… beat it… to the wharves.. stick in the shadow.. duck the bulls… lay low.. head for the mist!..
I’m telling you all these details because subdued in memory they lie lightly on the years. they gently enchant you to death, that’s their advantage. There’s sorcery for you, really there, tangible, lined by the water!. I’m warning you!.. A lot of good it’ll do you!.. Let’s forget it!..
After the strings of houses, after the unvarying streets through which I gently accompany you, the walls rise up.. the warehouses, all-brick giant ramparts. Treasure cliffs!.. monster shops. phantasmagoric storehouses, citadels of merchandise, mountains of tanned goatskins enough to stink all the way to Kamchatka! Forest of mahogany in thousands of piles, tied up like asparagus, in pyramids, miles of materials!
.. rugs enough to cover the Moon, the whole world… all the floors in the Universe!.. Enough sponges to dry up the Thames! What quantities!.. Enough wool to smother Europe beneath heaps of cuddly warmth. Herrings to fill the seas! Himalayas of powdered sugar.. Matches to fry the poles!.. Enormous avalanches of pepper, enough to make the Seven Floods sneeze!.. A thousand boatloads of onions, enough to cry through five hundred wars. Three thousand six hundred trains of beans drying in covered hangars more colossal than the Charing Cross, North and Saint Lazare stations put together. Coffee for the whole planet!. enough to give a lift during their forced marches to the four hundred thousand avenging conflicts of the fightingest armies in the world.. never again sitting, snoring, exempt from sleep and eating, hypertense, storming, exalted, dying in the charge, hearts unfolded, borne off to superdeath by the hyperpalpitating superglory of powdered coffee!.. The dream of the three hundred fifteen emperors!..
Still more buildings, more enormous, for the loads of cheap meat, preserved carcasses in dry freezers, in mustard sauce, in prodigious venison, myriads of sausages with chopped rind as high as the Alps! *.. Corned-beef fat, giant masses that would cover Parliament and Leicester and Waterloo so that you wouldn’t see them stuck underneath, they’d be swamped so fast! two mammoths all stuffed with truffles just transported from the River Love, preserved, intact in ice, refrigerated for twelve thousand years!..
I’m now talking about jam, really colossal sweetness, forums of jars of mirabelle plums, surging oceans of oranges, rising up on all sides, overflowing the roofs, fleetloads from Afghanistan, sweet golden loukoums from Istanbul, pure sugar, all in acacia leaves.. Myrtles from Smyrna and Karachi.. sloes from Finland.. Chaos, vales of precious fruits stored behind triple-doors, incredible choice of flavors, exquisite sugared Arabian Nights’ magic in amphora jars, eternal joys for childhood promised from the depths of the Scriptures, so dense, so eager that sometimes they crack the wall, they’re squeezed in so thick, burst the sheet metal, roll into the street, cascade right into the gutter! in pleasant torrents and delights!. Then the mounted police come charging in, clear the area, the view, lash the looters with blackjacks. It’s the end.of a dream!..
Immediately on the other side of these docks there’s the big violent sweep of air whirling in from the green heights of the valley in Greenwich.. the big bend in the river.. the gusts from the sea.. from the pale-dawn estuaries below.. after Barking.. lying just below the clouds.. where the tiny cargoes come up. where the waves break against the jetties, splash, fall back, swoon into the mud.. The ebbing tide. It all depends on the kind of thing you like!.. I say it in all simplicity!. The sky. the gray water. the purplish shores.. it’s all so soothing.. No control of one or the other. gently drawn round. in slow circles and eddies, you’re always charmed further off toward other dreams… all to expire in lovely secrets, toward other worlds getting ready in veils and mists with big pale and fuzzy designs among the whispering mosses.. Are you following me?
Farther off in the current toward Kindall, you see the worrying barges, cutters and sloops ready to tack, loaded to list.. All the morning’s vegetables, the whole cargo of "perishables,” carrots, potatoes, cauliflowers, high as the yard, doubling in the wind, struggling broadside toward the city, Housewives’ Cape!.. Not much traffic at the moment, except the citrus fruits, bargefuls, tide downstream around seven o’clock!.. water up to the arches, far as the channel of Major Bridge when the weighbridge loosens up, lifts, grinds, breaks in two!
.. the Australian Mail sweeps in with high, slow majesty, strutting to the river, its black bow cutting clean through the spray, its frilly train of a thousand waves, rippling off, lapping the pebbles..
A few more steps toward the pier, please!. and then a detour outside the tide gate and here we are again at the towing.. the sticky passway, all slimy, seaweed, watch out!.. A bit lower down, on the pebbles, we inch forward on eggs!.. feeling our way!. here and there. Now we’re in front of a tunnel.. Better say a kind of sewer, we go down into it, we’re swallowed up! we climb the dozen steps. and we come out right into a pub. Not much, but still and all roomy! a pub that can hold, all the shutters closed, around forty or fifty people. You’ve got to know how to get there. Better arrive at low tide, that way no one sees or knows, or at night from a boat, high tide, and easy does it now!. It’s picturesque!
The Dingby Cruise, the pub I’m telling about, the name on its license, between Colonial Docks and Trom.
Not much of it’s left, I can tell you right now, it ended in a disaster, you’ll hear about it as you keep reading.
Besides, now with the bombs probably nothing’s left at all, even the ashes must have blown away. It’s too bad! I’ve got to remember about everything! I’d have gone back to take a look!
Really a pretty orderly pub and well known around the three piers, and not bad, nor criminal, there were much worse kinds!. Mostly dockers, regular customers, workers, with a handful of smugglers, naturally, you always find some. A small school of hoodlums.
The boss wasn’t talkative. Agreeable, obliging, but reserved. He didn’t get confidential. You’d start the talking… His gestures which always amazed me, a knack of catching glasses, sometimes four or five at a time, in the air, like flies, juggling them! never breaking a saucer, trapeze artist. Must have been a performer at one time, rope dancer, not allowed now on the public stage, a fine metier lost. Besides his pub, did some pawnbroking on the side for the drunks, handled dope a little, too. I can’t deny that. He took commissions, deals that had to be handled just right and never the slightest slipup! discreet with the cops! never a word out of him! That’s rare in the underworld.
We hung out regularly in the joint, at least in the early days. The place was practical for us, right near the Wapping buses and yet in the center of the docks. It was a rare location. You could get away by the bank when the dicks from the Yard came around, when you heard their graceful steps. their shoes squeaking… all over the cobblestones… As for the others, the River Police, when they were snooping around the pylons with their motor boats, ptup! ptup!. sly motor. velvet fart.. slip through faultlessly.. makes you want to crap. would last more than an hour, the time for their job, to go up to the locks and then back. Always that to the good! What rats, I see them, mangy rats between river and bank, I never could stand them. the supreme scum, earth and waves!. Real water garbage!.. The River Police!.. Beyond the bounds of treachery!.. And I’m not telling everything!.. I boil with rage thinking about them!. I get steamed up!. I go haywire just talking about them!. at the memory!.. It’s not polite!.. Shame, shame!.. Sorry!.. No way to act I realize!.. not very artistic… or reasonable… I bring you back to the table… I welcome you!.. I offer you something! inside with everyone. I’m not going upstairs. I’m setting you up on the main floor.. It’s a long room, that’s all.. with partitions for the pub.. dark, sticky, but warm around the stove.. you appreciate it during the season… the boss handles the orders himself. Prosper can manage it… He doesn’t need bouncers like the Mile End saloons. at La Vaillance for example..