and thicker and
thicker, their sides more precipitous with tin cans, their pinnacles more
angular with ashes year by year. But then, past all this sordidity, sweeps
indifferently a great liner, bound for India. She takes her way through
rubbish barges, and sewage barges, and dredgers out to sea. A little further,
on the left hand, we are suddenly surprised — the sight upsets all our
proportions once more — by what appear to be the stateliest buildings ever raised by the hand of man. Greenwich Hospital with all its columns and
domes comes down in perfect symmetry to the water's edge, and makes the
river again a stately waterway where the nobility of England once walked at
their ease on green lawns, or descended stone steps to their pleasure
barges. As we come closer to the Tower Bridge the authority of the city
begins to assert itself. The buildings thicken and heap themselves higher.
The sky seems laden with heavier, purpler clouds. Domes swell; church
spires, white with age, mingle with the tapering, pencil-shaped chimneys of
factories. One hears the roar and the resonance of London itself. Here at
last, we have landed at that thick and formidable circle of ancient stone,
where so many drums have beaten and heads have fallen, the Tower of
London itself. This is the knot, the clue, the hub of all those scattered miles
of skeleton desolation and ant-like activity. Here growls and grumbles that
rough city song that has called the ships from the sea and brought them to
lie captive beneath its warehouses.
Now from the dock side we look down into the heart of the ship that has
been lured from its voyaging and tethered to the dry land. The passengers
and their bags have disappeared; the sailors have gone too. In defatigable
cranes are now at work, dipping and swinging, swinging and dipping.
Barrels, sacks, crates are being picked up out of the hold and swung
regularly on shore. Rhythmically, dexterously, with an order that has some
aesthetic delight in it, barrel is laid by barrel, case by case, cask by cask,
one behind another, one on top of another, one beside another in endless
array down the aisles and arcades of the immense lowceiled, entirely plain
and unornamented warehouses. Timber, iron, grain, wine, sugar, paper,
tallow, fruit — whatever the ship has gathered from the plains, from the
forests, from the pastures of the whole world is here lifted from its hold and
set in its right place. A thousand ships with a thousand cargoes are being
unladen every week. And not only is each package of this vast and varied
merchandise picked up and set down accurately, but each is weighed and
opened, sampled and recorded, and again stitched up and laid in its place,
without haste, or waste, or hurry, or confusion by a very few men in shirtsleeves, who, working with the utmost organisation in the common interest
— for buyers will take their word and abide by their decision — are yet able
to pause in their work and say to the casual visitor, 'Would you like to see
what sort of thing we sometimes find in sacks of cinnamon? Look at this
snake!'
A snake, a scorpion, a beetle, a lump of amber, the diseased tooth of an
elephant, a basin of quicksilver — these are some of the rarities and oddities that have been picked out of this vast merchandise and stood on a
table. But with this one concession to curiosity, the temper of the Docks is
severely utilitarian. Oddities, beauties, rarities may occur, but if so, they are
instantly tested for their mercantile value. Laid on the floor among the
circles of elephant tusks is a heap of larger and browner tusks than the rest.
Brown they well may be, for these are the tusks of mammoths that have lain
frozen in Siberian ice for fifty thousand years; but fifty thousand years are
suspect in the eyes of the ivory expert. Mammoth ivory tends to warp; you
cannot extract billiard balls from mammoths, but only umbrella handles and
the backs of the cheaper kind of hand-glass. Thus if you buy an umbrella or
a looking-glass not of the finest quality, it is likely that you are buying the
tusk of a brute that roamed through Asian forests before England was an
island.
One tusk makes a billiard ball, another serves for a shoe-horn — every
commodity in the world has been examined and graded according to its use
and value. Trade is ingenious and indefatigable beyond the bounds of
imagination. None of all the multitudinous products and waste products of
the earth but has been tested and found some possible use for. The bales of
wool that are being swung from the hold of an Australian ship are girt, to
save space, with iron hoops; but the hoops do not litter the floor; they are
sent to Germany and made into safety razors. The wool itself exudes a
coarse greasiness. This grease, which is harmful to blankets, serves, when
extracted, to make face cream. Even the burrs that stick in the wool of
certain breeds of sheep have their use, for they prove that the sheep
undoubtedly were fed on certain rich pastures. Not a burr, not a tuft of
wool, not an iron hoop is unaccounted for. And the aptness of everything to
its purpose, the forethought and readiness which have provided for every
process, come, as if by the back door, to provide that element of beauty
which nobody in the Docks has ever given half a second of thought to. The
warehouse is perfectly fit to be a warehouse; the crane to be a crane. Hence
beauty begins to steal in. The cranes dip and swing, and there is rhythm in
their regularity. The warehouse walls are open wide to admit sacks and
barrels; but through them one sees all the roofs of London, its masts and
spires, and the unconscious, vigorous movements of men lifting and
unloading. Because barrels of wine require to be laid on their sides in cool
vaults all the mystery of dim lights, all the beauty of low arches is thrown in
as an extra.
The wine vaults present a scene of extraordinary solemnity. Waving long
blades of wood to which lamps have been fixed, we peer about, in what seems to be a vast cathedral, at cask after cask lying in a dim sacerdotal
atmosphere, gravely maturing, slowly ripening. We might be priests
worshipping in the temple of some silent religion and not merely wine
tasters and Customs Officers as we wander, waving our lamps up this aisle,
down that. A yellow cat precedes us; otherwise the vaults are empty of all
human life. Here side by side the objects of our worship lie swollen with
sweet liquor, spouting red wine if tapped. A winy sweetness fills the vaults
like incense. Here and there a gas jet flares, not indeed to give light, or
because of the beauty of the green and grey arches which it calls up in
endless procession, down avenue after avenue, but simply because so much
heat is required to mellow the wine. Use produces beauty as a by-product.
From the low arches a white cotton-wool-like growth depends. It is a
fungus, but whether lovely or loathsome matters not; it is welcome because
it proves that the air possesses the right degree of dampness for the health
of the precious fluid.
Even the English language has adapted itself to the needs of commerce.
Words have formed round objects and taken their exact outline. One may
look in the dictionary in vain for the warehouse meaning of
`valinch,"shrive,"shirt,' and 'flogger,' but in the warehouse they have formed
naturally on the tip of the tongue. So too the light stroke on either side of
the barrel which makes the bung start has been arrived at by years of trial
and experiment. It is the quickest, the most effective of actions. Dexterity
can go no further.
The only thing, one comes to feel, that can change the routine of the docks
is a change in ourselves. Suppose, for instance, that we gave up drinking
claret, or took to using rubber instead of wool for our blankets, the whole
machinery of production and distribution would rock and reel and seek
about to adapt itself afresh. It is we — our tastes, our fashions, our needs —
that make the cranes dip and swing, that call the ships from the sea. Our
body is their master. We demand shoes, furs, bags, stoves, oil, rice
puddings, candles; and they are brought us. Trade watches us anxiously to
see what new desires are beginning to grow in us, what new dislikes. One
feels an important, a complex, a necessary animal as one stands on the
quayside watching the cranes hoist this barrel, that crate, that other bale
from the holds of the ships that have come to anchor. Because one chooses
to light a cigarette, all those barrels of Virginian tobacco are swung on
shore.
Flocks upon flocks of Australian sheep have submitted to the shears
because we de mand woollen overcoats in winter. As for the umbrella that we swing idly to and fro, a mammoth who roared through the swamps fifty
thousand years ago has yielded up its tusk to make the handle.
Meanwhile the ship flying the Blue Peter moves slowly out of the dock; it
has turned its bows to India or Australia once more. But in the Port of
London, lorries jostle each other in the little street that leads from the dock
— for there has been a great sale, and the cart horses are struggling and
striving to distribute the wool over England. Street Haunting: A London Adventure by Virginia Woolf
No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in
which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having
an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter
hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may
be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the
pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover
of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter—rambling
the streets of London.
2 The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness
of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer
by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields.
The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are
no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six,
we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of
anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.
For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own
temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece,
for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister
old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but,
“Take it!” she cried, and thrust the blue and white china bowl into our hands as if she never
wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how
badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night,
the innkeeper quarreled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look,
and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was
stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There,
too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul—as travelers do. All this--Italy, the windy morning, the vines
laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul—rise up in a cloud from the
china bowl on the mantelpiece.
And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet. Mr. Lloyd George made
that. “The man’s a devil!” said Mr. Cummings, putting the kettle down with which he was about
to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.
3 But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell–like covering which our souls have
excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and
there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous
eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one
can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating
islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their
poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given
life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them.
But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not
a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain
sleeps perhaps as it looks.
4 How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness,
and on one side of it perhaps some tree–sprinkled, grass–grown space where night is folding
herself to sleep naturally and, as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and
stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl
hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is London, we are reminded; high
among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light—windows; there are points
of brilliance burning steadily like low stars—lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country
in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour
fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted
forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the
lamplight falls upon the privacy of some drawing–room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its
inlaid table, and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons
of tea which——She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs and somebody asking, is
she in?
Continued on page two
5 But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves;
we are impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root. At any
moment, the sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in
response; the army of human beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and
sordidities. Let us dally a little longer, be content still with surfaces only—the glossy brilliance
of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendor of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and
purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of
the florists’ windows. 6 For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks color and
basks in warmth. On a winter’s night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen
herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the
whole earth were made of precious stone. The thing it cannot do (one is speaking of the average
unprofessional eye) is to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure
angles and relationships. Hence after a prolonged diet of this simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure
and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety. We halt at the door of the boot shop and make
some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the bright
paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier chamber of the being where we
may ask, as we raise our left foot obediently upon the stand: "What, then, is it like to be a
dwarf?"
7 She came in escorted by two women who, being of normal size, looked like benevolent giants
beside her. Smiling at the shop girls, they seemed to be disclaiming any lot in her deformity and
assuring her of their protection. She wore the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the
faces of the deformed.
She needed their kindness, yet she resented it. But when the shop girl had been summoned and
the giantesses, smiling indulgently, had asked for shoes for “this lady” and the girl had pushed
the little stand in front of her, the dwarf stuck her foot out with an impetuosity which seemed to
claim all our attention. Look at that! Look at that! she seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust
her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of a well–grown woman.
It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it resting on the
stand. She looked soothed and satisfied. Her manner became full of self–confidence. She sent for
shoe after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She got up and pirouetted before a glass which
reflected the foot only in yellow shoes, in fawn shoes, in shoes of lizard skin. She raised her little
skirts and displayed her little legs. She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important
part of the whole person; women, she said to herself, have been loved for their feet alone. Seeing
nothing but her feet, she imagined perhaps that the rest of her body was of a piece with those
beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed, but she was ready to lavish any money upon her shoes.
And as this was the only occasion upon which she was hot afraid of being looked at but
positively craved attention, she was ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting.
Look at my feet, she seemed to be saying, as she took a step this way and then a step that way.
The shop girl good–humouredly must have said something flattering, for suddenly her face lit up
in ecstasy. But, after all, the giantesses, benevolent though they were, had their own affairs to see
to; she must make up her mind; she must decide which to choose. At length, the pair was chosen
and, as she walked out between her guardians, with the parcel swinging from her finger, the
ecstasy faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology came back, and by the
time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only.
8 But she had changed the mood; she had called into being an atmosphere which, as we followed
her out into the street, seemed actually to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed. Two
bearded men, brothers, apparently, stone–blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the
head of a small boy between them, marched down the street. On they came with the unyielding
yet tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to lend to their approach something of the terror and inevitability of the fate that has overtaken them. As they passed, holding straight on, the little
convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers–by with the momentum of its silence, its
directness, its disaster. Indeed, the dwarf had started a hobbling grotesque dance to which
everybody in the street now conformed: the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin; the
feeble–minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick; the old man squatted on a doorstep as if,
suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it—all
joined in the hobble and tap of the dwarf’s dance.
Continued on page three
9 In what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this maimed company of the halt
and the blind? Here, perhaps, in the top rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and
Soho, where people have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades, are gold beaters,
accordion pleaters, cover buttons, or support life, with even greater f...