Recuerdos de un italiano en Londres-19

 

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La tranquila vida diaria de Oxford Street a veces se veia interrumpida por la aparición repentina y casi fugaz de los "contrabandistas".

Eran personas acechantes del este de Londres, menos malvadas y deshonestas de lo que su apodo podía suponer, que eran capaces de improvisar una venta en la calle de articulos de lujo falsos más adecuados para la comedia de Goldoni.

Por lo general, actuaban en grupos de cuatro, cada uno de ellos con un papel definido.

Llegaban a la calle Oxford en una hora topica (entre las 11.30 a.m. y las 16.p.m.) después de estacionar en su camioneta en una de las calles adiacentes. Por lo general, ocupaban un segmento de acera entre dos barras transversales; dos de ellos actuaban como postes en cada una de las dos intersecciones, por lo que nunca podría suceder que una patrulla se acercara inesperadamente y los otros dos dispusieran la caja con la mercancía en el centro del pavimento (perfumes, billeteras, bufandas, encendedores, relojes joyas, que variaban según los días, pero siempre eran marcas de lujo pero falsas).

Uno de ellos, el orador, sentado en una de las cajas de cartón, volcóada como asiento, elogiaba la calidad y el precio de los productos expuestos a la venta,, con voz exaltada en ese incomprensible dialecto de Londres, que a su vez era un espectáculo imperdible.

El cuarto compliz, el provocador, estaba colocado detrás de la multitud que regularmente se detenía alrededor del orador, atraída por ese espectáculo improvisado, y luego,  empujando el dinero, visible entre sus dedos, gritaba "... ¡Compro tres de ellos!" , "¡Quiero dos!", "¡Tomo cuatro de esos!" Arrastrando consigo a docenas de compradores que a veces daban el dinero sin siquiera saber lo que estaban comprando.

Una vez uno de los dos de guardia, consciente de la llegada de un par de bobbies, dio la alarma. En cuestión de cinco segundos, sin haber previamente tranquilizado a los clientes ocasionales sobre sus honestas intenciones, los bienes, el dinero y las cajas ya habían desaparecido, tragados desde el callejón frente a la dirección de llegada de los policías. Y después que la patrulla londinesa, completamente ignorante, desaparecia de la vista aguda de las guardias contrabandistas, en el mismo punto se iba  reformando el mercado de ventas fraudalentas. Y debe agregarse que la interrupción no le hizo mucho daño a los asuntos de la banda.

En reversa, el miedo que la banda mostraba de haber por la policia, ya sea cierto o falso, podría haber convencido a la gente de que los negocios propuestos tenían que ser muy rentables.

¡Qué bendita ingenuidad de los británicos y los turistas de Londres!

Recuerdo que mi padre solía contarme acerca de los sinvergüenzas napolitanos que vendían a los compradores ingenuos relojes de oro falso,  desde la época de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, fingiendo que eran el botín del último robo del siglo. Aunque todos conocen el Teatro Napolitano, es algo diferente de la comedia inglesa.

También recuerdo que Bob una vez me confesó que se había ganado de vivir en ese estilo, durante un tiempo, y que sabía que los que lo practicaban eran todos muy buenos chicos.

Recuerdos de un Italiano en Londres -17

 

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Bob y los otros comerciantes, incluidos sus dos hermanos y una hermana, habían abandonado la escuela poco después de haber resuelto sus obligaciones escolasticas; de hecho, muchos incluso antes de ese término.

Rebelde y refractarios con las duras reglas de los profesores de la escuela inglésa, preferían la vida libre de la calle; sin supervisores jerárquicos invadiendo o reprendiendo y sin ningún tipo de obligación (no era raro que cambiaran las malas palabras con algún cliente demasiado exigente o desafortunado). Y con un gran sueldo sobre las ganancias promedio de los trabajadores y empleados de las oficinas encerradas.

Otros vendedores ambulantes eran los vendedores de periódicos. También ellos procedìan casi exclusivamente del este de Londres, pero era muy raro encontrar jóvenes entre ellos. Trabajaban al aire libre durante todo el año, ocupando las esquinas a la salida de las estaciones metropolitanas más importantes, usando una simple caja metálica dentro de la cual estaban los periódicos, y una mesa con silla de metal, y de allí emitieban algunos sonidos incomprensibles que se fusionaban con las corrientes que salìan de las entrañas de la tierra, a través de los infinitos meandros del metro; y en esos sonidos ya no se podían reconocer los nombres de los diarios Evening Standard y Evening News, que pronunciaban en una forma corta y deformada por el hábito, similar al traqueteo de una bestia herida, para atraer la atención de los pasajeros distraídos y apurados en tránsito hacia las entradas de los túneles subterráneos. 

The real story of Patrick Winningoes-8

 

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How had succeeded, that strange old man, in transporting those visions down our sights, below the windows? The same visions I had still in my mind, being so fresh and real, we had just lived right that Friday of 9th November 1979 I was relating of!

We had walked silently. Sometimes we crossed some hasty passing or perceived, almost more than hear it, as a fleeting apparition, a car or a motorbike whose noise was spaced out slowly, as absorbed and diluted in the immensity of the surrounding silence. Turning around several times, after an indefinite time, that desert of dry leaves seemed to stop against an iron handrail.

From my point of observation, tall brushes of trees hid the horizon and I could only see, slightly swaying in the void, a green poster with the write “Winpey “in block red-dark characters.

I felt a pleasant excitement throughout my body. A feeling that immediately was of lightness. A desire to let my body flow in the air, toward that poster, flying the sky.

. As we went down the stairway, the view, under of us, revealed his real contours.

That poster, that seemed to me like suspended in the air from my previous point of view, was the summit of the tall pylon of a crane that laid in the center of an immense housing estate.

I watched again toward that write and noticed that it was hacked against a loaded leady sky with no change of tonality. A dark and heavy vault until my eyes could see.

To find the access of the yard, that occupied a wide place in the centre of a crossroad, we walked for an half along his perimeter. The thick tables that bounded it were interspaced of half an inch, around through numerous working machines were glimpse: diggers, shovels, concrete mixers, kneaders, all firm, as dead animals, in the most total silence.

The entrance was exactly on the opposite side of the inn from where, for the first time, I had perceived the pylon of the crane. We reached it, after a quick and silent walk. Between working machines and shovels, heaps of sand and piles of sacks of cement, bricks, lumbers, irons and utensils, we noticed a small cottage of red plate that was almost in the centre of the building yard. We were approaching there when a small door was opened out of the shed.

- «Hello boys!» - A gentleman said sorting out. - « Can I help you?»-.

His voice was cordial and happy. It seemed he was talking to well known persons.

-« Is there any need of some workers?»- George did him without preambles and also laughing.

We stopped a little closer and so I had the opportunity to better observe him: he looked quite a lot peaky, making a net contrast with the strong black of the hair. He dressed with elegance a brown suit on a white shirt with a red and black cravat.

- « I would not mind at all » - the man replied in the former jovial tone -«but our firm assumes only through the agency. Now I will give you the address so you can go and see there. There are good hopes. Follow me in to the office, please» -, he spurred on, seeing us so undecided.

The office looked like the building field. As matter of fact inside there were numerous buckets full of hammers, chisels, pickets, waterlevels, trowels and other mason utensils.

Once inside, Mr. Joking (that’s was the name he had introduced himself, asking us in turn our names) immediately passed beyond a desk loaded on with papers, different samples of colored tiles and some minute utensils . He scrutinized us for a long while.

-« Where do you come from?» - He asked after a careful examination, dissuading his look.

-«From Italy»- responded promptly George, preceding me.

We seemed to overcome his examination, because he smiled in a satisfied way.

-«Here is your agency’s address» - he said after scribbling some lines on a piece of paper, - «and good luck!»-, added while was handing the note to George!

We had not even had the time to read it that we heard a strong aloud voice:

"-Old Pat doesn't stand people pronouncing his name and that of his Agency in a wrong way and above all he doesn't bear to be told any lies. If you do it, you won't have any job from him."

Then, turning to Mr Joking he added:

- "Sir Patrick the Hanger Winnin’goes again, doesn’t he?" - Only later on we had to realize that the big man we saw rudely laughing, turning a look back on our shoulders, was not misgiving English language at all, as he willingly wanted but to stress the wrong verb, like he really did.

George stood perplexed, with the note in his hand, now looking the big man, who was still laughing, now Mr. Joking, who seemed rather embarrassed than enjoyed.

I walked closer when I saw him reading the note. On a single line the note said:

"Pat Winningoes - Gehenna Geld", and nothing else.

-" Strange names, the last two. They sound quite German" -, George exclaimed by low voice.

- "He has not even put the telephone number. Shall we ask for it?" -, I said.

-" We might take a look for it on the telephone guide. Still if it really does exist" -,

George murmured. putting the note in his pocket while sorting out the cottage. We walked out without even greeting, with fast and nervous footsteps. Before reaching the exit of the yard, nevertheless, we heard a man’s call.

-« Hey, wait a moment, please!.» Mr. Joking came rushing slightly breathing towards us.

- «Do not pay attention to Big Joe, please! He is a joker» - he added gently smiling like he had made the first time, with a tone of reassuring voice.

«Come over with me, please» -, he said driving us over the exit .

- «You cross the road in that direction and take straightly the avenue you have in front; then, taking the third street on your left, that can’t be wrong, you will see a big door in dark wood. There is the agency. Go in….. and...... good luck»!.

He had spoken all of a breath and in so convincing way that we had already forgotten Big Joe and his strange former laughing . The avenue that Mr Joking had pointed us, was really the third crossroad on the left. It was a blind, wide and short alley.

At the bottom a massive dark wood doorway stand out, occupying all the breath of the street..

More than the entry of a job’s agency, it seemed to be as the entrance of a rich and luxurious residence. A few steps in marble lead to an extraordinarily glimmering atrium, to whose sides were risen, also in marble, two mighty columns.

George, walking the steps, almost was very close to stumble. He restored immediately his equilibrium, murmuring an annoyed "My goodness!" and looking on the bottom of his shoes, like searching there the cause of the accident.

The wind was blowing more insistently, and formed in the alley a strong eddy, violently shaking above the front door a rectangular poster which was bestowed with some scotch tape, held out against the wind on a unique side. With my right hand I stopped it on the front door. We read there, in a clear handwriting and cursive characters:

"London Trickery and Illusion Centre."

- «But where the hell did they send us?» -said George looking at me.

- «’I do not know!» -, I answered, releasing the side of the poster, which retook immediately to wave.

- «They made a joke of us, those two braggarts!» -, I told him with angry voice. Then turning to my companion - «Didn't we make a mistake by wrongly counting the crossroads?.» I said returning back on our steps to check in.

- «Come soon to have a look, please!»-, cried George in that while, with excited tone of voice.

I returned quickly on my footsteps and drew close to him. With the right hand he stopped the poster on the front door and surprisingly I could read on it this time - "Pat Winningoes - Geenna Geld Agency - 1st Floor."

-«What devil of history is this? »-, I told George, who was looking at me in a mocking way, with the right hand still fixing the poster on the door.

-« The history is all here» -, he answered. And with emphatic gestures as a conjurer who discloses an amazing trick to the public, he turned the poster from a side to another, showing the different writings we had read on it just a little before. I turned it for a couple of times, as to make myself convinced, while George was already pushing the other half of the front door.

Recuerdos de un Italiano en Londres-13

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Pero si Soho es el corazón palpitante de Londres de noche, el turismo es el gran negocio en el resto del West End: un gran centro comercial y comodidades en cuyas venas corre un río infinito de personas, motorizadas y con dinero, que atrae a un reemplazo continuo de nueva vida de las arterias invisibles del inmenso metro subterráneo de la metrópoli de Londres. La presencia de esta masa de plancton metropolitano había permitido en esas calles el surgimiento de una variada fauna de vendedores, incluidos los puestos de frutas, que se establecían principalmente a lo largo de Oxford Street. Sus frutos, tan hermoso y llamativo que parecian falsos, se destacaban más por la calidad y la forma que por la cantidad. Los "vendedores de fruta" en realidad vendían a los transeúntes, lo habitual para un "almuerzo rápido", o para turistas ocasionales, una manzana roja californiana, una "Granny Smith" sudafricana verdosa o incluso un pomelo siciliano, un plátano o , quizás, al más sofisticado, un avogadro cortado en dos mitades, provisto de sal y cuchara de plástico. Mientras que las pocas amas de casa o restauradores en la zona, que se encuentran en la calle Berwick cercana, encuentraban precios más baratos y mejores opciones. La "London Fruits Sellers Company" (de la que dependían estos vendedores de frutas en particular) era sin duda una empresa con todos los documentos adecuados: permisos de comercialización municipales; Licencia de ocupación de suelo público; tarjeta de seguro médico e incluso pagos regulares y sustanciales al Gran Socio Estatal: el voraz Fiscal de la Corona. La cumbre corporativa estaba compuesta casi en su totalidad de financieros judíos, eternos y expertos, siempre en busca de inversiones y ganancias, mientras que la organización en el campo, por así decirlo, estaba en manos de los ingleses. Todos los vendedores ingleses venían del barrio "East London", una ciudad en la ciudad, el mejor Londres, para aquellos que eran legítima y auténticamente londinenses.

La concentración en el este del Támesis de los descendientes de los antiguos habitantes de Londinium había ido junto con la expansión de la capital inglesa.

Expulsado hacia el este por la ampliación del núcleo antiguo de la ciudad (así como de Holborn, Seven Dials y Covent Garden), que se convertirá en los siglos en la rica milla cuadrada, desalojada del oeste para hacer espacio a ricos y lucrativos edificios, la gente más pobre de Londres encontró refugio cada vez más en el lado este de la ciudad, fusionándose con los descendientes de los hugonotes, los judíos, los romaníes y los ingleses más pobres de la actualidad, mudandose a Clerkenwell, Finsbury, Shoreditch, Wapping, Limehouse, Hoxton, Stepney, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Aldgate, Millwall, Hackney, Rotherhithe, Mile End e Bow, que se convirtieron en otro Londres, el único real y original, en contraste con los ricos y turistas de Londres. Y mientras Harrod's, Selfridges, Marks y Spencer y los bancos más grandes de Londres estaban ubicados donde una vez ellos vivieron, encontraron refugio en el East End, lejos de la caótica y contaminada Nueva Frontera. Y cuando cruzaban esa cortina invisible que los protegía hacia el este, entraban en la "Ciudad" o la "Ciudad", pero Londres ya estaba detrás.

The real story of Patrick Winningoes-5

 

https://www.amazon.it/real-story-Patrick-Winningoes-Salvatore-ebook/dp/B0B244SFNQ/

While I was trying to go further in what the man had told of his personal story he took back with sad voice to tell his tale.

 

«I apologize for talking in a such confused mess. Before continuing telling you of my son it would be better to resume what happened first. At the age of twenty one, after a long journey and appropriate studies, I started some peculiar experiments on the human brain. I felt that I had to create a super brain in order to be reproduced and form a race of super-men able to drive on the right direction this dreg of humanity that inhabits the world. After all I had to consider that the brain of every living being contains, even though modified by the evolution, the original matrix of our existence.

After some rough attempts of surgical engineering, that occupied me for different years, whose initial success and following disappointed bitterness, almost led me to abandon the whole project, it was the fate to intervene and to point out the right way to me.

Which kind of proof would I more need to wait for? The same celestial stars directly showed me the way!

A beautiful day, in fact, while I was observing under the microscope a cat’s brain, ulterior, fortunate guinea-pig, subtracted to the deprivations of its life for the glory of the Science, an amazing account happened to me.

I had set the small feline’s organ in a cylindrical open neck test-tube and I was continuously thinking about it, looking as usual for a sprout of understanding on its complex and mysterious composition. At a certain point, needing something to eat, I went upstairs. I left unwillingly open the microscope’s focus. I was going to have a cup of tea, with my daily survival meal.

 

As I returned downstairs I immediately noticed that something strange had happened during my brief absence.  In the test-tube the brain of the cat had dried, acquiring a grey and pale color.

I extracted it with the pliers: it seemed a dry sponge without neither weight nor smell. What devil had it happened?  It was a gust of wind which answered to me.

In that underground where I secretly developed my experiments, I had not left but a small window, that I wanted surfaced to the level of the ground.  It had slightly disclosed, quiet enough to allow the passage of a provident ray of sun which, intruding the optic circuit of the microscope, had poured in with all its mighty energy, dehydrating completely the object of my experiments.

 

But my light, initial disappointment had soon to be transformed in high exultation, when I closer observed the test-tube that had served like furnace to that unforeseen experiment. On its fund rested some drops of a dense and glimmering liquid! I had a lightning, an intuition that afterwards had to be exactly revealed.

Admirably exact, my friends! I had found the way to extract from the muscle that includes our life, from the brain that contains all the knowledge of a human being, its own essence. An extract, a summary, that is the same, but free from the physical brain’s encumbrance, from the grey mash that comprises it. Free from the flesh as a soul is free from his body as an idea from his thinker as a thought from his action!

 

As you certainly know all our mental energy springs by a simple chemical reaction that is continuously produced in our brain. Such reaction, that the physicians define with the name of “synapse”, is originated by the reaction between the liquid whose any  brain is imbued and the cells it copiously contains. In practice this liquid, that has equal molecular structure in every man, works as a tracing detector of the cerebral process, whose action is, instead, what countersigns a man from another.

 

The intimate reasons for such different action of the cerebral processing, have seen divided for a long time the humanity. Manhood has however been until now incapable to intend the true reason for the difference of the beings of its species.  A human being, from the scientific point of view, it is only a product of a casual connection of the basically chemical mixtures that are contained in the cells. And all its activity is coordinated by the cerebral cells.

To succeed on obtaining a distillate of those cells, meant therefore to dispose of a substance of inestimable value.

 

At the beginning I thought to try his reproduction, but actually this would have been only an interesting and suggestive detour from my principal aim.

In order to reach it I had to gather all my efforts, and the results of that first experiments constituted the base of my following job.

First of all it was clear that the cerebral muscle, under particular conditions of temperature and environment, like those which took accidentally place that prophetic day in my laboratory, released a particular, liquid and dense substance, containing the fundamental geniuses, that I call primaries; those which are responsible of the most intimate and proper characters of the race.

 

It was also evident that such substance appeared able to be moved into another brain, creating there a new habitat in which to regenerate its cells and with them repurchase its functions and its aboriginal characters.

I verified more times the exactness of these hypotheses, but only in a direction, that I define evolutionary. The experiment only succeeded if the essence of a superior animal, in the steps of the evolutionary chain, was introduced in the brain of an inferior animal, while in the other way down, the phenomenon took place in a lesser and very attenuated tone deprived of significant consequence.

 

I baptized the liquid essence ‘nouchefalon ', and I prepared hence myself to develop in the foreseen direction my experiments.  What would it happen if I transfused some ‘human nouchefalon ' in to the brain of another man?”

 

 

 

 

The real story of Patrick Winningoes-4

 

https://www.amazon.it/real-story-Patrick-Winningoes-Salvatore-ebook/dp/B0B244SFNQ/

During the war I had the opportunity to deeply analyze the causes of those disastrous events. I had been, it is true, in the years immediately preceding the war completely devoted to my studies, in a way that I could call purely scientific of the phenomena which stand at the base of the human life, but it was not certainly in the fore coming years of war that we had to seek its reasons and inmost causes. The roots of hate and evil sank their extreme appendixes in the most tangled and lavish meanders of human mind. These deleterious feelings, so inherent to human mind, were to be conceived like the principal causes of that huge bath of blood.

 

From this premise I puzzled out that the basic beliefs of the national socialist philosophy were correct: the humanity, in order to be saved, needed a superior race to be raised over the others for leading them to salvation. But German race could not certainly be the chosen one. Not even any other among the existing races could be that, because it had to be a race who didn't know, in their hearts but goodness and love.

 

With a greater fury than before, I addressed all my energies against the hateful enemy: I challenged death ten, hundred, thousands of times, always defeating the adversary.

 

Little by little, I started perceiving what role it was reserved to me in the history of the world and the contours of my destiny assumed more and more its clean and precise outline.”

 

While pronouncing his last words Mr Winningoes, who had gradually been increasing his excitement during the narration, lifted up the right hand, tensing his forefinger as an accuser, and his eyes rotated a couple of times halting eventually in an insane expression of craziness depicted on his face. He remained for indefinite time with the lift forefinger, staring into space, with his muscles tended as if they had wanted to get out of standing. He seemed a statue of marble, immortalized in a grotesque pose. This sudden explosion of apparent madness came unexpected. Before we had the time to interact, however, the man seemed to recover himself. He looked around, lost and embarrassed and, grabbed a glass of water, voided all of it in a hit. The water seemed to calm the man. His eyes showed now a serene light and he looked like being almost absent, lost in his thoughts or perhaps looking for recomposing the interrupted line of his story. He pulled the refreshments trolley and picked up a carafe filled with a golden colored liquid.

 

- “Have a drink, please. It is cognac from Charente, one of the few things that I appreciate of French people.”

 

This way saying he poured some of that liquid in a short, carved wine glass, explaining us that a cognac, to be really good, has to leave, if slightly rotated, a thin layer of color inside the glass.

As soon as I had drunk, I immediately felt a comforting warmth. On the warm’s alcohol wave I thought that that man surely knew so much indeed about life. His theories, nevertheless, yet quiet abstruse to me, showed however a sort of suggestive charm.

I imagined my brain imploding together with George’s, melting with it and flying, as a winged rocket, in the endless universe.

 

Memoirs of London - 6

In 1979 I was back on the road to work for the B.B.C., a company that, apart from the initials of its name, had nothing else to share with British state television. In fact, the Benjamin Building Company did not afflict people with boring programs, neither it  talked with shameless lies about national and international political events. Finally my Company did not even put its nose in the lives of the Queen and the other members of the Royal Family,  generally speaking.

The company I worked for delighted their customers  by selling ice cream and drinks, logistically relying on a chain’s shop of souvenirs, sweets and tobacco’s  strategically located at several points in the great London area known as West End.

 This vast and famous London metropolitan area, which also includes Soho district and numerous small and large parks, is bordered by a perimeter that runs through the important streets of Oxford Street, Charing Cross Rd, Shaftesbury Av and Regent's Street, forming an irregular trapeze whose four tops pass from Tottenham Court Rd to Oxford Circus; from there to Piccadilly Circus and  finally end at Leicester Square, couple of yards   from Trafalgar Square, where Admiral Nelson's statue, according to the likely intentions of the public authorities who wanted it so powerfully high, witnessed  the  British’s greatness and glory to all those who would walk from there: French people, foreigners  and British from all over the Empire.

 In those years, the greatness and glory of England, after the almost total depletion of the British Empire,  seemed more remote and far from the statue of the great conductor of the seas. And nostalgia, it’s all over known, is a feeling that more acutely manifests itself, when the best times are over and  a crisis is bound to come.

 And that Great Britain was in crisis at the end of the seventies of the twentieth century, it immediately became apparent also to the "street traders" who, living among the people, felt the moods of the average citizen in an emotionally direct way.

 On the street, they felt discomfort and nervousness, though the real troubles were still to come, shortly thereafter, with the irresistible rise to power of the Conservatives headed by Margareth Tatcher (later known as the “Iron Lady"), which would mark the end of a cycle in London's administrative life, characterized by a policy of traditional securing of democratic freedoms and sympathy for the weaker social classes.

Moreover, the English metropolis had represented since the rising of the first music liberation and protest groups (born on the wave of the American Hippies movement, also known as the "beat generation") a decisive cultural reference point, helping to make London the Capital of the Rock Movement, where refugees disappointed by the illusion of the failed revolution of 1968, could find a safe refuge escape from the backflow of the reaction which  had gone through  the whole world.

And it was right there, in London, that they could still see the last glow of brightness before its definite sunset. So, in a good way, I agreed to resume my job and sell ice-creams and drinks in the street. By my side I had a refrigerating machine that turned milk into ice cream and a refreshing machine dispensing orange and lemonade.

Where  else could I work, let alone  the road? And to do what? Maybe to get into some office with air conditioning in the summer, heating in the winter, and the stench of paperwork under my nose? There was no other world for me, now, if not that; no other destiny, no other life I could have wanted, than the free life  of street's traders.

 Returning to the road meant for me to relive from the very beginning my adventure in that mysterious and fascinating city that, unfortunately and superficially, is too often considered cold and inhospitable, considering also that never or almost never come into you get a direct contact with English or British people.

 This story is devoted to London and to the dear places where I have lived in.  But it is also dedicated to all the peoples that those places with such variety and vivacity animated in those years who will pass through the main scene of my story: the streets of London.

6. to be continued...