Imagined London Read Free

girlhood, before anyone used (and overused) the term “role model,” that distant princess was mine, refusing to be demoted and undervalued because of her gender, determined to be the greatest ruler England had ever known and making a go of it, too. And, of course, there was the resting place of her mother, Anne Boleyn, up the Thames in the grounds of the Tower of London. What a story, that, as entrancing as any fairy tale or fable! Since I was a little girl, I have been able to recite the short history of Henry’s six queens: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.
    If you have spent your days in an armchair with a book, your nights reading yourself to sleep, then London is the central character in so much of what you have read that it is as though it is your imaginary home, a placewhose lineaments are as clear as those of your own living room despite the fact that—at least in my case—you have never set foot in the place. Because of time and circumstances, I did not actually go to London for the first time until that day when I was well into my forties, being put up at the Groucho Club so that I could promote one of my own books in the United Kingdom.
    As I was set down in Soho by that disgruntled cabbie, I was not thinking of it as a neighborhood but as a series of word pictures. “You see it as you wish,” P. D. James once wrote. “An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centers for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe.” That was Adam Dalgliesh on Soho in Unnatural Causes, but there was also the Soho in which Robert and Stella stop for dinner on the way from the train station in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, the Soho about which John Galsworthy had written, in the trilogy about people of property and rigid propriety called The Forsyte Saga, “Of all the quarters in the queer adventurous amalgam called London, Soho is perhaps least suited to the Forsyte spirit. ‘So-ho, my wild one!’ George would have said if he had seen his cousin going there. Untidy, full of Greeks, Ishmaelites, cats, Italians,tomatoes, restaurants, organs, coloured stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, it dwells remote from the British Body Politic.”
    It seemed to me that morning that the area had not changed a bit. That made me very happy.
    Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it through the overarching scrim of every description of it I had read before. When I turn the corner into a small, quiet, leafy square, am I really seeing it fresh, or am I both looking and remembering? Is it possible to stroll through Little Venice without having my perceptions colored by the artists in Margery Allingham’s mystery novel Death of a Ghost, or to visit the Old Bailey without imagining John Mortimer’s Rumpole trotting through its halls on his way from the cells to Pommeroy’s Wine Bar for a glass of plonk? Can I ever shake the ghosts of Clarissa Dalloway and Dr. Johnson?
    This is both the beauty and excitement of London, and its cross to bear, too. There is a tendency for visitors to turn the place into a theme park, the Disney World of social class, innate dignity, crooked streets, and grand houses, with a cavalcade of monarchs as varied and cartoony as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and, at least in the opinion of various British broadsheets, Goofy.
    They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways.
    As the tourists mass outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, also known as Buck House (or is that only what tourists who think they are au courant call it?), it is hard to