[-133-]
"JOHNSON'S RETREAT."
"JOHNSON'S RETREAT" * [*This place,
which was situated in the Hornsey district of northern London, has happily been
abolished since this article was written.] is eligible for the resting
and refreshment of those home-returning wayfarers who on Sundays and holidays
patronize our end of the town for the sake of its hedge-skirted lanes and
blossoming fields.
There is nothing of the flashy tavern tea-gardens visible
about "The Retreat" - indeed, there is no tavern attached to it, and a
glass of grog may not be obtained there for love nor money. Yet it is not
strictly teetotal. Over by the stall where the ginger-beer and Banbury cakes are
vended, you may procure, drawn from the barrel, a jug of ale. A jug, mind you,
and not a dissipated bright public-house pewter - a vessel of brown glazed
earthenware, such as farm-labourers and other rustics quaff their sober
home-brewed from. The sort of pot it is impossible to sit and sot at. The
influence of bright pewter measures on weak minds is a subject worthy the
attention of our total abstinence chiefs. There never was so much drunkenness as
since the invention of pewter pots.
In the old times, as our historical novelists have been at
considerable pains to discover and make known, boozing and carousing occupied a
large share of the leisure of such as could afford the luxurious pastime, but it
is a remarkable fact that [-134-] the tipplers and
bibbers, from the humble retainer in the kitchen to the baron his master, who
sat in the armour-hung hall of his ancestors, were invariably described as
quaffing their potations out of flagons made of some lustrous metal or another
whereas, drinking to drunkenness out of delf; when delf was the universal
material of the poor man's pot, was of such rare occurrence that the
indefatigable Harrison Ainsworth himself has been unable to light upon a single
instance sufficiently well authenticated to warrant its citation. How may this
be explained? Are crockery and home - pottery and domestic felicity - so
intimately associated that the brown jug, wherever it is met - even at the
drinking shop - acts as a kindly remembrancer of wife and fireside, and ensures
the happy balance of mirth and wisdom? if so, let us have an anti-pewter-pot
association with all speed, whose aim shall be the total abolition of the more
seductive measures and the substitution of brown jugs. At least, Parliament
might be moved to make a law insisting that every publican shall hang up in his
bar, and fair in view of his customers, the homely clay cup as a hint against
inebriation and excess. Who knows the good that might follow the adoption of a
plan so simple? There is a story told of a company of Californian gold-diggers,
who for many months cut off from the wholesome influence of female society and
left to their own devices, had grown to be as brutal and reckless a crew as can
be well imagined. Well, one day this charming fellowship in the course of its
wanderings in the desert came upon a woman's bonnet - a battered, tattered wreck
of female finery, cast off and trodden into the mud. But there was enough in it
to rouse the better natures of the finders. Respectfully raising the discarded
finder they on the spot got up a feast in honour of it, giving it the post of
honour at the head of their rough camp table. Sweethearts and wives were
toasted, and home and old friends, long-forgotten fireside stories
[-135-]
and songs were sung, and such fond memories of absent ones recalled, that
every fellow of the company went to bed that night resolved to mend his ways,
and, what is better, all stuck to the resolution more or less. Yet nothing is
more common than for people to declare their disbelief in magic!
Johnson, of "The Retreat" - for the propriety of
whose ways a hundred Sunday-school teachers and promoters of treats for little
children are at this moment ready to vouch - affects earthenware drinking-pots,
and out of them you must be content to take your liquor, supposing you should
require refreshment of a more exhilarating nature than may be extracted from a
ginger-beer bottle. You will be disappointed in expecting, because
"Johnson's" is known as a tea-garden, to find the facilities for
dancing afforded by the proprietor of "The Grotto" and similar
disreputable places. "The Retreat" provides no German band, perched up
aloft, no capacious platform. Such dainties may be very well where young men and
women are concerned ; but Johnson's customers are children merely, and if the
frisking lambkins desire to indulge in saltatory exercse there is a nice patch
of green, and it is hard but that they can caper to the music of their own sweet
voices. The beer on tap is, of course, not for these innocents, but for their
elders - their fathers and grown-up brothers - who, by way of a treat, bring
them to this delightful old-fashioned place. There are swings here, and
roundabouts, and pretty games of puss-in-the-corner, and kiss-in-the-ring, and
the entrance gate stands wide open, and there is neither policeman nor
money-taker. No wonder so worthy a place is well patronized and supported! No
wonder that Monday after Monday bands of schoolchildren, marshalled by
benevolent gentlemen of clerical attire, with neat flags and banners bearing
appropriate scriptural mottoes, are met in the green lanes on their way to
"The Retreat." How the benevolent Johnson can afford to keep [-136-]
the place open is marvellous. All this great space of ground - all these
arbours, and swings, and roundabouts, and no other profit except what arises
from the sale of penny bottles of ginger-beer and a pint or so of ale, and the
furnishing of substantial teas with thick bread and butter and watercresses at
the rate of sixpence a head ! Surely the concern must he a loss, and the
proprietor of "The Retreat" no common tradesman but an eccentric
gentleman of means, who, pitying the sad condition of little boys and girls
dwelling in pent-up courts and alleys, devotes his time and his money in
mitigating the evil, hoping for reward not here, but hereafter. May he find it!
It was as may be yesterday that, reflecting on the
self-sacrificing of the amiable Johnson, we expressed this wish and, as may be
to-day, with our eyes opened to a totally different view of Mr. Johnson's
character, we still say may he in some shape or way receive his due, and that
speedily. That he may receive his due here and not hereafter is the very
best his friends can wish for him, since, according as it is written in The
Book, a man dying as he has lived may expect no mercy at the last assize. He is
a man one would desire to be the exact reverse of. The creature whom in his ways
he most resembles is now happily extinct in this country. No mother's baby was
safe anywhere but at her own bosom while the ravenous monster was permitted to
prowl at large, and even older children sent on errands were in danger from its
cowardly cunning and ferocity - as witness the fate of little Red Riding Hood.
What a shocking tragedy was that Goodness knows how many centuries have elapsed
since its perpetration ; but ask any six-year-old child in the Queen's dominions
and he is able to give you the fullest information on the subject, even to
detain,, the conversation that took place between the scraggy impostor and the
affectionate little girl with the pot of butter.
[-137-] Long
enduring as the English language is the legend of that wolf's infamy. The
arch villain! Had he been content - he could not have been so very hungry - with
devouring only grandmanama, his crime might possibly in time have been forgotten
; but when we find him, with deliberate calculation and scheming, beguiling the
sweet and unsuspecting little girl to a bloody and violent death, why then- Why
then, since he gobbled her up body and bones at a single meal, his method of
treatment was decidedly less cruel and much to be preferred to that adopted by
modern wolves, in clothing fictitious and innocent-looking as grandmamma s
nightcap and bedgown, who lurk in dens of which "The Retreat" is an
example, enticing little Red Riding Hoods by the score, and for the sake of a
profit of twopence affording facilities for their descent to such terrible
depths that from thence death is looked up to and cried for as a friend and
deliverer. As already intimated, there is no bobbin to pull or latch to fly up
at Mr. Johnson's gate. There it stands wide open. "How dark your garden is,
Mr. Johnson!" "All the better for you and the stupid boy with you, nay
dear, that you may sit in one of my arbours and partake of the pint of beer he
so manfully orders." "What great ears you've got, Mr. Johnson!"
"All the better for you, nay dear. The naughty things I am obliged to hear
amongst my after-dark customers passes in at one and out at the other the more
readily." "What little eyes you've got, Mr. Johnson!' "All the
better for you, my child; otherwise I must see amongst nay after-dark customers
very much that is shocking and immoral, and turn you and your companions out and
lock my gate."
Mr. Johnson does not eat the
little girl all up, however. What he does do, and the fullest extent of his
doing appears in the above imaginary little dialogue. It was on a Sunday night;
just when the spring was advancing and the evenings growing [-138-]
longer, that "The Retreat" was visited, and a scene more
disgraceful than that witnessed cannot be imagined. As regards the ordinary
suburban tea-garden, the proprietor is obliged to observe a certain amount of
decorum - he cannot admit little boys and girls, apparently under fourteen years
of age say. Not that he objects on personal grounds. Oh, dear no. He has a
family himself, and likes children as well as any man, and threepence is threepence
by whomsoever tendered. Nor has he moral qualms worth speaking of on the
subject. The matter stands thus:- Young men and women when they come out to
enjoy themselves at a tea-garden like quiet. Without tranquillity sweethearting
is the merest farce, and to preserve tranquillity where boys and girls are is
simply impossible. They will romp and giggle and indulge their propensity for
prying and peeping and poking their inquisitive little noses into just those
places where they are least welcome. They - the sweethearting couples - won't
stand it. They don't object to paying the rent of a box to the amount of several
sixpences, taking gin-and-water as a receipt but they won't put up with
intrusion. It is not likely. An Englishman's house is his castle all the world
over, and whatever the place he rents, it may be fairly regarded as his house.
Nor is the spirited proprietor inclined to be hard with his renters. He is not
the man to break a contract because it is insinuated, and not stated. When
children of tender age seek admittance to his gardens he sternly refuses them,
telling them that his is no place for brats, and that they had best be off home
and get to bed.
And so, Heaven knows, they had better, and probably they
would do so if no other gate were open to them. Mr. Johnson's is the other gate,
and a walk of a mile or more is no obstacle to those flocking to it. Who and
what are these juvenile teagarden customers? Errand boys as to the male portion
- little boys engaged at shops or factories, and earning from 5s. to 8s. [-139-]
a week, and allowed 6d. out of it for pocket-money. Good boys enough in
the main, in all probability, children of decent parents who see no harm in Bill
and Dick staying out an hour after church-time on their only evening of leisure.
Bill and Dick, aged respectively thirteen and fifteen, are not the youngsters
they appear to be they would have you to understand. Wearing a tall hat is quite
a matter of taste, and all young men have not got whiskers. If a young fellow
chooses to wear a jacket and blucher boots, that is exclusively his business;
like the tall hat, it is a matter of taste, maybe. Anyhow, he must be a pretty
old boy who can take his swig at the beer when it conies to his turn, and who
can smoke a cigar without betraying symptoms of illness ; and there in the dark
recesses of an arbour - ("The Retreat" is absolutely dark, and without
the slightest attempt at illumination) - may be made out Dick and his brother
sitting along with Jemima Riggs and Betsy Trotter, puffing manfully at their
penny cigars (though every puff produces an internal shudder worse even than
that which attends a gulp of Epsom salts), and handing about the brown jug, and
ejaculating " Damn," and " So help me this," and
"Strike me" t'other, with an earnestness and frequency calculated to
impress the two young ladies that though young they are lads of mettle and
knowing cards, up to snuff of every degree of strength and variety of flavour,
and possessing a knowledge of the time of day to a fraction of a tick. It is
wonderful the lengths these foolish little dogs will go - the serious sacrifices
they will make in dread of "looking little" in the eyes of the shrewd
old women of fourteen, their companions. They don't care a pin's head for beer,
and, indeed, never take a drop of it through the working days, but beer is the
drink of men - of young men as well as old. It would be ridiculous to think of
smoking a cigar with ginger-pop, or to "keep company" on sherbet or
penny ices: so beer [-140-] is the liquor in
request, even though the purchase of a second pint of it sweeps away Dick's
pocket-money to the last farthing.
And who are Jemima and Betsy? They are even younger than Bill
and Dick, and though very forward and naughty children, have at present but a
limited knowledge of vice. They are girls who are just launched in the world to
learn a trade, or who mind children, or help mother who is a laundress, and very
probably are absent from home on the same artful pretence as their "young
men," and would as certainly as those worthies come in for a whipping if
they were found out by their parents. If they are juvenile hands at factories
they have constant opportunities for hearing the conversation of elder girls
relative to their Sunday evening experiences of their flirtation, and their
"sprees," and their sweetheart's generosity, until it becomes plain to
Jemima - thirteen next birthday - that to have a "young man" is to
possess all that is desirable on earth. That conclusion paves the way for the
first step, which is to arrange with Betsy Trotter to "slip off" on
Sunday evening and go for a walk. Then Dick and Bill are encountered, and four
more customers are booked for "The Retreat."
There may not appear much in all this; it may even seem
injudicious to discuss the morality of calf-love, and to drag before the public
for its consideration the billings and cooings of Tommy and Sally. The records
of our reformatories and penitentiaries, however, tell a different story. Nor is
it necessary for any one who is curious on the subject to consult printed and
published statistics. Let him any night, between the hours of nine and twelve,
take a walk between the Angel at Islington and Highbury, or through Regent
Street and the Haymarket, or along Westminster Road, from the bridge as far as
the thoroughfare known as the New Cut. Let him count the num-[-141-]ber
of painted, flaunting, poor little wretches, under fifteen years old, who, with
the regularity of policemen on beat, there ply their terrible trade, and then
say that no harm comes of calf-love of the sort described as indulged in under
the auspices of a friendly Johnson all in the dark, and stimulated by a pint or
so of that excellent tradesman's potent "sixpenny."