Songlines in the City
Our Palaeolithic ancestors drank the land more deeply than we do. As they wandered, they would have heard dozens of types of bird song, discerned the temper of the wind, felt the varieties of moisture on the grass between their toes, smelt caribou and wolves, or the scent of blood on the breeze, read weather narratives in the sky, understood the implications of storms, and tracked animals miles and miles by the simple disturbance of twigs and leaves. Without this closeness to the land, they would have died, and we wouldn’t be here, surrounded by skyscrapers and supermarkets.
Similarly, the Aborigines of Australia used songlines to navigate vast distances through the interior of the land, each song recording the location of landmarks, watering holes, trees, so that the whole continent became a lyricism of pathways, invisible to the untrained eye, but navigable to someone who knew the songlines, who could follow them, mile after mile, reciting the landscape as they went.
Our senses have atrophied a lot since then, starting with the Neothlic Revolution, when one day, twelve thousand years ago, we stopped wandering and settled down to farm. Clearly, they have deteriorated a lot further since, and the iPhone may kill them off entirely, until we notice nothing but a flat layer of glass 12 inches in front of our noses.
But for those armed with stories, the city can be a place as deep as the wild ever was. If you know your city, its legends, its soul, its songlines, then walking through it can be an almost hallucinogenic experience, every building, every alleyway, every pub prickling with life, yielding myths and associations. A city is more densely narrative than any wilderness. We can feel it in the way our hunter gatherer ancestors felt the land.
A city has a soul, and that soul is the accumulation of the people that have lived there, worked there, loved there, procreated there, built there, died there, leaving their residue in the bricks and the walls, their collective energies shepherding the metropolis through time, each generation bequeathing an evolved city to the next. To commune properly with a city is to seek that soul; and to seek it, you must start to raise the dead.
I stand outside the Lamb and Flag pub, tucked away on the back of Rose Street, its flat little front facing towards Garrick Street. I was hoping to sit, but already it is full to bursting. A thin, unnourishing winter sunshine falls on the cobbled courtyard, which is bubbling and jostling with drinkers in groups of threes and fours, their necks retracted into their quilted coats, their conversations mixing and overlapping until soon they become only the unintelligible babble of the city.
To get here, I came out of Charing Cross Station, passed Coutts, founded on the Strand in 1692 by an enterprising Scot, an establishment which famously banks for the British Royal Family, although in a show of admirable egalitarianism it will also open its ancient and patrician doors to businessmen, actors, footballers and even lottery winners, provided they come weighted down with at least a million pounds in liquid assets, its discrimination, as with so many things in modern life, merely fiscal in nature.
Walking up the broad flow of the Strand, I was to turn left in front of the Zimbabwean embassy, which is lined with headless nude statues by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, representing the birth and creation of life. These statues were decapitated by members of the Rhodesian High Commission in the 1930s, because their nudity was said to be unseemly (‘a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man, his fiancée, to see’ – Evening Standard, 1908), and there is something almost frightening about them; not only have their heads been hacked away, but so have their hands, the penises on the male statues, their limbs, as if they are the victims of a tribe gone mad with bloodlust, a kind of foreshadowing of the many hatreds of the 20th century.
Approaching the building, I wonder where these severed body parts were taken, if they were simply disposed of as rubble, ground to dust, or if some collector took them away, tried to give them a new dignity in some suburban home, where they languish, ignored and forgotten. For a moment, I imagine some vast museum containing all the statues and the sculptures and the monuments that have ever fallen from grace with the fickle, censorious eye of the moment, and been ripped down. They should be kept somewhere, together, victims of the tyranny of the now.
But well before I arrived at the embassy, I could hear a voice monotonously shouting over and over again, although the words are impossible to decipher. I assumed it was protestors, exiles from Mugabe’s thuggery who congregate in little huddled masses come rain or shine outside the embassy and lament their lost land, their lost friends at home whose torture and mutilation mimics the violence administered to Epstein’s statues.
But instead it was a woman, all alone, an elderly black lady, screaming into a microphone but somehow making almost no noise, her voice swallowed and flattened rather than amplified by the device. She was enjoining passers-by to come to Jesus, and in return she promised not only the salvation of the soul, but also more immediate succour, the healing of all physical ailments, specifying again and again that Jesus would heal your body, correct its malfunctions, its mutations, even depression. Here was another London eternal, the eccentric, the preacher, often to be found at the mouth of tube stations to guarantee as consistent a flow of souls as possible, or on Oxford Street - itself a hellish strip of American Candy stores and assorted money laundering operations - voices crying out in the urban wilderness.
Nowhere is further from God than the city, because nowhere has more material and corporeal pleasures. It is easy to be godly on the peak of a mountain, but less so when surrounded by the obscene wealth of Regent Street or the beckoning bars of Soho and Leicester Square, a parade of temptations, so these preachers shout harder, rant longer, as all around them people swirl, not so much ignoring them, as almost not seeming to notice they are there at all.
Back in the Lamb and Flag, I nurse my drink, a pint of London Pride. It is just a pub, full of noise and ruddy faces. Or is it? It is always deeper in London. Dickens used to drink here. He used to drink almost everywhere in London, but this pub would have been one of the first places he wet his lips, when he worked as a child around the corner at a boot blacking business, pasting labels on pots, crying himself to sleep in the attic of an old lady, living without his family, his father imprisoned, his mother volunteering to incarcerate herself alongside him. Just twelve years old, to celebrate his birthday, he crept small and diminutive into the public-house here to order a glass of their best ale, ‘with a good head to it.’ I can see him, all alone, matured early, never mentioning the family secret, barely able to see over the bar, shillings clenched tightly in a small, pale fist, watching, observing, scanning the faces, the pick-pockets, small boys in rags and paper caps, the drunks, the gentlemen run to seed, top-hats, swallowtails, lawyers, the dishonest and the garrulous, the orphans and the barmaids, hard men with thick jaws who might one day hang at Tyburn, the people who would transmogrify into some of the most famous characters in literary history, assembling around him.
He might have heard a thumping sound, the thick crunch of knuckles smashing into jawlines, or separating ribs, drifting from upstairs. Dickens was born at the start of the Regency Era, a golden period of British bareknuckle boxing, where the best bareknuckle fighter in Britain was considered de facto the best in the world. It goes without saying that the boxer is a reoccurring figure in London and indeed British history, with Britain producing more world champions than any other European nation, by far, including today’s undisputed heavyweight champion of world. These 18th and early 19th century bareknuckle fighters were so lauded that British champion Tom Cribb (himself a landlord in a pub near Haymarket after retiring), and former slave Bill Richmond (considered England’s first black sporting star) acted as ushers at the Coronation of George IV, tapping into the respect, grudging or otherwise, held by all people in all times for those capable of the least fakable virtue on earth: great physical courage.
The upstairs room of the Lamb and Flag was famous for hosting such bareknuckle fights, where men would strip to the waist and fight until one of them was too weak to continue. Standing in the room now, I am surrounded by middle-aged men and women, plump and comfortably dressed, eating rubbery looking chicken and overcooked potatoes swimming in thin gravy, enjoying a calorific respite from their laps of the West End. But 200 years ago, there was such violence in this space that the room was known as The Bucket of Blood, for reasons that need no elaboration. This is not a room favouring much evasive movement. It is tight, irregularly shaped. Ringed with a cheering crowd it would have been smaller still. In it, people fought fifteen, twenty, even thirty rounds, their faces gradually softening, cutting, pulping and reddening, like meat hanging in a butcher’s. They would be dragged, dizzy, into their corners between rounds, to be fortified with alcohol, slapped across the cheek, have words of encouragement screamed into their ears across the general din of the room, their seconds trying to anchor them to something worth fighting for, something worth clinging to amidst all that pain and fear.
One can imagine a young Dickens, sat down below, hearing the shouting and the crunching, grunts of exertion, the shake of the roof, perhaps a drop of blood leaking through the floorboards overhead, falling ruby red onto the pages of a notebook where he was jotting down the thoughts and observations that would one day flesh out into the greatest London novels.
Boxing was not the worst violence dealt in the orbit of this pub. The worst violence must always involve an involuntary participant. There is a tiny passageway, to the right-hand side of the Lamb and Flag, Rose Alley, leading through to Lazenby Court. In this passageway, shortly before Christmas 1679, John Dryden, the Poet Laureate at the time, was attacked and beaten with cudgels by three masked men. He was beaten so badly he almost died. Nothing was taken from him. No one was ever arrested or charged with the assault, despite the offer of a reward. The suspicion ran that the men had been hired to avenge insults (“false, foolish, old, ill-natur’d and ill-bred”) levied at the Duchess of Portsmouth, a mistress of Charles II, and a native of France widely disliked in the country. A newspaper reported the attack as executing a, “Feminine, if not Popish vengeance.” Women of the day did not take slights to their honour lightly.
The alley is perhaps four feet across. It is claustrophobic even to stand in. There is no conceivable escape if cornered from both ends. As a group of two men try to pass me, they inadvertently jostle me, and I have to retract my body. I smack the stone walls with my hands. They are cold and utterly unyielding. They would be a weapon in and of themselves if your head was smashed against them. The saving grace of this passage is that it is too narrow to swing a bat with full force. That might have saved Dryden’s life, on that dark winter night.
On account of this assault, the upstairs room at the Lamb and Flag, that bucket of blood, has been renamed the John Dryden Room, so that his spirit can forever watch London day-trippers eating overpriced steak and triple-cooked chips, with a side of reheated mushy peas.
Half the pubs in London sing a story like this. Christopher Marlowe was murdered in one in Deptford, stabbed in the forehead for reasons never fully known. Dr Johnson, who defined a tavern somewhat plainly as ‘a house where wine is sold and drinkers are entertained’, was a regular at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub on Fleet Street, almost half a millennium old. He finished his famous dictionary just yards from its entrance, and one can imagine him slipping off to the pub to fortify himself for the completion of this crushing task. People were drinking on this spot when Magellan was planning to circumnavigate the world, when Martin Luther was penning the ninety-five theses that would upend the religious make-up of Europe.
A plaque near the entrance lists other regulars, including Reynolds, Gibbon, Garrick and Boswell. A subsequent century saw Carlyle, Macaulay and Tennyson, Conan Doyle, Twain, Chesterton, Yeats. Writing is very lonely, so it makes sense that those who practice it most might take refuge in the throng of a pub. Dickens drank here, of course, and in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Darnay retreats to this pub to restore his strength after being acquitted of treason, the noise, brevity and energy of a pub representing the antithesis of the silent, mute eternity of death.
And in the 20th century, thousands of lesser writers, hacks from the old newspaper industry on Fleet Street, poured through the doors of this pub, night after night, trading stories, waiting for the morning copy, their nostrils flaring at the prospect of a scoop, a rumour, an MP sleeping with a call girl, a train robbed on the West Coast Main Line, something worth printing on the front page of England’s scurrilous, vital newspapers.
As I sit in there, a surprisingly lively fire warms the February afternoon. I have never been in a pub where the air is so smoky. Old paintings of 18th century grandees, including Dr Johnson, overlook a small group of elderly men, whiskered and weather beaten, whiling away the afternoon over perspiring pints of beer. Time seems palpably slow in here, a laziness ingrained into the wood. I overhear three Americans thrilling at the antiquity of the place. A poster boasts that since its last rebuilding the pub has outlived fifteen sovereigns, starting with Charles II - around the same time that Dryden was being beaten to within an inch of his life a mile away - but it has not been updated to mark the ending of the latest, longest and perhaps greatest of the sovereigns it has overseen. Soon, I suppose, it will be taken down, edited, the end of Elizabeth II recorded, and Charles III marked down as a 16th monarch whose has reigned whilst people have drunk in this place. The story of London rolls on forever.
I finish my pint and leave. Outside, directly across from the pub, an excavator is tearing down a building, ripping at it whilst it’s still standing, eating it alive. This is the endless churn of the city. Destroy. Rebuild. I wonder what stood there, not just yesterday, but centuries ago? Who eked out a whole life there, toiling, sleeping? Who ran barefoot on those streets, and was called home in the failing light by a mother of ten, ladling gruel into small bowls? Who watched the fire of London eat the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub, and then finally burn out a few dozen yards further on, at Fetter Lane?
You could walk through London as an amnesiac, carrying nothing heavier than yourself. Perhaps it is better that way. Hatred lives strongest in those with the longest memories. But I choose not to. I want to excavate, to try to read the songlines of this ancient city.