Among the Children of the East End

In *The Chosen Highway* Lady Blomfield records an afternoon in September 1911 when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, having spent the morning receiving distinguished visitors at Cadogan Gardens, asked to be taken across London to the poor district of the East End.

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The Master had been informed, the chronicle preserves, of a small settlement house in one of the streets behind the docks that took in the children of the dock-workers’ families for classes after school. He had asked, with His characteristic attention to the lives of those without rank, whether He might visit. The arrangements were made. He set off in a motor-car with Lady Blomfield and a small interpreter.

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The streets of the East End in 1911 were the streets of one of the poorest districts in Europe. Children played barefoot in the puddles. Laundry hung between the windows of the tenements. The air was thick with smoke from the river craft and the gas-works. The Master, the recollection records, took in everything as the car moved through the streets — looking out, naming what He saw to the interpreter, asking quiet questions of His hostess about the wages of the men in the factories and the cost of bread.

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The settlement house had gathered, on word of His coming, every child the rooms could hold. The hall was crowded with small faces, many of them dirty, all of them curious. The Master was introduced.

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He spoke to them, the recollection preserves, with the same careful courtesy with which He had spoken that morning to a Member of Parliament. He told them they were the flowers of their parents’ hearts. He told them they were the citizens of a new century. He told them they were beautiful in the eyes of God. He told them — through the interpreter, in the simple words the small audience required — that the world they were inheriting must be a world of brotherhood, and that they themselves would be the builders of that brotherhood.

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Lady Blomfield records that one of the children — a small girl in a torn dress — came forward, after the talk, and offered the Master a single bunch of violets she had been holding throughout in her closed hand. He took the flowers. He bent down. He kissed the top of her head. The hall, the recollection says, was perfectly quiet.

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> The Master in His turban received the violets, and bent and > kissed the small head from which they had come.

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The drive back across the city was made in something close to silence. Lady Blomfield closes the chapter without ornament. The Master, her account suggests, had honoured the East End the afternoon He came to it; the East End would honour Him in its turn for as long as there were grandchildren of those dock-workers who would, in the next century, hear the story of the man who had once come into their grandmothers’ classroom and named them the flowers of God.

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