Impressions Of London
By J. L. Richesson

It is called Mount Street Gardens.  On this September day it is warm and humid.  I am sitting on a bench in the shade.  At the west end of the gardens is Grosvenor Chapel and the Mayfair Library.  At the east end is Immaculate Conception Church.  The St. George Hanover Square School borders on the south.  On its roof is a weather vane, its points stopped on an east-west axis.  School is out for the day; it is nearly four.  Released, a boy and girl run past me laughing.  Propped against the library building are stone grave markers.  These gardens were once a cemetery.

In Belgravia it is a busy, warm, late summer evening.  A car drives by with music blaring,  “Louie, Louie.”  Suddenly, I’m on Alki Beach, summer of1963, instead of walking down Cambridge Street in front of rows of Georgian flats.  As I pass each, the bottom flat windows reveal women at their kitchen sinks, each in the same place.  Women preparing meals at Number 18, 20, 22, 24, 26.  I walk along and see them as if on an assembly line.

Walking past Buckingham Palace, I notice four police lined near the north gate on motorbikes.  “Someone’s coming or leaving,” I think.  A small crowd had gathered.  Just wait a moment.  Not long.  Soon, whisking past faster than I could focus, the four police on motorbikes lead a dark green station wagon, with someone—a blur—in the back seat, out and away.  I see red hair.  The crows yells, “Fergie!” and the car speeds away.

Near and in Victoria train station the air has a distinct aroma of travel:  heat, exhaust, dust, an untold number of criss-crossing, hurrying bodies.  Small eddies of air catching these smells swirl past your nose.

There are parts of London—near Victoria Station is one—where you can smell decadence.  In the sense of agedness and decay—decade-ness—not in the sense of licentiousness, although there’s a fine line.  It’s there in the stones and brick—psychogeology, as Ian Sinclair calls it.  As you pass a church blackened by centuries of soot and grime, the decades of dirt emit an odor.  If you take a deep whiff, suddenly you are a medieval citizen of darkest London.

I lay in my room, a guest hotel in Pimlico.  It is late night and very hot. Although it is September, London is having a heat wave.   I cannot sleep.  The air is still, heavy with heat; and a fine layer of perspiration lays on my body, like dew on an apple.  Suddenly, a burst of icy air comes through my open window, lifting the curtain and blowing past my head.  “What on earth?” I think.  I get up and look out the window.  The street is still and quiet; nothing is there and the icy air has vanished.  In the morning, I hear on the news that an elderly lady living in a flat behind her antique shop only at the end of my block had been murdered in the middle of the night.

You cannot pass a street, close, mews, road or crescent without seeing scaffolding up against a building.  Even Buckingham, Kensington and St. James Palaces have scaffolding.  They are washing windows, painting stucco fronts or window trim, steam cleaning bricks and granite.  Or, they are doing nothing, scaffolding holding only idleness. And so it is ghost scaffolding, giving the air of rejuvenation, unless you look closer.

I met Mrs. Katzin in Victoria Gardens, the small park at the west end of Parliament.  We started talking about the birds who were scavenging along the brown banks of the Thames below us.  She said they were sea gulls, but they neither looked nor sounded like the sea gulls I’m accustomed to.  We went on from there.

Mrs. Katzin had been an actress.  She looked like an actress; although undoubtedly in her 70’s, she had taut, flawless skin, mellifluous speech and an easy presence.  She had married a Russian Jew and “learned a different side of Europe” in doing so.  With him, she traveled to South Africa and Switzerland, where they lived for many years in Lucerne.  She is now a widow, and living in mansions in Westminster.

We talked about women traveling alone and widowhood.  “You just get on with it,” she said.

“How things have changed,” she said.  I said I’d noticed that Londoners didn’t seem as friendly as they had when I was here four years ago.

“Everyone’s apprehensive,” she said.  “England entering the European Community.  What does it mean?  Terrorists.  No one is safe.  No one seems to know what to do, especially the politicians.  People are nervous.” 

Page 1 of 2 Next Page

All contents copyright ©2006 Pology Magazine. Unauthorized use of any content is strictly prohibited.