Peter Pan

Right: Peter Pan, Kensington Gardens

American children of any generation later than mine have their image of Peter Pan from the same place they get entirely too many of their childhood icons: Walt Disney. I suppose that malady is worldwide now. People grow up without seeing the illustrations of Sir John Tenniel or Ernest Shepard, but carry a whopping technicolor image in their minds of Alice or Winnie-the-Pooh that’s just somehow wrong. So that’s Peter on the right, and the young lady looking up his little dress is Wendy Darling. Everyone else is a fairy or a cunning woodland creature. Every child or former child, finding him- or herself in London, really needs to pay a visit for childhood’s sake, as I did on Sunday, queueing up with much younger children for my chance to take this photo.

If you skipped Disney and read the book (I pre-date the animated feature, so got my Pan straight from Sir James Barrie), you might remember that Peter was scarcely the charming infant of the sculpture (created by Sir George Frampton in 1911 and placed in the park in 1912) by the time he was introduced to theatre-goers in 1904 and readers in 1911. Sir James’ Pan is a self-absorbed brat, and Tinkerbell is a tiny but murderous psychotic. Of course those are their darker sides; they’re really quite charming at parties.

But in spite of all the good, clean “Let’s go kill some pirates” fun to be had in the book, there are darker things being said here about the dangers of perpetual childhood. Children are creatures of impulse, mainly, and while we may scoff at civilization, it’s that process acting on us as children that, if we’re lucky, results in adults, or at least people who can wear the costume with authority. One day we’re merrily squashing bugs, and on some other day we develop compassion, and the journey to humanity has begun. Pan and the Lost Boys will be squashing bugs in the Neverland until the end of time. Girls – in the person of Wendy – are the civilizing influence the boys didn’t realize they needed until they had her. The Neverland makes you forget though, so you may be sure they don’t miss her now she’s gone. And as for Tinkerbell, she’s just laughing her ass off.

Touching the Mystery

Another day out. I could get to like this. My friend Alison White wanted me to meet her mother, who lives over here, and we decided to meet in St Albans, formerly the Roman city of Verulamium, even more formerly the Catuvellauni stronghold of Verlamio. Americans never quite get over how bloody old everything is over here. We live with a persistent notion that our country emerged from the brow of John Adams, et al, in 1776, and before that there just wasn’t anything. (Steve Martin, showing Victoria Tennant around Los Angeles in L.A. Story: “Some of these buildings are more than twenty years old!”). We all have to take American History in high school, but in my time at least, it was only the history of Europeans in America, which they could have covered it in six weeks and let everyone go home early.

Our plan was for lunch and a walk around the Verulamium Roman museum and the ruins of an amphiteatre that were somewhere about. We did get to the museum eventually, but skipped the amphiteatre on account of rain. Carolyn, along with John Thurgood, picked me up at St Albans rail station. Carolyn and John are delightful, warm, intelligent people, and I felt welcomed the moment I stepped through the station turnstile. We spent a chatty and companionably long lunch hour at a 700-year-old pub, the Old Tudor Tavern. Carolyn obtained some history from the bartender: The place was formerly two coach inns, the Swan and the George, and the very beams above our head were original to the 14th century, when pilgrims on their way to the monastery and cathedral stopped here. You had to be somebody important to stay at the monastery, so it was surrounded by inns like this one for the rest of us, around which the present town grew up. We were parked near the cathedral, so we decided to check that out first and find the museum later.

We had only been wandering around near the doors a few minutes when John alerted us that a guided tour was about to start, and we joined it. On our own we would probably have spent 30 minutes looking at the architecture and gone on in search of the real reason for the day out – Romans again – but once under the spell of our tour guide, a man who clearly loved this church and all it represented to him, we followed along to the end, which took at least an hour and a half. I won’t tire you with endless details, but a look at the nave will help you understand why we felt compelled to see the rest and listen to our guide’s seemingly endless store of historical anectdotes.

The longest and highest church nave in Britain is no-nonsense 11th century Norman architecture on one side, with faded frescoes on every pillar, and elaborate 14th century gothic stonework on the other side, owing to a partial collapse and rebuilding. In some places along the older side, parts of gothic arches emerge out of Norman plaster walls as though planned by some distant ancestor of H.R. Giger.

The original church, dating to the 8th century, was built around a shrine housing the remains of St Alban, the first British martyr. A wealthy Roman citizen, Alban had given his life in place of that of a Christian priest under his protection. There’s a very brave story involved, which is probably apochryphal, but that’s not the point; the point is that it is a brave story, full of compassion and selflessness, and it moved people. In addition to lots of other, more self-serving reasons, people journeyed here to touch the mystery of St Alban and be moved. They didn’t have TV, so they couldn’t just stay home and watch American Idol as one does in these more enlightened times.

In 1539 the Catholic church was outlawed in England, and the monks fled, one with a bag hidden inside his robe containing the bones of St Alban. The bones ended up in Germany, and would not return until about twenty years ago. The shrine that had housed them for centuries before the Reformation, a delicately-pillared structure of Welsh marble, was broken up into about 2000 pieces and hidden in nearby walls. Its location was forgotten, and when some of it was found by accident during the 20th century, the rest was recovered from hiding and painstakingly reassembled in a process that took a team of archaeologists more than ten years. It now rests on a dais in its own chapel, surrounded by an iron railing, still overlooked by a 700-year-old carved oak hiding place where monks once watched to make sure pilgrims’ gifts remained unmolested.

At the end of our tour, our guide explained that he was a Roman Catholic who held some office or other in a very ecuminical Anglican cathedral, and by exercising his priveleges (after apologizing for a demonstration of excess pride) he could allow us to touch the shrine. He opened a gate and we filed inside. I placed my hand on something created when my ancestors were driving the Vikings back to Dublin, something that had drawn people from all over Britain to St Albans in a time when most people never got five miles from the spot where they were born, and I absolutely felt something. All the centuries between those people and me just faded away, and I felt the weight of all those stories. The air around that chunk of carved marble containing a pile of 1600-year-old bones was thick with stories, and for a moment it felt like I was touching all of them. It was a mystical experience of the sort only a person as irreligious as myself could have – a person who holds no faith in Alban’s sainthood in the eyes of a personal God she doesn’t believe in, but is perfectly willing to accept (along with Joseph Campbell) that any place can be holy if you draw a circle around it and say “This is a holy place.”

But I Do Know What I Like...

Right: The Tate Britain, North Side View

There are about a thousand good reasons to visit the Tate Gallery (Britain). Only one of them is that it’s a mile from my Kennington digs, just across the Vauxhall Bridge. The collection is vast, and you never see exactly the same mix twice, but the most famous pieces are probably up all the time to avoid disappointing visitors. If you love art there’s nothing to compare with walking into one large room and seeing absolutely lyrical works by Sargent, Waterhouse, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Rosetti, and Watts all around you. And I only mention the ones I came back to see again after my last visit two years ago. On a quieter day I would have stood and gazed at them even longer than I did, and having the luxury to go back when I like, you can be sure I will. Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallot is worthy of long and loving contemplation, as is Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose, a study of dusk light and flowers and children, and Burne-Jones’ King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, the most amazing portrayal of a man lost in love that anyone ever painted. Watts' Hope is an allegorical piece, somehow the perfect portrait of the word.

Only a couple of rooms over is John Everett Millais’ Ophelia, likewise breathtaking. Ophelia was praised by Millais’ contemporaries as a landscape, which is odd, because its central figure is a dead woman and they could scarcely have failed to notice that. The landscape features are remarkable: for one thing the entire painting is foreground; there’s no fading or diminution of detail from the grasses on our side of the bank to the flowers in dead Ophelia’s hands to the greenery on the far side. This lends an effect of in-your-face life to everything that surrounds poor Ophelia, who was modelled by Elizabeth Siddal, floating in a bath warmed by lamps underneath. The landscape was painted from life, in Surrey, which proves there is life in Surrey (Hi, Molly!), or at least there was in 1851.

And that’s just some 19th century frost on the tip of the British painting iceburg: 17 rooms cover roughly the period from 1600-1899, another 12 or so deal with the 20th onward (and one entire gallery downriver, the Tate Modern). One immense room the size of six of the others is dedicated to the paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner, who left his works to the nation when he died.

The first time I saw a Turner realtime, I was in the National Gallery (the one in Trafalgar Square, not the one in Washington, D.C.). I turned a corner and there it was, and I swear I stopped breathing. It was The Fighting Temeraire Being Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up . Now what, you may ask if you’ve never seen this painting, could be of anything more than historical interest about a picture of two ships going slow on an ocean? If you have seen it you probably don’t need to ask. Turner himself referred to this painting as "my darling," and refused to sell it. J.M.W. Turner was in the ground before the second half of the 19th century got out of first gear, but paintings like The Fighting Temeraire and The Burning of the Houses of Parliament should still be teaching painters something about modern art. The Turner Galleries at the Tate also contain a lot of earlier landscapes that don’t affect my breathing, but it’s amazing just to see so much of his life’s work in one room.

Of course another reason to go to the Tate Britain is to contemplate the paintings of Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942). But that’s a subject for another (darker) day.

And so to bed...

Another issue of Æon SF put to bed, and this one was like a three-year-old after a cotton candy and three rides on the roller-coaster; for a while there we didn’t think it was going anywhere. It just stood there screaming, and we wished we were three so we could scream, too. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to keep my brains from leaking out my ears, and I can’t imagine what the Seattle crew must’ve been going through. It’s a relief, I can tell you. Now go out and buy a copy. It’s a brilliant issue – our seventh – and has a wonderful Alan M. Clark cover and lots of superb stories and articles and columns and poems.

I’m pretty sure we decided on quarterly publication because it was so long between issues, but it doesn’t seem that long anymore, and now it’s time to finalize the contents of the next one. But first, a day off. Maybe two.

I remember the days when I could put in seven 16-hour days a week for weeks on end before hitting a wall. We were building a publishing company from scratch with no experience but lots of ideas, most of which turned out to be surprisingly good ones. I think Æon was the most brilliant one of all, but by the time it came along I was finding 12-hour days plenty of work for anyone, and allowing myself a lot more downtime. Lately I’ve almost forgotten how to spell downtime, but I think I can just about remember again if someone will write it down for me. My next communication will treat on some delightful feature or other of England’s teeming capital city. I have a list.

Surveillance

Right: My Very Own CCTV Cameras!

“We live in a surveilled society” a British friend told me some years ago. I had already noticed the many signs in public places announcing the presence of CCTV, but because I’m from the States, and didn’t expect to see cameras everywhere I looked, I didn’t. But I’m starting to see them now, like the one I noticed only today outside my window.

Scientists who study human perceptions already know that we don’t so much see what’s actually in front of our eyes as we reference snapshots we’ve already taken, and if we missed a detail when we took our mental snapshot we may continue to miss it until it calls itself to our attention, at which time it pops onto our landscape and we take an amended shot for later reference. Leaving the philosophical ramifications of that for a much later discussion, that seems to be what happened when I looked out my window a few hundred times without seeing the camera. But it’s there, right there in the picture. Not surprising there’d be one outside a pub, I suppose.

Of course there’s closed-circuit surveillance in the U.S., too, it’s just not nearly as ubiquitous, and I suspect we give it even less thought. If we did think about it we’d have to go through some changes, American-style: first, we’d have to feel outrage at the intrusion into our privacy, then relief that someone was keeping their eye on those other guys. As a visitor here I don’t think much of it one way or another, really.

Meanwhile I do my own surveillance. Kennington Lane at 0700 is populated by dustmen and other early-risers, the traffic starting to pick up a bit from the relative quiet of the relative dark hours -- it’s never either dark or quiet in London. By 0830 the commuters are out in force, and the vans and lorries, and the pavements are populated by brisk walkers-to-the-dayjob and mums holding kids’ hands on the way to school. These have slacked off by 0900, and out comes Thistledown Lady to sweep her portion of the pavement. Thistledown lady lives over Kennington Lane and down a couple of doors in a neat little house with a neat little garden out front that blessedly missed the craze for paving over front gardens in the 60s and 70s. Her iron railings are covered with rose bushes, and she has a tiny patch of neatly-mown grass. She comes out every morning to sweep the pavement and tidy up the garden, dressed immaculately and neatly, her hair a white pouf that seems to have settled onto her head from above on some errant breeze from the nearest wigmaker’s shop.

On weekends the traffic consists of fewer cars and more tour busses from Wales and Yorkshire and France and Germany. I can’t imagine what the tour guide is finding to say as they pass through the modest borough of Lambeth, probably “Cheer up, folks – we’re less than a mile from the Houses of Parliament.”

Friends and Romans

Right: The Romans did show up in Leeds – August 2005

I took a drive to Old Sarum yesterday with friend and Æon author Dev Agarwal, a fellow Roman enthusiast. English Heritage were putting on a Romano-British day, and we bravely set out from Whitton only two hours behind schedule, armed with our wits and a road atlas, the latter item being what saved us from driving pointlessly around Salisbury all afternoon. But I’m hours ahead of myself here in Salisbury, so let’s back up a bit:

There’s a truth every Briton knows and every visitor soon learns: “Never plan any travel on a Bank Holiday weekend.” The reason is that those weekends when most people do travel are also the weekends Transport for London and the various regional rail services that used to be British Rail schedule engineering works and station closures. So a 30-minute tube-and-overland rail journey to reach our meeting place in Twickenham turned into a 90-minute snafu of closed stations and detours and busses, and we hadn’t even gotten a start on the day out proper. Once we did, we managed the drive to Old Sarum (actually I managed being a passenger, at which I excel) without getting lost more than twice. It had been raining all morning, but we outpaced the weather and arrived at a stunning English springtime in Wiltshire.

Old Sarum was there as advertised, and English Heritage, and there were interesting demonstrations of Roman cookery and engineering, but the actual Romans seem to have marched past the whole thing, and by now are probably encamped somewhere in Devon. Their participation was sorely missed; we had all come there expecting to see a cohort of Britain’s ancient oppressors smiling for the cameras, perhaps a few camp-followers and Romano-British brats running about. As it happens the entire event consisted of two couples at opposite ends of a field, one roasting parsnips in honey (pretty good, actually) and the other operating models of ancient inventions.

An hour or so sufficed to absorb all this and walk around the ruins, and we were on our way back to Whitton and a late lunch with Dev’s wife (transplanted American writer Terri Trimble) and daughter (the irresistible Rani) at a café near their home. After tea back at the flat, and making the acquaintance of several friends named Piglet, it was back to good ol’ Room 3. I had managed to take my first complete day off in several weeks, and without experiencing the tiniest pang of guilt. As I suspected, all the work I left undone was still here waiting for me this morning along with more rain, and a lovely day out had done tons for my outlook.