Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [32]
And Doris Lessing, too, for her sense of what came after, bleak and hard and unforgiving. In The Four-Gated City she gave me a sense of a London that I had never met before, not harsh on a grand scale as Dickens’s or Defoe’s London was, or frivolous and class-bound in the fashion of Fielding and Thackeray, but mean and low and second-rate on the inevitable morning after a great cataclysm, a formerly dominant nation that now felt itself slipping into a stature more commensurate with its physical size. Early in the book Martha Quest walks through the Thameside neighborhood hit hard by the war:
About three acres lay flat, bared of building. Almost—it was a half job; the place had neither been cleared, nor left. It was as if some great thumb had come down and rubbed out buildings, carelessly: and then the owner of the thumb had blown away bits of debris and rubble, but carelessly. All the loose rubble had gone, or been piled up against walls, or the fence; but pits of water marked old basements, and sharp bits of walls jutted, and a heap of girders rusted.
From this landscape, surely, and the subsequent years in which the Soviet Union and the United States went on to be superpowers locked in a cold war and 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. “Business as usual,” 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, “But it all sorted itself out. We finished with more of their land than they had, didn’t we now?” 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 president’s badge of the Anti-Gallican Society. The society was founded in 1745 “to oppose the insidious arts of the French nation,” and the brooch is engraved with its motto “For our country” and St. George on a white horse running his spear gleefully through a fleur-de-lis. There were Anti-Gallican teacups and china, too. “It goes back a long way,” 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