and
will shelter all the different departments of the many companies that
combine under the Oppenheimer chairmanship. When the architects and
builders finally sign off, Hatton Garden will be transformed. There
will be a garden, or rather a small park, in front of the new building,
and what with the smokeless-fuel ordinance that has already gone into
effect in the city, the dingy old neighborhood won't know itself. Then
at last, perhaps, it will be possible to imagine a connection between
the provenance of rough diamonds and the jewels that are for sale,
cosseted on their plushy beds, in Paris and along Fifth Avenue.
On
a fine August day I went to the Hatton Garden district to attend a
diamond sight. As I approached the Holborn Viaduct I found myself
struggling to make my way in the busy streets. There was no reason they
should have been more crowded that day than any other and as a matter
of fact they weren't: it is always like that in London in August.
According to the glossy magazines of the sort that advertise choice
diamonds among other commodities, everybody leaves town in August, at
any rate before the twelfth of the month, and goes to Scotland to
shoot, but it is no use believing the magazines. For every person who
leaves London for Scotland, there must be a replacement of a whole
organized tour from the Continent or the States. Germans and Swiss and
Norwegians and French flood the town. Wearing shorts and carrying great
knapsacks that knock down passers-by whenever their owners turn around
suddenly, they tour the most unlikely places, even the Holborn Viaduct.
Sunburned and attired as if for open sandy beaches, they go shopping
near Fleet Street for such things as foam-rubber dish mops and small
plaster statues of guardsmen or Sir
