At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  Ever since that night in December 1940, when the City was burned out, the black crowds marching over London Bridge to their offices have seen a lifetime’s seriousness made nonsense of. It was dumfounding to lose one’s working past, affronting to pride and good sense. There has always been pride in trade and in London it was commemorated in the plaques and urns and epitaphs of Wren’s churches. Men working in the city—selling shirts in Cheapside or insurance in London Wall—knew they were working in the birthplace of modern capitalism. They were heirs of Defoe and Lloyd. A guidebook to this part of London is useless now. Streets vanished. Neighborhoods vanished. North of Cheapside one wanders in an abstract wilderness of streets without reason, for no buildings stand in them. London Wall is brick frieze three feet high to prevent one from falling into the cellars. Tears come into my eyes when I see the blackened husk of Bow Church. I suppose because the place had been made human by the nursery rhyme so suited to the children of merchants:

  “When will you pay me,”

  Said the bells of Old Bailey.

  “I do not know,”

  Said the big bell at Bow.

  One thinks of mere impedimenta: the desks, the telephones, the filing systems, the teacups of the sacred quarter-of-an-hour for office tea, the counters and tills, the lifts that some people spent their working lives in. All gone. That wilderness north of Cheapside is misery; in the winter, when the snow is on it, or under the moon, it is the Void itself.

  The wastes gave space and perspective to a city which the greedy middle-class individualism of trade had always grudged. All the fine planning in London, and any nobility it has, is aristocratic and royal; the rest of us, from the small shopkeeper to the great bureaucratic corporations, are consumed by the tenacious passion for property. The true Londoner would sooner have property than money; he would certainly sooner have it, no matter how muddled, than air or space.

  This muddle of property, however, has its own richness. I worked in pungent London when I was young. Pungent London lies eastward of London Bridge. In the Boro’ High Street, where you can still eat at one of those galleried inns that you probably thought existed only in the drawings of Cruikshank, I mooned in the heady smell of hops; in Tooley Street it is the Scandinavian trade in butter and eggs; in Pickle Herring Street, dry salted hides, rank and camphorous. Australian leather is being pulled off the lighters at Thames wharf, where the cranes sigh in their strange, birdlike communities. There is a strong smell of pepper, too, and the sour-mutton odor of wool. We dodged the crane hooks and got startling earfuls of the language of carmen, who are noted for their command of blasphemy. The cranes, the anchor chains and winches are clattering across the water, and steam and smoke go up dancing in the river wind. There are one or two public houses with terraces on the river, sitting as neat as pigeons between the warehouse walls. London is not a very self-regarding city; these wharves are its innumerable windows looking on the faraway world—to Africa, the Indies, China or the Levant.

  But, for myself, Bermondsey was the place. There on the south bank they refer to London as the place “over the water.” We worked in the stink of leather, listening to the splitting machines and the clogs of the hide men. The slum kids used to climb up the bars on the office windows and make faces at us and tie the swing doors so that we could not get out. When we caught these children their mothers turned up: “You take your bleedin’ hands off that bleedin’ kid.” The Hide Market has been knocked silly now; Bermondsey and Rotherhithe are burned out, and where there was once a jungle of little houses, there now is London’s naked clay, filling up with thousands of prefabricated huts that look like sets of caterpillar eggs. There are new tenements. One notices a rise in tone. At the Caledonian Market, where they sell everything from old clothes and worn-out gramophone records to antiques at the top West End prices, a good many stall holders talk the new B.B.C. English. “No, madam,” one hears the incredible accent, “the date of this saltcellar is 1765, not ’75. One can see by the scroll.”

  In Throgmorton Street, we used to see the stock jobbers thick in the street. Inside the Stock Exchange we looked down on the littered floor and saw again what a passion for the market London has. For the stalls marked Diamonds, Industrials, Mines, and so on, are really gentlemanly versions of the vegetable market at Covent Garden, the meat market at Smithfield or the fish market of Billingsgate. The only difference is that a boss at the Stock Exchange puts on a top hat when he visits his banker; at the others, he sticks to his white dust coat, his cap or his bowler. The population of bowlers in London has declined, but in the conservative city clubs they can still be seen rowed up by the hundred like sittings of black eggs.

  In Carlyle’s London Library or under the dome of the whispering Reading Room of the British Museum, one may forget that London has the habit of markets and auctions. But at Christie’s, the world-famous auction rooms of pictures, silver and china, they will knock down a Picasso or a Matisse, a Gainsborough or a Raphael, at a nod no one can see. The crowd is well-dressed and silent. Knowingness irradiates from inscrutable faces. It is like a chapel service, and the auctioneer is up to all the tricks of the sinners in the congregation: “I must ask you, sir, to stop preventing people from bidding. You turned round. Three or four times you have made a face.” Such is the sensibility of this secretive business that a mere raised eyebrow can cause doubt. Where all are mad, all are cunning. It is the same at Sotheby’s. You realize in these markets that London is composed of cliques, coteries and specialists, little clubbable collections, causeries, exclusivities, snobberies, of people in innumerable “games” played on secret knowledge, protecting people “in,” keeping others “out,” with dilatory blandness. It is untrue that we are white sepulchers. Our sepulchers are rosy.

  In London, whatever you do, you have to be a “member.” I have no doubt there are cliques at Covent Garden or Smithfield. It is different only in those instantaneous, outspoken markets of the street, that mark more clearly than anything one district from another. Berwick market for the foreigners, junk in the Portobello Road, dogs at Bethnal Green, pictures on the Embankment, jewelry and diamonds being sold on the street at Hatton Garden.

  Petticoat Lane, just past Aldgate off the Whitechapel Road, is still the richest; this narrow mile, gashed by bomb sites and hemmed in by the East End sweatshops, is London’s screaming parody of an Oriental bazaar. It is a mile deafened by voices that have burst their throat strings years ago and are down to tonsils and catarrh. “Nah then, come on closer. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. What’s that? You’re not my bloody sister. My family’s like me, ugly as hell. Nah then, will any lady or gentleman present this morning do me the favah of lending me a pound note?” Or: “I’m not taking money this morning, not two pound, one pound, not eighteen, seventeen, fifteen, twelve shilling but”—bang on the book—“five shilling and sixpence for these beautiful cut-glass vases, the last. I’m frowing them away.”

  The crowd is dense here. You move six deep, chest to back, an inch at a time, jammed in by Cockneys, Jews, Negroes, Lascars and Chinese off the ships. And, head and shoulders above all, there will be that pink-feathered Zulu prince who can be seen any day anywhere between Aldgate and Tottenham Court Road, selling his racing tips and making the girls scream with his devouring smile. There will be a turban or two and, moving through them against the crowd, will come that tall, glum specter of the London streets with his billboard high above his head, denouncing the Jews for their wickedness in trading on Sunday morning. “The Wages of Sin,” the notice reads, and people make way for him, “is Death.” He passes the stalls where they are serving stewed eels by the cup and black-currant cordial by the glass. He passes the hot dogs and the sugared apples, the stalls of china, socks, watches, handkerchiefs, blankets, toys. A yell comes up from your boot. You have almost trodden on a little fellow who has sat down there suddenly in the middle of the street and is crying out, as if he were on fire: “Ladies! Ladies! Nylons a penny a pair!” And just when we are crushed a
nd cannot move even our chests, there is the tinny sound of kettledrums, the wheeze of clarinet and trumpet, the boom of a soft slack drum. The blind men’s band, with its one-legged collectors fore and aft, moves sternly through us all, raking in the cash.

  For a year or two the City and the London market used to tempt me. There is a torpid pleasure in custom and routine which give their absorbent power to great cities. You could spend your life in those acres of desks under the thousands of green-shaded lamps that hang over them. There was that little temple in the middle of Lloyd’s great temple of insurance, where the Lutine Bell was and still is, and where the red-robed and black-collared attendant in his velvet sat calling out the names of the underwriters like psalms throughout the day. You never realized before what a passion for guarantees the human race has and that London was the steady guarantor. I have never heard that Bell ring, as it is supposed to do, once for Bad News and twice for Good, and I am told that they have given up ringing it for Bad News because nowadays it would never stop ringing. They did ring it twice lately because some coastal steamer in the eastern Mediterranean and given up for lost had just crawled into Tobruk. Nothing happens at sea in any part of the world, but London suffers a seismographic tremor.

  And then the spell of working in London owes something to its lingering medieval habit of working in districts; the tailors in Savile Row and their cutters in the Whitechapel Road; the car dealers in Great Portland Street; there are streets sweet to international banking, others committed to insurance; a street for merchant shipping, the “rag” or mantle trades round St. Paul’s, as near as possible to Defoe’s Cheapside—what is left of both—newspapers in Fleet Street. Even the Law splits up among the lawns and chambers of the Inns of Court, into Law and Equity. This is pleasant and, by middle age, one has gathered that London lives by and enjoys its inner self, purveying the careful illusion of leisure and the pretense that its business is private. But for a young man this was all privilege, mystery and a bore. One gets restless.

  One morning in the First World War, a carman called Ninety burst into the office and shouted “Air Raid!” across the counter to us boys, and to show he had a proper respect for white collars, added the inevitable “Please” (I have heard the reception clerk at Broadcasting House say the same thing in the Blitz twenty-five years later—“Air Raid, please”—to call the boys to close the iron shutters). It did please. What a relief from the monotonous London rumble to hear a sound like doors banging in the sky. We left our desks. A flight of German aircraft flew as steady as mosquitoes in a clear May sky that was pimpled with gunfire. Black smoke was going up from Billingsgate.

  Our boss, a white-bearded old lion of eighty, with the telephone in his shaking hand, was saying breathlessly to the head clerk: “Have you heard the news? The Dunnottar Castle has just docked. Send a boy to me.” There were no boys. We were on the roof. It was about this time I decided that if I wanted to see the world London had so much experience of, the sooner I stopped seeing it from weighing slips, delivery orders, the foreign mail and the secondhand bookshops of the Charing Cross Road, the better. London would make me less impatient once I had got back from Paris, Rome, Madrid or New York.

  What does strike me when I come back from these places now is that London is a masculine city, a place for male content and consequence. The men, I notice, dress better here than anywhere else; none knows the curl of a hat or the set of a shoulder better or wears clothes of finer quality. It is just as well, for the absurd variety of English chins, teeth and noses needs some redemption, and people who run so easily to eccentricity need strong rituals and conventions. This is not the idiotic London of Bertie Wooster and the Drones, for the man-about-town is an extinct type. But, we have a dandy for Prime Minister, and there are tens of thousands of less eminent males doing what Henry James called “the thing” properly.

  Coming out of the cloakroom of a hotel during the war with my hat in my hand, I saw Sir Max Beerbohm give me a historical look. “In my youth,” he said, “it was not correct to uncover one’s head in an hotel.” How low we had sunk. Such men suffer for us all. They bear the cruelty of the mirror of Narcissus with fortitude.

  That young undersecretary to the Cabinet Minister who stands, without overcoat, in the biting January wind, outside Brooks’s Club talking to a friend, knows that if he dies of pneumonia tomorrow he will have caught it, properly costumed, at the right address. It will satisfy him and we, who are not impeccable, know that he is suffering fashion for us. Just as the Guards are when they stamp at the Palace.

  Nor does this London vanity afflict only a small class. Detectives and barrow boys, bank messengers and the man in the shop have it as a matter of amour-propre. I used to know a London leech gatherer who went barefoot, with his trousers rolled up, into the ponds on his strange search, but he always wore a white lining to his waistcoat and a carnation in his buttonhole when about his duties. Old Mr. Cox at the London Library, who knew every famous writer and scholar of the last sixty years, used to say with deep London approval: “I knew Mr. Pater. Very particular about his clothes, Mr. Pater was.” Sartorially, we like to burn like Mr. Pater’s “still blue flame.”

  Foreigners say that Londoners are less honest than they were before the war, but find us startlingly kind and clever since we have put aside the imperial mask. It is true, I am sure, that we are less starchy; but I am far from noticing any disastrous decline in our complacency, our traditional habit of lazy and vocal self-congratulation. It is also true that once we went out to the Empire; now the Commonwealth comes to us and adds to the polyglot vivacity of our streets.

  These strangers come, of course, in the summer when London is green and the smoked white clouds boil over the sultry brick. Then the center of London becomes a foreign city. There are summer mornings at Victoria or Waterloo when the platforms become African or South American. The African tribes appear in all their topknots and shaven blackness: the Moslem turbans gather in the underground railway. The universities and schools have always had a large number of Hindus, Moslems and Chinese and, indeed, it is from their lips mainly that one hears authentic Oxford English. There have always been maharajahs at Claridge’s, Africans at the British Museum, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders in the Strand; and we would be hurt if there were not.

  What surprises us is that the real foreigners now come to visit us, not for trade, but for pleasure. There are posses of Argentines in the art galleries of Bond Street. There are days when Piccadilly is German. Crowds of Scandinavians sit on the steps of Eros in Piccadilly taking photographs. Most astonishing are the young French who pour over for the pleasure of eating the cuisine anglaise in the Corner Houses! Most familiar, for they have always come here, are the Americans. We do not know and they do not know whether they are foreign or not.

  The change is remarkable. Once visited for the power we had, we are, as I say, now visited for our pleasures. The effect is most notable in the police. It has been said that every Englishman desires to be a policeman, a just, tolerant, self-commanding man, and the police may be considered martyrs to our desire for what we call “the sterling qualities”—the stoical, slow and resistant. But, inevitably, the policeman becomes a giddy tourist guide; he begins to rock on his pedestal into a state of informative frivolity. He has always been good-natured; now he becomes witty. And so with other groups. Conductors get off buses—in defiance of regulations—to show a stranger the way; taxi drivers throw away their misanthropy; all barmaids, waiters, doormen, porters, club servants and chambermaids appear to have sat up the night before reading their Dickens, in order to turn out next morning as authentic characters from Pickwick or David Copperfield. The foreign touch has always ignited the strong inner fantasy life of the Londoner.

  The desire for a Dickensian London is strongest among Russians and Americans. This has its dark side. The Russians search for cotton mills in Piccadilly and expect to find children starving to death up every chimney. There are Americans who expect to find t
he roaring hungry chaos of the home of the Industrial Revolution. The American student, like the American soldier, gets to know something more like the real contemporary London. The American Dickensian visits the shrine in Doughty Street, follows the ghosts through the quadrangles and the alleys of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Temple, drinks a glass of warm beer in piety at that old coaching inn in Southwark and looks hopefully from London Bridge towards Rotherhithe for the fog to be coming up the river. He returns to his hotel and, as I say, finds the perpetual Dickens there, if the staff are not all Poles, Czechs, Italians or Irish.

  Americans, too, are strong Johnsonians and are familiar with Wine Office Court and the Old Cheshire Cheese. Do they look at the Doctor’s statue under the trees by the burned-out church near the Law Courts? They know Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, the museums and galleries better than ourselves. Do they know the exquisite Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with its collection of Hogarth’s paintings? London is still Hogarthian underneath.

  When they come from seeing the Italian paintings in the National Gallery, do they risk their lives in the middle of the traffic south of Trafalgar Square and regard one of the few beautiful statues in a city notorious for its commemoration of nonentities—the equestrian figure of Charles I gaily prancing down the street of his downfall? Do any go into the church of St. Stephen in Wallbrook, the perfect small classical seventeenth-century building, or consider the blue octagon interior of St. Clement Danes?

  I would send my American friends down St. Peter’s Square into Chiswick Mall, to go out to Strand-on-the-Green, to walk for days in the London squares, to drink at Jack Straw’s Castle or The Spaniards on the Hampstead Heights, where one can look down at the whole London mess and get a breath of air. At Gravesend, you can get even a touch of the sea from the Thames estuary, and from the window of an inn built for an earl’s mistress in the Regency, you can watch that magical procession of the ships of the world proceeding seawards, two or three a minute, at the top of the tide.