The Pritchett Century (33 page)

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:

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.

But, for myself, Bermondsey was the place. There on the south bank they refer to London as the place “over the water.” We worked in the stink of leather, listening to the splitting machines and the clogs of the hide men. The slum kids used to climb up the bars on the office windows and make faces at us and tie the swing doors so that we could not get out. When we caught these children their mothers turned up: “You take your bleedin’ hands off that bleedin’ kid.” The Hide Market has been knocked silly now; Bermondsey and Rotherhithe are burned out, and where there was once a jungle of little houses, there now is London’s naked clay, filling up with thousands of prefabricated huts that look like sets of caterpillar eggs. There are new tenements. One notices a rise in tone. At the Caledonian Market, where they sell everything from old clothes and worn-out gramophone records to antiques at the top West End prices, a good many stall holders talk the new
B.B.C. English. “No, madam,” one hears the incredible accent, “the date of this salt-cellar is 1765, not ’75. One can see by the scroll.”

In Throgmorton Street, we used to see the stock jobbers thick in the street. Inside the Stock Exchange we looked down on the littered floor and saw again what a passion for the market London has. For the stalls marked Diamonds, Industrials, Mines, and so on, are really gentlemanly versions of the vegetable market at Covent Garden, the meat market at Smithfield or the fish market of Billingsgate. The only difference is that a boss at the Stock Exchange puts on a top hat when he visits his banker; at the others, he sticks to his white dust coat, his cap or his bowler. The population of bowlers in London has declined, but in the conservative city clubs they can still be seen rowed up by the hundred like sittings of black eggs.

In Carlyle’s London Library or under the dome of the whispering Reading Room of the British Museum, one may forget that London has the habit of markets and auctions. But at Christie’s, the world-famous auction rooms of pictures, silver and china, they will knock down a Picasso or a Matisse, a Gainsborough or a Raphael, at a nod no one can see. The crowd is well-dressed and silent. Knowingness irradiates from inscrutable faces. It is like a chapel service, and the auctioneer is up to all the tricks of the sinners in the congregation: “I must ask you, sir, to stop preventing people from bidding. You turned round. Three or four times you have made a face.” Such is the sensibility of this secretive business that a mere raised eyebrow can cause doubt. Where all are mad, all are cunning. It is the same at Sotheby’s. You realize in these markets that London is composed of cliques, coteries and specialists, little clubbable collections, causeries, exclusivities, snobberies, of people in innumerable “games” played on secret knowledge, protecting people “in,” keeping others “out,” with dilatory blandness. It is untrue that we are white sepulchers. Our sepulchers are rosy.

In London, whatever you do, you have to be a “member.” I have no doubt there are cliques at Covent Garden or Smithfield. It is different only in those instantaneous, outspoken markets of the street, that mark more clearly than anything one district from another. Berwick market for the foreigners, junk in the Portobello Road, dogs at Bethnal Green,
pictures on the Embankment, jewelry and diamonds being sold on the street at Hatton Garden.

Petticoat Lane, just past Aldgate off the Whitechapel Road, is still the richest; this narrow mile, gashed by bomb sites and hemmed in by the East End sweatshops, is London’s screaming parody of an Oriental bazaar. It is a mile deafened by voices that have burst their throat strings years ago and are down to tonsils and catarrh. “Nah then, come on closer. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. What’s that? You’re not my bloody sister. My family’s like me, ugly as hell. Nah then, will any lady or gentleman present this morning do me the favah of lending me a pound note?” Or: “I’m not taking money this morning, not two pound, one pound, not eighteen, seventeen, fifteen, twelve shilling but”—bang on the book—“five shilling and sixpence for these beautiful cut-glass vases, the last. I’m frowning them away.”

The crowd is dense here. You move six deep, chest to back, an inch at a time, jammed in by Cockneys, Jews, Negroes, Lascars and Chinese off the ships. And, head and shoulders above all, there will be that pink-feathered Zulu prince who can be seen any day anywhere between Aldgate and Tottenham Court Road, selling his racing tips and making the girls scream with his devouring smile. There will be a turban or two and, moving through them against the crowd, will come that tall, glum specter of the London streets with his billboard high above his head, denouncing the Jews for their wickedness in trading on Sunday morning. “The Wages of Sin,” the notice reads, and people make way for him, “is Death.” He passes the stalls where they are serving stewed eels by the cup and black-currant cordial by the glass. He passes the hot dogs and the sugared apples, the stalls of china, socks, watches, handkerchiefs, blankets, toys. A yell comes up from your boot. You have almost trodden on a little fellow who has sat down there suddenly in the middle of the street and is crying out, as if he were on fire: “Ladies! Ladies! Nylons a penny a pair!” And just when we are crushed and cannot move even our chests, there is the tinny sound of kettledrums, the wheeze of clarinet and trumpet, the boom of a soft slack drum. The blind men’s band, with its one-legged collectors fore and aft, moves sternly through us all, raking in the cash.