London - Edward Rutherfurd [591]
Until recently, though acts of conspicuous gallantry in the military could be rewarded by the famous Victoria Cross, there had been no equivalent honour for civilian gallantry. This had now been remedied by the institution of the George Cross and the George Medal.
If there had ever been any doubt about the gallantry of the members of the Auxiliary Fire Service during the Blitz, that doubt was utterly vanquished when a number of fire-fighters won the George Cross. One of them, on the personal recommendation of Admiral Barnikel himself, was Charlie Dogget.
For Charlie it was rather an embarrassment. Though, as any of his colleagues could have attested, he’d earned a medal many times, he knew he hadn’t deserved this one. But what could he say? Even Silversleeves, who remembered nothing at all of the moments before the explosion, had insisted upon visiting him and thanking him personally. He also had a letter from his Auntie Jenny when she saw it in the papers.
He had visited the place once, out of curiosity, but there was no sign of any gold. He kept the Roman coins he had, though, in a little box, and later gave them to his son.
THE RIVER
1997
Sir Eugene Penny, chairman of the mighty Penny Insurance Company, member of a dozen boards and alderman of London, was feeling rather virtuous. Few possessions had been more treasured in his family than the collection of river landscapes, a number by Monet, that his father had bought just after the Second World War from the estate of the last Lord St James. And today he had just given the whole lot away.
The trouble with going on to the boards of charities and good causes, he thought wryly, was that sooner or later you always started putting your own money into them. As a trustee of the Tate Gallery it was impossible not to be excited by its plans, both for the original museum of modern art in its lovely classical building by the river and for the vast new gallery they planned to open in the old Bankside Power Station on the south side of the river, just near the reconstructed Globe Theatre. When a fellow trustee had hinted that really, those Monets of his ought to be seen by a wider audience he had felt bound to agree. After signing them over that morning, he had paid a visit to the nearby Chelsea Flower Show, followed by lunch at his club and a visit to Tom Brown, his tailor. He was in an excellent mood, therefore, when he turned up for his visit to the site by the river this afternoon.
In recent years he had become interested in the Museum of London. His interest had first been sparked by an exhibition the museum had mounted on the Huguenots. As a Huguenot himself, Penny had always known a fair amount about the French community, which still had its own association and charities. He had even known that three out of four Britons had some Huguenot ancestry. But the exhibition had been a revelation. Silk-weavers and generals, artists, clock-makers, famous jewellers like the Agnews, firms like his own – the exhibits, as well as showing off some wonderful arts and crafts, had revealed the Huguenot origins of any number of concerns that one thought of as quintessentially British. The thing had been so well done that he had begun to take more notice of the museum, and a little later, secretly hoping to find more evidence of Huguenot genius, he had gone to another show they had put on.
“The Peopling of London” had been very well done; but it had also been a surprise.
“I thought I knew something about my British heritage,” he remarked to his wife. “It turns out I didn’t at all.” In his schooldays the history of England at least – if not of the whole of Britain – had been about the Anglo-Saxon race. “We knew about the Celts, of course. And then there were the Danes and a few Norman knights.” But the exhibits on the peopling of London told a completely different story. Angles, Saxons, Danes, Celtic folk: they had all been