But
if Soho is the pulsating heart of London's by night, tourism is the real great business in the rest
of the West End: a huge shopping mall and amenities in whose veins runs an infinite
river of people, motorized and money which draws a continuous replacement of
new life from the invisible arteries of the immense underground subway of the
London metropolis.
The presence of this mass of metropolitan
plankton had allowed in those streets the emergence of a varied fauna of
sellers, including the fruit ‘s stalls, which were set mostly along Oxford
Street.
Their fruit, so beautiful and flashy to
look fake, stood out more for quality and shape than for quantity.
The "fruit'stallers" actually
sold to the passers-by, usual to quick "lunch-time", or to occasional
tourists, Californian a red apple, a greenish South African "Granny
Smith" or even a Sicilian
grapefruit, a banana or, perhaps, to the most sophisticated, an avogadro cut in
two halves, provided with salt and plastic spoon. While the few housewives or restaurateurs in
the area, found in the nearby Berwick street market cheaper prices and better choices.
The "London Fruits Sellers
Company" (from which these particular fruit sellers were dependent) was
certainly a company with all right papers: municipal marketing permissions;
Public land occupation license; Health insurance card and even regular and
substantial payments to the Great State Partner: the voracious Fiscal of the
Crown.
The corporate summit was almost entirely
made up of Jewish, eternal and skilled financiers, always looking for
investments and profits, while the organization on the field, so to say, was in
the hands of the English.
The vendors all came from the neighborhood
"East London", a city in the city, the ultimate London, for those who
were legitimately and authentically Londoners.
The concentration in the east of the Thames of the descendants of
the ancient inhabitants of Londinium had gone along with the expansion of the
English capital.
Pushed away to east by the enlargement of
the ancient core of the city (as well as from Holborn, Seven Dials e Covent
Garden), due to become in the centuries the wealthy square mile, evicted off
the west to make space to rich and profiting buildings, the poorest people of
London found shelter more and more to the East side of the town, merging with
the offspring of the Huguenots, the Jews, the Romani and the already settled poorest
English people and so moving to Clerkenwell, Finsbury, Shoreditch, Wapping,
Limehouse, Hoxton, Stepney, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Aldgate,
Millwall, Hackney, Rotherhithe, Mile End e Bow which all became another London, the only real and
original one, in contrast to London’s rich and tourists.
And
while Harrod's, Selfridges, Marks and Spencer and the largest London banks were
located where once they lived, they found refuge in the East End, far from the
chaotic and polluted New Frontier. And when they crossed that invisible curtain
that protected them to the east, they entered the "Town" or the
“City”, but London was already behind.
Bulwark and symbol of the identity
of this people was, still at that time, the Cokney.
It is a real English dialect, though it has lexical borrowings from
Yiddish, and a distinctive accent that features T- glottalisation, a
loss of dental fricatives and diphthong alterations.
This slang, which is said to bear more than one trace
of early English London speech, acts as a linguistic element of group
identification where the East Londoners find their emotionally primary
language, a true mother tongue.
The other English find it very funny, a bit like it
happens to the Italians when they hear the colorful Roman dialect
of certain comedians, from Ettore Petrolini onwards. Also in my company were several of these "East Londoners".
8.
to be continued...
