“It’s a shame. It looked decent once. To be candid I came here because I had a bit of trouble with my daughter. I’d forgotten all about it—well, the years go, you forget. But she found out and ‘Oh dear, our dad in prison!’—you know? She was so upset I had to get the priest to calm her down. It’s all right now. So, I thought, next time I’m over I’ll have a look at the old place. I didn’t expect this mess.”
“Oh we’re putting it right. We’re getting in the show cases; there’s been a delay in the cement,” apologised the old man. “But we’ve got the toilets nearly finished. We’re waiting for the pipes. It’s in the Commandant’s office. I’ll show you. We’ve done a nice job here.” We went into the toilets.
“That’s it,” said the Englishman. “They brought you in here. That’s where he must have sat.”
Toilets for tourists: is that how the history of a human agony ends?
(1967)
LONDON
No Londoner can be exact or reasonable about London. This place with the heavy-sounding name, like coal being delivered or an engine shunting, is the world’s greatest unreasonable city, a monstrous agglomeration of well-painted property. The main part of the city, 120 square miles of low-lying and congested Portland stone, yellow brick and stucco, slate, glass and several million chimneys, lies a few minutes’ flight from the North Sea. There are immense acreages of railway track, and the subsoil is a tangle of tunnels running into scores of miles. Such is the mere core of London; another 700 square miles of what was once pasture and woodland is now continuous red-faced suburb. People talk loosely about the number of London’s inhabitants: there are certainly nine million. To the police it seems much more.
It is impossible to be exact about London because no one really has ever seen it. Once in, we are engulfed. It is a city without profile, without symmetry; it is amorphous, like life, and no one thing about it is definitive. A natural guess, for example, is that it is as gray and yellow as it looks; yet, from any small height it looks entirely green, like a forest, with occasional stone towers sticking out. The explanation is paradoxical: by preserving trees the Londoner, by far the most urban living creature, convinces himself he is living in the countryside.
Of the world’s capitals London has been the most powerful and important for a good two hundred years, the capital of the largest empire since the Roman. It is now the capital of a Commonwealth. But to be a Londoner is still to be immediately, ineluctably, a citizen of the world. Half of the mind of every Londoner is overseas. If the French government falls, if there is dock trouble in New York, a riot in the Gold Coast, even the charwoman cleaning the office will mention the lugubrious fact. There is an old story that someone was once mad enough to ask a Cockney whether the London he came from was London, Ontario; the Cockney groaned “Nah! London the whole bloomin’ world.” Truculent, proud, even sentimental, yet the old hypocrite was piously complaining of the weight of the world upon the London mind.
Perhaps because of the weight and the worry, London is the least ostentatious of the world’s capitals. It has little of the rhetorical architecture and the ambitious spacing of monuments and temples to be found in the capitals of the new democracies; none of the marble splash endowed by patriotic planners. Napoleon would turn in his grave in the Invalides if he could see Nelson’s urn crowded among painters and bishops in the crypt of St. Paul’s. The Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace are among the few great edifices to compose a view, and so—thanks to German bombers—was St. Paul’s Cathedral for a few years during and after the war; but, for the rest, though London has its fine quarters, its monuments, palaces and even a triumphal arch or two, these have been eased into the city and are not ornately imposed upon it.
London excels in the things that segregate and preserve an air of privilege: the lovely terraces of the Regency, the sedate faces of the squares and of the moneyed or modest Georgian and Early Victorian streets. These are not collectors’ pieces; they are the routine of central London. The Londoner is purse-proud and shows it in his domestic property rather than in imperial splash; and if in a moment of vainglory he builds a Pall Mall club that looks like the Foreign Office and a Foreign Office that looks like a cross between a Renaissance palace and a Turkish bath, he redresses the balance by putting the Prime Minister in a small private house called No. 10 down a side street and with only an iron railing—and a couple of policemen—to prevent us from putting our noses against the window.
But I am writing as if I had seen London, when the confusing fact is that I have only lived in it most of my life. I have just looked at the smear of gray sky through the window of my top-floor flat. It is in one of those blocks of pink structures which went up like so many vending machines in London between the wars, when architecture broke with the Victorian rotundity and the cheese-colored stucco of 150 years before. I closed the window to shut out the noise of the buses. Look at my hands. Already filthy.
I find myself siding with Henry James, who noticed the filth of London as soon as he arrived here, went on to say that it was not cheerful or agreeable, added that London was dull, stupid and brutally large and had a “horrible numerosity of society.” Was anything left after that? Yes, he said; there was magnificence.
London is a prime grumbler. The weather, the traffic, the smoke, the dirty color get us down and we feel our life is being eaten up in those interminable bus and tube journeys through the marsh of brick—eaten up before we have even started to live. But gradually we begin to feel the magnificence that rises out of the gray, moody, Victorian splodge. We felt it in the sound of Big Ben growling like an old lion over the wet roofs in the silent, apprehensive nights of the war. Where Paris suggests pleasure, Rome the human passions of two thousand years, with assassination in every doorway, where New York suggests a ruthless alacrity, London suggests experience.
The manner of the city is familiar, casual, mild but incontrovertible.
London has this power not only of conserving the history of others but of making one feel personally historic. A young bus conductor, a youth with Korea in his face, said to me the other day: “That’s all a thing of the past, like everything else nowadays.” He was feeling historic already at twenty-five. Perhaps in all the very large cities of the world at the moment, people are beginning to feel they only have a past; the future seems short. But London has always turned the mind inward. Londoners vegetate.
The city also is something you get on your lungs, which quickens and dries your speech and puts a mask on the face. We breathe an acid effluence of city brick, the odors of cold soot, the dead rubbery breath of city doorways, or swallow a mouthful of mixed sulfuric that blows off those deserts of railway tracks which are still called Old Oak Common or Nine Elms without a blade of vegetation in sight for miles—we breathe these with advantage. They gave us headaches when we were young, but now the poison has worked and is almost beneficent to those born to it. So herrings must feel when they have been thoroughly kippered.
On top of this there is the climate. That is in itself aging. We are, for example, ten years older since eight o’clock this morning, for we woke up to fog, saw it melt into feeble sunshine, watched white clouds boil up and then stand still like marble. A thunderstorm? No, the temperature changes, shoots up, drops down, the sky blackens. At midday the lights come on in flats and shops. All those thousands of green desk lamps in the banks of the City are switched on. What does this mean? Snow this afternoon? Or rain? Probably rain but who can tell? We can’t. In the next twenty-four hours we shall have lived a lifetime’s weather. We shall have seen a dozen hopes and expectations annulled; we shall have been driven in on ourselves and on the defensive. We shall talk of what it was like yesterday, of the past.
Yet when Henry James used that word “magnificent” it was the London sky I at once thought of. London generates its own sky—a prolonged panorama of the battle between earth and heaven. For if the lower sky is glum over London and sometimes dark brown or soupy yellow, it is often
a haze of violet and soft, sandy-saffron colors. If the basis is smoke and the next layer is smoke and fog banked up, the superstructure of cloud is frequently noble. White cumulus boils up over the city against a sky that is never blue as the Mediterranean knows blue, but which is fair and angelic. The sky space in our low city is wide.
And this sky has had another magnificence: it has been a battlefield. I never see a large white cloud now, against the blue, without going back to that afternoon when the Spitfires dived into it like silver fish, as the sirens went off over the British Museum. And many times in 1940 I saw the night sky go green instead of black, twitching like mad electricity, hammered all over by tens of thousands of sharp golden sparks as the barrage beat against it like steel against a steel door. The curling ribbons of fire that came down from heaven were almost a relief to see, with that unremitting noise. One was glad of silence, even if the silence was alight. One cloudless August afternoon green snow fell in dry, unmelting flakes in Holborn. We picked this new venture of the English climate off our coats: a V-2 had just fallen nearly two miles away in Hyde Park and had blown the leaves of the trees into these mysterious smithereens.
London is an agglomeration of villages which have been gummed together in the course of centuries. It is a small nation rather than a city, and its regions have never quite lost their original identity or even their dialects. The City of London, the administrative heart of the city, which begins at Aldgate suddenly, like a row of cliffs, is a province in itself. Yet a large part of central London is not muddle at all, for here it was planned in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the squares were laid out between Bloomsbury and Bayswater. The habit of making tree-shaded oases, in squares and private terraces, gave a respite from the vulgar uproar and ugly building of the general commercial scramble. The railed-in lawns and the green enclosures of the Inns of Court betray our love of privacy and privilege, and for delectable cliques, clubs and coteries, just as those acres and acres of little two-story houses show how much we like a little property to ourselves. This has been the despair of urban planners.
There are immense cheese-colored areas in Bayswater and elsewhere where Bernard Shaw’s tall Heartbreak Houses have pillars like footmen’s legs. Chelsea is one kind of place. Westminster another. Inner London is gray or yellow, outer London is red; that is about as much as can be said of the Victorian jungle, unless we name the slates shining like mirrors in the wet.
In that tired air, always heavy and often damp and lethargic, the grass grows green in the black soil of the gardens, the shrubs grow dusty and the dappled plane trees grow black. In the summer evenings we listen to their leaves turning over like the pages of endless office ledgers. We hear the ducks fly over from some pool of filthy water left on a bomb site to the wooded lakes in the parks. We hear the starlings at St. Martin’s crying down the traffic. We hear owls. We even hear sheep in Regent’s Park in the summer. A city so countrified cannot be megapolis.
We are tree lovers. In the winter the London trees are as black as processions of mourners and, like the weeds of some sooty gathering of widows, their higher branches are laced against the mist or the long, sad sunsets. The thing that reconciled us to those ruined miles in Holborn, Cheapside and round St. Paul’s were the trees that grew rapidly out of burned-out basements where the safes had been kept; and the willow herb that grew in purple acres out of commercial brick.
The London tree grows out of poisoned soil, its roots are enclosed by stone and asphalt, and it breathes smoke. There is one heroic creature, raising its arms between two overtowering blocks of office buildings and the church of St. Magnus the Martyr in Billingsgate. Typewriters clatter among its branches instead of birds; and a boy who climbed it would come down black. Its survival shows how firmly Londoners cling to nature and, in life, to some corner of what has been.
Except in the curve of the river between Westminster and St. Paul’s, there are no large vistas in London, and our small ones have come to us by luck and accident. I have a typical view of the London muddle from my flat. There is one of those Victorian streets of carefully painted small houses, with their classical doorways and their iron railings. (The Victorians did not know what to do with all the iron they produced and simply caged up everything in it.) I have counted 270 chimneys in a couple of hundred yards—cheap coal, cheap servants to carry it up from those basements. Now only about ten of those chimneys are smoking; we run on electricity and gas; but this population of London chimneys remains like millions of sets of old, unwanted teeth.
The street runs into a decaying square where the first publisher I knew used to live and poke his small Victorian fire in the late twenties; he wore button boots and believed in Animal Magnetism. A furniture depository has wrecked one end of the square. At the back of it are the mews: one smart mews flat, several garages with the chauffeurs cleaning and polishing and one of those doubtful “caffs” where the police are always asking questions. Until the espresso bars started there was a certain affinity between London coffee and crime.
Turn back, across the main street, and you are walking through Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and The Newcomes into the country of the Victorian new rich and the pretty houses of their mistresses. Dickens lived near here in state. But close to their back doors was and is the toughest street in the neighborhood, a place for those fantastic fights between women who have had a pint or two. I once saw a lady pulled off her prey by three or four men. “I can’t take the ’ole ruddy lot of you on,” she said, misunderstanding their intention. “I’m not an elephant.”
The quarter has its gin palaces, its television shops, its cinemas, its plastic bars, a reputation for smash-and-grab, and the ripest old London music hall. There are only a few left. The idea is to go there, full of beer and with the family, and to laugh from the belly at mothers-in-law, double beds, perambulators and love from the point of view of the sexual treadmill. No Puritans here; on the other hand, not much art either. London has always liked its jokes to be common, full-fleshed, dirty and sanguine and its chorus girls to be pink, broad and breezy. It likes Britannia on the loose, with her helmet over one eye and her trident unspeakably meaningful.
The eye tours the slate roofs of the horizon and, presently, it stops short: there is that new aspect of the London skyline, the sudden gap. Ten or twelve houses went down over there in a cloud of dust during the war. These gaps and gashes are everywhere in London; some of them startle us. We see our ghosts. Up there (we say), where the sky is now, I used to dine with the So-and-so’s. Or, there in that space were my first lodgings: the landlady used to tipple. Or, there, about thirty-five feet in the air, I was in love with a girl who read my fortune in my hand and infuriated me in predicting that I was to be the least important of the three great loves of her life. The back room where I wrote my first book is a piece of sky. To have survived such total destruction by ten or fifteen years makes one feel irrelevant. It makes life seem very long. The gardens of these destroyed houses are now haunted and sinister wilderness.
These gaps bring back the strangest thing that has ever happened to London: the silence of the city at night during the war. Only one writer has described it: Elizabeth Bowen, who sat it out in her cracked and boarded-up Regency house in the Park. One walked in those days down empty streets that stared like sepulchers, hearing only the echo of one’s own heels. Voices carried far, as if across water. I remember two painted old ladies sitting up late on a bench in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and I could hear their solitary chatter from across the square. They were, of course, talking about the distant connections of the Royal Family.
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.
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