On Wednesday, my brother came down on the train to join the clan. The boat was packed to the rafters with best beloveds. It was noisy but rather wonderful. We all herded off up into Canary Wharf for some lunch followed by a walk around and then the happy discovery of a terrific gelato place rounded off our expedition perfectly. By the time I had waved goodbye to them all I was fit for nothing but collapsing on the sofa.
My mum was born in London. Her parents met in the RAF. My granny, who was from Leicester, was a morse code operator. My grandad who was from High Wycombe, did things with ground crew and washed up back in the UK after trekking through Persia and then Italy. He and my gran decided to marry after they were demobbed. They started married life proper in London. My mum made an appearance in 1947, born in Lambeth within the sound of Bow bells, like a true Cockney. They moved to Leicester when she was four.
Her memories are a patchwork of bits and pieces, jumbled together by a child’s eye view and the passage of time. She has told me before that my grandad tried to get work at the docks, and often came home without any. Eventually he got lucky and was hired by the company who originally imported Mateus Rose wine to the UK. Their offices were down by Waterloo and have long since gone, but I think about him every time I’m passing through. He must have travelled around here, looking for work. What would he make of it now?
In his day it must have been more like Virginia Woolf describes it in The London Scene.
‘The banks of the river are lined with dingy decrepit looking warehouses…Behind the masts and funnels lies a sinister dwarf city of workmen’s houses. In the foreground cranes and warehouses, scaffolding and gasometers line the banks with a skeleton architecture.’
This made me think of the pubs I keep passing, tucked, like the churches in the lee of great glass towers. Each one proclaiming itself to be the oldest, to have the most history, while the towers rise, concerned only with what comes next. History forever knocking on the door of an indifferent future:
‘Further down, an inn with swelling bow windows still wears a strange air of dissipation and pleasure making. In the middle years of the nineteenth century it was a favourite resort of pleasure makers, and figured in some of the most famous divorce cases of the time. Now pleasure has gone and labour has come; and it stands derelict like some beauty in her midnight finery looking out over mud flats and candle works, while malodorous mounds of earth, upon which trucks are perpetually tipping fresh heaps, have entirely consumed the fields where, a hundred years ago, lovers wandered and picked violets.’
Memory layers on memory as buildings rise and fall. A child’s memories wake in the mind of an old lady and wind around these buildings, jogged into fresh remembrances by the jumble of old and new. Mum talked about walking by all the bomb sites as a child. The houses over the road from their flat all gone. Every place they passed damaged in some way by a war that still echoed through the streets.
I think of it as I walk them to the station, the sides of the underpass swelling with buddleja, the skeletons of shedding rose bay willow herb and now, thistledown scuffing its way through the warm evening air. All plants of the bomb site. A new wild landscape, softening the edges of a war ravaged city. The sights may be different but the smells are the same as they ever were. So is the perpetual noise of building, the clang of girders, the juddering of lorries, the slap of cement being poured and the rumbling of foundations being laid where foundations have been being laid for centuries. Always different and the same.