It was the first Saturday afternoon in August; it had been broiling hot all day, with a
cloudless sky, and the sun had been beating down on the houses, so that the top rooms
were like ovens; but now with the approach of evening it was cooler, and everyone in
Vere Street was out of doors.
Vere street, Lambeth, is a short, straight street leading out of the Westminster Bridge
Road; it has forty houses on one side and forty houses on the other, and these eighty
houses are very much more like one another than ever peas are like peas, or young
ladies like young ladies. They are newish, three-storied buildings of dingy grey brick
with slate roofs, and they are perfectly flat, without a bow-window or even a projecting
cornice or window-sill to break the straightness of the line from one end of the street to
the other.
This Saturday afternoon the street was full of life; no traffic came down Vere Street, and
the cemented space between the pavements was given up to children. Several games of
cricket were being played by wildly excited boys, using coats for wickets, an old tennisball
or a bundle of rags tied together for a ball, and, generally, an old broomstick for bat.
The wicket was so large and the bat so small that the man in was always getting bowled,
when heated quarrels would arise, the batter absolutely refusing to go out and the
bowler absolutely insisting on going in. The girls were more peaceable; they were
chiefly employed in skipping, and only abused one another mildly when the rope was
not properly turned or the skipper did not jump sufficiently high. Worst off of all were
the very young children, for there had been no rain for weeks, and the street was as dry
and clean as a covered court, and, in the lack of mud to wallow in, they sat [6] about the
road, disconsolate as poets. The number of babies was prodigious; they sprawled about
everywhere, on the pavement, round the doors, and about their mothers' skirts. The
grown-ups were gathered round the open doors; there were usually two women
squatting on the doorstep, and two or three more seated on either side on chairs; they
were invariably nursing babies, and most of them showed clear signs that the present
object of the maternal care would be soon ousted by a new arrival. Men were less
numerous but such as there were leant against the walls, smoking, or sat on the sills of
the ground-floor windows. It was the dead season in Vere Street as much as in
Belgravia, and really if it had not been for babies just come or just about to come, and
an opportune murder in a neighbouring doss-house, there would have been nothing
whatever to talk about. As it was, the little groups talked quietly, discussing the atrocity
or the merits of the local midwives, comparing the circumstances of their various
confinements.
'You'll be 'avin' your little trouble soon, eh, Polly?' asked one good lady of another.
'Oh, I reckon I've got another two months ter go yet,' answered Polly.
'Well,' said a third. 'I wouldn't 'ave thought you'd go so long by the look of yer!'
'I 'ope you'll have it easier this time, my dear,' said a very stout old person, a woman of
great importance.
'She said she wasn't goin' to 'ave no more, when the last one come.' This remark came
from Polly's husband.
'Ah,' said the stout old lady, who was in the business, and boasted vast experience.
'That's wot they all says; but, Lor' bless yer, they don't mean it.'
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