*
If there is one thing of which one can be assured in London life, it is the eternal nature of that city’s hostelries.
The Angel Inn, which, in my own time, I had been acquainted with only from the top deck of the Number 21 Omnibus en route to the pleasure gardens of Harringay, still served much the same purpose now as it had for centuries before. Once, it had been a coaching inn on the border of city and country. Now, it was a half-way house between the poisoned and unclaimed wasteland that bounded the Thames and the vestigial petty-kingdom of Holloway and North London, ruled by its feral king-assumptive, the equally assumptively monickered Beau Riche.
The Angel Inn had fared better than any structure I had until then seen in this rubble-rich world. It was the same building I remembered from 1908, then relatively new, having been built only ten years previously. Now its imposing terracotta façade, once so pale it seemed to glow like gold in the London sun, was, as the evening added a further gloom to the London wastes, visibly scarred with soot, pocked and gouged, its once impressive cupola collapsed along with much of the upper fourth storey. The inn’s many windows were now boarded, where boards still remained, and where not, curtained only with grey rags or otherwise open to the elements. A hamlet of ramshackle huts had been raised from the ruins around, from which many feeble plumes of wood-smoke rose in the twilight to hang like wreaths from the spoiled grandeur of the old inn.
As we rode closer I could see movement amongst the hovels and then a number of raggedy figures shuffled from their shacks, no doubt alerted to our presence by the clickety-clack of the auto-cycle, to stand in a scattered mob between us and the inn. Be they paupers and scoundrels, they were at the least other human beings!
But as the crowd of figures grew, as the mob before us became less scattered and more tightly packed, I could not help thinking, elated as I was to encounter other living beings, that this was no welcoming committee.
K briefly turned her head and smiled reassuringly back at me.
“You can hold on tighter now,” she said, “you may find this distressing.”
And she immediately let out the throttle until the ticks and tocks of the engine so quickened that the machine seemed to purr, building up quite a momentum. K leaned low over the handlebars (and I had no alternative but to lean with her, clinging to her as I was) as the machine began to rattle and bounce violently over the rutted road, bucking like an untamed bull. I held on all the tighter to save myself being thrown from the saddle.
But rather than swerve around the mob, as I had assumed our intention to be, K instead gripped the handlebars straight and set our course directly for it! I groaned and braced myself for the calamity I felt sure was to come.
Miraculously, the vanguard of the mob shuffled apart before us, and K directed the still speeding auto-cycle into the slim opening created!
We would not maintain our momentum for long, however. Not wishing to cause us any misfortune as we wended our way through the throng, K had no choice but to slow considerably and, with much more intention than it had shown in scattering, the mob took this as an opportunity to press in on us all the more.
We became so impeded by those pressing bodies that K was reduced to kicking the machine along with her feet and was even, when the press became too thick for us to advance, made to push backwards or to make tight turns to find an all too narrow and all too brief corridor through the bawling pack.
It was impossible to discern what it was those terrible beggars mumbled and howled as we pushed through them in fits and starts. I blocked my ears to it and did close my eyes. But I felt the brush of their bony fingers as they reached out to us imploringly, appallingly, moaning all the time; could hear the wailing of their women and children at the rear; could smell the disease and poverty on them, the stink of want amidst dirth.
When K had opportunity to glance back at me, it was with knitted brow and lips curled in a determined grimace. Her cheeks were wet with the perspiration and tears of exertion.
“I’m sorry,” she said and repeated, over and over, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I wanted to say that it was perfectly all right, that I was man enough to cope with a horde of filthy beggars. But instead I said nothing. I did not have the words. Oh that human beings, and more than that, British human beings, should be reduced to such depravity! And Oh! That the once fine streets of Islington should become home to such beggars!
Then, as it seemed we were in the very eye of the swarm, our advance halted and pressed from all sides by that clemming rabble, a grating sound as of metal on stone echoed from beyond the mob, and the tide of filthy, groping flesh began to recede, finally dissolving away like scum on a broken wave.
As the crowd broke from us, I could see the gates to the inn opened ajar and two figures, guards no doubt, both bald headed and scarred like back-street pugilists, stole through the narrow gap. One of the figures shouldered a crossbow, much heavier than K’s delicate weapon, and kept careful aim on the straggling mob as his comrade began to scatter scraps of fodder from a large barrel. The beggars scrabbled after these rotting slops eagerly and, with no further obstacle, we tick-tocked through the open gates.
K turned the auto-cycle in a leisurely arc around the high-walled yard and brought it to a halt outside the stable block to the rear.
An elderly though still well-built gentlemen appeared from the stables and held the handlebars of the now quieted vehicle while K alighted gracefully and I, somewhat less elegant in my dismount, slipped from the saddle and stumbled to my feet.
“Stable the bike, please, Howel,” K said to the old man, wiping the drying tears from her cheeks. “We will be spending the night here.”
“Yes, Milady.”