Hooligan Nights | Page 2

Flag. For in the former Patrick Hooligan lived a portion of his ill-spent life, and gave laws and a name to his followers; in the latter, the same Patrick was to be met night by night, until a higher law than his own put a period to his rule.
Moreover, my companion was one on whom a portion at least of Patrick Hooligan's mantle had fallen; a young man--he was scarcely more than seventeen--who held by the Hooligan tradition, and controlled a gang of boys who made their living by their wits, and were ready for any devilry if you assured them of even an inadequate reward.
Young Alf--this is not the name by which the constable on point duty at the Elephant mentions him to his colleague who comes along from St George's Road--young Alf was first at the meeting-place. He had, he explained, an evening to spare, and there were lots of worse places than the Elephant.
Young Alf beckoned; and while I hovered on the kerb, watching the charging buses, the gliding trains, and the cabs that twinkled their danger signals, he had plunged into the traffic and slithered through, dodging buses and skirting cabs without a turn of the head. He went through the traffic with a quiet, confident twist of the body, as a fish whisks its way through scattered rocks, touching nothing, but always within a hair's-breadth of collision. On the other side he awaited me, careless, and indeed a little contemptuous; and together we made our way towards Bethlehem Hospital, and thence in the direction of Lambeth Walk.
As we swung round a corner I noticed a man in the doorway of a shop--a bald-headed man with spectacles, and in his shirt-sleeves, though the night was chilly.
'Ain't caught yer yet?' was the remark that young Alf flung at him, without turning his head half a point.
'You take a lot o' catchin', you do,' retorted the man.
Young Alf looked round at me. I expected to hear him laugh, or chuckle, or at the least seem amused. And it came upon me with something of a shock that I had never, so far as I could remember, seen him laugh. His face was grave, tense, eager, as always.
'That's a fence,' he said. 'I lived there when I was a nipper, wiv my muvver--and a accerabat.'
'Was that when-' I began.
'Don't talk,' he muttered, for we had emerged upon Lambeth Walk. The Walk, as they term it to whom Lambeth Walk is Bond Street, the promenade, the place to shop, to lounge, to listen to music and singing, to steal, if opportunity occur, to make love, and not infrequently to fight.
The moon was up, and struggling intermittently through clouds; this was probably one of the reasons why young Alf allowed himself an evening of leisure. But Lambeth Walk had no need of a moon: it was Saturday night, and the Walk was aflare with gas and naphtha, which lighted up the street from end to end, and emphasized the gloom of the narrow openings which gave entrance to the network of courts between the Walk and the railway arches behind it.
The whole social life of a district was concentrated in the two hundred yards of roadway, which was made even narrower by the double line of barrows which flanked it. There was not a well-dressed person to be seen, scarcely a passably clean one. But there was none of the hopeless poverty one might have seen at the same hour in Piccadilly; and no one looked in the least bored. Business and pleasure jostled one another. Every corner had its sideshow to which you must turn your attention for a moment in the intervals of haggling over your Sunday's dinner. Here at this corner is a piano-organ, with small children dancing wildly for the mere fun of the thing. There is no dancing for coppers in the Walk. At the next corner is a miniature shooting gallery; the leather-lunged proprietor shouts with well-assumed joy when a crack shot makes the bell ring for the third time, and bears off the cocoa-nut.
'Got 'im again!' he bawls delightedly, as though he lived only to give cocoa-nuts away to deserving people.
Hard by the bland owner of a hand-cart is recommending an 'unfallible cure for toothache' to a perverse and unbelieving audience. As we pass we hear him saying,
'I've travelled 'underds of miles in my time, ladies and gentlemen--all the world over; but this I will say--and let him deny it that can, and I maintain he can't--and that is this, that never in the 'ole course of my experience have I met so sceptical a lot of people as you Londoners. You ain't to be took in. You know-'
But young Alf was making his way through the crowd, and I hurried after him.
Literature, too,