VI
London

When I returned from school I found we’d moved:

“53 Church Street. Yes, the slummy end”—

A little laugh accompanied the joke,

For we were Chelsea now and we had friends

Whose friends had friends who knew Augustus John:

We liked bold colour schemes—orange and black—

And clever daring plays about divorce

At the St. Martin’s. Oh, our lives were changed!

Ladies with pearls and hyphenated names

Supplanted simpler aunts from Muswell Hill:

A brand-new car and brand-new chauffeur came

To carry off my father to the Works.

                                   Old Hannah Wallis left:

For years she’d listened to me reading verse;

Tons, if you added them, of buttered toast

Had she and I consumed through all the days

In happy Highgate. Now her dear old face,

Black bonnet, sniffs and comfortable self

Were gone to Tottenham where her daughter lived.

    What is it first breeds insecurity?

Perhaps a change of house? I missed the climb

By garden walls and fences where a stick,

Dragged on the palings, clattered to my steps.

I missed the smell of trodden leaves and grass,

Millfield and Merton Lanes and sheep-worn tracks

Under the hawthorns west of Highgate ponds.

I missed the trams, the few North London trains,

The frequent Underground to Kentish Town.

Here in a district only served by bus,

Here on an urban level by the Thames—

I never really liked the Chelsea house.

“It’s simply sweet, Bess,” visitors exclaimed,

Depositing their wraps and settling down

To a nice rubber. “So artistic, too.”

To me the house was poky, dark and cramped,

Haunted by quarrels and the ground-floor ghost.

I’d slam behind me our green garden door—

Well do I recollect that bounding thrill!—

And hare to Cheyne Gardens—free! free! free!—

By Lawrence Street and Upper Cheyne Row,

Safe to the tall red house of Ronnie Wright.

    Great was my joy with London at my feet—

All London mine, five shillings in my hand

And not expected back till after tea!

Great was our joy, Ronald Hughes Wright’s and mine,

To travel by the Underground all day

Between the rush hours, so that very soon

There was no station, north to Finsbury Park,

To Barking eastwards, Clapham Common south,

No temporary platform in the west

Among the Actons and the Ealings, where

We had not once alighted. Metroland

Beckoned us out to lanes in beechy Bucks—

Goldschmidt and Howland (in a wooden hut

Beside the station): ‘Most attractive sites

Ripe for development’; Charrington’s for coal;

And not far off the neo-Tudor shops.

We knew the different railways by their smells.

The City and South reeked like a changing-room;

Its orange engines and old rolling-stock,

Its narrow platforms, undulating tracks,

Seemed even then historic. Next in age,

The Central London, with its cut-glass shades

On draughty stations, had an ozone smell—

Not seaweed-scented ozone from the sea

But something chemical from Birmingham.

When, in a pause between the stations, quiet

Descended on the carriage we would talk

Loud gibberish in angry argument,

Pretending to be foreign.

                                            Then I found

Second-hand bookshops in the Essex Road,

Stacked high with powdery leather flaked and dry,

Gilt letters on red labels—Mason’s Works

(But volume II is missing), Young’s Night Thoughts,

Falconer’s Shipwreck and The Grave by Blair,

A row of Scott, for certain incomplete,

And always somewhere Barber’s Isle of Wight;

The antiquarian works that no one reads—

Church Bells of Nottingham, Baptismal Fonts

(‘Scarce, 2s. 6d., a few plates slightly foxed’).

Once on a stall in Farringdon Road I found

An atlas folio of great lithographs,

Views of Ionian Isles, flyleaf inscribed

By Edward Lear—and bought it for a bob.

Perhaps one day I’ll find a ‘first’ of Keats,

Wedged between Goldsmith and The Law of Torts;

Perhaps—but that was not the reason why

Untidy bookshops gave me such delight.

It was the smell of books, the plates in them,

Tooled leather, marbled paper, gilded edge,

The armorial book-plate of some country squire,

From whose tall library windows spread his park

On which this polished spine may once have looked,

From whose twin candlesticks may once have shone

Soft beams upon the spacious title-page.

Forgotten poets, parsons with a taste

For picturesque descriptions of a hill

Or ruin in the parish, pleased me much;

But steel engravings pleased me most of all—

Volumes of London views or Liverpool,

Or Edinburgh, ‘The Athens of the North’.

I read the prose descriptions, gazed and gazed

Deep in the plates, and heard again the roll

Of market-carts on cobbles, coach-doors slammed

Outside the posting inn; with couples walked

Toward the pillared entrance of the church

‘Lately erected from designs by Smirke’;

And sauntered in some newly planted square.

Outside the bookshop, treasure in my hands,

I scarcely saw the trams or heard the bus

Or noticed modern London: I was back

With George the Fourth, post-horns, street-cries and bells.

“More books,” my mother sighed as I returned;

My father, handing to me half-a-crown,

Said, “If you must buy books, then buy the best.”

    All silvery on frosty Sunday nights

Were City steeples white against the stars.

And narrowly the chasms wound between

Italianate counting-houses, Roman banks,

To this church and to that. Huge office-doors,

Their granite thresholds worn by weekday feet

(Now far away in slippered ease at Penge),

Stood locked. St. Botolph this, St. Mary that

Alone shone out resplendent in the dark.

I used to stand by intersecting lanes

Among the silent offices, and wait,

Choosing which bell to follow: not a peal,

For that meant somewhere active; not St. Paul’s,

For that was too well-known. I liked things dim—

Some lazy Rector living in Bexhill

Who most unwillingly on Sunday came

To take the statutory services.

A single bell would tinkle down a lane:

My echoing steps would track the source of sound—

A cassocked verger, bell-rope in his hands,

Called me to high box pews, to cedar wood

(Like incense where no incense ever burned),

To ticking gallery-clock, and charity bench,

And free seats for the poor, and altar-piece—

Gilded Commandment boards—and sword-rests made

For long-discarded aldermanic pomp.

A hidden organist sent reedy notes

To flute around the plasterwork. I stood,

And from the sea of pews a single head

With cherries nodding on a black straw hat

Rose in a neighbouring pew. The caretaker?

Or the sole resident parishioner?

And so once more, as for three hundred years,

This carven wood, these grey memorial’d walls

Heard once again the Book of Common Prayer,

While somewhere at the back the verger, now

Turned Parish Clerk, would rumble out “Amen.”

’Twas not, I think, a conscious search for God

That brought me to these dim forgotten fanes.

Largely it was a longing for the past,

With a slight sense of something unfulfilled;

And yet another feeling drew me there,

A sense of guilt increasing with the years—

“When I am dead you will be sorry, John”—

Here I could pray my mother would not die.

Thus were my London Sundays incomplete

If unaccompanied by Evening Prayer.

How trivial used to seem the Underground,

How worldly looked the over-lighted west,

How different and smug and wise I felt

When from the east I made my journey home!