So many of the novels I've read, from Charles Dickens to Mick Herron, paint the streets of London in sad, dreary colors not meant to give you a sense of wonder unless it is who is lurking around the next corner.
I have been there a few times, and each time it has presented itself, whether in full color or in shades of rain, as a place of wonder. A city where anything might happen. One might even, as I outline in my novel Ghosts of the Heart, think one sees ghosts.
I never really thought I saw one, but it was not unusual for me to feel that the place was loaded with them. Not in a bad way, you understand. But a great many people have lived and died here, and I don’t think all of them have left.
My first trip, in 1979, was magical. For one thing, I had an affair that remains a memory of delight to this day. He took me to visit Jeremy Bentham’s famous remains and the grave of Carl Marx. And that’s all I will say about that. I was also accompanied by a troupe of friends – it was a Humanities Department sponsored trip – who were delightful companions wherever we went, almost nowhere on the sponsored trip list of historical must sees. We did go to the theatre and the opera. We saw the musical A Chorus Line, and danced in the streets all the way home. We went to Soho to see the London production of The Rocky Horror Show and were the only ones yelling “Take it off! Take it off!” We smoked hash and partied with some Jamaicans we picked up one night. We went to nightclubs where swing bands played just like Dire Straits said they did. And it seemed that wherever we went, I heard Blondie singing Heart of Glass, as if it were a theme song.
Back in London in 2005, I wandered alone through the British Museum as if it were a time machine. The Rosetta Stone in its glass case, just a few inches between me and the ancient world. Huge Assyrian gates. Tiny Egyptian shabtis. Greek bas reliefs. British bog bodies. Ghosts everywhere. I left them there.
The Tower of London – yeah, this time I’m doing the usual Tourist tour – inspired neither awe nor terror. In fact, it was downright jaunty, with colorful Yeoman warders – one could imagine them cracking jokes while leading prisoners to the block – rooms full of dulled weapons, rooms full of crown jewels, and the biggest golden punch bowl I’ve ever seen (not that I’ve seen many). It actually had a placard calling itself the Grand Punch Bowl. "Pretty damned grand," I muttered to a fellow tourista. She laughed.
The Globe Theatre – it purports to be a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe, and it may be. I’m no expert, but unless you’re hungry for another museum, buy a ticket for a play. I didn’t because I could only afford Groundling, and I doubted I could stand for the length of a Shakespearean play. I have heard they are good. So go.
Westminster Abbey. I couldn’t get enough of this place. First was the receiving line of Ministers – no kidding. Just around the corner is a little nook where I found Max, the ghost I wrote about in Ghosts of the Heart. Tucked way up above some other piece of stone is a little marble box which claims to contain the bones of the Princes in the Tower. I almost laughed to see Queen Elizabeth Tudor resting none too comfortably directly atop her sister Mary. I had to sleep with my own sister for years when we were kids, and she would have liked to kick me out of bed. Wandering past chapels and tombs of kings and queens galore, I finally emerged into the Poet’s corner, where light spills onto slabs of marble engraved with the names of Dickens, Tennyson, Hardy, and the like. Geofrey Chaucer, in a small chest ensconced in the wall, ennobles his descendants by his very presence. When I visited them a few years later, my daughter seemed impatient at my lingering. “So many are here, Caroline,” I told her. “Look, Henry James, Robert Browning, Rudyard Kipling!” “I read fluff, Mom,” she told me, and we left the Abbey with me thinking I should have raised her better.
The ghosts followed me home.
Besides the gems to be found in the typical tourist spots – and there are literal gems, in at least one of them – some of the best are to be found just walking around. Little blue plaques announce the homes where vaguely familiar people once lived. A street sign pops up reminding you of Agatha Christie novels. A stray gravestone in an unremarkable little park turns out to be that of Oliver Cromwell’s granddaughter.
And yes, Jeremy Bentham’s remains are still there, just inside and down the hall from the entrance to University College London. The college sat kitty-corner to the Jeremy Bentham Pub, which was not there for my lover and I in 1979. But it was the perfect place for me to end a London day in 2005. Unfortunately, things have changed. Luckily, it isn’t the only pub in London.