previous | next

Within five minutes a fire engine swings round the corner and the crew are out, as handsome and as multi-ethnic as out of an episode of London's Burning. "Got yourself locked out again Annie?...l make my excuses to the little bundle in the chair and leave.

Now I am hotter and hungrier than ever. I walk crossly to Sloane Square and catch a 137. 1 settle into the fusty upholstery and look forward to lunch in 15 minutes.

But no; in two hundred yards we halt. I look ahead and I think, well, yes, obviously, I should have thought of that, now shouldn't I?

For ahead, at the top of Chelsea Bridge Road, midst an ocean of shaven-headed devotees in saffron robes and trainers, twice the height of my double decker and flanked by motorcycle outriders, lurched an effigy of the Hindu God of Wisdom, the elephant deity Ganesha, en route for a festival in Battersea Park. And how was Ganesha getting to Battersea? More to the point how fast? Answer, since he was being pushed (like his colleague Lord Jaganath) on a huge float by bowed and sweaty acolytes, shoulders to the wheel: one mile an hour.

I got off the bus which had abandoned all attempt at progress and squeezed irascibly through the mass of devotees, their visages radiant with joy, chanting and dancing, their irritating little cymbals going 'ching ching ching' while the great bulk of Ganesha, festooned with garlands swayed above us, à la David Lean and the hot sun beat down.

While walking the streets I had also been reading histories of London and accumulating photocopies of maps and views. I had no interest in these in antiquarian way, simply the information they carried. I found myself looking at a print, l74Oish, standard topography of the time, reliable, unremarkable, of the yard flanking the north wall of the Banqueting House in Whitehall. Not much going on here; rough ground, a dog barking at a passing woman and child; in the background a pointed archway leading out into Whitehall itself. Looking at this little ogival patch of sunlight through a magnifying glass I felt myself as if pulled though the successive planes of the image to this arch, and then out, out into the sunny street; a carriage was rolling past the shadowed facade of the Horseguards; blinking from the shade I had left behind I looked
left and right and looked up and down the street with no surprise because I knew exactly what I would see; indeed I did "see" it; right, to Charing Cross, left down to the Holbein Gate.

previous | next