Sometimes people make mistakes here about the origin of words--Reformatory is not Reform-a-Tory, as ardent Liberals said--and sometimes they make mistakes about the words themselves. During the War there was an entertainment for wounded soldiers at a house not far from here; and they came up in chars-à-banc with bagpipes playing all the way. I heard a small boy calling out, “Hearken to that music there,” and another one snubbing him, “Bain’t music, ‘tbe the magpies.” On first hearing of a Turkish bath, a girl assumed that it must be a turkeys’ bath. I picture an old turkey-cock jerking his head about and gobbling while he was screwing up his courage for a header into the cold plunge.
A cockney was greeted by a man down here with courteous inquiries about her health, “And how be you now? Be you all right?” The reply was, “No, half right, half left, like you”; and he told me that he had to do a bit of thinking afore he saw the sense of it. An old lady here surprised me just as much in town. She had not been there before, though well advanced in years; and I took her up in the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court to get a good look round. She told me afterwards, “I were a-thinkin’ all the time how Satan took our Lord up into an exceedin’ high place a-seein’ all the kingdoms of the world.”
I once heard a cockney expressing her contempt for everybody born elsewhere. She said with pride, “I was born and bred where I stand,” and she was standing in a gutter in a slum. Londoners do not often give themselves away like that: they usually are people of resource. I complained to an umbrella-maker that a new umbrella kept turning inside-out, and with a jerk I turned it inside out at once. He took the umbrella, jerked it the other way and said, “You see, sir, it comes back again quite easily.” I complained to a stationer that his envelopes did not stick. He replied with dignity, “No, sir, they do not: we use only the purest gum.”
On a spring morning I was coming out of Charing Cross station on my way back from Algeria with a very sun-burnt face, about the colour of a red geranium; and while my hansom was going slowly through the gates, I heard a loafer say, “Look, Bill, ee’s come into bloom early this year.” People are more courteous here. At a harvest supper there was a general desire to sing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” but also a general feeling that it would not be quite respectful: so they softened the familiar term and sang without restraint, “For he’s a jolly good gentleman.” And this version suits the tune so well that anyone would think the tune was written for it.--I am told that when I go to sleep, I snore. One afternoon I asked why the letters had not been brought in to me as soon as they arrived; and the answer was, “I was afraid I might disturb you, sir, I thought I heard you sleeping.”