Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [10]
In the park itself is a posted timeline, showing how it too has changed, the land acquired by Henry VIII for hunting in 1536, hangings at Tyburn discontinued in 1783. There is a notice on the board to leave the baby birds alone: “Parent birds rear their young better than you can.” Another asks for public help with information on a recent assault and carries the heading RAPE in red capital letters. A third suggests the number of dogs that can reasonably be handled by a single park-goer (four) but concludes that no hard-and-fast rule will be made “at this time.” Young Londoners seem a bit sick of the stereotypical view of the English: doggy bird-watchers mired in propriety and history. It is just that the stereotype seems to so often conform to observable reality.
It is probably in the London parks that the descriptions contained within its best known novels come most alive; it is also in the parks that a reader realizes that the London frozen in the amber of great fiction is a London quite out-of-date and out of time. The soldiers on horseback in Rotten Row may seem more appropriate than the runners in shorts and singlets simply because, for a reader, the tableau of Hyde Park is indelibly one of a parade of conveyances, barouche and phaeton and curricle. (I have encountered them all dozens of times in period fiction. I still have no idea what they are, much as after all these years of reading the English magazine Tatler I have still not managed to puzzle out who gets to be called an Honorable, and why. Frankly, I don’t much care.) The milky-skinned English roses are outnumbered by Indian families walking with their sloe-eyed children. This is part of the problem with developing an understanding of London simply from reading its great books; too much of it takes place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, too little in the present, on buses and the Underground and in the back of an Austin Mini and in neighborhoods rich with the sounds and smells of India or Jamaica.
Surely there are still Becky Sharps, manipulating their way into an advantageous marriage and a lucrative lifestyle; the British magazines are full of them, in towering heels and dwindling skirts. But seeing Hyde Park through the eyes of a Forsyte is as ridiculous as seeing Greenwich Village through the eyes of Henry James. The modern, the ever changing, insists on tapping you on the shoulder or, occasionally, slapping you in the face. In the Princes Gardens block where the Roger Forsytes once set up housekeeping, there are indeed the expected elegant white houses with small pillared porticos. But at the corner is the half-sunken modern block that is the sports center of the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, “pilates classes, inquire within.” And, across the square, a kind of Soviet gray structure sits as the antidote to the slender lightness of the older houses; it must be a dormitory, for only college students use flags as curtains. The students fly across the square on bicycles and the occasional skateboard or pair of Rollerblades; if Soames Forsyte was appalled at his daughter’s necklines, he should see the young women with pierced navels moving hither and yon.
In fact, he was appalled long before the twentieth century had given over to the twenty-first: “A democratic England,” he concludes bitterly by the end of the saga. “Disheveled, hurried, noisy and seemingly without an apex…. Gone forever, the close borough of rank and polish.” Every British generation has complained that its successor has transgressed the old standards. One of London’s best known poems is a version of the kind of not-what-it-used-to-be