The Pritchett Century (34 page)

For a year or two the City and the London market used to tempt me. There is a torpid pleasure in custom and routine which give their
absorbent power to great cities. You could spend your life in those acres of desks under the thousands of green-shaded lamps that hang over them. There was that little temple in the middle of Lloyd’s great temple of insurance, where the Lutine Bell was and still is, and where the red-robed and black-collared attendant in his velvet sat calling out the names of the underwriters like psalms throughout the day. You never realized before what a passion for guarantees the human race has and that London was the steady guarantor. I have never heard that Bell ring, as it is supposed to do, once for Bad News and twice for Good, and I am told that they have given up ringing it for Bad News because nowadays it would never stop ringing. They did ring it twice lately because some coastal steamer in the eastern Mediterranean and given up for lost had just crawled into Tobruk. Nothing happens at sea in any part of the world, but London suffers a seismographic tremor.

And then the spell of working in London owes something to its lingering medieval habit of working in districts; the tailors in Savile Row and their cutters in the Whitechapel Road; the car dealers in Great Portland Street; there are streets sweet to international banking, others committed to insurance; a street for merchant shipping, the “rag” or mantle trades round St. Paul’s, as near as possible to Defoe’s Cheapside—what is left of both—newspapers in Fleet Street. Even the Law splits up among the lawns and chambers of the Inns of Court, into Law and Equity. This is pleasant and, by middle age, one has gathered that London lives by and enjoys its inner self, purveying the careful illusion of leisure and the pretense that its business is private. But for a young man this was all privilege, mystery and a bore. One gets restless.

One morning in the First World War, a carman called Ninety burst into the office and shouted “Air Raid!” across the counter to us boys, and to show he had a proper respect for white collars, added the inevitable “Please” (I have heard the reception clerk at Broadcasting House say the same thing in the Blitz twenty-five years later—“Air Raid, please”—to call the boys to close the iron shutters). It did please. What a relief from the monotonous London rumble to hear a sound like doors banging in the sky. We left our desks. A flight of German aircraft flew as steady as mosquitoes in a clear May sky that was pimpled with gunfire. Black smoke was going up from Billingsgate.

Our boss, a white-bearded old lion of eighty, with the telephone in
his shaking hand, was saying breathlessly to the head clerk: “Have you heard the news? The
Dunnottar Castle
has just docked. Send a boy to me.” There were no boys. We were on the roof. It was about this time I decided that if I wanted to see the world London had so much experience of, the sooner I stopped seeing it from weighing slips, delivery orders, the foreign mail and the secondhand bookshops of the Charing Cross Road, the better. London would make me less impatient once I had got back from Paris, Rome, Madrid or New York.

What does strike me when I come back from these places now is that London is a masculine city, a place for male content and consequence. The men, I notice, dress better here than anywhere else; none knows the curl of a hat or the set of a shoulder better or wears clothes of finer quality. It is just as well, for the absurd variety of English chins, teeth and noses needs some redemption, and people who run so easily to eccentricity need strong rituals and conventions. This is not the idiotic London of Bertie Wooster and the Drones, for the man-about-town is an extinct type. But, we have a dandy for Prime Minister, and there are tens of thousands of less eminent males doing what Henry James called “the thing” properly.

Coming out of the cloakroom of a hotel during the war with my hat in my hand, I saw Sir Max Beerbohm give me a historical look. “In my youth,” he said, “it was not correct to uncover one’s head in an hotel.” How low we had sunk. Such men suffer for us all. They bear the cruelty of the mirror of Narcissus with fortitude.

That young undersecretary to the Cabinet Minister who stands, without overcoat, in the biting January wind, outside Brooks’s Club talking to a friend, knows that if he dies of pneumonia tomorrow he will have caught it, properly costumed, at the right address. It will satisfy him and we, who are not impeccable, know that he is suffering fashion for us. Just as the Guards are when they stamp at the Palace.

Nor does this London vanity afflict only a small class. Detectives and barrow boys, bank messengers and the man in the shop have it as a matter of
amour-propre
. I used to know a London leech gatherer who went barefoot, with his trousers rolled up, into the ponds on his strange search, but he always wore a white lining to his waistcoat and a carnation in his buttonhole when about his duties. Old Mr. Cox at
the London Library, who knew every famous writer and scholar of the last sixty years, used to say with deep London approval: “I knew Mr. Pater. Very particular about his clothes, Mr. Pater was.” Sartorially, we like to burn like Mr. Pater’s “still blue flame.”

Foreigners say that Londoners are less honest than they were before the war, but find us startlingly kind and clever since we have put aside the imperial mask. It is true, I am sure, that we are less starchy; but I am far from noticing any disastrous decline in our complacency, our traditional habit of lazy and vocal self-congratulation. It is also true that once we went out to the Empire; now the Commonwealth comes to us and adds to the polyglot vivacity of our streets.

These strangers come, of course, in the summer when London is green and the smoked white clouds boil over the sultry brick. Then the center of London becomes a foreign city. There are summer mornings at Victoria or Waterloo when the platforms become African or South American. The African tribes appear in all their topknots and shaven blackness: the Moslem turbans gather in the underground railway. The universities and schools have always had a large number of Hindus, Moslems and Chinese and, indeed, it is from their lips mainly that one hears authentic Oxford English. There have always been maharajahs at Claridge’s, Africans at the British Museum, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders in the Strand; and we would be hurt if there were not.

What surprises us is that the real foreigners now come to visit us, not for trade, but for pleasure. There are posses of Argentines in the art galleries of Bond Street. There are days when Piccadilly is German. Crowds of Scandinavians sit on the steps of Eros in Piccadilly taking photographs. Most astonishing are the young French who pour over for the pleasure of eating the
cuisine anglaise
in the Corner Houses! Most familiar, for they have always come here, are the Americans. We do not know and they do not know whether they are foreign or not.

The change is remarkable. Once visited for the power we had, we are, as I say, now visited for our pleasures. The effect is most notable in the police. It has been said that every Englishman desires to be a policeman, a just, tolerant, self-commanding man, and the police may be
considered martyrs to our desire for what we call “the sterling qualities”—the stoical, slow and resistant. But, inevitably, the policeman becomes a giddy tourist guide; he begins to rock on his pedestal into a state of informative frivolity. He has always been good-natured; now he becomes witty. And so with other groups. Conductors get off buses—in defiance of regulations—to show a stranger the way; taxi drivers throw away their misanthropy; all barmaids, waiters, doormen, porters, club servants and chambermaids appear to have sat up the night before reading their Dickens, in order to turn out next morning as authentic characters from
Pickwick
or
David Copperfield
. The foreign touch has always ignited the strong inner fantasy life of the Londoner.

The desire for a Dickensian London is strongest among Russians and Americans. This has its dark side. The Russians search for cotton mills in Piccadilly and expect to find children starving to death up every chimney. There are Americans who expect to find the roaring hungry chaos of the home of the Industrial Revolution. The American student, like the American soldier, gets to know something more like the real contemporary London. The American Dickensian visits the shrine in Doughty Street, follows the ghosts through the quadrangles and the alleys of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Temple, drinks a glass of warm beer in piety at that old coaching inn in Southwark and looks hopefully from London Bridge towards Rotherhithe for the fog to be coming up the river. He returns to his hotel and, as I say, finds the perpetual Dickens there, if the staff are not all Poles, Czechs, Italians or Irish.

Americans, too, are strong Johnsonians and are familiar with Wine Office Court and the Old Cheshire Cheese. Do they look at the Doctor’s statue under the trees by the burned-out church near the Law Courts? They know Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, the museums and galleries better than ourselves. Do they know the exquisite Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with its collection of Hogarth’s paintings? London is still Hogarthian underneath.

When they come from seeing the Italian paintings in the National Gallery, do they risk their lives in the middle of the traffic south of Trafalgar Square and regard one of the few beautiful statues in a city notorious for its commemoration of nonentities—the equestrian figure
of Charles I gaily prancing down the street of his downfall? Do any go into the church of St. Stephen in Wallbrook, the perfect small classical seventeenth-century building, or consider the blue octagon interior of St. Clement Danes?

I would send my American friends down St. Peter’s Square into Chiswick Mall, to go out to Strand-on-the-Green, to walk for days in the London squares, to drink at Jack Straw’s Castle or The Spaniards on the Hampstead Heights, where one can look down at the whole London mess and get a breath of air. At Gravesend, you can get even a touch of the sea from the Thames estuary, and from the window of an inn built for an earl’s mistress in the Regency, you can watch that magical procession of the ships of the world proceeding seawards, two or three a minute, at the top of the tide.

What the right-minded American comes to see in London is what we enjoy most ourselves: the sideshows. The city of markets is also a circus. We never know when we are going to run into the Brigade of Guards up to some ceremonial antic—I heard the Horse Guards this morning trooping off from the stables to the palace, and yesterday there were the royal and golden coaches picking up an ambassador at St. James’s as if he were a piece of wedding cake and not a commissar and one-time graduate of the London School of Economics. They buried an ambassador this week too. The Guards came across Bryanston Square to the single tap of a muffled drum, their arms reversed and like votaries of death itself in their gloomy Russian busbies. The minute gun went off in Hyde Park, the pigeons flew high off the hotels. It was well done and with pride.

The State never gives up a sideshow, a privilege, a title or a yard of scarlet or gold. In the House of Commons, before the free-for-all of Question Times begins, the Speaker walks like a specter in his silken knee breeches, with the Mace borne before him. We half grin at the solemnity and then, unaccountably, we straighten our faces. Our religion? Clearly we are ancestor worshipers; at any rate we worship their clothes and emblems.

There is humbug in this, of course. There was a good deal of clever humbug in
Alice in Wonderland
, and that book is the best guide to the inner life of London because it catches that London mood which is
half solemn and half comic. A man will make jokes about some medieval office of vastly symbolical but slender real meaning, but in some private sense he will think the farce serious. We catch the feeling that, to relieve London of its crushing importance, we must have dreams that are half absurd, half elegant; we could hardly live under this weight without some grotesque or fancy. It is perhaps shady of us to be like this. John Quincy Adams thought it was plain hypocrisy. When the English are behaving badly, he said, they always pretend to be mad. At the House of Lords I heard a packed and humdrum collection of peers debate the outrageous fact of their existence in a democratic state. When Lord Salisbury said he could not offhand think of a logical defense of the hereditary principle and, for this reason, was disinclined to give it up, he was properly adjourning to
Alice in Wonderland
, and asserting the necessity of the London dream.

The clash between scarlet dream and pin-stripe reality is frank in the courts. They are the best booths in the London circus, easier to walk into than a news cinema and the only toothy bit of Dickensian London left. Dickens had the feeling for the London Wonderland. You can begin at the bottom with the police courts, a place like Bow Street. And here, as so often in this city, you are distracted and have to break off, for you are in a characteristic London muddle. For they have put an Opera House as fine as Milan’s and the toughest police court of the city into the middle of Covent Garden vegetable market, so that you have to dodge the Black Maria and step over squashed oranges and cabbage stalks before you can see Fonteyn dance or hear Schwarzkopf sing.

Behind the market lorries is a church famous as a burial place for actors. The best collection of theatrical prints outside the museums is on the walls of the saloon bar of The Nag’s Head public house, and at five in the morning the bar will be packed with market porters. One of the minor pleasures for women in London is to walk through Covent Garden early in the morning to a serenade of wolf cries, whistles, blunt suggestions, and the crucial bars of love songs from men of powerful voice. And here, in a strong smell of disinfectant, the Law hauls in its morning catch of thieves, prostitutes and drunks. People put in an hour at Bow Street before the pubs begin to open at 11:30.

Bow Street is crude casualty and is not dressed up. London’s
Alice in Wonderland
really begins at the law courts of the Old Bailey, under its golden sword and scales, and continues at the Queen’s Bench. When I was a child I used to sit at my father’s office window watching the crowds queue for the murder trials at this ugly temple, which they put up in place of disreputable Old Newgate. This is a region of ghosts, doubly so since the war. In Dickens’s time the Law was housed in eighteenth-century buildings and behaved with Gothic oddity; now it is housed in nineteenth-century Gothic and behaves with a disturbing decorum. Yet pale oak paneling, with its suggestions of parliament, public libraries, choir stalls and the halls of modern universities, has not killed the waggishness of the Law. Wigs and scarlet robes, ermine and starched bibs, look alarming against this color. The real thing here is ourselves, foolish in our ordinary clothes but also rather aggressive, vulgar and impudent. There is nothing like the sight of a truculent witness, in a navy blue suit and with a bad accent, stonewalling Learned Counsel. The air is motionless, dry and tepid. A small cough, the turning of the pages of briefs, the quiet voices of lawyers, conducting as it seems not a trial but an insinuating conversation among educated friends—these stiffen behavior. A very thoughtful game of chess is going on at dictation speed. The Pawn goes into the box, Queen’s Bishop stands up, King’s Bishop sits down, a Knight scratches under his wig with a pen. Wrapped in his scarlet, that untakable piece the Lord Chief Justice, an old man with a face as hard as a walnut, restlessly moves his waxen hands.