At 4 O’Clock in the Morning

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 164, 1 October 1927, Page 12

At 4 O’Clock in the Morning

The World’s Most Famous Mart Tat-tat -tat! Hullo, what’s this? • I sit up in bed and blink sleepily. Tat-tat-tat again. Someone knocking at the door? Ah, yen, I remember now. I am ' being called at 4 o'clock in the morning to go to Covent Garden. “All rii?ht,” I cry. "Thanks very much, ril get up.” I hear my friend return to his room. He has a flat near Covent Garden. At 4.20 a.m. we leave it. In five minutes we are in the tangle of traffic which surrounds the market. At half-past fo\ir we are walking through its spacious lofty, light ancl airy halls. You know what an ant-heap looks • like if you disturb it. This would look very much the same if the roofs were all taken off and you could "observe if from above. everywhere there are men moving about. They movo in all directions. Each one carries something (like the ants). Some carry baskets, some crates, some wooden boxes, some sacks, some barrels. Whatever it is, it is full of something good to eat. ‘Look out for that case of apples!” my friend warns me. Take care, you’re backing into that heap of potatoes,” I tell him a few .moments later. A Bustling Crowd Then he slips on a piece of cabbagestalk. Then I very nearly step into a small mountain of young carrots. At first it is bewildering, having to get out of . o many people’s way. Wo seem to be the -only pair in the whole bustling, crowded place who are not busily occupied. Yet there is no disorder, no pushing, no c filiding. Everyone knows exactly where to go. They do it three mornings: a week, many of them every morning. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday are the principal market days, but where is a great deal done on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as well. Nightly the big horse wagons laden with the produce of market gardens on the edge of the city come slowly up to the centre. With them are mixed up motor-lorries, used by the more enterprising) vans from the docks and railway stations. All kinds of vehicles, great and small, stand in the yards and streets we came through. Winter as well as summer these early morning scenes go on. Hundreds of greengrocers and fruiterers come to marke t every day so that their customers may have vegetables and fruit fresh. A million tons pass • through Covent Garden in the 12 months. It remains what it has been fop a hundred years and more—the most famous market of its kind in the world. “Mud-Sa ad Market” It used to be one of the scandals of the world as well. “Punch” used to hold up to scorn its owners, the Dukes of Bedford. It was called Mud-salad Market. It was the black spot of London government. Now all that is altered. New brooms have swept clean. The old muddle, the old filth have disappeared. There is not enough room, but there is more room. Cribbed, cabined and confined though the market area still is, and must bo it is used to the best advantage. The place ought to be twice its size. ' Its turnover has increased to many times what it was even 50 years ago. It was then a place of seasonal trade. Now it takes small account of seasons. • Supplies from overseas stock it with .apples, oranges, grapes, pears, plums, grape-fruit, all the months in the year. “Tricky business, oranges,” I hear from tho members of a firm engaged in it. “Good in fine weather. In wet weather people don’t want ’em—l’m ,'talk.ng of the mass of people, mind you. Bad times affect it, too. Oranges are a luxury. If there’s only enough /Isa the family purse for bread and butter and meat and vegetables there are no pennies for the kids to buy oranges with.” Memories of Golden Days When shall we learn, as they have learned in America, that the orange is one of the most valuable forms of ''nourishment, that its juice is Nature’s best tonic for inactive stomachs or for jaded nerves ? Fruits that have the sun in them make Covent Garden glow with their warm colour. What memories they call up of golden days in delightful spots! The Spanish Mediterranean, Table Bay, the vineyards of South Africa, the mountain-sides of New Zealand and British Columbia, the orchards of Australia, California, Rhodesia, all contribute to this tempting display of Covent Garden’s delicious wares. And then, the Flower Market —that of itself is well worth getting up at 4 in the morning to see. I certainly prefer flowers in a garden to rosebuds in boxes, carnations by the thousand, gladioli without number, masses of blue cornflowers, purple asters, white daisies, crimson sweet peas. Yet these do make a marvellous show —a show to be seen nowhere else. Christmas and Easter are the busiest times for flowers, but every day in the year there is an exquisite setout of delicate-scented blooms. Now it is past 6. There is a slackening of purchases. There is a disposition to drink cups of tea or to go off to the public houses, which have special license to be open during market hours. The greengrocers* carts are beginning to be driver off. Their owners have struck bargains and carried off their stuff. Some they would like to have is too dear to-day. They feel sure their customers wouldn't give the price. It goes only to the shops which cater for the rich. Exotic Fruits There is a buyer for one such shop, and talking to him is a man from one ol the big hotels. They are discussing a consignment of exotic fruit from a tropic clime. They pronounce it too exotic for the English taste. “All very well on the spot,” says one, “but people here would say. ‘What a queer flavour!' They wouldn’t care about it. Might happen to get some old fellow in tho shop who’s lived in the tropics. He’d very likely go into ecstacies over it. But he probably wouldn’t have the money to buy it. Very little use to me—except for win-dow-dressing. I’ll take a basket or two for that.” As a contrast to these grandees among the buyers look at the small shop proprietors haggling over the cauliflowers and cabbages and peas. They are inclined to look back regretfully to days when they could take big loads home and sell cheap. Now, they say, tilings are so dear, fruit especially, that they have to be content with much smaller stocks. “But you make bigger profits on ’em,” *ay« one of the sellers, employed by one of the few world-renowned firms that have gradually guttered up almost sll Covent Garden’s trade. Yes. they admit that. There’s a cheerful side to everything after all! Hamilton Fyfo in London “Daily Chronicle.”