London - Edward Rutherfurd [592]
“So the much vaunted Anglo-Saxon race . . .?”
“Is a myth. The northern half of Britain is more Danish and Celtic; and even in the south,” he shrugged, “I doubt very much whether our Anglo-Saxon ancestry would make up one part in four. We are, quite simply, a nation of European immigrants with new graftings being added all the time. A genetic river, if you like, fed by any number of streams.” The museum had produced a book on the subject. He kept it in the drawing room for guests to see.
“So how would you define a Londoner, then?” Lady Penny asked curiously.
“Someone who lives here. It’s like the old definition of a cockney: someone who’s born within hearing distance of Bow bells. And a foreigner,” he added with a grin, “is anyone, Anglo-Saxon or not, who lives outside.”
Now that he thought of it he had seen the process in the huge offices of the Penny Insurance Company. In the decades after the Second World War, there had been massive immigration from the Caribbean and from the Indian subcontinent into London. In a few places – Notting Hill Gate above Kensington, and Brixton, south of the river – there had been friction and even riots. Yet recently as he toured the office and found himself talking to the young generation in their twenties, he had realized that they all – black, white, Asian – not only talked with the local accents of London, but had taken on the same sports, the same attitudes, even the same irreverent cockney humour as the London folk he had known as a child. “They’re all Londoners,” he concluded.
It was quiet in the trench. Sarah Bull glanced at her co-workers and smiled to herself. She had been on many digs before, but she had particularly wanted to join this one because it was being conducted by Dr John Dogget.
Dr John Dogget was a Londoner through and through. “My grandfather was a fireman in the Blitz,” he had confessed to her once. He was also a curator of the Museum of London where she had recently come to work.
Sarah loved the museum. Perched up on a big pedestrian area a few minutes’ walk from St Paul’s, its windows looked out on a large, handsome fragment of the old Roman wall of London. It was a growing tourist attraction and the parties of schoolchildren who were brought there seemed to love the place. The whole museum was arranged as a walk through history, from prehistoric times to the present day. The curators had created whole scenes, accompanied by the appropriate sights and sounds, into which the visitor walked: a prehistoric camp, a seventeenth-century room, a whole eighteenth-century street, Victorian shops – even a model of old London which lit up as you heard extracts from Pepys’ diary of the Great Fire. Accompanying each exhibit were articles from the time, from flint arrowheads to a real, fully stocked costermonger’s barrow.
Behind it all, Sarah knew, lay hard scholarship. As an archaeology graduate, this was what had attracted her to the place. There were new finds, often huge discoveries, being made all the time: the little Temple of Mithras and then, only a few years ago, the discovery that the old Guildhall was actually standing on the site of a huge Roman amphitheatre. Roman roads and medieval buildings were regularly being uncovered. A charming recent find just by the old