Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [31]
London was different up to 1940. From the illustrated books, it often seems tranquil and quaint, full of lost churchyards and hidden courts. There were always places where the traffic noise dropped away and you could enjoy a bit of peace. That was before the firestorms blasted the East End into blazing fragments of people and buildings, when so much of that quaint tranquillity became heaps of rubble, tottering walls, fire-blasted windows, cutaways of people’s private lives: their bathrooms and bedrooms, everything they’d valued, exposed to the hasty curiosity of the survivors.
By 1945, the bodies and the worst of the rubble had been cleared away, and I see from those pathetic scraps of newsreels and pictures from the illustrated magazines the London I really loved and grew up in. Until then it had been a malleable London in which you could leave home in the morning and find your street completely transformed by the evening; where the house next door could become a pile of junk or your best friend could disappear forever. After the war finished, we knew what in some ways was a more innocent London. We hadn’t quite taken in the Nazi Holocaust, let alone the A-bomb. We were a bit bewildered by how, having won, we were somehow poorer than when we were losing. The London in which Orwell wrote 1984 was my first peacetime London.
I wouldn’t much want to live through that period again. Most of those films I give so much attention to were terrible, about keeping a stiff upper lip and knowing your place while facing down the Chaos. We kept replaying that trauma for years. What had gone wrong?
Our general entertainment was mostly dreadful and, like our styles, shrunken cheap imitations of what boom-time America was offering. The decade represents a world which has no representation in the physical world around me, for my ruins have vanished and the unfamiliar, often beautiful buildings erected in their place offer few coordinates from which to calibrate my memories.
By the time I had my first job as a messenger for a shipping company in the City, I could take a bus or a train down to the docks and then walk for miles looking for the appropriate ship or customs office, past grey cranes, redbrick warehouses, endless rust-grimed ships. I never had any idea of where docklands ended. Apart from the offices of great shipping lines, banks and insurance companies, the City was still an area of small businesses. There were scrapyards, independent stationers, booksellers, printers, chop houses, eel and pie shops, tea shops: a London whose variety and complexity you didn’t have to guess at.
Then there were the places where London was simplynot—a few irregular mounds of grass and weeds with rusted wire sticking through concrete, like broken bones, exposed nerves. This part of London could very easily be identified because almost nothing of it had survived except the larger seventeenth-and eighteenth-century buildings like Tower Hill, the Customs House, the Mint, the Monument. And of course St. Paul’s, her dome visible from the river as you came up out of the delicious stink of fresh fish from Billingsgate Market, a snap of cold in the bright morning, and walked between high banks of overgrown debris along lanes trodden to the contour of the land. We had made those paths by choosing the simplest routes through the ruins. Grass and moss and blazing purple fireweed grew in every chink. Sun glinted on Portland Stone, and to the west, foggy sunsets turned the river crimson. You never got lost. The surviving buildings