“Is anyone for it?”
“No one I know. I suspect my mother might be for it. At least, she reads the Daily Telegraph. I suppose that must mean she’s for it.”
“My mother’s dead set against it. She talks as if she was trying to get up a military coup against the government.”
“I wouldn’t put much hope in a coup organized by your mother.”
The flat appeared to belong to a stranger, a warren of unaired and dusty rooms, too big and bare to be at home in. The pile of mail was full of the usual threats to distrain my goods, sever my electricity supply and cut my telephone off at the root. Life on the third floor seemed perilously high. The plane tree in the street outside was thick with green. Its leaves brushed my windows and darkened the living room. When I’d been here last, the tree had been bare, the room full of winter sun.
It was at night that London seemed strangest. I’d grown used to a sky of cold ultramarine in which you could pick out the Great Bear and find Polaris without thinking. The sky over North Kensington was starless, a sickly electric orange in which even the moon was hard to find. Deep into the small hours this synthetic sky glowed through the bedroom curtains, and I’d come awake, expecting to find it already afternoon.
Once I yelled my way out of a nightmare. This was a useful but embarrassing trick. Trapped in nightmares as a child, I’d tried to scream and managed only a dry choked rattle in the throat which brought no one in the dream to my rescue; then I learned to break the barrier, waking myself with a whoop that began far back inside the dream and lived noisily on into the room where I found myself sitting up in bed and hollering. I never knew exactly how loud these screams actually were. They happened only when I slept alone.
On my third night back in the city, I woke appalled at having drawn attention to myself in such a shaming way. Had the neighbors heard? It had sounded to me like a very loud scream indeed. I listened, in the weird orange light that passed for darkness. Not a sound. Then there was. It was a low, bubbling cry of fright, repeated twice. I went to the window, but no one was out there. The gardens were still, the windows of the houses at the back were all unlit. Silence. When the cry, or rather gurgle, came next time, I pinpointed it to a curtained window with a raised sash, thirty yards away.
At 0335, the explanation struck me as perfectly obvious: this was a London nightmare, transmitted like a virus from sleeping stranger to sleeping stranger, working its way slowly round and down from the northern heights of Hampstead and Highgate, through Brondesbury, Kilburn, Kensal Rise, sidling off to Westbourne Park and drifting along Ladbroke Grove to Notting Hill. Each screamer was handing the dream on intact to its next victim—and the dream was of London itself, a surreal city in which you tried to run, fell, called for help, and woke to hear the strangled sounds of all the other people who were trying to shout their way out of the labyrinth.
There was no weather in this city: there was rain, of course, and sometimes the sun shone, but there was no weather. You couldn’t tell which direction the wind was coming from, or even if there was any wind at all. The branches of the plane tree jostled outside the window every time a bus went past; London air was kept in a continuous slow swirl by the passage of traffic through the streets. But the cycle of Atlantic depressions and ridges of high pressure, with the wind swinging round, southwest to northeast, northwest to south, seemed to pass clean over the top of London’s head. I listened out of habit to the shipping forecasts, but they were like news from abroad. “Humber, Thames. Southwest 7 to Gale 8, perhaps Severe Gale 9 in Thames later. Rain later. Moderate becoming poor.” But the leaves were hardly stirring in the plane tree, and the visibility, at least as far as the elevated M40 motorway to the south, was excellent and getting even better.
There was no weather, and no horizon. You couldn’t move around the city by instinct, feeling your course by the way the shadows fell, measuring distance traveled by the transit of trees and hilltops, as countrymen and sailors do. You navigated by artificial landmarks, monument to monument, with no compass points: Eros to Winged Victory to Harrods, then right and left and right again.
In thirteen years of living in London, I’d learned to think of the artifice of the city as a kind of nature in its own right; but on this visit I was being thrown by novelties that should have been novel only to the most naive of crofters on a day trip from Skye. London seemed unmanageable, unimaginable. I had approached it by a classic foreigner’s route—exactly the same route that was taken by the Irish emigrants in the 1840s and the European Jews in the 1880s—and London had rewarded me by summarily demoting me to the role of tourist.
So I resorted to the solution of the tourist: I took a daylong guided coach tour to see the sights of London, this baffling foreign city which I was supposed to know by heart.
We London greenhorns were a mixed bunch. Most of us were Americans, some of us were Japanese. A mother and daughter from South Africa sat in the seat across the aisle from mine. There was a Swiss family, not called Robinson, and a cadaverous lone Venezuelan, making a two-day pit stop between Tel Aviv and New York.
As is the way with travelers, the physical mechanics of our journeys preoccupied us rather more than the places we were passing through. As the coach moved off, it was full of voices talking not about what we could see through the windows, but about the logistics of tomorrow’s itinerary, who’d got the hotel key, what was the best rate of exchange.
“They’re asking one sixty at the desk.”
“You can get one fifty-three at the Cambio place around the corner.”
“It’s only one forty-eight at the bank—”
“We can go to Brighton at 9:32, gets there at 10:42. Then we got to get the 6:37 …”
“We can take a cab, Herman. To the hotel. You can always take a cab—”
It made me think of tides. High Water at London Bridge at 1404, add an hour for British Summer Time, so depart 1304, two hours before High Water, and make Sheerness on the ebb …
The loudspeakers were switched on and our guide introduced himself as John. A short man in rubber shoes and a creased and shiny city suit, he had bangs of gray hair pasted over a bare skull. There was a slightly desiccated scholasticism in his voice, and I took him for a prep-school master who’d run into a spot of bother.
“Does anyone want French? Est-ce que personne qui veut moi de parler en Français?” There were no takers. He looked relieved.
The running commentary was recited rather than spoken, and it had to be continuously adjusted to the changing speed of the bus. At red lights and sudden holdups in the traffic, it slowed to a dead march of isolated words; as we accelerated away it quickened to a polysyllabic stream, like a new fragment of Finnegans Wake.
“Now … approaching us … on … the … right … we see … the … National … Portrait … Gallery … where … many famous … portraits are … on … view … including several of … Lady Di. We are now entering Trafalgar Square, with its statues of Lord Nelson, George Washington, who never told a lie, and George the Fourth, who spent his life telling lies. Fromteninthemorningonwards, youcanbuyaquartpotofcorntofeedthe pigeonsfromastallinthesquare—”
We were told to look out for the coats of arms which were emblazoned over the front doors of shops patronized “by appointment” by members of the Royal Family. “On your right you will see Lillywhites, famous for its sporting goods. As you’ll see from the Queen’s arms just up there, the Queen buys all her sporting goods here.” Given a little imagination, you could see her, head-scarfed, perspiring, pushing through the plate-glass doors shouldering a pair of skis.
Lulled by the commentary, it was easy enough to drift into the picture-book city which we’d paid to see and wanted to believe in. The essence of being a good tourist lay in ignoring everything you actually saw and listening instead to what the guide told you you should see. Obediently we found ourselves in streets that were crawling with Royalty. We kept on almost spotting them in the shops, behind the windows of the mornin
g rooms of their clubs, in the apartments of their palaces, and riding their horses on Rotten Row. The Connaught was “the hotel where English aristocrats who live in the country stay when they come up to Town to conduct their business.” No, you had to tell yourself as you looked out at the group of people on the hotel steps waiting for the doorman to flag them a taxi, they are not American tourists, they are the Earl and Countess of Glossop, with the Honourable Jocelyn Glossop, Lady Bastable and the Duke of Surrey. The oriental-looking man is with them because he does their laundry.
Mayfair turned out to be “where the aristocrats of London live. A three-room apartment in a brownstone of the kind you see approaching you on the left would cost about £250, or $400, a week to rent.” The guide’s prices, like much of the rest of his information, were a long way wide of the mark, but they made this strange new world of brownstones in Mayfair cozily accessible. For $400 you could be an aristocrat for a week, strolling out from your apartment to blow a few bucks at roulette at the Clermont or take tea at the Ritz with Lady Di.
“Lady Di” was the heroine of our day’s story. In the commentary she still retained her virginal title, even though we were due to visit St. Paul’s, which had been billed as “the place where Lady Di and Prince Charles got married.” Lady Di cropped up everywhere. She even appeared in the glass-pagoda bar-restaurant on the Serpentine which “was designed by Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the ex-husband of Princess Margaret, who is now Lady Di’s aunt.”
We only just missed her—in person—on Beauchamp Place. “Lady Di was in and out of all these boutiques when she was making up her trousseau, and she still pops back regularly to keep up with the latest fashions.”
There was a five minute stop for a photocall on Westminster Bridge, where we had a snatch of “Earth hath not seen anything so fair …” by the Famous Lake Poet, William Wordsworth. I stayed in the coach, looking out on a wonderfully simplified city, London revealed as a cabinet of famous icons. The red buses and black taxicabs were icons; Big Ben was an icon. The Royals and aristocrats, who were so tantalizingly nearly visible to us, were the city’s iconic residents, and if we couldn’t reach out and actually touch them, that was a failure of faith on our part. Blessed are they that have not seen Lady Di and yet have believed.
It was low tide, and the river below us had shrunk down the walls of the Palace of Westminster, leaving the stonework brown and dripping. The wasteland of Bermondsey was less than three miles away to the east, but the Thames had tucked it tastefully out of sight behind a right-angled bend. I thought, if I were from Omaha, I’d go to Bermondsey, and Rotherhithe, and Brixton, and the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove. I’d take some pictures really worth the taking. I’d be a tourist in bad-dream country.
To be in time for the Changing of the Guard, we had to do Westminster Abbey in fifteen minutes flat, with our five-foot guide rallying us around him by waving his “growie” umbrella high over his head. We piled at speed around the tombs of Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Mary, stamped across the tomb of Joseph Addison and raced to keep up with the airborne umbrella as it flew off in the direction of Poets’ Corner. The Abbey was dotted about with signs on plinths saying “NO LECTURING/KEIVE ERLÄUTERUNGEN,” but by each sign there stood a lecturer, banging on about kings and queens, roodlofts and misericords, treating the plinth as a handy support and rendezvous. Robed vergers stood in hiding beside all the most uninteresting tombs while the tourist troops, led by their lecturing platoon commanders, ransacked the church for curiosities.
“Congratulations, everybody! Right on time!” said our guide over the speakers as the last bashful Japanese was packed on board the coach. “We are now proceeding to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace.”
We climbed all over the traffic island of the Victoria Memorial in search of the best vantage point from which to take our pictures. The band played. The bearskins looked like bearskins, the sentry boxes like sentry boxes, and the ritual drill as old as England. For our guide, the Changing of the Guard was the one break in the day when he could retire from his script and lounge in the wings. He turned his back on the pageantry, leaned against the railings, dabbed at his nose with a hanky and sneaked a fugitive look at his pink Financial Times. His twin bangs of wiry hair blew up in the breeze like a pair of rabbit’s ears.
“How long have you been on this job?” I said.
He stared at me. Not a friendly gaze. “I see you’ve been taking a lot of notes,” he said. “What’s your game, then?”
“I’ve lived here for thirteen years. I’ve never seen things like the Changing of the Guard. I’m learning a lot from your commentary.” All true.
He wasn’t a disgraced schoolmaster. He’d been a bookkeeper in the City. Hankering to get away from his high stool, he’d taken evening classes in how to be a London guide. He’d been at it now for twenty-one years. “Too long,” he said.
“It must have been a bit different then.”
“Yes, there weren’t these packages in those days. They were more educated. More interested in history. Now you tell them anything historical, they’re bored after five minutes.”
Yankee Doodle Dandy went the band behind us. Hand in hand with the Changing of the Guard, there was the parallel ceremony of the Changing of the Cameras. So that everyone could be seen to have stood outside Buckingham Palace, all pictures had to be taken twice, with the photographer formally relinquishing the camera to his next of kin to do the honors. I offered to photograph the two South Africans together, and found my services in demand all over the Memorial. I snapped everybody and was snapped in return. A photograph was cast-iron proof. It would hold up as evidence that the picture book was real and that we were part of the story.
After the Changing of the Guard, Whitehall and Downing Street. The coach slowed so that we could snap the Prime Minister’s residence through the windows. The two policemen at the barrier across the street grinned like maniacs as the camera lenses showed from behind the glass. They had important parts to play in the masque. At least one pair of Friendly London Bobbies is required for each performance, and our men hammed it up for us as if we were a party of visiting big-shot producers with contracts for star roles like the Highland Piper or the Yeoman Warder of the Tower in our pockets.
We lunched, disgustingly, at a ferro-concrete hotel of many stories around the back of Euston Station.
“What’s this?”
“Risso’s,” the waiter said, chucking a pair of brown woolen mittens on my plate. They were filled with something soft, but whether it was fish, flesh or vegetable I couldn’t fathom. Nor did I plumb too deeply.
The Swiss woman was lancing her rissoles like boils. She said: “London is not so clean a city, I think. We live in Geneva. Geneva is very clean.”
The lone Venezuelan said, in careful and exact English: “I wish to disagree. London is very clean.” He paused and, wishing, apparently, to temper his disagreement with the Swiss woman, added, “in comparison with Caracas.”
At the table behind us, four Americans were engaged in a discussion about the relative merits of rival brands of diarrhea tablets. One said, “We brought over about a gallon of Pepto-Bismol. It’s in our room—”
I thought, if I were from Omaha, I’d call diarrhea Lady Di’s Revenge.
The tourists, who by this time had made me confess my nationality and citizenship, had a fund of sad stories about their reception in England. Urgent messages for them had been casually mislaid by the staff of their hotels, they’d found inexplicable charges on their bills, “Service” had been rudely demanded on top of a 15-percent standard service charge, their queries had been met with shrugging discourtesy. Yet none of them said they wished they hadn’t come. England was living up to everybody’s expectations of it—the sights, the ceremonial, the wonderful old homes, the Royal Family, the costumes, the traditions, the bad manners and the disagreeable food.
“I’m afraid we’ve turned into just another of those countries that have been swamped by stranger
s,” I said. “There’s very little curiosity or friendliness left.”
“Oh, no!” said an American, as indignantly as if I’d been caught out setting fire to the flag. “You have so much to be proud of in your country. I don’t understand you. I think Britain’s great.”
On the way to St. Paul’s and the route of Lady Di’s wedding procession, the coach got stuck outside a particularly ripe example of 1960s English public housing. It was called Camelot Tower, and some architectural critic with a spray gun had added the words “IS SHIT” in letters six feet high after its name. We gazed politely at the graffito. The traffic was locked solid. This was a serious test of a tour guide’s skill.
“If you look now to your left, you’ll see a council tower block. There are some people in London who are too poor to pay an economic rent, and the government provides apartments for these people in blocks like this. People living here pay whatever they feel they can afford—just a few pounds—for their apartments, and the government makes up the rest of the money out of taxes.”
It had never occurred to me before, but I could see what our guide meant: council flats were, well, really, kind of … sweet.
It was three o’clock by the time we made St. Paul’s, and I was halfway up the steps, following the umbrella, when my nerve snapped. The prospect of more lectures, more tombs, the very carpet on which Lady Di had set her precious feet, let alone the Tower ravens and the Crown Jewels, opened ahead of me like a course of dental surgery. As I saw the last of our party disappear into the gloom of the cathedral nave for their first lecture, the afternoon ballooned with sudden light and warmth. Fiesta! I could walk where I wanted, see what I chose, I was free of the lifeless and pedantic gabble of the bulkhead speakers in the coach. I did what people tend to do with freedom, and ran for the nearest hole in the ground.
Rattling through the tunnel of the Central Line, I looked out furtively, affectionately, at my fellow passengers. Some had their eyes closed, some toyed with papers, some looked abstractedly upward as if they were doing sums in their heads. Walls of black moss streamed past inches from the windows; looped cables, toolboxes. Each time the doors sighed open at a lighted station they let in a gust of subterranean wind. It tasted metallic, of burned carbons and newsprint—a warm, industrial mistral, as particular to the city as Big Ben or red buses, quite different from the rottingvegetable odor of the New York subway or the reek of Gauloises in the Paris Métro. Everyone aboard the carriage had mastered the trick of looking as if he or she were alone in an empty room. Everyone was traveling under sealed orders to a separate destination. In a fleeting conceit, I saw us all as members of the Underground, moving in secret through Occupied London, and for the first time on the trip, the city felt like home again.
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