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 bending, 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
‘I have no name:
I am but two days old.’
What shall I call thee?
‘I happy am.
Joy is my name.’
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old.
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile.
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.
William Blake
Walking back from the Underground I pass three churches. Two of them are no longer conduits for celestial currents: one is a theatre, one derelict. In such a small bit of London, three churches … that other-worldly visitor so useful for enlivening our organs of comparison might, s
eventy years ago, have wondered, ‘What are they for, these buildings, so like each other, so unlike all the others, several to a district? Administrative buildings? A network of governmental offices? Newly built, too!’ But these days this person, she, he or it, would note the buildings are often unused. ‘A change of government perhaps?’ Yet certain types of buildings repeat themselves from one end of the city to the other. ‘Just as I saw on my last visit, there are “pubs” for dispensing intoxicants, and centres for fast movement by means of rail. Others are for the maintenance of machines like metal bugs or beetles – a new thing this, nothing like that last time I was here. And there is another new thing. Every few yards is a centre for the sale of drugs, chemical substances.’ A funny business – he, she or it might muse, mentally arranging the items of the report that will be faxed back to Canopus. ‘If I put them in order of frequency of occurrence, then chemists’ shops must come first. This is a species dependent on chemical additions to what they eat and drink.’ Within a mile of where I live there are at least fifteen chemists’ shops, and every grocery has shelves of medicines.
As I turn the corner past where the old mill stood I leave behind the stink and roar of vehicles pushing their way northwards and I realize that for some minutes it has been unpleasant to breathe. Now Mill Lane, where shops are always starting up, going bankrupt, changing hands, particularly now with the trebling and quadrupling of rents and rates. Soon, I am in the little roads full of houses, and the traffic has become a steady but minor din. The streets here are classically inclined. Agamemnon, Achilles, Ulysses, and there is an Orestes Mews. Add to these names Gondar, and one may postulate an army man, classically educated, who was given the job of naming these streets. In fact, this was not so far wrong. The story was this. (True or false? Who cares? Every story of the past, recent or old, is bound to be tidied up, rounded off, made consequential.) An ex-army man, minor gentry, had a wife in the country with many children, and a mistress in town, with many more. To educate all these he went in for property, bought farmland that spread attractively over a hill with views of London, and built what must have been one of the first northern commuter suburbs … for remember, in the valley just down from this hill, towards London, were the streams, the cows and the green fields my old friend took a penny bus ride to visit every Sunday. The commuters went in by horse-bus or by train to the City.
Some of the buildings are Mansions, built from the start as flats, but most were houses, since converted into three flats. Hard to work out how these houses functioned. The cellars are all wet. In mine labels come off bottles in three months. Yet there was a lavatory down here. Used by whom? Surely nobody could have lived in this earthy cave? Perhaps it wasn’t wet then. Now a circular hole or mini shaft has been dug into the soil, for the damp has long ago heaved off the cement floor, and in it one may watch the water level rise and fall. Not according to the rainfall: all of us in this area know the tides have something to do with the leaking pipes of the reservoir, which from my top window looks like an enormous green field, or village green, for there are great trees all around it: the Victorians put their reservoirs underground. (They say that if you know the man who has the task of guarding the precious waters, one may be taken through a small door and find oneself on the edge of a reach of still black water, under a low ceiling where lights gleam down. One may add to this attractively theatrical picture the faint plop of a rat swimming away from sudden light, and a single slow-spreading ripple.) The top of my house is a converted attic. But the attics were not converted then. There are three bedrooms on the second floor, one too small to share. Two rooms on the first floor, now one room, but then probably dining room and sitting room. A kitchen is pleasantly but inconveniently off a veranda or ‘patio’ – a recent addition. It was not a kitchen then. On the ground floor is one room, once two, and ‘conveniences’ also added recently. A garden room, most likely a nursery. In those days they had so many children, they often had relatives living with them, and every middle-class household had at least one servant, usually more. How were they all fitted in? Where did they cook, where was the larder, how did they get the washing done? And how did they keep warm? There are minuscule fire baskets in small fireplaces in every room.
A hundred years ago this suburb, these houses, were built, and they are solid and thick-walled and all the builders who come to mend roofs or fix plumbing tell you how well they were put up, how good the materials were. ‘We don’t build like that now.’ Nor are these experts dismayed by the wet cellar. ‘You keep that clay good and wet around your foundations, and it won’t shrink in these summers we are having now, and you won’t be sorry.’
As I turn the corner into the street I live in the light is arranging the clouds into tinted masses. The sunsets up here are, to say the least, satisfactory.
Ivy loads the corner house, and starlings are crowding themselves in there, swooping out, swirling back, to become invisible and silent until the morning.
The New Café
There is a new café in our main street, Stephanie’s, a year old now, and always full. It is French, like the ‘Boucherie’ next to it – a very British butcher – like the ‘Brasserie’ opposite, and it is run by two Greeks. At once it acquired its regulars, of whom I am one. Here, as in all good cafés, may be observed real-life soap operas, to be defined as series of emotional events that are certainly not unfamiliar, since you are bound to have seen something like them before, but to which you lack the key that will make them not trite, but shockingly individual.
The miraculous summer of 1989, when one hot blue day followed another, made pavement life as intense as in Paris or Rome, and our café had tables outside crammed against the aromatic offerings of a greengrocer. There everyone prefers to sit, but you are lucky to find a seat. Early in the summer two German girls appeared, large, attractive, uninhibitedly in search of boyfriends for their holidays. They were always together, usually outside, and for a few days sat alone eating the delicious cakes – genuinely French – that none can resist. They were delighted when someone – anyone – said, ‘Is this chair free?’ Once this was me. They had three weeks in London. They were in a small hotel ten minutes away. They thought London was a fine place. The weather was wonderful and – look! – how brown we are getting. While we chatted their eyes at once flew to anyone coming in.
And then they were with a young man. I had seen him here before. He sometimes dropped in for a coffee and was off at once. The German girls liked him. They leaned forward on their large and confident behinds and laughed and flung back blonde manes and all their rows of dewy teeth shone out at everybody. For they continued to keep an eye on possibilities. He leaned back in his chair, and entertained them. I like that one,’ you could imagine one girl saying to another. ‘He is a joker, I think?’
He was a likeable man, perhaps twenty-seven or eight, blue-eyed, fair haired – all that kind of thing, but he had about him something that said, Keep Off. He was a little like a young hawk that hasn’t yet got the hang of it, with a fluffy apprentice fierceness. And he was restless, always hooking and unhooking his legs, or flinging them hastily to one side to get them out of the way of someone coming past, or who seemed to sit too close.
For a few days the three of them were together, usually in the early afternoon. When they left, a girl was on either side of him. But there ought to be a fourth, and soon there he was. When the four met, inside the café or on the pavement, it did not seem as if they had paired off. The girls still kept their eyes on the entertainer, their bright mouths smiling in anticipation for the moment they could laugh, for that is what they liked best to do. And he sat watching them laugh, pleased he was giving them what they wanted, and the other young man, who did not seem to hope for much, laughed too.
Once or twice they ate a proper meal. Sometimes they talked about a film they had seen. One afternoon he came in with a dark composed girl who had a sisterly and satiric air. He bought her coffee and cakes and seemed apologetic about something.
When the German girls came in he waved at them, tucked away his legs like an awkward parcel to make room, and the three girls and the man stayed for a time, and then went off together. Thereafter I saw him with the dark girl and with other girls and he treated them as he did the German girls, for he seemed to like them all.
Once two tables outside were empty and I sat at one and soon he was at the other, dropping into a chair at the last moment as he went past, as if he might as well do that as anything else. By now we were café acquaintances. He remarked that the summer wasn’t bad at all and he was glad he hadn’t gone to Spain, for it was better here. There was a week left of his holiday. He worked at the builders’ supply shop down the road. It wasn’t bad, he quite liked it. Sitting close to him in the strong light it could be seen that he was older than he seemed. There were lines under his eyes, and he was often abstracted, as if he were continually being removed from present surroundings by an inner buzzer: attend to this.
The German girls arrived and they were laughing in anticipation before they sat down.
Then they were not coming to the café, and he was back at work. He dropped in once or twice with a colleague from work, two young men wearing very white boiler suits, which were to make them look knowledgeable about building materials. The German girls’ young man seemed frail inside the thick suit.
One day I was standing outside the Underground station, waiting to meet someone. He strolled past, taking his time, preoccupied. Then his face spread in a smile so unlike anything I had seen there, I quickly turned. Just ahead of him on the pavement was a young girl with a pram. No, when you looked she was a small pale young woman, probably twenty, and she was the baby’s mother, from the tender way she bent to tuck it into already overwhelming covers. She smiled at the concealed baby, and then turned, startled, as the man came up and said in his whimsical, don’t-take-me-seriously way, ‘Hilda, it’s me.’ The two stood, dissolved in smiles. In a moment they would be in an embrace, but she recovered herself and quickly stood back. Then he, too, put on responsibility, as if fitting a winter’s coat over his white boiler suit. Because he could not, apparently, embrace the mother, he leaned over the pram with a gallant air, and she leaned past him, lifted a bundle from its depths, and held the baby so that he could see its face. He bent politely over it and made appropriate noises, laughing at himself so that she had to laugh too. But all the time his eyes were on the young mother. She laughed again and pretended to thrust the baby at him for him to hold. At which he staggered back in a pantomime of an embarrassed male, and she fussed the bundle back under its covers and stood soberly, confronting him. He too was serious. They stood there a long time, long at least for an observer, perhaps a minute or more, looking at each other, entranced. These two were a match, a fit, the same kind: you had to say about them as you do, rarely, say about a couple: they are two halves of a whole, they belong together.