London Is Just My Home Town To Me

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 229, 27 September 1941, Page 15

London Is Just My Home Town To Me

lyiY neighbour had tears in her eyes. They had bombed Westminster Abbey. She had never been within 10,000 miles of it, but the news struck her like a blow, for to her, as to most -visitors and strangers, London was a place of show buildings and magnificent shops. But when you have lived there, it is quite a small place—a place of nooks, corners, glimpses. Everybody knows that the true Londoner, though he may boast about St. Paul's and the Tower, has probably never been inside either, unless dragged there by some insistent country cousin. And to tell the truth, they do not to him make up the real London at all.

By G. D. Hessell

His London, like anybody else's home town, is a place where he knows all the short cuts and has his favourite pubs and seats in the park, and fried fish shops; a place, too, where the commonest stones may shine with the ineffaceable radiance of childhood's memories, that transforms all things. Yes, London, to a Londoner, is surprisingly like a small country town, for in it, in order to have a local habitation for his entity, he has had to make, in Winifred Holtby's phrase, a delightful groove hollowed out of a vast complicated mass." London was a thrilling city for a child; there was always so much to look at. A huge hole in the Strand where cables were being laid or drains dug up; the wedding of a lovely unknown bride; water carts spraying their beneficent Condy's over the hot streets: a fire-engine rushing remorselessly along, a brilliant spectacle of scarlet and brass, perhaps even a fire itself, or a burst water main. "Potted Meat , * Machine There were also many lesser sights obligingly supplied by shopkeepers— the "potted meat machine" in a Holborn window, into which a procession of toy geese, ducks, lambs, pheasants, hares and fish passed, and out of which emerged a train of little tins apparently containing their remains; the lady who sat with her back to the public in a Regent Street window to show her wonderful head of hair. Nor was a London child deprived of those pleasures which come so abundantly to a country one—the gathering of "conkers" under chestnut trees, the fishing for "tiddlers" in the Serpentine, feeding sea-gulls on the embankment or pigeons at St Paul's. And no country child, I am sure has ever known anything so exhilarating in the way of hide-and-seek as the epic game with which we used to celebrate the end of term. Those with season tickets on the Underground between Temple and city would divide into two parties. One went ahead, the other following on the next train a few minutes later By this time the first party had got out at the next station, hidden themselves somewhere on the platform or possibly dodged over and gone back to the first station. Anyway, the game was to catch up with them on the same train, and you can imagine the thrilling chases down subways and over bridges. There was one place where, with luck, you could even dash along the street and race the train while it waited for a connection.

r All this was complicated by the j necessity of looking innocent, for our game was unpopular with station i officials, and I am not. sure I should s have the courage to write of it unless . I felt myself to be at a fairly safe - distance. ' As one grew older, London had i more soulful pleasures to offer. One J went to church at St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, for the pleasifre of walking between a double row of t daffodils. One lingered on the enf bankment to see at dusk the lovely film of periwinkle blue that is the Thames twilight drifting up the » river, soon to be softly pierced by , round yellow lamps shining like r primroses. t Yearly Pilgrimages [ One had one's pilgrimages—to Staples Inn when the hornbeam tree was in berry, to Kew for crocuses and bluebells and azaleas and haymaking, to Bushey at horse-chest-nut blossom time, and Hampton Court for tulips and Epping Forest for the scarce wild anemone. 3 You know the feeling when they - say patronisingly to you, "Ah, yes, 5 of course, you weren't here when we » had the gale that blew the roof off . the grandstand," or "That happened in the flood—before your time," or, ■ "You ought to have been here when ■ we had the earthquake." Do you feel altogether glad to have • missed such perilous and uncomfort- . able excitements—or do you feel a ■ little inferior, a little disappointed? 1 That is how a Londoner feels at hav- : mg missed such grave, tremendous, heroic times in the old home town.