London Observed

by Doris Lessing

  The woman doctor in charge summoned the group forward, and the doctors and nurse stood to one side as the young men went through into ‘No Admittance’. Blood pattered down.

  And then they were all able to see the face that hung over the blood-soaked shoulder. It was dull grey, not a colour many of them were likely to have seen on a face. The mouth hung open. The eyes were open. Blue eyes … The professionals followed the young men in, and the doors swung shut.

  Nurse Doolan came out from behind the desk with a cloth, and bent to wipe blood off the floor. She too looked sick.

  Meanwhile the second cup of tea arrived, and the old woman took it. The niece, feeling that something had happened in the few minutes she had been gone, was looking around, but no one looked at her. They stared at ‘No Admittance’, and their faces were full of news.

  ‘Well,’ said the old woman loudly, full of gleeful energy. ‘I haven’t done badly at that, have I? I am eighty-five this year and there’s plenty more where that came from!’

  No one looked at her, and no one said anything.

  In Defence of the Underground

  In a small cigarette and sweet shop outside the Underground station, the Indian behind the counter is in energetic conversation with a young man. They are both so angry that customers thinking of coming in change their minds.

  ‘They did my car in, they drove past so near they scraped all the paint off that side. I saw them do it. I was at my window – just luck, that was. They were laughing like dogs. Then they turned around and drove back and scraped the paint off the other side. They went off like bats out of hell. They saw me at the window and laughed.’

  ‘You’re going to have to take it into your own hands,’ says the Indian. ‘They did up my brother’s shop last month. They put burning paper through the letter box. It was luck the whole shop didn’t burn. The police didn’t do anything. He rang them, and then he went round to the station. Nothing doing. So we found out where they lived and we went and smashed their car in.’

  ‘Yes,’ says the other, who is a white man, not an Indian. ‘The police don’t want to know. I told them. I saw them do it. They were drunk, I said. What do you expect us to do? the police said.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what you can do,’ says the Indian.

  All this time I stand there, disregarded. They are too angry to care who hears them and, it follows, might report them. Then the young white man says – he could be something in building, or a driver, ‘You think I should do the same, then?’

  ‘You take a good sized hammer or a crowbar to their car, if you know where they live.’

  ‘I’ve a fair old idea, yes.’

  ‘Then that’s it.’

  ‘Right, that’s it.’ And he goes out, though he has to return for the cigarettes he came to buy, for in his rage he has forgotten them.

  The Indian serves me. He is on automatic, his hands at work, his mind elsewhere.

  As I go out, ‘Cheers,’ he says, and then, continuing the other conversation, ‘That’s it, then.’

  In our area the Indian shop-keepers defend their shops at night with close-meshed grills, like chain mail – and it is not only the Indian shops.

  Now I am standing on the pavement in a garden. It is a pavement garden, for the florist puts her plants out here, disciplined ranks of them, but hopeful plants, aspiring, because it is bedding plant time, in other words, late spring. A lily flowering a good month early scents the air stronger than the stinks of the traffic that pounds up this main route north all day and half the night. It is an ugly road, one you avoid if in a car, for one may need half an hour to go a few hundred yards.

  Not long ago just where I stand marked the end of London. I know this because an old woman told me she used to take a penny bus here from Marble Arch, every Sunday. That is, she did, ‘If I had a penny to spare, I used to save up from my dinners, I used to look forward all week. It was all fields and little streams, and we took off our shoes and stockings and sat with our feet in the water and looked at the cows. They used to come and look at us. And the birds – there were plenty of those.’ That was before the First World War, in that period described in books of memoirs as a Golden Age. Yet you can find on stationers’ counters postcards made from photographs of this street a hundred years or so ago. It has never not been a poor street, and it is a poor one now, even in this particular age of Peace and Plenty. Not much has changed, though shop fronts are flashier, and full of bright cheap clothes, and there is a petrol station. The postcards show modest self-regarding buildings and the ground floor of every one is a shop of a kind long since extinct, where each customer was served individually. Outside them, invited from behind a counter to centre the picture, stand men in bowler hats or serving aprons; if it is a woman she has a hat on of the kind that insisted on obdurate respectability, for that is a necessary attribute of the poor. But only a couple of hundred yards north-west my friend sat on Sundays with her feet in the little streams, while the cows crowded close. ‘Oh, it was so cold, the water’d take your breath away, but you’d soon forget that, and it was the best day of the week.’ A few hundred yards north there used to be a mill. Another woman, younger than the first, told me she remembered the Mill. ‘Mill Lane – the name’s because there used to be a mill, you see. But they pulled the mill down.’ And where it was is a building no one would notice, if you didn’t know what it replaced. If they had let the mill stand we would be proud of it, and they would charge us to go in and see how things used to be.

  I enter the station, buy a ticket from a machine that works most of the time, and go up long stairs. There used to be decent lavatories, but now they are locked up because they are vandalized as soon as repaired. There is a good waiting room with heating, but often a window is smashed, and there is always graffiti. What are the young people saying when they smash everything they can? – for it is young people who do it, usually men. It is not that they are depraved because they are deprived, for I have just visited a famous university up north, where they have twenty applications for every place, where ninety-nine per cent of the graduates get jobs within a year of leaving. These are the privileged young, and they make for themselves a lively and ingenious social life their teachers clearly admire, if not envy. Yet they too smash everything up, not just the usual undergraduate loutishness, boys will be boys, but what seems to be a need for systematic destruction. What need? Do we know?

  At the station you stand to wait for trains on a platform high above roofs and the tree tops are level with you. You feel thrust up into the sky. The sun, the wind, the rain, arrive unmediated by buildings. Exhilarating.

  I like travelling by Underground. This is a defiant admission. I am always hearing, reading, I hate the Underground. In a book I have just picked up the author says he seldom uses it, but when he did have to go a few stops, he found it disgusting. A strong word. If people have to travel in the rush hour, then all is understood, but you may hear people who know nothing about rush hours say how terrible the Underground is. This is the Jubilee Line and I use it all the time. Fifteen minutes at the most to get in to the centre. The carriages are bright and new – well, almost. There are efficient indicators, Charing Cross: five minutes, three minutes, one minute. The platforms are no more littered than the streets, often less, or not at all. ‘Ah but you should have seen what they were like in the old days. The Tube was different then.’

  I know an old woman, I am sure I should say lady, who says, ‘People like you …’ She means aliens, foreigners, though I have lived here forty years … ‘have no idea what London was like. You could travel from one side of London to the other by taxi for half a crown,’ (In Elizabeth I’s time you could buy a sheep for a few pence and under the Romans doubtless you could buy a villa for a silver coin, but currencies never devaluate when Nostalgia is in this gear.) ‘And everything was so nice and clean and people were polite. Buses were always on time and the Tube was cheap.’

  This woman was one of London’s Bright Young Thin
gs, her young time was the twenties. As she speaks her face is tenderly reminiscent, but lonely, and she does not expect to persuade me or anyone else. What is the point of having lived in that Paradise Isle if no one believes you? As she sings her praise-songs for the past one sees hosts of pretty girls with pastel mouths and rouged cheeks wearing waistless petal-hemmed dresses, their hair marcelled in finger-waves, and as they flit from party to party they step in and out of obedient taxis driven by men only too happy to accept a penny tip. It was unlikely those women ever came as far north as West Hampstead or Kilburn, and I think Hampstead wasn’t fashionable then, though in D. H. Lawrence’s stories artists and writers live there. What is astonishing about reminiscences of those times is not only that there were different Londons for the poor and the middle class, let alone the rich, but the pedlars of memories never seem to be aware of this: ‘In those days, when I was a little girl, I used to scrub steps. I did even when it was snowing, and I had bare feet, they were blue with cold sometimes, and I went to the baker’s for yesterday’s bread, cheap, and my poor little mother slaved sixteen hours a day, six days a week, oh those were wicked times, cruel times they were.’ ‘In those days we were proud to live in London. Now it’s just horrid, full of horrid people.’

  In my half of the carriage are three white people and the rest are black and brown and yellowish. Or, by another division, five females and six males. Or, four young people and seven middle-aged or elderly. Two Japanese girls, as glossy and self-sufficient as young cats, sit smiling. Surely the mourners for old London must applaud the Japanese, who are never, ever, scruffy or careless? Probably not: in that other London there were no foreigners, only English, pinko-grey as Shaw said, always chez nous, for the Empire had not imploded, the world had not invaded, and while every family had at least one relative abroad administering colonies or dominions, or being soldiers, that was abroad, it was there, not here, the colonies had not come home to roost.

  These Japanese girls are inside an invisible bubble, they look out from a safe world. When I was in Japan I met many Japanese young ladies, who all seemed concerned to be Yum Yum. They giggled and went oooh – oooh – oooh as they jumped up and down, goody goody, and gently squealed with pleasure or with shock. But if you got them by themselves they were tough young women with a sharp view of life. Not that it was easy, for there always hovered some professor or mentor concerned to return them to their group, keep them safe and corporate.

  A young black man sits dreaming, his ears wired to his Walkman, and his feet jig gently to some private rhythm. He wears clothes more expensive, more stylish, than anyone else in this travelling room. Next to him is an Indian woman with a girl of ten or so. They wear saris that show brown midriffs as glossy as toffee, but they have cardigans over them. Butterfly saris, workaday cardigans that make the statement, if you choose to live in a cold northern country, then this is the penalty. Never has there been a sadder sartorial marriage than saris with cardigans. They sit quietly conversing, in a way that makes the little girl seem a woman. These three get out at Finchley Road. In get four Americans, two boys, two girls, in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts and sports shoes. They talk loudly and do not see anyone else. Two sprawl opposite, and two loll on either side of, a tall old woman, possibly Scottish, who sits with her burnished shoes side by side, her fine bony hands on the handle of a wheeled shopping basket. She gazes ahead of her, as if the loud youngsters do not exist, and she is possibly remembering – but what London? The war? (Second World War, this time.) Not a poor London, that is certain. She is elegant, in tweeds and a silk shirt and her rings are fine. She and the four Americans get out at St John’s Wood, the youngsters off to the American School, but she probably lives here. St John’s Wood, so we are told by Galsworthy, for one, was where kept women were put in discreetly pretty villas by rich or at least respectable lovers. Now these villas can be afforded only by the rich, often Arabs.

  As people get into the waiting train, I sit remembering how not long ago I visited a French friend in a St John’s Wood hotel. While I stood at the reception desk three Arabs in white robes went through from a back part of the hotel to the lift, carrying at shoulder level a tray heaped with rice, and on that a whole roasted sheep. The lobby swooned with the smell of spices and roast meat. The receptionist said, to my enquiring look, ‘Oh, it’s for Sheikh So-and-So, he has a feast every night.’ And she continued to chat on the telephone to a boyfriend. ‘Oh, you only say that, oh I know all about men, you can’t tell me anything’ – using these words, as far as she was concerned, for the first time in history. And she caressed the hair above her left ear with a complacent white hand that had on it a lump of synthetic amber the size of a hen’s egg. Her shining hair was amber, cut in a 1920s shingle. Four more Arabs flowed past, their long brown fingers playing with their prayer beads, like nuns who repel the world with their rosaries. ‘Hail Mary Full of Grace …’ their lips moving as they smile and nod, talking part in worldly conversation: but their fingers holding tight to righteousness. The Arabs disappeared into the lift, presumably on their way to the feast, while the revolving doors admitted four more, a congregation of sheikhs.

  Not far from here, in Abbey Road, are the studios where the Beatles recorded. At the pedestrian crossing made famous by the Four are always platoons of tourists, of all ages and races, standing to stare with their souls in their eyes, while their fingers go click-click on their cameras. All over the world, in thousands of albums, are cherished photographs of this dingy place.

  This part of London is not old. When the villas were full of mistresses and ladies of pleasure it was a newish suburb. Travelling from NW6 or NW2 into the centre is to leave recently settled suburbs for the London that has risen and fallen in successive incarnations since before the Romans. Not long ago I was at lunch in the house that was Gladstone’s, now a Press Club. For most of us it is hard to imagine a family actually living in a house that seems built only to present people for public occasions, but above all, no one could stand on Carlton House Terrace and think: Not long ago there was a wood here, running water, grazing beasts. No, Nature is away down a flight of grandiose steps, across the Mall, and kept well in its place in St James’s Park. The weight of those buildings, pavements, roads, forbids thoughts of the kind still so natural in St John’s Wood, where you think: there must have been a wood here, and who was St John? – almost certainly a church. Easy to see the many trees as survivors of that wood: unlikely, but not impossible.

  Today I am glad I am not getting off here. The escalator often doesn’t work. Only a month ago, on one of the blackboards the staff use to communicate their thoughts to passengers was written in jaunty white chalk: ‘You are probably wondering why the escalators so often aren’t working? We shall tell you! It is because they are old and often go out of order. Sorry! Have a good day!’ Which message, absolutely in the style of London humour, sardonic and with its edge of brutality, was enough to cheer one up, and ready to make the long descent on foot.

  In jump three youngsters. Yobbos. Louts. Hooligans. They are sixteen or so, in other words adolescents, male, with their loud raucous unhappy braying laughter, their raging sex, their savagery. Two white and a black. Their cries, their jeers, command everyone’s attention – which is after all the point. One white youth and the black are jostling and the third, who puts up with it in a manner of stylized resignation, smiling like a sophisticated Christian martyr: probably some film or television hero. Impossible to understand what they are saying, for their speech is as unformed as if they had speech defects – probably intentionally, for who wants to be understood too well by adults at sixteen? All this aggro is only horseplay, on the edge of harm, no more. At Baker Street the two tormentors push out the third, try to prevent him from re-entering. Not so easy, this, for trains take their time at Baker Street, the all-purpose junction for many-suburbed London. The three tire of the scuffle and step inside to stand near the door, preventing others from entering, but only by their passivity. Ex
cuse me, excuse me, travellers say, confronted by these three large youths who neither resist nor attack, but only take up a lot of room, knowing that they do, knowing they are a damned nuisance, but preserving innocent faces that ignore mutters and angry stares. As the doors begin to close, the two aggressors push out the victim, and stand making all kinds of abusive gestures at him, and mouthing silent insults as the train starts to move. The lad on the platform shouts insults back but points in the direction the train is going, presumably to some agreed destination. As we gather speed he is half-strolling, half-dancing, along the platform, and he sends a forked-fingered gesture after us. The two seem to miss him, and they sit loosely, gathering energy for the next explosion, which occurs at Bond Street, where they are off the train in dangerous kangaroo leaps, shouting abuse. At whom? Does it matter? Where they sat roll two soft-drink cans, as bright and seductive as advertisements. Now in the coach are people who have not seen the whole sequence, and they are probably thinking, Thank God I shall never have to be that age again! Or are they? Is it possible that when people sigh, Oh if only I was young again, they are regretting what we have just seen, but remembered as an interior landscape of limitless possibilities?

  At Bond Street a lot of people get out, and the train stays still long enough to read comfortably the poem provided by the Keepers of the Underground, inserted into a row of advertisements.

  THE EAGLE

  He clasps the crag with crooked hands:

  Close to the sun in lonely lands.

  Ring’d with the azure world he stands.

  The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls:

  He watches from his mountain walls.

  And like a thunderbolt he falls.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  In get a crowd of Danish school-children, perhaps on a day trip. They are well-behaved, and watched over by a smiling girl, who does not seem much older than they are. Tidily they descend at Green Park, and the carriage fills up again. All tourists. Is that what people mean when they complain the Underground is so untidy? It is the xenophobia of the British again? Rather, the older generations of the British. Is what I enjoy about London, its variety, its populations from everywhere in the world, its transitoriness – for sometimes London can give you the same feeling as when you stand to watch cloud shadows chase across a plain – exactly what they so hate?