A Writer's World (30 page)

One of the flight-paths to London Airport, Heathrow, goes straight over the middle of the capital, east to west. The city does not look much at first: just a drab sprawling mass of housing estates, terraces and industrial plants, nibbled at its edges by a fairly grubby green – just mile after mile of the ordinary, splodged here and there with the sordid.

Presently, though, the route picks up the River Thames, sinuously sliding between the eastern suburbs, and one by one landmarks appear that are part of the whole world’s consciousness, images familiar to every one of us, reflecting the experience of half mankind. The Tower of London squats brownish at the water’s edge. Buckingham Palace reclines in its great green garden. The Houses of Parliament, of all famous buildings the most toylike and intricate, stand like an instructional model beside Westminster Bridge. There are the swathes of London parks, too, and the huge Victorian roofs of the railway terminals, the cluttered hub of Piccadilly, the big new block of Scotland Yard, and always the river itself, twisting and turning through it all, out of the city centre into the western purlieus, until the first of the country green appears again on the other side, with gravel pits and motorways. Windsor Castle appears tremendous on its hillock, and the aircraft, slightly changing its tone of voice, tilts a wing over Slough and begins the last descent to the airport.

It is the city of cities that we have flown over. Like it or loathe it, it is the daddy of them all. If New York is ethnically more interesting, Moscow or Peking ideologically more compelling, Paris or Rome more obviously beautiful, still as a historical phenomenon London beats them all. It has been itself, for better or for worse, for a thousand years, unconquered by a
foreign army since William the Norman was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey in 1066. It has spawned and abandoned the greatest empire known to history. It was the first great industrial capital, the first parliamentary capital, the arena of social and political experiments beyond number. It is a city of terrific murders and innumerable spies, of novelists, auctioneers, surgeons and rock stars. It is the city of Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Johnson, Churchill, Dick Whittington, Henry VIII, Florence Nightingale, the Duke of Wellington, Queen Victoria, Gladstone and the two Olivers, Cromwell and Twist. Mozart wrote his first symphony in London, and Karl Marx began
Das
Kapital
. London has five great symphony orchestras, eleven daily newspapers, three cathedrals, the biggest subway on earth and the most celebrated broadcasting system. It is the original world capital of soccer, cricket, rugby, lawn tennis and squash. It is where Jack the Ripper worked. It is the home of the last great monarchy of all, the House of Windsor, likely to be outlived only, in the expert judgement of the late King Farouk of Egypt, by the Houses of Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades. London is nearly everything. If you are tired of London, Dr Johnson once remarked, you are tired of life.

It is a gift of London, or rather a technique, that through the dingy and the disagreeable, the fantastic habitually looms. Illusion breaks in! Its principal agency is that monarchy, whose heraldic lions, unicorns, crowns, roses, thistles and Norman mottos are as inescapable in this city as Leninist quotations in Moscow.

Monarchy in London is part religion, part diplomacy, part make-believe; if the gleaming standards above the royal residences are like prayer flags or talismans, the ramrod soldiers stamping and strutting between their sentry boxes are pure Sigmund Romberg. The mystique of London’s royal presence, the fetish feel, the mumbo jumbo, colours the sensations of this peculiar city, and often makes it feel like a place of pilgrimage, a Lourdes or a Jerusalem, or more exactly, perhaps, like one of those shrines where a familiar miracle is regularly re-attested, the saintly blood is annually decongealed or the hawthorn blossoms each Christmas morning. The world flocks in to witness the mystery of London, enacted several times a year in the ceremonial thoroughfare called the Mall. The pavements then are thick with foreigners, and far away up Constitution Hill the tourist buses, emblazoned with the emblems and registration plates of all Europe, stand nose to nose in their shiny hundreds. The guardsmen lining the Mall are like acolytes at the shrine; the patrolling policemen, sacristans.

The beat of a drum is the start of the ritual, somewhere up there in the blur of gold, grey and green that is Buckingham Palace. The beat of a drum, the blare of a band, and presently a procession approaches slowly between the plane trees. A drum major leads, in a peaked jockey cap and gilded tunic, as impassive on his tall white horse as a time drummer on a slave galley. Then the jangling, clopping, creaking, panting cavalry, black horses, brass helmets, plumes, anxious young faces beneath their heavy helmet straps, the skid and spark of hoofs now and then, the shine of massive breastplates, sour smells of horse and leather. Three strange old gentlemen follow, weighed down beneath fat bearskin hats, with huge swords bouncing at their sides; they ride their chargers rheumatically stooped, as though they have been bent in the saddle like old leather.

Another plumed squadron … a pause … a hush over the crowd … and then, bobbing high above the people, almost on a level with the flags, the familiar strained and earnest face of the mystery itself, pale beneath its heavy makeup. It is like the Face on the Shroud, an image-face. Everybody in the world knows it. It is a lined and diligent face, not at all antique or aristocratic, but it possesses its own arcanum. The crowd hardly stirs as it passes, and the murmur that runs down the pavement is a tremor less of astonishment or admiration than of compassion. It is as though a martyr is passing by. She rides, she bleeds, for us!

There is something fatalistic about the spectacle. The ritual is so old, so very old, so frozen in so many conventions and shibboleths. The Queen bobs away with her guards, her captains and her bands towards whatever elaborate and meaningless ceremonial her major-domos have prepared for her beyond the trees, but she leaves behind something stale. Her martyrdom is the suffering of a tired tradition, and if the royal flummery is the saving fantasy of London, it is the city’s penance too. London seems often to be labouring beneath the weight of its own heritage – year after year, century upon century, the same beat of the drum-major’s drum, the same jangle of the harnesses, the same bent old courtiers on their chargers lurching generation after generation down the Mall.

Like many another celebration of faith, it is an act, and this perpetual posturing around the royal palaces, like the swishing to and fro of surpliced priests around a reliquary, pervades the rest of the capital too.

More than any other city in Europe, London is a show, living by bluff and display. People have always remarked upon its theatrical nature. In Victorian times it was Grand Guignol, and the smoky blackness of the city
streets, the rat-infested reaches of the river, coupled with the lively squalor of the poor, that powerfully impressed susceptible visitors. In the blitz of the 1940s it was pure patriotic pageantry: the flames of war licking ineffectively around the mass of St Paul’s, Churchill in his boiler-suit giving the V-sign from the steps of 10 Downing Street, Noël Coward singing ‘London pride has been handed down to us’ or ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square …’

Today we are between the great civic performances that have punctuated London’s history, but the greasepaint is always on, and the sensation of theatre is still endemic to the place. It is a city of actors always, as it has been since the days of Will Shakespeare and his troupers down at the Globe. You can hardly spend a day in London without seeing a face you recognize, and in this city, famous actors are not mere celebrities or glorified pop stars, but great men. They are figures of authority, honoured or ennobled. Laurence Olivier sits as a baron in the House of Lords. Sir Ralph Richardson lives like a grandee in his Regency house by the park. Sir Alec Guinness, Sir Michael Redgrave, Sir John Gielgud – these are the truest nobility of this capital: people who, like the admirals of an earlier English age, frequently sail abroad to do their country honour, fighting the Queen’s battles in Rome or Hollywood, but who return always, full of glory, to this their natural estate.

The histrionic art is the London art
par
excellence
– the ability to dazzle, mimic, deceive or stir. Look now, as you step from the restaurant after dinner, across the blackness of St James’s toward Westminster. There is the floodlit Abbey, that recondite temple of Englishness; and there is the cluster of the Whitehall pinnacles; and there, the flash of the neons pinpoints Piccadilly and intermittently illuminates Nelson on his pillar in Trafalgar Square; and riding above it all, high over the clockface of Big Ben in the Palace of Westminster, high in the night sky, a still small light, all alone, burns steadily above the city. It is the light that announces the House of Commons, the mother of all parliaments, to be in session below. There’s theatre for you! There’s showmanship!

Or pay a visit to the High Court in the morning, and see the performers of London law present their daily matinee. No professional actors ever played such unfathomable, judicial judges as the justices of Her Majesty’s Bench, wrinkled like turtles beneath the layered carapaces of their wigs, scratching away at their notes on their high seats, or intervening sometimes with polysyllabical quips. No prime-time mimic could outdo the sharpest of the London barristers, who play their briefs like instruments, hold themselves whenever possible in profile and wrap their robes around
them in the ecstasy of their accomplishment, like so many Brutuses assembling for the kill. Laughter in a London court is frequent and often heartless; there is a regular audience of hags and layabouts, and so infectious is the atmosphere of theatre that often the poor accused, momentarily hoisted into stardom, wanly smiles in appreciation.

With luck one may still see Cockneys in performance. The Cockney culture survives only precariously in the city of its origins, as the taxi-drivers, marketmen and newspaper vendors move out to the suburbs, are rehoused in high-rise apartments, or find their accents, their loyalties and their humour swamped in the sameness of the age. It is many years since officialdom cleared the flower sellers from Piccadilly Circus, and even the buskers of the London tradition, the escape artists who used to entertain the theatre queues, the pavement artists outside the National Gallery, are slowly being chivvied on to oblivion. But the culture
does
survive, and remains among the most truly exhibitionist of all traditions.

Sometimes at fêtes and functions, even today, you may see the pearly kings and queens, the hereditary folk monarchs of the Cockney vegetable-barrow trade, dressed in the curious livery, decked all over in thousands of mother-of-pearl buttons, which is their traditional prerogative. Better still, any Sunday morning, in the vast outdoor market of Petticoat Lane, among the shabby mesh of streets that lies to the north of the Tower, you may watch the Cockney salesmen exuberantly in action. Theirs is an art form straight from the music hall, or vice versa, perhaps; in their timing, in their sly wit, in their instinctive rebound from a failed joke, in their exhilarating air of grasping insouciance, the Cockney hustlers stand directly in the line of the gaslight comedians.

London is a stage! The big red buses of this city, moving with such ponderous geniality through the traffic, are like well-loved character actors. The beefeaters outside the Tower, holding halberds and dressed up like playing cards, are surely extras hired for the day. And most theatrical of all are those London functions which are not merely quaint, or ornamental, but really integral to the status of this capital, close to the political power of it.

I went one day to the installation of a new member in the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Parliament. He was a prominent politician ennobled for his party services, and I was taken to the ceremony by another peer, of more literary distinction. We were late and hurried through the vast, florid halls of the Palace of Westminster, past multitudinous busts and forbidding portraits (‘my great-great-great-grand-father’,
panted Lord J. as we passed William III, ‘illegitimately, of course’,) down interminable carpeted corridors, through chambers enigmatically labelled, between gigantic murals of swains, maidens, liege lords and war horses, until up a winding stone staircase, through a creaking oak door, he shoved me precipitately into the visitors’ gallery.

Inside a dream was in progress. The rest of the peers and peeresses indeed looked mundane enough on their benches below: thick-set party reliables, jowly former ministers, a handful of flinty and talkative women, a bishop with heavy-rimmed spectacles and a resolutely ecumenical expression. But slumped eerily with his back to me, the Lord Chancellor of England sat like a dummy on his woolsack, the big woollen bag which has for 600 years and more sustained the Chancellorian rump. Dark robes blurred the shape of him, a black tricorn hat was perched on top of his judicial wig, and he suggested to me the presiding judge of some sinister hearing, with a hint of that magisterial caterpillar with his hookah, on top of the mushroom in
Alice
.

Just as I entered, the new peer, appearing silently out of nowhere, approached this daunting figure. He was dressed in red and ermine, escorted by two colleagues and preceded by a functionary in black knee breeches holding a silver wand. Spooky things ensued in the silence. The three peers sat down, but almost at once they rose again, in dead silence, and in unison bowed toward the woolsack, simultaneously removing their hats. The Lord High Chancellor removed his in return, adjusting his posture on his sack and bowing slightly, almost frigidly, in their direction. Twice more, without a sound, the ritual was repeated – down, up, hats off, bow, hats on, down – while we in the galleries, perhaps even the other peers and peeresses in their benches below, watched almost aghast, so arcane was the spectacle.