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Updated: June 11, 2025
Behind the counter of a fried-fish shop in High Street, Camden Town, serving slabs of browned hake, and skate, and penn'orths of fried eels and chips to the hungry customers who surge in tempestuously to be fed on their homeward way from the Oxford or the Camden Hall of Varieties, or the theatre at the junction of Gower Street and the Hampstead Road one develops acuteness of observation, one gains experience, there being always the bloke who cuts and runs without paying, or eats and shows reversed trouser-pockets in default of settlement, to deal with.... But one does not develop muscle, the thing above all that W. Keyse most longed to possess.
Now and again, during intervals of comparative calm, I was forced to put my head out of the window to breathe the air of the street. Even that was tainted, for a fried-fish shop across the way and a public-house next door billowed forth their nauseating odours. After a while access to the window was denied me.
"Do you think I'm a greater-hearted woman than she? Wait, I've not finished," she cried in a loud voice. "Your Princess you cut her heart into bits the other day, when you proclaimed yourself a low-born impostor. She thought you a high-born gentleman, and you told her of the gutter up north and the fried-fish shop and the Sicilian organ-grinding woman. She, royalty you of the scum! She left you.
We are quite near it now." I assented eagerly. If it had been a coal-shed or a fried-fish shop I would still have visited it with pleasure, for the sake of prolonging our walk; but I was also really interested in this old house as a part of the background of the mystery of the vanished John Bellingham.
It is really a wonderful, an astounding city, once you have got the feel of the tourist out of your soul. I have been reading the most enthralling essays on it, written by a newspaper man who first fell desperately in love with it at seven an age when the whole glittering town was symbolized for him by the fried-fish shop at the corner of the High Street.
Hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang dangling from pegs outside the windows or flaunting from the door-posts; and the shelves, within, are piled with them. Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse.
They all knew him well, and his fried-fish and fritters even better. He came up to me, and asked if I had any news of Carmen. "'No, said I. "'Well, said he, 'you'll soon hear of her, old fellow. "He was not mistaken. That night I was posted to guard the breach in the wall. As soon as the sergeant had disappeared I saw a woman coming toward me. My heart told me it was Carmen.
But after that day in the Calle del Candilejo I couldn't think of anything else. All day long I used to walk about, hoping I might meet her. I sought news of her from the old hag, and from the fried-fish seller. They both told me she had gone away to Laloro, which is their name for Portugal. They probably said it by Carmen's orders, but I soon found out they were lying.
Houses half built and deserted in the middle, perhaps by some bankrupt builder; small traders, bakers, charcutiers, fried-fish sellers, lodged in structures of lath and plaster, just run up and already crumbling; cabarets of the roughest and meanest kind, adorned with high-sounding devices, David mechanically noticed one which had blazoned on its stained and peeling front, A la renaissance du Phenix; heaps of rubbish and garbage with sickly children playing among them; here and there some small, ill-smelling factory; a few melancholy shrubs in new-made gardens, drooping and festering under a cruel sun in a scorched and unclean soil: the place repelled and outraged every sense.
We left the fried-fish shops and fried spitted-meat shops behind, whence emerge kabobs second only to coos-coosoo and a smell indescribable; and we wound down tortuous alleys, past quiet windowless houses, whose great painted doors, yellow and brown, studded with enormous nails and knockers, spoke respectability. Never a straight street for six yards.
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