From JW’s fantastic ‘Battle of the Sun’, lovely noun and verb lists, and giving it to the whelk woman.
‘…It began as all important things begin – by chance. It was about twelve o’clock midday. The Thames was busy with boats of every kind; oarboats, sailboats, whelk boats, wherries, tideboats, oyster boats, barges, boats scooped out simple as a saucer – flat and shallow and so small that a cat could ride in one by himself. Great boats gilded, decked, cushioned, studded, crimsoned, velveted, proud, pennants and flags flying. Dragboats towing trees for timber, fishing boats, where a boy leant against the mast, arms waving, out over the waves and slop of the tidal river.
The water-craft came from every side, and down the middle too, so that there was no upriver and downriver, only a stream of boats, hugger-mugger, dodging one another, grazing one another, sometimes so close that a man putting a sausage to his mouth found he had fed the lady at the oars in the whelk boat next to him….’ – p5
‘…Silver had never driven a horse and cart in her life, but she took the reins, and the horse seemed to know how to go forward, and forward they went, out through the courtyard and into Dark House Lane and down towards the River Thames.
Stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, pudding dens, places where they stitched jerkins, made tallow candles, forged horses’ hooves, inns, taverns, bakers, cookshops, men and women with fish baskets on their heads, men and women alike smoking short clay pipes, dogs running in and out of cartwheels, a parrot on a perch shouting at passers-by, a woman selling bolts of cloth from a handcart, a tinker with pots and pans hung round his thin body, a fiddler playing a melody, a sheep in the middle of the pitted lane the smell of cooking, a pork smell, like roasting, and a smell like iron being heated so that it glowed. A little boy with bare feet, a girl carrying a baby, a donkey with a man on its back – a man so tall that his feet tripped along the ground as the donkey plodded on. Two soldiers, ragged and frightening, waved their fists at Silver, but she was brave, and urged the horse and cart on. Then she came towards the river. The River Thames, wide, like in a dream – jammed with craft and bodies, like in a nightmare.
Black boats that were the charcoal burners. Boats tarred and blistering in the sun. Boats smothered in pitch to keep the water out. Boats sanded and oiled and curtained and secret to keep out prying eyes. Rich boats like these, and poor boats like the others. Boats that carried barrels of beer, and boats half sunk under the weight of cattle, mooing and lowing at the slopping water.
There were naval boats, proud in blue and gold, and merchant boats with their Guild insignia embossed into the prow. There were scavenger boats trawling their nets to drag up what others had lost, and gaily painted boats carrying visitors to and fro. There was a boat full of cats – so full of cats that the boat itself looked to be made out of fur. These were ships’ cats coming ashore or going to sail, a mewling, rioting, spitting, sunning, tails-in-the-air-legs-akimbo of a boat, so noisy that a sloop packed with priests had their fingers in their ears, and the drunken party-goers sailing nearby nearly fell overboard for laughing.
And this was London. And this was the life of London. And this was the life of London rolled out like a carpet and played like a tune, and smelling to high heaven of fish and meat and animals and dung and sweat and beer and the hot scorching acrid smells of leather tanners and blacksmiths and the steam and hiss of water and flesh as the cattle were branded on the stumpy piers.
London, thought Silver. 1601.…’
[See Dickens’ on the Thames with Pip and Magwitch.]