All Was Not Quite As It Should Be

I recently read an imaginative biography of a cocker spaniel called Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf. It’s about the life of British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush. The book is public domain and available online for free here. In the midst of the lovely language and scenes of a pampered pup’s (mostly) idyllic life — along with Woolf’s critique of sexism and British class system—a description of the streets of London in 1846 had me reflecting unexpectedly on the streets of Los Angeles in 2016:

… if you were — and many people were — active and able-bodied and fond of walking, then you might see sights and hear language and smell smells, not a stone’s-throw from Wimple Street, that threw doubts upon the solidity even of Wimpole Street itself. So Mr Thomas Beames found when about this time he took it into his head to go walking about London. He was surprised; indeed he was shocked. Splendid buildings raised themselves in Westminster, yet just behind them were ruined sheds in which human beings lived herded together above herds of cows — ‘two in each seven feet of space’. He felt that he ought to tell people what he had seen. Yet how could one describe politely a bedroom in which two or three families lived above a cow-shed, when the cow-shed had no ventilation, when the cows were mixed and killed and eaten under the bedroom? That was a task, as Mr Beames found when he came to attempt it, that taxed all the resources of the English Language. And yet he felt that he ought to describe what he had seen in the course of an afternoon’s walk … Such sights were the more surprising, because one might come upon them in the most sedate and civilised quarters of London — ‘the most artistotratic parishes have their share’. Behind Miss Barrett’s bedroom, for instance, was one of the worst slums in London. Mixed up with that respectability was this squalor. But there were certain quarters, of course, which had long been given over to the poor and were left undisturbed … A dense mass of aged buildings in St Giles’s was ‘wellnigh a penal settlement, a pauper metropolis in itself’. Aptly enough, where the poor conglomerated thus, the settlement was called a Rookery. For there human beings swarmed on top of each other as rooks swarm and blacken tree-tops. Only the buildings here were not trees; they were hardly any longer buildings. They were cells of brick intersected by lanes which ran with filth. All day the lanes buzzed with half-dressed human beings; at night there poured back again into the stream the thieves, beggars and prostitutes who had been plying their trade all day in the West End. The police could do nothing. No single wayfarer could do anything except hurry through as fast as he could and perhaps drop a hint, as Mr Beames did, with many quotations, evasions and euphemisms, that all was not quite as it should be.

I haven’t returned to the Hoover Bridge since the time Noemi and I went to pass out ice cream and popsicles. Since my visit to the bridge, my hand is close to fully healed. I can see the new skin peeking out underneath the scabs of dry skin still leftover from the cut. My days have become occupied with a sudden overflow of work and my mind is preoccupied with all the recent news of violence and grief. All the while, the “pauper metropolis” continues to grow in my neighborhood and I feel like Mr Beames. I wonder what my part is to play, beyond that of the wayfarer whose only action is to hurry through.