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south-east into the maze of streets running between the Old Kent Road and the canal, and as they went along Paul was aware of a stronger and more tangible security than he had ever known. He did not understand why this should be so, only that, in some way, it emanated from the dapper little man tripping along beside him, an utterly incongruous figure here in his tweeds and billycock hat, twirling his cane to emphasise points in his flow of conversation. Zorndorff was obviously very much at home in this part of London, turning left or right without hesitation when, to Craddock, every seedy little street seemed the same and even their names ran in sets, the battles of the Crimea, the battles of the Indian Mutiny, the seacoast towns of the Cornish peninsula and a variety of flowering shrubs that had not been seen hereabouts for generations. The complexity of the brick labyrinth astonished him, for it went on and on until it melted into the bronze sky, under which the stale summer air was battened down by a pall of indigo smoke, rising from ten thousand kitchen-ranges behind the yellow brick terraces. The houses all looked exactly alike, narrow, two-storeyed little dwellings, bunched in squat, yellowish blocks, like rows of defeated coolies awaiting their evening rice issue. Here and there the occupiers (none were owners Franz told him) stood at the doors, obese, shirtsleeved men with broad, pallid faces, wrinkled old crones with furtive eyes and nutcracker jaws, shapeless, blowsy women in aprons, their moon faces curtained by great hanks of hair, and sometimes a very old man, like a Chelsea pensioner stripped of his uniform. The evening heat hung level with the chimney pots and although the litter carts were at work in the streets most of the rubbish escaped their revolving brooms and was whirled into the gutter. The curious thing was that Craddock did not shrink from the scene, as he had from the comparatively clean streets of the West End, for although, on this side of the river, there was airlessness, and evidence of an appalling poverty, there was also a sparkle and vitality that intrigued and interested him, as though he was exploring the seamier section of a foreign city. Watching the West End crowds that morning he had seen individuals hurrying past in isolation but down here, where the yards spilled into one another, and the house numbers ran up to two hundred in stretches of less than a hundred yards, the Londoners were obviously a community and, as far as he could judge, a more or less contented community. It was the urchins in the street that interested him the most, bedraggled little ragamuffins, with the zest and impudence of city gamins all over the world. He watched them spill out of their narrow houses, calling to one another in their strong nasal accents, to torment the carter in charge of the water-sprinkler who was doing a very little towards laying the dust. Every time the cart-jets sprayed the urchins dashed within range of the nipples, accepting the flick of the carter’s whip as part of the sport. Franz said, ‘It astonishes you? The richest city in the richest country in the world? Perhaps you find it difficult to believe but it is far more salubrious than it was. When I came here in the ’sixties no man dressed like us would have dared to walk these streets, not even in daylight. You have read your Dickens, I imagine?’ and when Craddock told him that he had, he added, ‘There is still squalor to spare but not nearly so much vice, I think. This is largely because there is plenty of work within easy walking distance of these hovels. It is only down nearer the Docks that a man can get knocked on the head nowadays, and then only at night.’
    As they went along, moving further south of the river, Franz pointed out various local landmarks. There was Peek Frean’s biscuit factory, employing over a thousand, and nearby the ‘Grenadier’ match factory, where there had been a national scandal over a