The Project Gutenberg EBook of Liza of Lambeth, by W. Somerset Maugham

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Title: Liza of Lambeth

Author: W. Somerset Maugham

Release Date: August 12, 2005 [EBook #16517]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_Liza of Lambeth_

SOMERSET MAUGHAM

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1897

1

It was the first Saturday afternoon in August; it had been broiling
hot all day, with a cloudless sky, and the sun had been beating down
on the houses, so that the top rooms were like ovens; but now with the
approach of evening it was cooler, and everyone in Vere Street was out
of doors.

Vere street, Lambeth, is a short, straight street leading out of the
Westminster Bridge Road; it has forty houses on one side and forty
houses on the other, and these eighty houses are very much more like
one another than ever peas are like peas, or young ladies like young
ladies. They are newish, three-storied buildings of dingy grey brick
with slate roofs, and they are perfectly flat, without a bow-window or
even a projecting cornice or window-sill to break the straightness of
the line from one end of the street to the other.

This Saturday afternoon the street was full of life; no traffic came
down Vere Street, and the cemented space between the pavements was
given up to children. Several games of cricket were being played by
wildly excited boys, using coats for wickets, an old tennis-ball or a
bundle of rags tied together for a ball, and, generally, an old
broomstick for bat. The wicket was so large and the bat so small that
the man in was always getting bowled, when heated quarrels would
arise, the batter absolutely refusing to go out and the bowler
absolutely insisting on going in. The girls were more peaceable; they
were chiefly employed in skipping, and only abused o