the origins of saturday night, as a social institution, are obscure. no doubt a little research would discover them to the earnest seeker, but i am temperamentally averse from anything like research. it is tedious in process and disappointing in result. successful research means grasping at the reality and dropping the romance.
the outstanding fact about saturday night is that it is an exclusively british institution. neither america nor the continent knows its precious joys. it is one of the few british institutions that reconcile me to being an islander. it is a festival that is observed with the same casual ritual in the london slums and in northumberland mining villages; in scottish hills and in the byways of the black country; in camden town high street and in the hamlets of the welsh marches. certainly, so long as my aged elders can carry their memories, and the memories of their fathers before them, saturday night has been a festival recognized in all homely homes. strange that it has only once been celebrated in literature.
[pg 135]
it is, as it were, a short grace before the meal of leisure offered by the sabbath; a side-dish before the ample banquet; a trifling with the olives of sweet idleness. on saturday night the cares of the week are, for a space, laid aside, and men and women gather with their kind for amiable chatter and such mild conviviality as the times may afford. then the bonds of preoccupation are loosed, and men escape for dalliance with the lighter things of life. then the good gossips in town and country take their sober indulgence in the social amenities. in village street, or raucous town highway, they will pause between shops to greet this or that neighbour and discuss affairs of mutual concern.
on saturday night is kept the festival of the string bag, one of those many rigid feasts of the people that find no place in the kalendar of the prayer book. go where you will about the country on this night, and you will witness the celebration of this good domestic saint by the cheerful and fully choral service of shopping. go to east street (walworth road); to st. john's road (battersea); to putney high street; to stratford broadway; to newington butts; to caledonian road; to upper street (islington); to [pg 136]norton-folgate; to kingsland road; to salmon lane (limehouse); to mare street (hackney); to the electric avenue (brixton); to powis street (woolwich); to the great shopping centres of provincial cities or to the easier market-places of the rural district, and you will find this service lustily in progress; the shops lit with a fresh glamour for this their special occasion. you will taste a something in the air—a sense of well-being, almost of carnival—that marks this night from other nights of the week. you will see mother hovering about the shops and stalls, her eye peeled for the elusive bargain, while father, or one of the children, stands away off with the bag; and when the goodwife has achieved all that she set out to do, and the string bag is distended like an overfed baby, then comes the crowning joy of the feast, when the shoppers slip together into the private bar of the "green dragon" or the "white horse," and compare notes with other saturday-nighters and condemn the beer.
saturday night is also, in millions of homes, bath night; another of the pious functions of this festival; and for this ceremony the attendance of the heads of the household is compulsory. then the youngsters, according to their natures, howl[pg 137] with delight or alarm as their turn for the tub approaches. they will be scrubbed by mother and dried by father; and when the whole brood is well and truly bathed and packed off to bed, the elders will depart with the string bag, and perchance, if shopping be expeditiously accomplished, take it, well-filled, to the second house of the local empire or palace.
do you not remember—unless you were so unfortunate as to be brought up in what are called well-to-do surroundings—do you not remember the tingling delight that was yours when, to ensure correct behaviour during the week, the prospect was dangled before you of going shopping on saturday night? many saturday nights do i recall, chiefly by association with these shopping expeditions, when i was permitted to carry the string bag; and the shopping expeditions again are recalled through the agency of smell. never does my memory work so swiftly as when assisted by the nose; i am a bit of a dog in that way. when i catch the hearty smell of a provision shop, i leap back twenty-five years and i see the tempestuous saturday-evening lights of lavender hill from the altitude of three-foot-six; and i remember how i would catalogue shop smells in my[pg 138] mind. there were the solemn smell of the furniture shop; the wholesome smell of the oilshop; the pungent smell of the chemist's; the potent smell of the "dog and duck", where i received my weekly heart-cake; the stiff smell of the linen-drapers'; the overpowering odour of the boot-shop, and the aromatic perfume of the grocer's; all of which, in one grand combination, present the smell of saturday night: a smell as sharp and individual as the smell of sunday morning or the smell of early-closing afternoon in the suburbs. if rip van winkle were to awake in any town or village on saturday night, he would need no calendar to name for him the day of the week: the smell, the aspect, and the temper of the streets would surely inform him.
but lately saturday night has come under control, and the severe hand of authority has wrenched away the most of its delight. not now may the string baggers express their individuality in shopping. having registered for necessary comestibles at a given shop, they enjoy no more the sport of bargain-hunting, or of setting rival tradesmen in cheerful competition. not now may the villagers crowd the wayside station for their single weekly railway trip to the neighbouring[pg 139] town, where was larger scope for the perfect shopper than the native village could afford. no more may the earnest london saturday-nighter journey by tram or bus to outlying markets because the quality of the meat was better in that district than in his own, or the price of eggs a penny lower—though, if the truth be known, these facts were mostly proffered as excuse for the excursion. no more do residents of brixton travel to clapham junction for their sunday stores, or the elegant ones of streatham slink guiltily to walworth road. no more is hampstead seen chaffering at the stalls of camden town, or bayswater struggling gallantly about the shops of the edgware road and kilburn.
the main function of saturday night has died a dismal death. still, the social side remains. shopping of a sort still has to be done. one may still meet one's cronies in the market streets, and compare the bulk and quality of one's ration of this and that, and take a draught of insipid ale at the "blue pigeon", and talk of the untowardness of the times. but half of the savour is gone out of the week's event; and it is well that the scots peasant made his song about it before it was controlled.
