Westwards along Ratcliff Highway the stews and doss houses peter out to be replaced by wholesale warehouses stuffed with pepper and cinnamon, teas and coffees, wines, spirits, carpets and beds, monkeys, macaws and the contraband wares of smuggler and river pirate - produce not fanfared on the signs above the doors. At the Highway's western end, dingy curiosity shops, junk shops proclaiming themselves to be antique emporia, ships' chandlers and the tagareen stores of the bum-boat men huddle together between the river and the soup kitchens and meeting halls of Whitechapel. Whitechapel does do politics.
Boz and Phoebles stopped for a light lunch in the catnip den that occupies the four floors downstairs from their bedsit. Snowdrop was singing a selection of songs from Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and should probably have stuck to juggling, but she was accompanied by Sam on upright and Mouse Jackson on tenor sax, they were really quite good, as was the eel pie and mustard ice-cream. Once fortified, the ginger pair set off towards Wapping and beyond to Whitechapel - for a little under-cover detective work.
Toynbee Hall, that vicarage-gothic edifice which might well have seen William Morris and Peter Kropotkin pass through its doors in times gone by was, this day, hosting a debate on Unity, Co-operation and World Solutions to World Problems. A degree of disagreement was beginning to emerge. Old Labour was present with a Yorkshire ex-colliery brass band; Marxists and Leninists and Trotskyists and Maoists were in dispute over the subjects for discussion, procedural details and fillings for the sandwiches; La Columna, in red neckerchiefs were acting as unofficial bouncers. Huddled in small yet noisy groups and eyeing each other suspiciously were collectivist-anarchists, mutualist-anarchists, communist-anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, anarcho-surrealists, Situationists and The Brick Lane Zapatistas. Consuella Starcluster was there with her tambourine, and the Kittens of Chaos had brought along a breakaway anarcha-feminist chapter of the WI who were starting to heckle. Boz and Phoebles, thinly disguised in matching 'Red Ed' t-shirts, cloth caps and mufflers, slipped unobtrusively into the hall and, with backs to the wall, quietly observed. The discord was beginning to spread to a gathering crowd outside in Commercial Street and scuffles were breaking out.
Round the corner in Angel Alley a soap box had been set up outside the offices of the Freedom Press. White cats in very dark glasses guarded its corners like Trafalgar Square lions and Slasher McGoogs had mounted it to address an unenthusiastic crowd.
"Yet, to be just to these poor men of pelf,
Each does but HATE HIS NEIGHBOUR AS HIMSELF:
Damned to the mines, an equal fate betides
The slave that digs it, and the slave that hides."
There was silence until one of the sinister white cats began to clap pointedly. There was a ripple from the audience followed by a Whoop and a couple of Yeahs. The front two rows of uncomprehending felinity were made up of feckless alley cats of assorted shapes, sizes and colours, but behind them was a press of black and white ships' cats and their docker cousins. These toms were politically aware and wanted to be roused. Slasher stepped up the rhetoric.
Early next morning began the first ever mass strike of ships' cats. Vessels without cats could not sail, the docks clogged up with stranded shipping and new arrivals rusted at anchor in the roads; cargos rotted and rats ran wild. Dockland fell eerily silent.
No comments:
Post a Comment