COVENT GARDEN IN THE EARLY MORNING.
MOST of us know that the flower-market at Covent
Garden opens at 5 o'clock in the morning, and is a very beautiful sight to see. Also that at the same time the fruit and vegetable markets are scenes of great activity, and that all through the night waggons are toiling up the roads, bringing produce from country and suburban market gardens, while busy people are at work in the market-place unpacking carts and dressing stalls in preparation for the morning sale. Bat to know of all this vaguely as something that goes on while we are asleep, and to get up in the middle of the night and go and see it for ourselves, are two very different things. Lord Bacon advised people now and again to assert their superiority to habit by sitting up all through the night. By occupying the tail of the night and the top of the morning with an expedition to Covent Garden Market, we may kill two birds with one stone,—show that we are not slaves to our own habits, and at the same time acquaint ourselves with the habits of a numerous and extremely useful class of our fellow- creatures. Being lately bitten with the curiosity to make such an expedition, the present writer consulted the local green- grocer as to days and hours, and gladly accepted his invitation to make the journey from Kew to Covent Garden in his cart on a Saturday morning. Unfortunately, the Saturday fixed upon was a rainy one ; but as it was already late in the season, and the Dissolution of Parliament was making trade slack, we would not postpone the visit. So at half-past 3, in a drizzling rain, we started from Kew and drove through Gunnersbury, Chiswick, Hammersmith, and Kensington into London. Though there are plenty of coffee-houses all along the road, their licenses do not allow them to open before 5 o'clock, and the greengrocer's first opportunity of getting breakfast is at the coffee-stall that stands under the hospitable shelter of the District railway-station at High Street, Ken- sington, where a group of early postmen, newsboys, tramps, and others bent on the same business as ourselves, gather daily. All the traffic we had seen along the road so far, amounted to two or three cabs bringing men home from late London parties, a few empty waggons already returning from the market, with drivers asleep on their seats, and a few more, with drivers also asleep, still on their way up to town. Tramps of both sexes and all ages, we saw in numbers still asleep or just waking up on doorsteps and benches, where they had spent the night in spite of the steady rain. A quite old woman with crutches, whom we saw just waking on the stone seat in the parapet of Kew Bridge, at the beginning of our drive, was a sight not soon to be forgotten. If it was odd to see the roads into London so empty, it was still odder to find Knights- bridge and Piccadilly in the same silent and deserted condition. And stranger still were the thoughts suggested by the answer of our friend the greengrocer to the remark upon the unwonted spectacle,--" I never see it any other way." To Londoners, Piccadilly suggests, as a matter of course, a street choked, almost unintermittently, with omni- buses, cabs, carriages, and every kind of conveyance, besides foot-passengers, hustling one another on the pavement, and anxiously threading the difficult crossings. And yet there is a whole class of people who pass up and down Piccadilly daily, taking intimate note of every building by the way, who think of it always as a road upon which you may see a few market- waggons as you go up, and a few more greengrocers' carts as you come down ; and otherwise, hardly any traffic at all. At half-past 4, we stopped in Garrick Street, put the cart up at the end of the file of greengrocers' carts that was to grow a good deal longer as the morning wore on, and walked into the market-place. From this point emptiness and quiet were no more. All the purlieus of the market,— all the streets leading from the great thoroughfares to Covent Garden—Bedford Street, Southampton Street, Exeter Street, Burleigh Street, Wellington Street, Henrietta Street, Russell Street, James Street, King Street, as well as Garrick Street by which we entered—each held its double file of greengrocers' and market-gardeners' carts, and every pavement swarmed with porters carrying baskets on their heads.
Vegetables, fruit, flowers, and those who deal in them, hold for these hours of the morning a monopoly of life in this part of London. Every other trade and occupation seems for the moment to have passed out of existence. The world exists only to buy and sell green-stuff. One's first feeling as one wanders round the market-square vaguely observing its apparently aimless stir and bustle, is a childish wonder whether all these people coming and going incessantly with baskets on their heads, can possibly know each what his own business is, and why he goes in one direction rather than another ; the next more reasonable thought is one of admira- tion for the wonderful organisation by wh ich excellent order is kept through all the apparent confusion, so that even an idle lady-lounger suffers not the slightest annoyance as she makes her journeys of observation and investigation in and out of the crowded scene. Gradually, as you fix your attention upon first one group and then another, and get into conversation with a policeman on duty or a portress waiting for a job, you begin to sort the people and to read a little intelligible meaning in their activity. All those empty carts standing in file belong to greengrocers who have driven in from different parts of London and the suburbs to stock their shops for the day. Those great waggons in the market-square and in Wellington Street, piled yards high with cabbages, have come up by night along the roads and are only waiting till they are quite un- packed to travel back again. Those swarms of men who come and go with round baskets on their heads are now carry. ing the contents of the waggons into the market, and soon will be carrying other basket-loads out again to the carts of the greengrocers who are making their purchases. That neat row of light, covered carts packed so closely along Tavistock Street, with their tail-ends towards the flower-market, are waiting to be filled with supplies of plants and cut-flowers for all the florists' shops in London. Those earnest-looking men who go busily from stall to stall, note-book in hand, are the greengrocers and florists making their purchases. If you have a note-book and pencil in your own hand—unless your air is either superlatively aristocratic or unbusinesslike—yon will he taken for a florist or a greengrocer yourself, and women with pads on their heads and enormous baskets in their arms will buzz round you eager to secure the job of carrying your goods to your cart.
The busy bustle of the fruit and vegetable market is exceedingly interesting; but for the mere looker-on who has nothing to sell and no occasion to buy, the supreme attraction of Covent Garden at this early hour of the morning is un- questionably the flower-market. Industrious hands toil pretty nearly all through the night (the flower-market is open to the stall-holders and officials from S o'clock in the evening), at arranging their stock, and by the time the doors open to the public at 5 o'clock in the morning, everything is ready. Tastes may differ upon this point as upon others ; but for the present writer, there is a charm about this daily exhibition of flowers that are immediately to pass forth into the world and take their parts in all its functions and ceremonies, which is lacking in the most beautiful flower-show that is a show and nothing more. Perhaps it lies in the touch of homeliness resulting from the necessary blending of considerations of use and beauty in the selection and the arrangement ; or it may be in the repetition of small effects, instead of the aim at concen- trated large ones. Though each stall-holder endeavours to make his stall as beautiful and attractive as he can, yet each thinks of his own stall only, and in the disposition of his flowers, he arranges them with a view to sale and removal as well as to immediate effect. Then, too, quantity as against quality counts for more in the market and less in the flower-show ; and where we have to do with fresh flowers, quantity is a very important element of beauty. The effect of this spacious and airy building, when it first 'opens in the morning, and there is no crowd or bustle, and all the flowers are perfectly fresh, and all the stalls are well furnished, and the atmosphere is innocent of any odours but delicious ones—is a perfect feast of beauty and fragrance. And upon the visitor who has looked in just for once by way of an adventure, the thought comes almost as a rebuke, that morning after morning this festival of fresh loveliness is held in the very heart of London amid sad associations of moral and material grime, and that hardly any one who is not called there on business comes to See it. For the first hour—to the ignorant onlooker at least —business does not seem to go very fast in the flower-market, and at 6 o'clock the show is almost as complete and hardly less fresh than at 5 o'clock. But between 6 and 7 o'clock buying goes on more briskly, and one sees the plants and the cut- flowers being rapidly moved to the florists' carts outside. One's thoughts follow them to their various destinations,—weddings, funerals, christenings, balls and dinner-parties—to balconies, button-holes, and church altars, where haply we may meet them again in the course of the day, and then come back again to the allegory of perpetual rejuvenescence suggested by the daily filling up of the stalls with fresh loveliness and sweetness.
To speak in detail of all the flowers in Covent Garden Market would be to write an article like a florist's catalogue. Every- thing is there that is in season. When we saw it in the last days of July, masses of sweet-peas, stocks and carna- tions, roses of every description—choice ones tied in small bunches, commoner kinds with long liberal stalks and abundant leaves and thorns bound in big bunches such as one likes to bring in from the shrubberies of a generous country garden—lilies and gladioles, white, red, and orange, some in pots standing tall and stately on the shelves above the stalls, others laid in layers of cotton-wool in oblong cases, and looking as if prepared for their own obsequies ; forests of palms and maidenhair-ferns, fringes of white creeping campanula, hazes of silvery gypsophylla, sky-like stretches of blue cornflower—struck us as among the most vivid and distinctive features. Between 6 and 7 o'clock we noticed a good many Sisters of Charity buying flowers for the churches they tend, and hospital nurses catering for their wards. Between 7 and 8 o'clock business began to be very eager, and from 8 to 9 o'clock the work of dismantling went on apace. It is then that the poorer class of purchasers come, the women in the familiar costume of the street-corner,—the black or nondescript coloured gown and tartan-shawl, and bonnet of straw, crape, or lace, well crushed down and battered, but brightened up with a brave bunch of the commonest and loudest artificial flowers a few pence can buy. This is the time when bargains may be made, and the poor woman who wants to furnish her basket for sale, and the managing lady with a dinner-party coming on, who " though on pleasure she is bent has yet a frugal mind," are equally eager to buy cheap. At 9 o'clock the closing-bell rings, and, after a few minutes' grace during which the exodus goes on rapidly, the doors are shut, and the great flower-market is over for the day. Passing out at the very last moment (a good-natured policeman having allowed us to stay for the finish) we came out into Tavistock Street, just opposite the Court Journal office at the corner of Burleigh Street, where the pavement had been occupied since 5 o'clock by a vendor of greengrocers' bags and labels. The bags and the labels, blazoned in blue, red, and green paint, with prices and laudatory phrases such as " Well Selected," " Very Ripe," " English Cookers," &c., had hung on the railings of the office, throwing its proper business, like all other non- vegetable businesses, entirely into the shade. Now, as the doors of the flower-market closed, and clock-hands pointed to a few minutes after 9 o'clock, the vendor of bags and labels hurriedly cleared his goods away, a young man opened the office door with a latch-key, the shutters slid silently down, and the words "Court Journal office" revealed themselves in gilded splendour on the windows. We realised that the world of fashion was awake, and that the greengrocers' monopoly of life was at an end. We had the curiosity to go down some of the streets leading into the Strand to see for ourselves the dispersion of greengrocers' and costermongers' carts ; and then strolling back to the market-square for a last look, we stood under the pediment of St. Paul's Church, which com- mands an excellent view of the fruit-market. By this time the sun was shining warmly and brightly, and making delightful little Dutch pictures of the groups of men and women still packing and unpacking carrots, turnips, and cabbages. Turning to read the inscriptions on the wall, we learned the date of the church's destruction by fire and reopening for divine service, and also that anybody exhibiting advertisements on its walls, or otherwise defiling or defacing them, would be prosecuted according to law. But we looked in vain for announcements relating to the present spiritual uses of the building ; and we came away wishing that St. Paul's, Covent Garden, would follow the good example of so many London churches which open for service in the early weekday mornings. An east-window with altar-lights shining through would have been a better complement to the scene of busy life than the blank wall with its forbidding announcements.
Previous page
