In our area the Indian shopkeepers defend their shops at night with close-meshed grilles, 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 into 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 Things, 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, pinkogrey 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 often 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, taking 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. Excuse 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 schoolchildren, 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? Is it 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?
Yet for people so threatened they are doing, I think, rather well. Not long ago I saw this incident. It was a large London hospital, in a geriatric ward. ‘I’m just on my way to Geriatrics’ you may hear one sprightly young nurse tell another, as she darts her finger to the lift button. An old white woman, brought in because she had fallen, was being offered a bedpan. She was not only old, in fact ancient, and therefore by rights an inhabitant of that lost Eden of decently uniform pinko-grey people, but working class and a spinster. (One may still see women described on old documents, Status: Spinster.) For such a woman to be invited to use a bedpan in a public place before the curtains had even been drawn about her was bad enough. To be nursed by a man, a male nurse, something she had never imagined possible. Worst of all, he was black, a young calm black man, in a nurse’s uniform. (‘No, I’m not a doctor, I’m a nurse – yes, that’s right, a nurse.’) He turned back the bed covers, assisted the old woman on to the bedpan, nicely pulling down her nightgown over her old thighs, and drew the curtains. ‘I’ll be back in just a minute, love.’ And off he went. Behind that curtain went on an internal drama hard to imagine by people used to polyglot and casually mannered London, whether they enjoy it or not. When he returned to pull back the curtains, ask if she was all right – did she want him to clean her up a little? – and then remove the pan, her eyes were bright with dignified defiance. She had come to terms with the impossible. ‘No, dear, it’s all right, I can still do that for myself.’
In a school in South London where a friend is governor, twenty-five languages are spoken.
Now we are tunnelling under old London, though not the oldest, for that is a mile, or two or three, further east. On the other side of thick shelves of earth as full of pipes and cables, wires, sewers, the detritus of former buildings and towns as garden soil is of worms and roots, is St James’s Park – Downing Street – Whitehall. If someone travelled these under-earth galleries and never came up into the air it would be easy to believe this was all there could be to life, to living. There is a sci-fi story about a planet where suns and moons appear only every so many years, and the citizens wait for the miracle, the revelation of their situation in the universe, which of course the priests have taken possession of, claiming the splendour of stars as proof of their right to rule. There are already cities where an under-earth town repeats the one above it, built in air – for instance, Houston, Texas. You enter an unremarkable door, just as in a dream, and you are in an underground city, miles of it, with shops, restaurants, offices. You need never come up. There are people who actually like basement flats, choose them, draw curtains, turn on lights, create for themselves an underground, and to them above-ground living seems as dangerous as ordinary life does to an ex-prisoner or someone too long in hospital. They institutionalize themselves, create a place where everything is controlled by them, a calm concealed place, away from critical eyes, and the hazards of weather and the changes of light are shut out. Unless the machinery fails: a gas leak, the telephone goes wrong.
In the fifties I knew a man who spent all day going around the Circle Line. It was like a job, a discipline, from nine till six. They couldn’t get at him, he claimed. He was having a breakdown. Did people go in for more imaginative breakdowns then? It sometimes seems a certain flair has gone out of the business. And yet, a few days ago, on the Heath, there approached a Saxon – well, a young man wearing clothes it would be possible to agree Saxons might have worn. A brown woollen shirt. Over it a belted jerkin contrived from thick brown paper. Breeches were made with elastic bands up the calves. A draped brown scarf made a monkish hood. He held a spear from a toy shop. Prithee, kind sir,’ said my companion, somewhat out of period, ‘whither goest thou?’ The young Saxon stopped, delighted and smiling, while his companion, a young woman full of concern, looked on. ‘Out,’ said the young man. ‘Away.’
‘What is your name? Beowulf? Olaf the Red? Eric the Brave?’
‘Eric the Black.’
‘It isn’t your name really,’ said his minder, claiming him for fact.
‘Yes it is,’ we heard as they wandered off into the russets, the yellows, the scorched greens of the unforgettable autumn of 1990. ‘My name is Eric, isn’t it? Well then, it is Eric’
Charing Cross and everyone gets out. At the exit machine a girl appears running up from the deeper levels, and she is chirping like an alarm. Now she has drawn our attention to it, in fact a steady bleeping is going on, and for all we know it is a fire alarm. These days there are so many electronic bleeps, cheeps, buzzes, blurps, that we don’t hear them. The girl is a fey creature, blonde locks flying around a flushed face. She is laughing dizzily, and racing a flight or flock of young things coming into the West End for an evening’s adventure, all of them already crazed with pleasure, and in another dimension of speed and lightness, like sparks speeding up and out. She and two girls push in their tickets and flee along a tunnel to the upper world, but three youths vault over, with cries of triumph, and their state of being young is such a claim on us all that the attendant decides not to notice, for it would be as mad as swatting butterflies.
Now I am going out to Trafalgar Square, along a tunnel, and there, against a wall, is a site where groups of youngsters are always bedding, crouching, squatting, to examine goods laid on boxes, and bits of cloth. Rings and earrings, bracelets, brooches, all kinds of glitter and glitz, brass and glass, white metal and cheap silver, cheap things but full of promise and possibility.
I follow this tunnel and that, go up some steps, and I am in Trafalgar Square. Ahead of me across the great grey space with its low pale fountains is the National Gallery, and near it the National Portrait Gallery. The sky is a light blue, sparkling, and fragile clouds are being blown about by winds at work far above our level of living, for down here it is quiet. Now I may enjoyably let time slide away in one Gallery or both, and not decide till the last possible moment, shall I turn left to the National, or walk another fifty paces and look at the faces of our history? When I come out, the sky, though it will not have lost light, will have acquired an intense late-afternoon look, time to find a café, to meet friends and then … in an hour or so the curtain will go up in a theatre, or the English National Opera. Still, after all these years, these decades, there is no moment like that when the curtain goes up, the house lights dim … Or, having dawdled about, one can after all simply go home, taking care to miss the rush hour.
Not long ago, at the height of the rush hour, I was strap-hanging, and in that half of the carriage, that is, among fourteen people, three people read books among all the newspapers. In the morning, off to work, people betray their allegiances: The Times, the Independent, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Mail. The bad papers some of us are ashamed of don’t seem much in evidence, but then this is a classy line, at least at some hours and in some stretches of it. At night the Evening Standard adds itself to the display. Three people. At my right elbow a man was reading the Iliad. Across the aisle a woman read Moby Dick. As I pushed out, a girl held up Wuthering Heights over the head of a new baby asleep on her chest. When people talk glumly about our state of illiteracy I tell them I saw this, and they are pleased, but sceptical.
The poem holding its own among the advertisements was:
INFANT JOY
