spoke while lesser folk listened.
In fact, my relatively humble position on the news desk left me free to pursue my real interests, solving the riddle life had given me. This necessitated studies that were complex, involved, possibly arcane. Not merely the prevalence of alchemy amongst the Elizabethans, but the nature of Giordano Bruno’s mission to England and the possibility of a Shakespeare cryptogram. (I’d like to point something out here: I have no natural inclination towards the mystical. In fact, I’ve always steered well clear of the hullabaloo at midnight every solstice. Most Roman Catholics probably agree with Cardinal Newman about mysticism, that the phenomenon, like the word, invariably starts in mist and ends in schism. I wanted precise answers to precise questions, but between each question and answer lay centuries of darkness. The light really has been a long time arriving.)
So I had simply taken my old tutor’s advice and decided to dedicate my life to pursuing the School of Night. I knew in some way that I was uniquely suited to the task, and London is a good place to study such things since in its streets you can still trace the topography of those times. The School of Night now had me enrolled. But in the grandiloquent building at the bottom of Kingsway what I was actually paid to do was merely reduce to digestible form the mighty transactions of human misery going on at any one moment; to provide a chronicle and abstract of the time. I made my précis of the groaning of creation out there, becoming very adept at it. I was complimented. From time to time I even complimented myself.
I also made a curious discovery: when I was on the late shift my migraines were greatly reduced and sometimes I didn’t have any at all. So the streets of London by night became my world. Unlike most of my colleagues at the BBC’s World Service, who worked nights unwillingly and intermittently, I started to do it all the time, by special arrangement. It paid more and my migraines were lessened, but those were only two of the reasons; there were others, perhaps as many as there were streets to walk. Making my urban pilgrimage from dusk to dawn, I often counted them.
I read once, in the work of one of those nineteenth-century writers who spent a lifetime meditating on metropolis, that all cities become one uninterrupted conurbation under cover of darkness. This I know to be untrue because as I made my forays and excursions, stepping through London’s nocturnal murk, the labyrinthine maze threading about Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Strand, I found myself thinking so often of somewhere else. Somewhere else and someone else. Unlike the people whose shifts I proxied, I didn’t feel I had too much left to hold me to daylight. Night had come to provide the perfect cover beneath which the mesh of my thought occasionally netted its prey.
It takes twenty-six minutes if you walk hard. That is to get from Durham House Street to the Tower; from the site where Walter Ralegh’s elegant home once stood to the place of imprisonment where so much of his life was spent. En route you pass the spot where Essex House issued its perilous invitations, its owner another grandee destined for the Tower and the block. And then there are the wharves and churches, the tiny alleys leading to the river or dying suddenly amongst the precincts of the latest office block, hygienic fortresses of glass and polished granite behind which lurks the riddling sphinx called finance. I even walked once right through the underpass, as a few early-morning lorries honked and blared at me in incredulity, so I could fathom the monoxide thunder down there, the underground roar of London’s myriad-headed beast. And I have stood on hundreds of occasions in varying degrees of shadow and light at the edge of the Pool of London, listening for the whispering cargoes arriving and departing in their stately clippers. Elephant ivories. Bananas. Then up the hill and down
In fact, my relatively humble position on the news desk left me free to pursue my real interests, solving the riddle life had given me. This necessitated studies that were complex, involved, possibly arcane. Not merely the prevalence of alchemy amongst the Elizabethans, but the nature of Giordano Bruno’s mission to England and the possibility of a Shakespeare cryptogram. (I’d like to point something out here: I have no natural inclination towards the mystical. In fact, I’ve always steered well clear of the hullabaloo at midnight every solstice. Most Roman Catholics probably agree with Cardinal Newman about mysticism, that the phenomenon, like the word, invariably starts in mist and ends in schism. I wanted precise answers to precise questions, but between each question and answer lay centuries of darkness. The light really has been a long time arriving.)
So I had simply taken my old tutor’s advice and decided to dedicate my life to pursuing the School of Night. I knew in some way that I was uniquely suited to the task, and London is a good place to study such things since in its streets you can still trace the topography of those times. The School of Night now had me enrolled. But in the grandiloquent building at the bottom of Kingsway what I was actually paid to do was merely reduce to digestible form the mighty transactions of human misery going on at any one moment; to provide a chronicle and abstract of the time. I made my précis of the groaning of creation out there, becoming very adept at it. I was complimented. From time to time I even complimented myself.
I also made a curious discovery: when I was on the late shift my migraines were greatly reduced and sometimes I didn’t have any at all. So the streets of London by night became my world. Unlike most of my colleagues at the BBC’s World Service, who worked nights unwillingly and intermittently, I started to do it all the time, by special arrangement. It paid more and my migraines were lessened, but those were only two of the reasons; there were others, perhaps as many as there were streets to walk. Making my urban pilgrimage from dusk to dawn, I often counted them.
I read once, in the work of one of those nineteenth-century writers who spent a lifetime meditating on metropolis, that all cities become one uninterrupted conurbation under cover of darkness. This I know to be untrue because as I made my forays and excursions, stepping through London’s nocturnal murk, the labyrinthine maze threading about Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Strand, I found myself thinking so often of somewhere else. Somewhere else and someone else. Unlike the people whose shifts I proxied, I didn’t feel I had too much left to hold me to daylight. Night had come to provide the perfect cover beneath which the mesh of my thought occasionally netted its prey.
It takes twenty-six minutes if you walk hard. That is to get from Durham House Street to the Tower; from the site where Walter Ralegh’s elegant home once stood to the place of imprisonment where so much of his life was spent. En route you pass the spot where Essex House issued its perilous invitations, its owner another grandee destined for the Tower and the block. And then there are the wharves and churches, the tiny alleys leading to the river or dying suddenly amongst the precincts of the latest office block, hygienic fortresses of glass and polished granite behind which lurks the riddling sphinx called finance. I even walked once right through the underpass, as a few early-morning lorries honked and blared at me in incredulity, so I could fathom the monoxide thunder down there, the underground roar of London’s myriad-headed beast. And I have stood on hundreds of occasions in varying degrees of shadow and light at the edge of the Pool of London, listening for the whispering cargoes arriving and departing in their stately clippers. Elephant ivories. Bananas. Then up the hill and down
Similar Books
