A Writer's World (31 page)

This was not a charade. This was a contemporary political occasion, London style. As soon as it ended I hastened out of the gallery and down the steps in time to bump into Lord J. emerging from the chamber below. ‘Good gracious me,’ I could not help saying, ‘however long have they been doing that?’ ‘I believe it began,’ he replied quite seriously, ‘with the Druids.’

Whether London is a success just at the moment or a failure, a rich city or a poor one, nobody quite knows. It is, surprisingly, a very volatile capital: the US ambassador recently diagnosed it as manic-depressive, on top of the world one day, all despondency the next. Sometimes the kingdom, of
which it is not just the heart, but the mind, lung and belly too, is represented to us as almost bankrupt. At other times it stands on the brink of incalculable wealth, revivified by the promise of oil from the North Sea. One month its accounts are disastrously in debit, the next month it has an enormous surplus. The vaults of London burst with money, the gold reserves in the Bank of England are higher than ever, but much of it is foreign wealth, deposited there for security and quick returns, and easily withdrawable.

All this is nothing new. Despite its reputation for stability, calm and balance, London has always lived precariously. Dickens’s Mr Micawber, always confident that something would turn up, was a true son of this city. It is essentially a market for invisible commodities, services performed, expertise. Insuring, banking, auctioneering, valuing, analysing – these are the archetypal functions of the place. They are fluid functions, hard to assess, and they are fragile too, since they depend upon the state of the world; so the prosperity of London is never certain, even in euphoric periods, but seems to fluctuate, apparently dependent upon the weather, the news or the mood of Europe that day.

It is a neo-socialist city, its economy a mixture of state and free enterprise, and the one constant in its progress since the war has been the decline of the bourgeoisie, which in previous generations was its bulwark. This process is apparent always. Walk into a Whitehall pub, say, any sunny lunchtime, and you may observe it for yourself. Outside the door, the tide of the city flows busily by – the rumbling buses, the shirt-sleeved tourists reading to each other from guidebooks – but inside the early drinkers are slumped heavily over their beers. They are businessmen and bureaucrats, senior enough to be able to slip out around twelve, sufficiently successful to have a club round the corner in Pall Mall. They are all men, all middle-aged, and would be instantly recognizable as English wherever they went in the world.

An aggrieved or embattled air attends them in the shadowy recesses of the front bar, as though they have retreated into this dim enclave off the streets to be among their own kind, to lick their wounds, perhaps. They do not talk much, but when they do it is generally to complain: about the state of the country, the beer, the young, the weather. Up the road their wives, in a break from shopping, are having their cups of coffee (or more exactly, the price of coffee being what it is, their cups of chicory extract). History has hit them harder still. Time was when a trip into town for a morning shopping was a treat; they wore their best hats and coats and took a friend
along. Now, all too often, they sit alone, and their clothes have lost their colour. Their faces, though kind, look strained. They wear head scarves and solid shoes, and each year they seem to lose a little of their class identity, and it becomes harder to tell whether the lady opposite you is married to a factory hand or a schoolmaster.

Yet in those streets outside, there are signs of opulence wherever you look. Rolls-Royces are two a penny. Your cab-driver tells you about the holiday he is planning in Tunisia, the record shops are jammed with the free-spending young, up-and-coming executives in BMWs invariably beat you to the parking space. In the upper-crust restaurants the comfortable conventions of old London are sustained by the magic of the expense account, and businessmen who scarcely know a tithe from a ptarmigan are treated with all the homely respect once reserved for the landed gentry. ‘Certainly, my lady’ is a stagey phrase that still drops easily from the lips of London lackeys, and if the English rich have been driven from their traditional haunts in Mayfair and Knightsbridge, they are still as snug as ever, with their nannies, their Filipino cooks and their Swedish
au
pair
girls, in the villas of St John’s Wood or Little Venice.

All these contrasts and anomalies help to give London its febrile air. Between performances! Stripped of its enormous empire, neither quite part of Europe nor altogether insular, socialist but capitalist too, hankering for its glory days, clinging to its ritual loyalties, London feels unsettled, unfulfilled, as though unsure which role to accept next. Is the old trouper ‘resting’, reading scripts, past it or about to launch another smash hit? Nobody is sure. Radical decisions are always in the air but never quite happen. There is always an election pending, a strike threatened, a settlement in sight, a ring road about to be built, a demolition started.

Some of it is certainly loss of confidence. The thirty years since the Second World War have been rotten years for London. Rich or poor, this city is no longer the greatest capital of the world, as it could still claim to be before the war, just as the pound sterling is no longer the world’s criterion of security. The consequence and authority of London, which are expressed in so many memorials and institutions, so many horseback statues, is a dream now. Even the Scots and the Welsh challenge the primacy of this capital today, and a city that once decreed the destinies of a quarter of the earth is reduced to the somewhat testy direction of 50 million souls. The political style is accordingly rather wilted. Nowadays when prime ministers emerge from their celebrated threshold, 10 Downing Street, with attendant policemen like caryatids beside the door, they do so almost
apologetically, or scuttle away into their waiting limousines as though they have just discovered their flies undone.

After dinner with friends one night, we wandered round the market area of Covent Garden, now in the first pangs of rebirth, the vegetable stalls and fruit wagons having migrated south of the river. In London the removal of an old and beloved landmark is an especially traumatic experience, and the gap left by that most celebrated of markets, where opera rubbed shoulders so romantically with cabbages, and Eliza Doolittle was originally picked up by Professor Higgins, is now being tentatively filled in – to me a disturbing phenomenon, like a numbed corner of the brain. We found a whimsical pottery shop, a very smart books store and the Rock Garden Café, through whose seventeenth-century arcade eponymous music thumped loudly through the night, suggesting to me less a corner of old London than a bit of some resuscitated ghost town living only by the summer trade.

The Opera House was being cleaned, and shone phosphorescent through its scaffolding, and to complete my sensation of dislocation, alienation perhaps, a solitary laser beam hung flickerless over London like a single wire of an imprisoning mesh. Didn’t they feel it too? I asked my friends. Didn’t they sense, in the condition of their city that night, symptoms of disintegration? It was like someone who had suffered a breakdown, I said, whose personality is split, splintered or possibly in abeyance.

‘It’s that damned laser beam,’ my host replied. ‘It’s enough to give anyone the creeps.’

Once the robustly English capital of the English kingdom, among the most homogeneous of the great cities of the earth, London is now one of the most international of capitals. It is not international in a generous way, opening its arms to the hungry yearning to breathe free, but only under protest. Evelyn Waugh anathematized modern London as a ‘vulgar cosmopolitan city’; the alienation of London is not just an after-dinner fancy, but a sociological fact.

In the winter it may not particularly strike you. The West Indian and Pakistani bus conductors, the black inspectors on the Underground, have become so thoroughly Londonized by now that they seem an organic part of the scene, as indigenous as the buses themselves. It is no longer a surprise to be greeted with a cheery Cockney ‘hullo, ducks’ by a jet-black functionary
from Barbados, and London Airport would not be its familiar self without the melancholy commiserations of the Indian ladies sweeping up the sandwich crumbs, or sometimes the sandwiches, from the coffee-bar floors.

But in the summer things feel very different. Then Londoners write letters to the editor of
The
Times
, wryly complaining that they can’t find another Englishman to talk to. Then, even to the most liberal mind, the foreigners seem to infest London like so many insects, and Waugh’s definition becomes uncomfortably true. Across the ancient face of the city the strangers are inescapable, wherever a deal is to be struck, an old church inspected, a work permit obtained, a ceremony to be observed, a property acquired or (as Londoners would murmur) a queue to be jumped. On every double yellow line, it seems, a diplomatic car is imperviously parked. In every Marks and Spencer store, relays of Frenchwomen hold sweaters against each other’s busts for size. Round the edges of Petticoat Lane aged oriental ladies sit in the backs of big black cars, watching the passing crowds as through
mashrabiya
windows, while their servants foray among the stalls for bargains.

All around Eros in Piccadilly Circus, the scruffy young of a dozen nationalities squat upon the statue’s pedestal – its fountain spilling incontinently about their feet – or lie flat on the ground sustained by rucksacks, while a few yards away the visiting bourgeoisie wait in interminable lines for the open-topped tourist buses. Then the beefeaters stand like island bastions against the polyglot sea of sightseers, and the foreign bankers return purposefully to their offices from the steakhouses, carrying black fibre briefcases with combination locks and talking to each other in unknown tongues.

This is not just the usual internationalism, common to all great capitals and essential, of course, to immigrant cities like New York. This is something more. This has to it a strong feeling of takeover or possession, which is why, for the first time in many years, the average Londoner is showing symptoms of xenophobia. London used to be the most self-sufficient, the most proudly separate of all capital cities: as the celebrated London
Times
headline is supposed to have said, VIOLENT STORM IN THE ENGLISH CHANNEL; CONTINENT ISOLATED. Now the alien worms have turned, and at this particular juncture in its history. London depends upon foreigners more than ever to keep it solvent. It depends upon the pundits of the International Monetary Fund, upon the bankers of the European central banks, upon the tourist trade, and not least upon the
Arabs, yesterday’s wogs or Ayrabs, who now provide incalculable funds for the London money market and have actually bought large slabs of the capital itself. London is momentarily in fee to the Arabs, and there are parts of the city that the Arabs actually seem to have colonized, thus turning the wheel of empire full cycle. In particular, Knightsbridge, that plush network of streets that lies between Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park Corner, has become a little Arabia. From Knightsbridge, the tracks of the London Beduin criss-cross the capital, linking the merchant banks of the City, the Oxford Street stores, the shoemakers of St James’s, the shirt-makers of Jermyn Street and the antique dealers of Bond Street, with their lairs, pads and harems around Harrods department store.

Sardonic Londoners claim it is easy to differentiate them. The Jordanians and the Palestinians, they say, are the charmers. Only the Saudis maintain the authentic plutocratic sneer in all circumstances. To most citizens, though, they seem a kind of dour unity, as Europeans once appeared to them, from the black-veiled ladies silent in the dentist’s waiting room to the plump small boys in expensive grey flannel ogling the shop-girls at Selfridges, or for that matter, the princelings, perfectly at ease in their beautiful tweeds, who offer, from time to time, slinky half-smiles in hotel lobbies.

By the standards of contemporary London many of these foreigners are unimaginably rich, and many indeed seem to have no sense of money at all. They spend without thinking, without trying. And if this tide of alien opulence rankles Londoners, it also corrupts them. It breeds envy and resentment and brings out the lickspittles. The sycophancy directed by Londoners to English lords and knighted actors is now extended to Japanese industrialists and illiterate sheiks. Fawning and visibly fattened are the chauffeurs, sons of the stalwart Cockneys, seen handing white-gowned tribesmen from their Mercedes; bland are the faces of the bellboys as they accept from yet another impassive client a gratuity beyond the remotest bounds of equity.

London is in flux more than usual just now, and out of the uncertainty ugly things are sprouting. The slums have almost vanished, but they have been replaced by ill-constructed tower blocks, where the lifts are all too often out of order, the walls are habitually covered with obscene graffiti, and every apartment seems fortified against the rest. This is a state of affairs common in other cities, but new to London: and in these dislocated communities, where nobody need be destitute but nobody seems content,
violence and prejudice fester. For the first time in London’s history there are sizeable segments of the city where foreign-born citizens are in a majority – and not just foreign-born, but actually black or brown, a different category of alien to the intensely race-conscious English. Racial bigotry thrives and indeed seems to fulfil some sort of psychological need; it is different in kind, I think, from the American variety and often seems not exactly a social attitude, even less a political conviction, but rather a category of sport.

I was walking with a friend one Saturday down Lewisham Way, a blighted thoroughfare south of the river, when we felt in the air some hint or tremor of trouble. The street indeed seemed built for trouble. As far as we could see it was lined with nothing in particular: apparently makeshift blocks of shops and offices, car parks that were mere extensions of ancient bomb sites, isolated terraces of Victorian houses left high and dry by social history, and occupied now by multitudinous tenants. Sure enough, that afternoon trouble approached. Far in the distance we descried a Union Jack, held high, crooked and bobbing, and we faintly heard above the Saturday traffic strains of that grand patriotic anthem, ‘Rule Britannia’.