Lord’s Cricket Ground, Marylebone
Twelve cricket bats are now reported to have grown hair overnight. Five sets of stumps replaced, either because they were found stretched as long as broom poles, or else shrunken or blackened. One set of wooden bails appears to have grown teeth.
Coffee stall owner, Hammersmith
My wife’s a nutmeg grater. I know it’s her. I come home. The grater’s in her chair. Oh, Margaret. How’d it happen, deary?
Stage Manager, Lyceum Theatre, West End
It’s the handkerchief we use for Othello. It keeps being misplaced. One stage hand swears he saw it flying about in the wings like a bat and, that on catching it with a butterfly net, it did bite him most fiercely. It has been replaced several times, but each time the handkerchief will not keep still. There have been reports of it suddenly appearing in the actors’ dressing rooms. The company is most perturbed and suspect there shall be a death among them. All their performances have been affected by the handkerchief. Mr Irving, who plays the Moor, terrifies all with his face darkened over; his murdering of Desdemona is the most repulsive thing I have ever seen on the stage.
From a chimney sweep, Bethnal Green
It was always soot that we were fighting up the chimneys, but now we have a new foe, all the chimneys are quite blocked with things, all stuffed up with bits and pieces from around the houses, some it seems going up the flue from the inside, others finding their way down the pots from outside. How they got to be there is anyone’s guess. Hundreds of things quite stuffed up. Think it some strange prank, but I now done four-and-twenty chimneys so suffocated. Should anyone light a fire below such a blocked chimney, there’d be black smoke in the house in a moment and all would choke, but that’s the very least of it – should a fire be unchecked with such a blocked chimney, then there’s every chance of it catching proper, of the whole house going up in flames, and if I’ve seen four-and-twenty so blocked, then how many might there be in all London?
From a butcher’s apprentice, Smithfield Meat Market
Sometimes people of London come to watch us in our labour, come to buy or just to see the sight of so much flesh all together. I don’t usually bother about them. But that morning among the gawpers was this strange dog I see, a huge dog it was, the size of a Great Dane or something, but misshapen and ugly and mangy. Curiously, it had a brass ring hanging from its nose. Then there was the dog’s owner, that was another queer thing right there. He was a bald man with a long nose, queer and pointy, and the other oddness was his ears: his ears were not equal to each other; one was old and wrinkled, the other small and neat and youthful. Despite all that he was quite a dapper little fellow – and kept an umbrella hooked at his arm. The man, he comes up, he says, ‘I want one whole dead pig. My dog, my dog shall carry it. Here, Otter, come, girl. Strap the pig to the dog, my good fellow.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes, please, come along. She’ll carry it and more besides.’
It was done. To see that huge hound with a weight of pig upon its back! And then the business exhausted and the purchase made, off they went into the darkness, like it was the normalest thing in the world to walk your dog in such a fashion.
Well and that was strange, surely it was, but London is the great hold-all of many a strange person, always has been, always will be. So what if a person has a dog that takes home his shopping for him, that’s not so telling if you balance it that way. Only then, with us turning back around to our business, then came the strange part. The meat, all the meat, all the meat of all of Smithfield had changed in those few moments. It had all spoiled. It was all stale and old and rotting, all gone off I tell you. In a sudden moment. All spoiled, quite spoiled, and then such a buzzing of flies and such a standing by. Where before all had been whites and reds and pinks, now was all darkest browns and muddy yellows and dirty greens. Wrong colours, wrong smells, wrong meat. All spent like from some rotting rubbish heap.
Smithfield had no new meat that day. If you wanted meat you had to go fetch it from Newgate Market or Leadenhall, which is generally the best for poultry, dead or alive.
From the Master of the Household, the Right Honourable Lord Steward, Marquis of Breddalbane, Buckingham Palace
A terrestrial globe in one of state rooms – a gift to the family from the collection of Catherine the Great – has begun to discolour and grow weeping blisters. Many countries have become quite illegible. Gibraltar is now no more than a swollen lump. India is taken over by a large, very sore-looking rash. Just yesterday the abused crust or scab that was once St Helena dislodged itself and fell to the floor.
As if all the Empire were under threat.