Imagined London - Anna Quindlen [33]
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 Notting Hill to St. James’s 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
Perhaps 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 a great novel with a young girl at its center, and the happiest of endings for some of us who were beginning to feel the talons of worldly ambitions clawing at our midsections, later summed up in the pop feminist slogan: I am my own prince. Although, in Elizabeth’s case, it might more properly have been: I am my own queen. And that of most of the known world.
But like so many of the most compelling English novels, the story of Elizabeth threw out tendrils that led to other engrossing tales. As Trollope’s novels of Parliamentarian intrigue led one to the other, with characters entering and departing the dance and some, like Plantagenet Palliser and his wife, the spirited Lady Glencora, appearing as perennials, growing older, wiser, or perhaps only cannier, so Elizabeth’s story led backward and forward to others. The young Henry, loving his brother’s widow, then casting her off for someone younger and wilder. The younger, wilder Anne Boleyn, holding the King at arm’s length, then succumbing, finally disappearing into the Tower, telling the executioner, according to legend, that he needn’t worry, that she had a little neck. And Elizabeth’s siblings, the unhappy and pious Lady Mary and the sickly and short-lived Edward. Later there would be the fops and intrigues of the Restoration, and the offspring of Victoria, populating the palaces of the world. These were sagas, too, but none of them could hold a candle to that of the Tudors and the redheaded goddess at the center of their story.
And that was despite the fact that, for young people’s consumption, these histories of the time glossed over the more provocative, uglier facts. None of the stories of the young Elizabeth checked out from my Catholic school library were explicit about her parent’s marriage, driven by lust, or their schism, in which Anne was accused of having sex with, among others, her own brother. None told of how Elizabeth’s last stepmother married a nobleman who may have molested the girl, or of how she dangled her virginity in front of every reigning monarch in Europe to keep the region in a state of dizzy disequilibrium. In all those books Elizabeth was described as she liked to describe herself, the Virgin Queen, but to a child raised on the Virgin