They put our maniac to sleep, they sewed up her buttock, it didn’t take long. They put her into a common ward. We still hung around.. Eleven o’clock, then midnight… We could see her in her cot, with her face all purple.. drooling all over the place..
As soon as she came to, she started raising a row, demanding her Cascade. They gave her another injection, she went to sleep again, it was one in the morning. Clodovitz wasn’t the boss, not even the important doctor, he was just a second-stringer at the London Freeborn Hospital, almost without pay, there were several like that who drudged away at all the thankless jobs, especially at night, on duty, Clodovitz almost every other night! Especially the foreign doctors who were interns at the London, that helped them get a start before they set themselves up.
I got to know Clodo well later on. It’s true that he was obliging, eager, you might even say zealous, only he’d falter for a moment, he was vague with words, had to tell him right away what you wanted, to put it on the line. had to know how to handle him…
The London, in the East End, wasn’t a swanky hospital at the time! They were waiting for donors who had to be begged!
It was written on all the doors that they were waiting for them, and pretty badly. in pleading terms! The philanthropists took their time. On the other hand, the corridors were full and so were the vestibules, every hour of the day and night, crowds, mobs, of all ages and origins. whispering horrible things, how they all felt on their last legs, and that they’d rather croak there, sitting on the tiles, then be sent home to suffer again. They wanted a bed or to die! That was the kind of thing you heard. Not to speak of a hundred little children outscreaming each other all over the place.. after their bottles and toys. the vestibules full of their whooping.. the chairs full of their muck everywhere… It wasn’t at all big enough for the patients squeezed against the doors, there were always some waiting outside, filling the sidewalks, the streets.. Still, it was an enormous place, a big lengthwise joint, wards and wards, with God knows how many windows, as far as Burdget, almost the other avenue.. The donations weren’t rolling in, only poverty kept coming. What a crowd! even in winter, in the rain, for admission!.. Lined up hours on end!
.. They caught the rest of what finished them off spitting out complaints and catarrhs! I always saw crowds being refused. It was very warm inside, naturally, from October on, a furnace. The undernourished are always cold. Coal’s not expensive there, they use it for everything..
They cried to be admitted, they cried again when they left.. they didn’t want to go away.. they were comfortable inside, they even were delighted with the ordinary food, red cabbage with mashed peas..
It was a dense crowded area, all Poplar, Lime and Stepney, all the surrounding neighborhoods, and Greenwich opposite, naturally, for medicine and surgery. In short, the whole East End, I’m talking of those days, from Highgate to the Docks, look at that mob, the jamming! It was so full when we came that if we hadn’t known Clodo, we’d never have been taken in with our Mamma! Even in the dark night, cuddling together shivering, they’d noticed our getup, and right away insults! Ah! a furious line! We came parading, bluffing them all! An enormous mob, take it from me! People who’d been there since morning trying to get in, one fellow even came to let us know, bellowing right in our faces, just like that, damned sore, that he had a double hernia! that he’d been waiting there for three days, while we with our cab and our dressed-up doll and her behind, we gave him a swift pain in the ass! it was no use explaining to him. It was a general chorus, a frightful agony!
They didn’t want to let us in! In order to get out we had to get a lantern and show them the blood, the towels, the dressing on her ass, which was dripping all over, that they were real clots!.. They moved aside a little, but they were grumbling, rough, ready to bite, we walked past the insults, we came to the ticket window, we immediately asked for Clodo.. Luckily!.. Dr. Clodovitz! Boro was the Soissons business all over again! We barely escaped getting tossed out.
Later on, over the years, I often passed by there, in front of the London Hospital… It still has pretty much the same walls, the same raspberry and yellow color, the same soot everywhere, the same enormous window cage from Commercial Road to East Port, only the people have changed a lot. The crowd, the mugs, the gait all surprise me, I no longer recognize them. They’re not the same noisy squabblers, bullying tramps. still a few bedraggled women. not many youngsters. No longer the same bums. they now discuss things soberly, they’ve taken on vocabulary.. They still gabble away in the fog about their varicose veins and their aches and pains…but not so peevishly.. They’ve stopped smacking each other in the puss if someone gets ahead of them.. they hardly swear any more.. the very neighborhood’s been changed.. I mean just before the war. the one of 1939 until doomsday..
It’s the population moving, if you think about it. There’re almost no sailing vessels, that’s what brought the real savages, they were the unmanageable ones, the real horrors. yellow-skins. blacks. chocolates!. hell-raisers!. They often came about their injuries, they had them on all their fingers.. one dressing, another… on their feet, too, and their bodies.. they’d start a riot over a trifle, at the door of the hospital, they’d bleed at the slighest provocation, rip each other’s guts out the way you’d say hello, especially from the Islands and from America! real wild men, from the tropics, from the Sunda Isles, from the equator colonies, and from the North too, have to be fair.. At bottom, they were all man-eaters.. all that on the "entrants” line. That made a mixture of yelling, terrific gales of laughter. with the cockney housewives and the drunken bullies of the neighborhood, the peg-legs, the whisky cirrhoses, the fistulas, the broken heads, the dyspeptics, the lumbagoes cut in two who squalled about everything, the albuminous, their little bottles, the finical bellyachers, the anti-everythings, the death-dodgers, the people with little pensions, the choking asthmatics, all of them corralled, roped in, pushing one another, squeezed against the door.. Often there was entertainment… an interlude… a minstrel.. with his clappers, his mouth noises, the whoah-whoah blackface! and a mandolin!.. the popular tunes!.. He’d pick up a couple of pennies.. he’d beat it… I did that later on… a button~up tailcoat, all kinds of colors, a real carapace!.. I think performers of that kind are still around.. Whitechapel likes hoofers, they drew a crowd quickly, but they cluttered up the street, stopped the trolleys, then the cops would swoop down, everyone would be pushed against the walls, women, legless cripples, one-armed men, spitters. It would break up fast!
The days when there was too much fog, when the frost spread out the crowd, the line wound round La Vaillance.. there was a permanent session in the pub.. One man would keep two others’ places. They’d go to warm up a bit around the liquor. They’d have a sniff of cherry punch. The ones who still had a penny would treat themselves to a small glass of beer together, the others pretended to be having something, it created a constant coming and going between the bar and the street when the weather was stinging cold..
Naturally there was always a slightly carbolic smell at La Vaillance. inside the pub..
They’re not the same men today, the same clientele, as I’ve said, there’s decorum… the neighborhood’s making progress.. Poverty’s going in for furniture.. They were already looking for white wood, they’ll soon be fixing up cozy-corners, one fine day they’ll be having their nails done.. Unless it’s all smashed at the time I’m writing, gone up in smoke beneath the bombs, the peccadilloes and the whims! Naturally I’m no longer up-to-date, we’re separated by the events, in ten years I won’t recognize the place! The streets, the walls were gloomy in those days, I mean the buildings. The house-fronts were coated with soot, the goo trickled.. should’ve seen the way it came down from the port, the docks, the factories… the clouds kept bringing in smears, coal tar.. gusts, tornadoes of it in winter, and sticky mists, a real affliction. It was sticky inside the hospital, too, and dark, the walls, even the beds, the drab almost yellow linen. The odors stuck in my nose, the urine, the ether, the coal tar, and the honeyed tobacco. I still get a whiff of them. Once you’re used to it, it has a charm.. Only the operating room was nickel-plated, whitewashed, gleaming, even blinding, coming from outside.