Consider the Eel by Richard Schweid

Author:Richard Schweid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2002-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Fresh Shellfish & Jellied Eels” said the sign on the back wall of Vic Hollister’s stall in the Chapel Market, a standard working-class outdoor market, lined with stalls selling everything from deodorant and shaving cream to fresh produce and fish, just a block away from the toney, gentrified Angel neighborhood in London’s East End. The Chapel Market stretched for three long blocks down the middle of the street, and it encompassed 150 stalls. Vic, 46, was gray, grizzled, and affable, in a white apron, purely at home in his stall at the top of the street. The jellied eels referred to on the sign came from Mick’s factory, and Vic swore by them.

“Look, I know my eels,” he told me, in his thick, Cockney accent. “I was born and bred here, and baptized in the Islington Union Chapel. The East End used to be the best place in the world for eel. You had restaurants with a tank outside that had live eels in them; you picked the one you wanted to eat. They sold jellied eels, too. On Saturdays, there’d be a queue out the doors. Now there’s less people selling eels in London every week.”

Eels and shellfish had been good to Vic Hollister. There used to be three or four other stalls in the market where you could buy jellied eels, but his was the only one left. In the entire city, he estimated, there were a couple hundred places where you could still find eels for sale at a retail level. He owned a second home on land that he had bought 20 years ago in deep countryside, but where development was beginning to edge up toward his property, and he was thinking of looking for something quieter.

Vic was no friend to developers. He was an ex-president of the Chapel Market Merchants’ Association, and while he was in office, a group of developers made a strong play to buy the area and close the market so they could replace it with hotels, flats, and sleek shopping. It cost the merchants’ association £25,000 sterling and a lot of time and savvy media planning, he told me proudly, but they prevented the developers from closing them down.

His family had been at the Chapel Market since the 1860s. By the time Vic was seven, he was working with his father at the stand, lifting, carrying, stacking, learning how things functioned, making change, keeping counters wiped down and clean. “We worked hard, but we had a good time when I was a kid, too,” he told me. “People knew how to enjoy themselves. In the summers my family would take off and go out in the country to pick hops: hopping. We slept in little wooden huts. At night they’d build a fire, pass around jugs of beer, sing and dance. Those were great summers.”

Nevertheless, as he grew older, he decided he wanted to try doing something besides taking over the Chapel Market stall. He went to university and became an industrial engineer, with a family of his own.

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