England to look on as their wise, slightly doddery uncle, arose that assurance my friend once gave to me that the great days of the U.K. were over and position and privilege now lay inevitably across the Atlantic.
The British people, especially those younger members who were born after the bombs had fallen, even after the vacant lots were cleared and rebuilt, surely must tire of hearing about the indomitability of their fathers and mothers in the face of that devastation. But its sheer indomitability is one of the great appeals of London in a sky-is-falling culture. âBusiness as usual,â Churchill said during the war, and business as usual might be the British motto, even today.
Doris Lessing in 1981
Certainly there is none of this air of rediscovering the wheel of history that prevails among Americans. At the height of the controversy about invading Iraq and the animosity that ensued between the United States and England and the French, a limo driver waxed poetic and specific about 1,200 years of French perfidy. Then he concluded with a nod, âBut it all sorted itself out. Wefinished with more of their land than they had, didnât we now?â It was difficult not to think of one of the prettiest pieces in the British Museum show, an enormous brooch of gold, silver, enamel, and rock crystal, the presidentâs badge of the Anti-Gallican Society. The society was founded in 1745 âto oppose the insidious arts of the French nation,â and the brooch is engraved with its motto âFor our countryâ and St. George on a white horse running his spear gleefully through a fleur-de-lis. There were Anti-Gallican teacups and china, too. âIt goes back a long way,â said the driver with a nod.
And yet the English have learned to adapt, if not to forgive and forget. Just opposite Fortnum and Mason, the enormous food emporium so beloved of Anglophiles, there is now a Japanese confectionery with sweets made of rice and bean paste, as beautiful as flowers nestled in their tiny wicker baskets. The notice board for the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace is in French as well as English, but also in German and in Japanese, despite the damage to the selfsame palace inflicted during the war.
Little of central London betrays any signs of that damage. Only the eldest residents can see retrospectively, the street as it appears today and as it once was, before the bombs. Rebirth is the theme instead. The scaffolds that mask the elegant facades from NottingHill to St. Jamesâs Palace speak of an era of indulgent rebuilding, not the reconstruction of deprivation and necessity but the adding of noise-resistant windows, new baths and kitchens. Strolling through those neighborhoods with our guidebooks, we tend to be a bit contemptuous of the new high-rise with no more character or ornament than a canvas awning to the street provides. We can forgive American cities their banal architecture (except, perhaps, for Houston); but not London. Not with all the beauty that surrounds us.
But what the guidebooks cannot tell is how the newer buildings rose there. In New York we know that, in almost every case, some benighted group or individual decided to trade in, say, the glorious neoclassic Penn Station for a hideous modern thing that appears to be the bastard child of a factory and a public school auditorium. But in London much of the modern rises on the bones of the antique because the antique was blown away in the Blitz. It is one of those moments when what has vanished teaches more than what remains.
CHAPTER TWELVE
P erhaps it was only the offerings in our school library, but there seemed to me as a girl to be a disproportionate number of stories, skewed specifically to the preteen set, about Elizabeth I. This was fine with me. At a threshold level the appeal was obvious: a pampered child, an adolescent outcast, an accident of birth, an accident of death, and then, greatness. It had all the elements of
The British people, especially those younger members who were born after the bombs had fallen, even after the vacant lots were cleared and rebuilt, surely must tire of hearing about the indomitability of their fathers and mothers in the face of that devastation. But its sheer indomitability is one of the great appeals of London in a sky-is-falling culture. âBusiness as usual,â Churchill said during the war, and business as usual might be the British motto, even today.
Doris Lessing in 1981
Certainly there is none of this air of rediscovering the wheel of history that prevails among Americans. At the height of the controversy about invading Iraq and the animosity that ensued between the United States and England and the French, a limo driver waxed poetic and specific about 1,200 years of French perfidy. Then he concluded with a nod, âBut it all sorted itself out. Wefinished with more of their land than they had, didnât we now?â It was difficult not to think of one of the prettiest pieces in the British Museum show, an enormous brooch of gold, silver, enamel, and rock crystal, the presidentâs badge of the Anti-Gallican Society. The society was founded in 1745 âto oppose the insidious arts of the French nation,â and the brooch is engraved with its motto âFor our countryâ and St. George on a white horse running his spear gleefully through a fleur-de-lis. There were Anti-Gallican teacups and china, too. âIt goes back a long way,â said the driver with a nod.
And yet the English have learned to adapt, if not to forgive and forget. Just opposite Fortnum and Mason, the enormous food emporium so beloved of Anglophiles, there is now a Japanese confectionery with sweets made of rice and bean paste, as beautiful as flowers nestled in their tiny wicker baskets. The notice board for the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace is in French as well as English, but also in German and in Japanese, despite the damage to the selfsame palace inflicted during the war.
Little of central London betrays any signs of that damage. Only the eldest residents can see retrospectively, the street as it appears today and as it once was, before the bombs. Rebirth is the theme instead. The scaffolds that mask the elegant facades from NottingHill to St. Jamesâs Palace speak of an era of indulgent rebuilding, not the reconstruction of deprivation and necessity but the adding of noise-resistant windows, new baths and kitchens. Strolling through those neighborhoods with our guidebooks, we tend to be a bit contemptuous of the new high-rise with no more character or ornament than a canvas awning to the street provides. We can forgive American cities their banal architecture (except, perhaps, for Houston); but not London. Not with all the beauty that surrounds us.
But what the guidebooks cannot tell is how the newer buildings rose there. In New York we know that, in almost every case, some benighted group or individual decided to trade in, say, the glorious neoclassic Penn Station for a hideous modern thing that appears to be the bastard child of a factory and a public school auditorium. But in London much of the modern rises on the bones of the antique because the antique was blown away in the Blitz. It is one of those moments when what has vanished teaches more than what remains.
CHAPTER TWELVE
P erhaps it was only the offerings in our school library, but there seemed to me as a girl to be a disproportionate number of stories, skewed specifically to the preteen set, about Elizabeth I. This was fine with me. At a threshold level the appeal was obvious: a pampered child, an adolescent outcast, an accident of birth, an accident of death, and then, greatness. It had all the elements of
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