GR words question

[Ya Sam]

I've been re-reading this beautiful passage, and ,to my horror, realised 
that I don't get certain things, namely

Who are these 'gentle beings from the country'? Someting out of folklore?

'...thousands of children who pestled foam up out of soft mortars of mouths, 
who lost easily a thousand times as many words among the chalky 
bubbles--bedgoing complaints, timid announcements of love, news of fat or 
translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the counterpane 
...'

'gland pie'?

'... the morning mouths growing with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry 
with fear, foul with idleness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, 
settling instead for the week's offal in gland pies, ...'


'smokeshriek linings'?


'... heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter 
shacks, each tube
wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in 
interference-patterns, hand against hand, waiting now--it is true return--to 
be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry, 
hidden smokeshriek linings the children of that other domestic
incarnation will never see. '

(p. 130, Peguin ed.)

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