No, the weather does not match the London I've been shown in stories.
It's impossible to imagine Mr. Hyde slinking along Ladywell Road in the bright midday sunshine-- the blue of the sky a clear, certain thing. The piling white clouds are not a threat to it. They will not encroach and smother it and turn the city into that dim grey teeming mass of humanity where Dracula and the Ripper peer out from the shadows and a hackney carriage clops down the cobblestones out of the flickering circle of the gaslights. They will continue to float above a normal, quiet Saturday afternoon. Perhaps occasionally they will hide the sun for a few moments, bringing the oncoming chill of autumn up to tap on summer's shoulder and remind us all that life goes on, and that it might be time to bring out the jacket.
Because London is a real place. A real city. London is not a gothic romance. It's not a Victorian mystery or a Regency novel of manners. It isn't a penny dreadful or a sprawling fantasy epic or a slim volume of careful, spare poetry. It isn't fiction.
And life here is as ordinary as it is anywhere else.
And life here is as ordinary as it is anywhere else.
I am walking up Ladywell Road, away from the village with its white-windowed pub and its tyre shop and the take-aways and off-license stores where you buy Pringles and top up your Oyster card. I am walking past the red brick facades of row houses that could not plausibly exist anywhere else in the universe but this small island nation that nevertheless feels so enormous in the imagination. Some of them are as neat and quaint as you would want in a picture postcard, but far more of them have front gardens littered with children's toys, or construction materials, or laundry being hung out to dry by people happy to have the sun on their side in this annoying, inevitable endeavor.
I am in London, and life goes on.
Intellectually, I knew that this would be the case. I've been dealing with visas and school paperwork and trying to find a place to live for too long now to not have grasped the absolute reality of London, and of the everyday mundanity that would doubtless accompany my move here. And I have not been disappointed. There are crowded busses and stubborn wifi connections and blistered feet unused to walking so far in boots rather than trainers. There is, yes, that confounded rain some days. Some things are breathtakingly expensive, and some things are lonely, and some things are just flat out confusing. Moving to London from Colorado Springs has not meant that everyday is suddenly written by Jane Austen. Or J.K. Rowling. Or Charles Dickens. (Thank goodness, because I don't think I could take that amount of miserable allegory dogging my steps as I run to get the bus to Goldsmiths.)
I have been living here for about three weeks, and things are finally settling in to something other than bewildered novelty.
I had my first meeting with my cohort and conveners at Goldsmiths yesterday, and will be beginning actual coursework for my Masters in Gender, Media, & Culture next week. I have met some lovely people outside of that setting, have gone down the pub with new friends, had wine beneath Big Ben with old friends. I have successfully navigated myself from my new flat in Brockley to school in New Cross to tea in Westminster and a book talk at London Bridge. I have walked down Portobello Market and eaten a picnic in Hyde Park as I watched young parents teach their children how to kick a football beneath the sunny, certain-blue sky. I live here now, pretty conclusively, and life goes on.
I look both ways once, twice, three times before I am convinced it is safe to cross the deserted intersection at Ivy and Ladywell Roads. I have almost stepped out in front of traffic coming from an unexpected direction once too often, and it will take a few more weeks for me to actually trust my instincts in this act. I look up as I enter Ladywell Cemetery to the cool, lichen-crusted stones of the archway, to the iron gates thrown open to the public who run, stroll, and picnic here amongst the dead.
And then something happens. The neat and messy feeling of the everyday quiets, the sense of normalcy I've so insisted upon muffled suddenly in the midst of looming gnarled trees and creeping ivy and the hundreds of monuments dappled darkly with the shadows in the shade of the oaks and elm trees.
I have always loved cemeteries. I love the quiet of them. The stillness and the solace that cannot exist for the living in any other place but so near the dead. I love the ornate tombstones and the not-ornate tombstones and the tiny offerings left in remembrance of someone who is missed but who is so very present in the missing. I love running my hands across limestone grown rough and pocked with age, and marble still so gleaming that I know this grief is, somewhere in the world, still achingly fresh in someone's mind.
I discovered this graveyard about a week ago; maybe a little more. I've only been here once before, but knew that I would need to come back often to explore the twisting, meandering paths, to read the tombstones and take a moment away from my all-hallowed real world for a while.
I walk loosely, letting my arms and legs swing where they will, sometimes stopping me to read an epitaph, sometimes pulling me around into a childish spin that sends my loose hair flying into my eyes. I stand still in the midst of a lane-- I am still very near the entrance-- and tip my head back and let the warm light of the golden autumn sun play across my face. I bury my fingers in my sun warmed hair against the vague but persistent chill that is creeping into even the bright afternoon air. I am suddenly very aware of the sensations of my body: the cold in my fingertips, the warmth on my hair, the strong, loose feeling of my joints and muscles and lungs and heart, all moving as they are supposed to.
I wander onto a packed dirt path that will lead me deeper into the graveyard, away from the stone-and-iron fence and the sharp, immediate sounds of traffic that reach me from the other side. Some of the tall headstones on either side of me have nearly disappeared beneath clinging fingers of ivy, some lean towards each other like dozing lovers on a park bench. Some stand firmly, defiantly straight, their words still etched clean and certain into the weathered stone, and some are simply blank-- tiny indents crowded together where the faded words used to tell the abridged version of some human life.
Birds are calling to each other from the shadows in the leafy heights of the trees. A trio of wild parakeets-- descended from an enterprising pair of house pets some years ago-- swoop and feint around each other in a patch of sunlight further down the path. A fat brown spider the size of a 50 pence piece sits in the middle of her web spun between the nodding heads of a patch of blue hollyhocks that have been left to their own devices until they pop up, tall and bright, for the entire length of a low stone wall that separates this section of graves from another that looks exactly like it deeper inside the trees. I spin to give her a wide berth, my trainers scuffing in the damp soil of the pathway and bringing the smell of moss and decaying leaves to my nose.
I stop to read a headstone-- Herbert Walter Sherlock (I have no idea what could have caught my attention!) and feel something begin to itch behind my eyes. The proprietary language in this tribute: my dear husband. My dear daughter. We only part to meet again. And the name at the bottom of the stone: Daisy Sherlock, this beloved wife and mother who almost certainly is the 'my' referred to in the remembrance of this dear husband, this daughter reunited too young with her dad.
My mind floods with her. With a young woman who grew into an old woman, who was born at the turn of the century and lived through the heavy, dangerous tectonic shifting of the world. How did she get the name Daisy? Was she bright, like her namesake, or was it a cruel irony that plagued her solemn life? Did she fall in love with Herbert Sherlock right away when they met, or was that 'dear' before his name more gradually earned? Was she evacuated from London during the Blitz only to return here, older, sadder, wiser? Did she read The Great Gatsby? Did she like Daisy Buchanan, or did she hate the association? Where did she get the name Lavinia for her daughter? How did she weather the loss of that child, that young woman who was not even my age when she died? Was she afraid then, in 1979, when she was faced with the prospect of reuniting with the husband who had been dead for longer than she could have known him? Did she truly believe they would be 'together again', or was that some dimly reassuring platitude meant to comfort those she left behind?
And once my mind floods with Daisy Sherlock, I cannot stop the onslaught from the others. This tombstone shouts the pain and fear and pride of death in war, that one murmurs the contented platitudes that are always voiced at the end of a long life well lived. There is a man buried beneath a spreading oak whose granite tombstone traces his journey across three continents from Australia to South Africa to England, a tiny white marker capped by a sleeping angel whose occupant never even lived long enough for a name other than Our Infant Daughter.
There are entire families where a cough meant nothing before it meant everything, all laid to rest within months of each other because disease is a vicious opportunist. There are names of patriarchs at the top of empty gravestones that seem to anticipate a wealth of progeny who must now be buried elsewhere, and he is left alone, the stone that marks his memory a silent expectation in its emptiness. Fathers killed in war, mothers killed in childbirth, someone's children or mother or uncle dying old in their beds who filled up years and years with breathing and living and all the wide breadth of human life that cannot possibly fit on a tombstone.
There are women who outlived their parents by years but who are still buried beneath the same weathered markers. They stayed daughters instead of becoming wives or mothers, and find themselves living back at home even in death. Did they want it that way? Were they happy? Are there other lonely daughters buried in other shadowy graveyards with whom they should be buried, if the world had let them love as they would? How many men and women remembered by these markers are buried with people other than the ones whose hands they held in secret, for fear of jail or death or ignominy? Which still bear the names of men who never existed, when the women they couldn't be are forgotten? How many of these lives actually looked like what we see of them in death?
I wander farther into the shadows of the trees, and although it is peaceful and serene in the sun-dappled world around me, my brain and my heart and the tears that I can feel pricking just behind my sinuses are all a riot of something that I find myself struggling to identify. Writers across disciplines and centuries have struggled to describe that balloon-filling-in-your-chest expanding of joy, or awe, or sadnessempathylovewonder, and I don't think any of us have ever really gotten close to articulating the complexity of feeling that happens when you are confronted with the magnitude and significance of something truly marvelous.
In the culture that I grew up in, when we talk about graveyards, cemeteries, necropoli, whatever, they tend to carry the connotative weight of death. We use them as shorthand for the spooky, the strange, the uncanny and the unexplained. They are desolate in our imaginations-- empty expanses of bone and stone slowly mouldering away while human life goes on elsewhere. They are for Halloween and horror films and scaring children and for the grim reminder of that towards which we are all inexorably moving. They are memento mori: remembrances of death.
As I continue my walk through the slanting, fading stones, with the sun fluttering in and out again through the breeze in the treetops, with the parakeets and the spiders and the ivy and me-- with my beating heart and my moving limbs and my tear-filled eyes and my brain spinning with the stories etched out in their barest detail of the hundreds and thousands of people who lived their ordinaryextraordinary lives as a part of this city before me--
I have never, never been anywhere more filled with life.
Because London (like the world it is a part of) is not fiction. Or, it is not only fiction, perhaps.
Because Sherlock Holmes and Daisy Sherlock and her Dear Husband and their too-young daughter and the brave soldiers and tubercular mothers and Oliver Twist and Harry Potter and all the other orphans who visited all these graves of barely-remembered or painfully-missed parents and the fog off the river and the bright sunny afternoons and the ivy slowly creeping up to overtake stone that we pretend will be eternal and the endurance of words written centuries ago murmured like a heartbeat in the ears of countless lovers and the faithful and the faithless and the liars and the saints and Becky Sharpe and Mary Shelley and Queen Victoria and me... all of us tiny pinpricks in the great pointilliste tapestry of this vast and complicated, living and breathing entity.
The truth of London, like the truth of the everything, resists simplicity.
I spend an hour on a bench I find hidden in a copse of trees where the natural world is reclaiming the reminders of human endeavor. All of the mosquitoes in the entire city seem to have found me here, and the necessity of slapping them away from my legs and neck prevent me sinking too deeply into an ecstatic, joy-addled daze. There is something about their mundanity that is compelling; there is something about my own mundanity that feels somehow significant. The sun sinks lower to the west, and I will have to find a grocery store before I go home to a refrigerator that could charitably be called sparse. And the ivy and holly will continue to grow over headstones, and roots will stretch out and knock monuments askew, and the words that tell the stories of these lives will be worn at by wind and rain, and London-- and the world-- will go on.
But it will not be ordinary, because nothing ever is.
There are entire families where a cough meant nothing before it meant everything, all laid to rest within months of each other because disease is a vicious opportunist. There are names of patriarchs at the top of empty gravestones that seem to anticipate a wealth of progeny who must now be buried elsewhere, and he is left alone, the stone that marks his memory a silent expectation in its emptiness. Fathers killed in war, mothers killed in childbirth, someone's children or mother or uncle dying old in their beds who filled up years and years with breathing and living and all the wide breadth of human life that cannot possibly fit on a tombstone.
There are women who outlived their parents by years but who are still buried beneath the same weathered markers. They stayed daughters instead of becoming wives or mothers, and find themselves living back at home even in death. Did they want it that way? Were they happy? Are there other lonely daughters buried in other shadowy graveyards with whom they should be buried, if the world had let them love as they would? How many men and women remembered by these markers are buried with people other than the ones whose hands they held in secret, for fear of jail or death or ignominy? Which still bear the names of men who never existed, when the women they couldn't be are forgotten? How many of these lives actually looked like what we see of them in death?
I wander farther into the shadows of the trees, and although it is peaceful and serene in the sun-dappled world around me, my brain and my heart and the tears that I can feel pricking just behind my sinuses are all a riot of something that I find myself struggling to identify. Writers across disciplines and centuries have struggled to describe that balloon-filling-in-your-chest expanding of joy, or awe, or sadnessempathylovewonder, and I don't think any of us have ever really gotten close to articulating the complexity of feeling that happens when you are confronted with the magnitude and significance of something truly marvelous.
In the culture that I grew up in, when we talk about graveyards, cemeteries, necropoli, whatever, they tend to carry the connotative weight of death. We use them as shorthand for the spooky, the strange, the uncanny and the unexplained. They are desolate in our imaginations-- empty expanses of bone and stone slowly mouldering away while human life goes on elsewhere. They are for Halloween and horror films and scaring children and for the grim reminder of that towards which we are all inexorably moving. They are memento mori: remembrances of death.
As I continue my walk through the slanting, fading stones, with the sun fluttering in and out again through the breeze in the treetops, with the parakeets and the spiders and the ivy and me-- with my beating heart and my moving limbs and my tear-filled eyes and my brain spinning with the stories etched out in their barest detail of the hundreds and thousands of people who lived their ordinaryextraordinary lives as a part of this city before me--
I have never, never been anywhere more filled with life.
Because London (like the world it is a part of) is not fiction. Or, it is not only fiction, perhaps.
Because Sherlock Holmes and Daisy Sherlock and her Dear Husband and their too-young daughter and the brave soldiers and tubercular mothers and Oliver Twist and Harry Potter and all the other orphans who visited all these graves of barely-remembered or painfully-missed parents and the fog off the river and the bright sunny afternoons and the ivy slowly creeping up to overtake stone that we pretend will be eternal and the endurance of words written centuries ago murmured like a heartbeat in the ears of countless lovers and the faithful and the faithless and the liars and the saints and Becky Sharpe and Mary Shelley and Queen Victoria and me... all of us tiny pinpricks in the great pointilliste tapestry of this vast and complicated, living and breathing entity.
The truth of London, like the truth of the everything, resists simplicity.
I spend an hour on a bench I find hidden in a copse of trees where the natural world is reclaiming the reminders of human endeavor. All of the mosquitoes in the entire city seem to have found me here, and the necessity of slapping them away from my legs and neck prevent me sinking too deeply into an ecstatic, joy-addled daze. There is something about their mundanity that is compelling; there is something about my own mundanity that feels somehow significant. The sun sinks lower to the west, and I will have to find a grocery store before I go home to a refrigerator that could charitably be called sparse. And the ivy and holly will continue to grow over headstones, and roots will stretch out and knock monuments askew, and the words that tell the stories of these lives will be worn at by wind and rain, and London-- and the world-- will go on.
But it will not be ordinary, because nothing ever is.
