Imagined London (8 page)

From this landscape, surely, and the subsequent years in which the Soviet Union and the United States went on to be superpowers locked in a cold war and England to look on as their wise, slightly doddery uncle, arose that assurance my friend once gave to me that the great days of the U.K. were over and position and privilege now lay inevitably across the Atlantic.

The British people, especially those younger members who were born after the bombs had fallen, even after the vacant lots were cleared and rebuilt, surely must tire of hearing about the indomitability of their fathers and mothers in the face of that devastation. But its sheer indomitability is one of the great appeals of London in a sky-is-falling culture. “Business as usual,” Churchill said during the war, and business as usual might be the British motto, even today.

Doris Lessing in 1981

Certainly there is none of this air of rediscovering the wheel of history that prevails among Americans. At the height of the controversy about invading Iraq and the animosity that ensued between the United States and England and the French, a limo driver waxed poetic and specific about 1,200 years of French perfidy. Then he concluded with a nod, “But it all sorted itself out. We
finished with more of their land than they had, didn't we now?” It was difficult not to think of one of the prettiest pieces in the British Museum show, an enormous brooch of gold, silver, enamel, and rock crystal, the president's badge of the Anti-Gallican Society. The society was founded in 1745 “to oppose the insidious arts of the French nation,” and the brooch is engraved with its motto “For our country” and St. George on a white horse running his spear gleefully through a fleur-de-lis. There were Anti-Gallican teacups and china, too. “It goes back a long way,” said the driver with a nod.

And yet the English have learned to adapt, if not to forgive and forget. Just opposite Fortnum and Mason, the enormous food emporium so beloved of Anglophiles, there is now a Japanese confectionery with sweets made of rice and bean paste, as beautiful as flowers nestled in their tiny wicker baskets. The notice board for the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace is in French as well as English, but also in German and in Japanese, despite the damage to the selfsame palace inflicted during the war.

Little of central London betrays any signs of that damage. Only the eldest residents can see retrospectively, the street as it appears today and as it once was, before the bombs. Rebirth is the theme instead. The scaffolds that mask the elegant facades from Notting
Hill to St. James's Palace speak of an era of indulgent rebuilding, not the reconstruction of deprivation and necessity but the adding of noise-resistant windows, new baths and kitchens. Strolling through those neighborhoods with our guidebooks, we tend to be a bit contemptuous of the new high-rise with no more character or ornament than a canvas awning to the street provides. We can forgive American cities their banal architecture (except, perhaps, for Houston); but not London. Not with all the beauty that surrounds us.

But what the guidebooks cannot tell is how the newer buildings rose there. In New York we know that, in almost every case, some benighted group or individual decided to trade in, say, the glorious neoclassic Penn Station for a hideous modern thing that appears to be the bastard child of a factory and a public school auditorium. But in London much of the modern rises on the bones of the antique because the antique was blown away in the Blitz. It is one of those moments when what has vanished teaches more than what remains.

P
erhaps it was only the offerings in our school library, but there seemed to me as a girl to be a disproportionate number of stories, skewed specifically to the preteen set, about Elizabeth I. This was fine with me. At a threshold level the appeal was obvious: a pampered child, an adolescent outcast, an accident of birth, an accident of death, and then, greatness. It had all the elements of a great novel with a young girl at its center, and the happiest of endings for some of us who were beginning to feel the talons of worldly ambitions clawing at our midsections, later summed up in the pop feminist slogan: I am my own prince.
Although, in Elizabeth's case, it might more properly have been: I am my own queen. And that of most of the known world.

But like so many of the most compelling English novels, the story of Elizabeth threw out tendrils that led to other engrossing tales. As Trollope's novels of Parliamentarian intrigue led one to the other, with characters entering and departing the dance and some, like Plantagenet Palliser and his wife, the spirited Lady Glencora, appearing as perennials, growing older, wiser, or perhaps only cannier, so Elizabeth's story led backward and forward to others. The young Henry, loving his brother's widow, then casting her off for someone younger and wilder. The younger, wilder Anne Boleyn, holding the King at arm's length, then succumbing, finally disappearing into the Tower, telling the executioner, according to legend, that he needn't worry, that she had a little neck. And Elizabeth's siblings, the unhappy and pious Lady Mary and the sickly and short-lived Edward. Later there would be the fops and intrigues of the Restoration, and the offspring of Victoria, populating the palaces of the world. These were sagas, too, but none of them could hold a candle to that of the Tudors and the redheaded goddess at the center of their story.

And that was despite the fact that, for young people's consumption, these histories of the time glossed over the more provocative, uglier facts. None of the stories of the young Elizabeth checked out from my Catholic school library were explicit about her parent's marriage, driven by lust, or their schism, in which Anne was accused of having sex with, among others, her own brother. None told of how Elizabeth's last stepmother married a nobleman who may have molested the girl, or of how she dangled her virginity in front of every reigning monarch in Europe to keep the region in a state of dizzy disequilibrium. In all those books Elizabeth was described as she liked to describe herself, the Virgin Queen, but to a child raised on the Virgin Mary, this seemed to have less to do with sex and more with importance and position.

Yet all the stories seemed to have one plot twist in common, and that was that London was the prize. When Catherine of Aragon, past her childbearing years, was discarded by her now-aged boy king, she was sent from the city. When Elizabeth was displaced by the disgrace of her mother and the birth of her brother, she was sent away as well, out to the English countryside. In rural beauty, becalmed, she awaited the summons back. To be restored to London was to be restored to the place where her mother Anne had reached the zenith of her
short career: arrived at the Tower while the Thames teamed with gaudily decorated boats, rode through the streets in a litter of cloth of gold dressed in ermine and jewels, was crowned in Westminster Abbey while all the lords and ladies of the court looked on. To return to London was to return to life—a life of color, confusion, intrigue, crosscurrents, but a life fully lived.

Of course, not everyone felt that way, then and now. English literature, and English life, are filled with those who are overwhelmed, exhausted, and repelled by life in the cheek-by-jowl metropolis, not the least of them reigning monarchs. Prince Charles is said to be more at home in his gardens at Highgrove, his country estate, than he is in the palatial quarters he occupies in central London. His mother the Queen looks most herself in photographs when she is pictured in the country, a scarf tied over her hair, Wellington boots on her feet, and a pack of dogs eddying around her. In fact, many of the pleasures of English life we foreigners have learned about through books tend to be country pleasures: dogs, horses, especially gardening.

This is clear in many of the most beloved English novels. Agatha Christie would much prefer to be in St. Mary Mead with Miss Marple or even on a cruise with Hercule Poirot then set down in the center of Chelsea. Austen is famously unequivocal in
Emma
when the
hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse says stoutly, “The truth is, that in London it is always sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.” (This sentiment stands in opposition to the oft-quoted—too oft-quoted, actually—sentiment of Samuel Johnson that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”)

In her memoirs Jessica Mitford recalled her father's trips: “On very rare occasions he lumbered into his London clothes and with much heavy breathing prepared for the trip—always considered a tremendously arduous journey, although it was actually only eighty miles—to sit in the House of Lords.” By contrast to the exile of the Elizabethans, in any number of English novels the good folks of the shires travel to the capital, or “to town,” as it is so often described, only under duress, and when they return to the villages and estates which they consider their proper homes a reader can almost feel them take in a lungful of good clean air.

Initially, of course, this was for simple sanitary reasons. The streets of long ago London were punctuated by enormous garbage piles; one afternoon, as I watched a man with a begrimed face pick through a trash basket in Regent's Park, I realized that I'd met his like before, in Dickens and in the diaries of Samuel Pepys, in the person of the trash pickers and vendors who made their living off the refuse.

But the garbage was not the worst of it. Even a sheltered young reader could, sooner or later, figure out what was inside a “slops jar” and what would be the net effect of throwing its contents out an upstairs window in what, half a millennium ago, was the most populous city in Europe. Disease ran rampant in London because sewage did. London Bridge had a public toilet, the contents of which went directly into the Thames. It is one thing to stand in the grand semicircle of Trafalgar Square and admire how the terrain slopes gently down to Big Ben and from there to the river, quite another to consider how important that was during the era when raw sewage ran through the gutters directly into the water. Even when the gutters were replaced by sewers, the sewers fed right into the famous river, until the water was brown, the water birds died, and members of Parliament talked of leaving Westminster because of the fumes. The Big Stink, it was called before it was remedied in the nineteenth century.

But it was not just the noisome air that drove the determination, evident in so many English novels, to stay safely away from London. There was the stench of evil, too, or at least license, so at odds with the sense of village rectitude. The eighteenth century, for instance, marked the heyday of what, in Heyer's romance novels, is known as the “ton,” a class of cynical dandies who
stood prevailing standards of good behavior on their head. Husbands and wives were expected to spend little time together; infidelity was de rigueur. (Hence this tight-lipped exchange in a Heyer novel,
Devil's Cub,
one of her typical tales of true love amid the debauchery: “He frowned. ‘Orgies, Fanny?' ‘Orgies, Hugh. Pray do not ask more.'”)

Stories reached the landed gentry of the escapades of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the queen of ton society, who used padding to make her upswept hair three feet high, who performed onstage and gambled her husband's money away, who spoke in a peculiar form of baby talk called the Cavendish Drawl. When Sheridan wrote
The School for Scandal,
Georgina was the model for the lead role of the good-hearted but loose-living Lady Teazle. But while the upright people of Devon or Kent would have been outraged to see themselves so portrayed, Georgiana's circle went to the theater to be seen watching a farce, as good as watching themselves and their own dissolute customs.

A century later Victoria had set a more rigid standard, but there were still stories that made London seem like a different, less ordered world than the villages and towns. Victoria's eldest son, the pleasure-loving Prince of Wales, had a deer brought to the center of the city, perhaps in an attempt to re-create the hunting parties of
Henry VIII that led to the creation of London's most beautiful parks. With his pals, the Prince chased the animal through Harrow and Wormwood Scrubs, cornering and killing it at Paddington Station while railway porters goggled at the sight. The newspapers editorialized darkly about the royal misbehavior.

Even the novelists passed judgment harshly. Reading Trollope's two great series of novels, one set largely in town, the other in the country, it is manifest that the folks of the Barsetshire chronicles are less hard, cold, and calculating than those we meet in London in the company of the Pallisers. Like the Mitford father, the aged country gentry eschew the city unless absolutely necessary. Sir Alured Wharton may be a baronet, but one “not pretending to the luxury of a season in London for which his modest three or four thousand a year did not suffice.” Trollope adds, “Once a year he came up to London for a week, to see his lawyers, and get measured for a coat, and go to the dentist.” Why venture into the city more? In
The Prime Minister,
every fashionable street is populated by those whose very names are meant to suggest their venality and dissolution: Sir Damask and Lady Monogram, Mr. Hartlepod, Lord Mongrober, the Marquis of Mount Fidgett. (“Now the late Marquis had been, as was the custom with the Fichy Fidgett, a man of pleasure. If the truth may be spoken openly, it should
be admitted that he had been a man of sin.”) These are manifestly not nice people, and, predictably, when his daughter is enmeshed in an unacceptable love affair, the upright Mr. Wharton's first thought is that he “must take her away from London.” A reader knows at the finale of the novel that Emily Wharton is finally safe because she will spend the rest of her life with the good folks of Herefordshire, of whom her first husband, sophisticated and dishonest, had been so dismissive.

In modern day London there is little talk of the evil that once inspired country folks to stay put and city folks to leave. All the evils of the metropolis—drugs, prostitution, pornography—are now available almost anywhere on Earth, even in sleepier shires. Some of those who prefer the country life speak of London's grime and crime, although even a cursory look back through the history of the capital shows that in the past it has been far dirtier and far less safe. (In one of the most dramatic scenes in
The Prime Minister,
two young men of fashion go for a drunken late night walk through St. James's Park, although they know it is foolhardy; sure enough, they are promptly mugged. In every regard the story seems completely contemporary.)

But the current fashionable reasons for leaving London are more pedestrian in a somewhat depressing fashion. The
Sunday Times
featured the issue one day in
its real estate supplement and focused on the families of the Wandsworth section of the city, who find it less “child-friendly” than the greener regions and are moving out of town in droves. “The thought of trying to get on the Tube with a buggy horrifies me,” one young mum complained. A far cry from the stench of evil that the shires once believed emanated from the city.