The Pritchett Century (32 page)

And then, at the most wretched moment of my visit, the absurd occurred, as it does again and again in Ireland. I was just about to leave when another visitor got into the prison. He had found the door open and he wandered towards us, a well-dressed, cheerful, vigorous-looking man in, I suppose, his early sixties; he looked like a prosperous business-man. He was English.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I was passing by. I thought I’d like to drop in on the old place. God, they’ve let it go. What a mess! What a shame! It wasn’t like this in my time, the British kept it up, spick and span and proper. It’s terrible. Oh yes, I was here. I was a naughty boy. They put me up there—in number three or four was it?—in the top gallery.”

The old workman had been wary but at this he woke up.

“What was it?” he said.

“Well,” said the man, “I’ve led a bit of a roving life, all over the world you might say, back and forth. I was a deserter. I was stationed in Galway. I was only a kid and I got into a spot of trouble down there—nothing really bad, well, we won’t go into it now, it’s a long time ago. Nowadays they’d let it pass but those were hard times. That’s where they put me, up there.”

“Is that a fact?” the old man began to grin.

“Yes, that’s it, number three or four, top gallery. The man next door went mad and threw himself off and killed himself. There was no net in those days. What am I saying? I’m telling a lie. I was in here twice. That was when I was in Cork—more trouble, I deserted again. I deserted twice.”

“Did you now?” said the old man who had his hands in his pockets and was scratching his legs with delight.

“Let’s see the exercise yard,” the Englishman said. “It’s through there if I remember right.”

The old man said: “That’s right. Through this door.”

“Do you see that? He remembers it!” the old man whispered to me laughing. “Come on now, I’ll show you.”

“It’s a shame the way they’ve let it go,” said the Englishman.

“No one seemed to care at all about it,” apologised the old man.

“Oh, here it is,” said the Englishman, aglow to be in the yard. “That’s it. I reckon I know every stone in that wall. They made you run close to it. I have run round that wall hundreds of times.”

“You’re right there,” said the elated old man.

“And the drummer—now where did he stand? Over there by the window in the corner, I think,” said the Englishman.

“In the corner it was. You see he remembers everything,” the old man said with admiration.

“Left, right, left, right, pick ’em up. The drum tap!” said the Englishman.

“Ah, the drum tap! The drum tap, it made you skip,” cried the old man.

“The drum tap! They knew how to beat it out fast.”

“Ah, they did that.”

Reluctantly the Englishman left his playground.

“Was it in the Devons or the Foresters you said you were?” asked the old man.

“The Foresters.”

“I was in the Fusiliers,” said the old man. “We were in the Curragh.”

They were charmed and they chattered. The Englishman gazed up at the cell.

“I think it was the third cell, perhaps I’m mixing it up with the second time. Or Arbour Hill Barracks—they had me there too. That was the third time.”

“Three times. Powerful,” said the old man whispering. And then, covering his mouth with his hand, he giggled: “I was in the bloody British Army too. I was a deserter myself. Ha! Ha!”

“Where were you then?” said the Englishman.

“I was in Solingen, never short of a razor blade there. And the girls cheering in the street when we got in,” said the old man.

“You’re bloody right. I was up there too!” said the Englishman. The two friends gazed at each other.

“It’s a pity, it’s a great pity it’s been let go,” the old man said.

“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)

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.