Читать книгу Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations онлайн

18 страница из 97

Gay and Pope both refer to the Tottenham Fields, and William Blake, painter and poet, sings of

‘The fields from Islington to Marybone,

To Primrose Hill and St. John’s Wood.’

Where Harrington and Ampthill Squares now stand ‘stretched fields of cows by Welling’s Farm,’[9] the reputed proprietor of 999 ‘milky mothers of the herd,’ which could never be increased to 1,000, a singular tradition common to the fields by Clerkenwell, and to the once green pastures between the Old Kent Road and Peckham. A lady well acquainted with Hampstead tells me that the same legend existed with regard to a local cow-keeper, a Mr. Rhodes,[10] in the early years of the present century.

A venerable friend of the writer’s in the fifties, an old inhabitant of the neighbourhood, remembered that where Francis Street now is there were fields called Francis’s Fields running up to the Tottenham Court Road, which few persons cared to pass through after dark. Some houses then below what is now Shoolbred’s had little gardens with green palings before them, which she specially remembered from the figures of the traditional blind beggar and his daughter, who so marvellously escaped the Great Plague of London, ornamenting one of them. Harrison Ainsworth has preserved the story in one of his graphically-written novels. A gentleman tells me that an old lady born in 1800, and only lately deceased, remembered as a child waiting in the evening at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street till a party of six or more persons collected, when, in fear of footpads, they were convoyed across the fields to Kentish Town by a watchman.