A Writer's World (12 page)

And so at the end of his brief stay, disturbed but undeniably stimulated by his visit, he makes his way once more towards the station – a little apprehensively, for he feels pretty certain that they gave him the wrong departure time, and anyway he has never been very adept with the 24-hour clock. He is, you see, a man of habit, and he is also middle-aged. He is
expressing all the prejudices of an imperial generation, reared to grandeur, fostered on the last fragments of splendid isolation. He can just remember, dimly in childhood, an England that was still the world’s arbiter, grandly correcting imbalances of power, here crossly checking a potentate, there patting a suitable revolutionary kindly on the head. He does not realize how fast they are draining his beloved Channel. He is not, I think, a married man, but if he had children of his own he would know that every thought that crossed his mind in Paris stamped him a child of his age. His is the last generation into whose silly old eye, when the white English cliffs appear at last above the blurred horizon, a hot atavistic tear embarrassingly insists upon rising. He is well the right side of fifty still, but he is almost the last of the islanders.

We should not blame him, or scoff at his ideas. His way was singularly successful in its time, and honourable too, and enabled the English, entrenched behind their moat, to evolve a national genius that has enriched, astonished and amused us all. The cycle of history has turned, though, and one of the excitements of our time is the thought that the old European comity is awakening again, recalling its estranged children, stretching itself like Rip Van Winkle and massaging its mighty muscles. Never again, I prophesy, will an English generation step so cautiously into Paris, with so many prickly reservations. Who could long be jealous of such a place? Even our friend in the trilby, startled to find his train at the right platform at the advertised time, has to admit, grudgingly, that the Parisians seem to be making some progress at last.

The day was very early when I began my morning’s affair with London, and I started, as determined lovers should, with a nourishing English breakfast, the most potent of aphrodisiacs. The first watery sunshine was glimmering as I walked into the streets of Covent Garden, and the noble façade of the Opera House stood there above the vegetable-wagons pale and romantic. The alleys were stodgy with lorries, and the pavements were bustling with porters, and a fine old lady in black strode by with a tray of cabbages on her
head. In the shade of a classical portico some union propagandist had pinned a notice suggesting several disagreeable methods of dealing with strike-breakers. Hanging, it observed, was too good for such vermin.

There was a public house around the corner. Licensed for the porters of the market, it was the one pub in London where you could get beer at that time of the morning, so I sat down to a brown ale, three smoking golden sausages, and a slice of toast – a princely breakfast. Two extremely stout men shared my table and swapped an incessant flow of badinage. Their Cockney was proud and undiluted, and every now and then one of them winked blearily at me, to put me at my ease. I put lots of mustard on my sausages and tried hard to enjoy the ale. London is a rich and saucy city, for all its espresso-bar veneer, and its heart still thrives on beer and bangers and such old stalwarts of the palate.

Presently the sun, like a timid tippler, appeared through the glass of the saloon bar door: so I said goodbye to those two portly jokers and made my way east to Billingsgate. London Bridge was almost empty when I arrived there, and as I climbed down the gloomy staircase to the fish market my footsteps echoed desolately away beneath the bridge: but when I emerged from the tunnel into Lower Thames Street there before me was all the blast and colour and virility of Billingsgate, against one of the most glorious city settings on earth.

Away to the east stood the bastions of the Tower, like misty cardboard replicas; and behind me there arose the mountainous hump of Cannon Street Station, grandly cavernous; and beside me, hunched against an office block, there stood the fine old church of Magnus Martyr, with its ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’; and to my left a meshwork of city lanes, Fish Street and Pudding Lane, Botolph Lane and St. Mary at Hill, clambered up the slope around the Monument; and everywhere there were the fish-men, in their white coats and queer leather hats, barging and pushing their way from the refrigerator trucks to the market, splashed with mud and gusto and fishy liquids. There was grandeur, and humour, and vivacity, and brutality to this compelling scene: and in the middle of it all stood the City policemen, like holy men, writing things down in little black notebooks.

Across the river on Bankside no such noble turmoil animated the wharves. A hush lay over the alleyways and warehouses, and only a few early dockers were coughing and talking throatily on the barges moored alongside. As I wandered, though, I could feel the rising animation of the place as the city woke to the day; and soon there approached me down
an empty lane a figure whose eager stride and sharp decisive footfalls were the very epitome of morning purpose. It was dressed all in black, and as it advanced down the shadowy canyon of the warehouses I saw that its legs were sheathed in gaiters. I stopped in my tracks, overcome by this pungent confrontation of the commercial, the medieval, and the ecclesiastical. ‘Magnificent!’ said I. ‘Well, er, yes,’ said the clergyman, ‘it always is lovely at this time of the morning, and if you go a little farther you’ll see the new house they’ve just built for me next to Christopher Wren’s, thus enabling me to be the first Provost of Southwark to live on the spot since my cathedral was founded some, let me see, yes, some one
thousand
,
three
hundred
years ago: Good morning!’ – and the Provost strode off to his cathedral.

But even London’s chain of associations is sometimes broken, and when one of the old landmarks is destroyed, replaced or made redundant, then you may feel the melancholy of the place, and realize how heavily it leans upon the grandeurs of the past. You may sense this nostalgia beside the forgotten India Office, or outside an Admiralty that is no longer the world’s final arbiter, or beside Buckingham Palace, where Queen Victoria gazes bleakly across an empire that has vanished: or you may do as I did that morning, cross by Blackfriars Bridge, meander down an awakening Fleet Street, turn into Kingsway, and pause for a moment to watch them pulling down the old Stoll Theatre, all too soon to be one with St James’s and the Tivoli.

A ramp leads you down through the gaunt skeletonic walls to the great pit of the theatre beneath; and there you can stand in reverie, like a sentimental singer in a Hollywood musical, gazing at the sad hulk of the building above you, with the dark wooden panelling of the box office still sedately in place among the ruins, and all the grabs and cranes and shovels burrowing desperately into the stalls. You can scarcely find a more evocative symbol of London than one of the celebrated Edwardian theatres, so long flushed with grace and gaiety, now being systematically bashed into oblivion.

By now the day had burst, so I took a bus to Harley Street: for there on any weekday morning, parked in lordly comity, you may inspect the best selection of Rolls-Royces in the world. The oldest of these cars is an orange coupé from the twenties, unashamedly antique; the newest is the 1958 model, a car fit for royal surgeons; and between these haughty extremes there runs the whole range of Rollses, an irresistible London assembly. There are upright pre-war Rollses, inclining slightly backward, as though
they are uncomfortably laced; and there are faintly sporty Rollses, belonging to dashing cynical psychiatrists; and there are uncompromising heavyweight Phantoms, black and awful, into which the dread specialist stoops himself with a soft word to his chauffeur and a sigh of responsibility. To taste some of the ingrained hierarchies and pretensions of London, take a walk down Harley Street and inspect these splendid machines, the finest instruments ever devised for going one better than the Joneses.

I drove to Sotheby’s next, by way of Wipers and the Somme, for my taxi-driver had some lurid tales to tell of the First World War, of drunken attacks and incipient mutinies, and the unhappy shortcomings of the French – ‘I wouldn’t trust them no more than I would these Yanks – and there’s an uneducated lot for you!’ It was glass they were selling that morning, and smooth as Swedish crystal was the elegant young auctioneer who presided. There were the canny, hard-bitten dealers, huddled around the table beneath the desk; and there were the Americans, sitting in baffled attitudes on sofas around the perimeters; and one or two girls in the highest and brightest and shortest of fashions sat cross-legged on occasional chairs; and the suave auctioneer, observing the inexplicable flickerings and noddings around him, suavely sold each piece and suavely banged his desk.

And so to luncheon (as the auctioneer might say). In a little side street called St Martin’s Court, beside the stage door of Wyndham’s, is to be found Sheekey’s, one of the great fish restaurants of Europe. Here you may buy the Londoner’s fish, halibut and turbot and stewed eel, and you may eat radishes with your cheese, and wash them down with white wine. Every kind of person frequents Sheekey’s, and when I investigated the people who were sharing my table I discovered one to be a refugee from Bavaria, now a successful manufacturer; and one to be a designer of shoes; and the third told me modestly, eyeing my stewed eels with distaste, that he was a member of a vocal group called the Keynotes and was also engaged in the production of jingles for commercial television. I drank to his harmonies, and congratulated the Bavarian on his fortune, and complained about the price of shoes, and thought to myself, as my morning slid to a replete, if not greasy, conclusion: ‘London! A hodge-podge, a kaleidoscope, a secret cupboard, a regular old stewed eel of a city!’

Tonight was the moment of catharsis for the Algerian revolution, the moment when all the inflamed emotions of the past few weeks burst into something dangerously approaching madness. Pumped full of slogans, drunk with militarism, blind with patriotism, at once triumphant and embittered, anxious and hopeful, the
colons
of Algiers gathered once again in the forum on the hill. When they sang their patriotic songs the music was the loudest and deepest and most frightening I have ever heard, and it was carried away like thunder across the harbour and out to sea. They were honest emotions that were expressed as well as vicious ones, kindly as well as intolerant; but by and large, to an old-fashioned democratic observer brought up on bearskins and blanco, the forum at Algiers this evening stank unpleasantly of jack-boots and gun-metal. Into this hideous setting, instinct with force and chauvinism, sustained by 300,000 cheering, shouting, singing, clamouring
colons
, General de Gaulle entered with an air of almost innocent integrity.

He seemed as welcome and incongruous as a bishop among gangsters. His face is rather pudgy these days, and when he spreads his arms in his victory sign, it looks an effort. But his voice had a ring of honesty to it, and he seemed to look at us, all 300,000 of us, straight in the eye. He said that all the people of Algeria, whatever their race or creed, must be French citizens with equal rights and duties. They must be given the means to live a decent life, he said, and there must be a reconciliation between the French people of North Africa and the Muslims, whose rebel
forces had put up a brave fight and must be brought back within the French fold.

Bursts of cheers and chanted slogans interrupted his speech, and repeated cries of
‘l’Algérie
Française’
; and you could feel the sensitive mass reaction of this complex-ridden crowd as he moved from subject to subject, from the Republican institutions to the future of Algeria, from integration to reconciliation. For there
must
be reconciliation between the peoples, he said again, and bracing himself behind his microphone while the crowd waited, he thumped his chest, surveyed the arena before him and proclaimed magnificently: ‘I, de Gaulle, open the door!’