H. V. Morton

“ They wish to escape from their surroundings into something which is their very own. They dream of the little house, just like every other little house in the row, and they dream of locking the front door on life and opening their arms to each other.
In the great hive of London you can see them meeting, hungrily snatching a moment from their separate labours which are just a means to an end. In the City she comes, lighting his heart with her beauty, and she goes, leaving him feeling that the light has been turned off inside him. ”

“ As you walk out on a large stone platform London lies below in a huddle of buildings and smoking chimneys. You pick out landmarks. How narrow even the widest streets look. To the east over the big black bulk of Cannon Street is the faint outline of Tower Bridge in the mist. Only the broad Thames has size. Men are midgets, an omnibus is blotted out from time to time by the flight of three pigeons; your eye rakes offices, exploring all floors at a glance, floors packed with typists. You feel like a beemaster looking into a hive ”

“ Men slept and stirred uneasily as if afraid of the dawn that was stealing on to draw them again into the battle. How many would rise gloriously; how many fall? We talk of human nature in the rough, heartbeats, life. Here it is in the middle of London every night, each sleeper a real drama of struggle, each man and woman midway in that Valley of the Shadow through which all lives, spiritually or materially, must pass. ”

“ So when I ask myself why I love London I realize that I appreciate that ancient memory which is London—a thing very like family tradition for which we in our turn are responsible to posterity—and I realize that I am every day of my life thrilled, puzzled, charmed, and amused by that flood-tide of common humanity flowing through London as it has surged through every great city in the history of civilization. ”

“ Boys are always leaning over London Bridge, as right-minded boys have been leaning these five hundred years and more. Beneath them the Thames, that loved river of ours, swirls and eddies round the piers, sucking at the weathered stone as it runs seawards, out and away.
When I joined them the other day I noticed with an authentic thrill that against the grim wharves men were doing interesting things in ships. No matter how trivial the act—the hauling of a rope, the turning of a winch, the painting of a hull—it becomes somehow vital and significant to anyone on dry land. ”

“ Piccadilly Circus is empty of life and movement—save for a prowling policeman trying shop doors, and a group of men directing water from a giant hose over the gleaming, empty road.
A taxicab is an event, and a stray person walking quietly into the Circus holds dramatic possibilities. The mind fastens on him. Who is he? He may be a great criminal, or a great lover walking home after a dance with his head full of glorious dreams, or he may be a burglar, or a young man who has just inherited a million, or a young man without a place to rest his head. The emptiness of Piccadilly at three a.m. ”

“ In the dark engine cab of an Underground train I have shot like a comet through light and darkness, the glittering tail of the train thundering behind packed with people on their way from Bow to Ealing.
A bell rang. The driver looked out over the track where three gleaming steel rails met in a point outside a tunnel. He pulled over a lever and the train started. It was the strangest sensation. I forgot the six packed coaches at the back of us. I forgot the cargo of calm newspaper-reading men and novel-reading girls which we were carrying across London. ”

“ Behind this roomful of strange, intent men in a London auction-room I seemed to see other men, the wild, uncouth men of youthful romance, out in the savage places of the earth and in the great loneliness of forests and ice. Hunters, trappers! Though we grow old and hard and inaccessible to all soft thoughts we will never lose our love for these. It is in our blood. ”

“ London is full of antique shops—places where Chinese Buddhas gaze pointedly at the alleged work of Chippendale—but if you asked me which is the most remarkable of all I would take you to a shop which deals only in articles more than a thousand years old.
When you enter, the centuries drop away like sand in an hour-glass. Through the frosted opacity of the door you are dimly aware of the red blur of a passing omnibus, of shadows that are men and women busying about their day's work. You hear the sound that is London ”

“ And when you look you see the hand that placed it there, you hear a voice and see a face bending over the pretty, unimportant thing, and it's ten to one that you are a child again on some slow, lazy afternoon of sun; and the voice is the voice of your mother telling you the same old story you have heard a hundred times as you watch her, fascinated by her brilliance, hypnotized by the growth of the brocade bird and its beaded eye: a masterpiece which fills your mind and stands out as the most marvellous and beautiful thing the world has ever seen. ”

“ In spite of the supply of desirable lamps in Bagdad the census of owner-drivers must have been quite negligible, so that the average inhabitant must have lived through the romance of those days sitting in the same patch of sun, bitten by insects and trodden on by negroes.
In London, and in the free cities of this modern world, the drama of life widens, the characters increase and the unchanging human heart, no happier perhaps in the long run, beats less timorously than it did, yet leaping in sympathy to the same old loves and fears and hates. ”

“ Victoria Station is every morning the scene of a daily romance—the departure of the Continental boat expresses. When the fog comes and the rain and the driving sleet, and every Londoner loathes London just a little, I can extract a certain pale kind of pleasure by buying a penny platform ticket and watching other people start off to the snow or the sun.
I can never decide whether the act of extracting enjoyment from other people's luck is the lowest or the highest form of fun. There is always a sting in the tail of it. ”

“ Life is full of portentous triviality. Is it not strange that our minds often refuse to recognize some sensation—a word like a worn-out boot—while they react immediately to something so small as to be almost foolish? You may be bored stiff by the front page of the evening paper, but you go home remembering some common thing seen or heard; some little humanity: the sight of a man and a girl choosing a child's cot, two people saying good-bye at a street corner, the quiet hatred in a man's eyes—or the love....
Let us now go out into London. ”

“ Men who sell things in the streets become more than ever deliciously horrible and blood-curdling; they never arrive normally; they loom; they appear, delightfully freezing the blood, howling their wares like the lonely wolf in a picture book.
I go out into the fog and enter an incredible underworld. The fog has turned London into a place of ghosts. At one moment a man with a red nose and a moustache like a small scrubbing-brush appears with the startling suddenness of an apparition. There must be millions of such men with exactly similar moustaches, but this one is segregated from the herd. ”

“ One mannequin is fair, another is dark, a third is petite, a fourth is tall. Each one is the perfection of her type—too perfect. As each sways up to Madame over the black carpet she gives Madame one half-smiling look in the eyes, then turns, lingers, sways a little, and slowly goes. Sometimes Madame puts out a hand and touches a gown. The mannequin stands like a piece of machinery suddenly stopped. All the time M. Flair remains with one plump hand on the gold couch, explaining, expounding, and, at length, advising. ”

“ A great high hall blue with smoke, steel-girdered at the roof like a railway station. It is packed by a cloth-capped crowd, predominantly Oriental—a crowd of swift murmurs and sudden silences and sharp, instantaneous uproars. Good tempered now, but—O my!—suppose somebody started a row! There is not one woman present. The elegant girls in evening gowns who sit out Albert Hall prize fights have no place here. It is a gathering of fight fans. In the centre under bright, white lights rises the ring. The men in it are like men on a raft floating on a sea of restless, white faces. ”

“ He may not possess the social charm of the old horse-omnibus driver, who, according to legend, wore a top hat and used his whip butt on London as a lecturer uses a wand. He is a more solemn character. Machines always leave their mark on men. The big petrol engine has created a grim, silent, crouching character who, fortunately for London and Londoner's wives and families, has no time for social pleasantries as he urges his great, red, double-decked steed through the thousand perils of a crowded street. ”

“ The Past only can be grasped and loved. That, at least, is how they think in this queer shop where Time is regarded as a mere convention; a shoreless ocean in which each man's life is just a spoonful taken and returned.
The men who wander in look mostly dull and dry, sunk in whiskers and absent-mindedness. They sometimes leave their umbrellas in the rack and say "yes" when they should have said "no." They often remark on the wonderful weather when it is pouring with rain. They are probably thinking, you see, of some Grecian dawn or the raising of the siege of Troy. ”

“ To a London office boy who has been told not to linger by the wayside—ah! how exquisite, how irresistible!
Sometimes little important jets of steam rose from a cargo boat, marvellously suggesting departure and the imminence of great adventure; enviable free men whose boots had never trod an office stair popped their heads out of hatchways and lumbered up on deck; a string of linked barges, dingy, low in the water, went by behind an impertinent tug, which nosed the tide sideways, pulling and puffing. On the hindmost barge a man was frying bacon in a jet-black pan. ”

“ As we go from the brilliantly lit room the emptiness and the chill of sleeping London meets us at the door. Long lines of lights shining on desolate pavements, a shuffling figure under a lamp, a slow taxicab cruising near the kerb, and then, surprisingly, like a ghost of old London, a hansom cab standing in Piccadilly, the ancient horse, head down as if remembering past things! ”

“ Yet London is not asleep. Hundreds of people in London never seem to sleep. Come into one of the all-night cafés which have sprung up within the last year or so. It is full. It hums with talk and laughter. Waiters move about between the crowded tables. There is a constant clatter of cups and saucers, and the air is blue with smoke. In contrast with the desolation of the empty streets outside, it is an astonishing place. ”

“ For them an object is not only full of beauty but also full of magic; it is like a talisman that has the power to call up visions. I have no doubt that when these old men hold their treasures they can see the hosts of Pharaoh sweeping through Syria, the nodding of the plumes, the drive of arrows and all the confusion of an ancient war. They can recreate round a relic a dead empire. They feel that they possess something of the mighty personality of old times just as in millions of lives a treasured letter can call up "the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still." ”

“ Oriental
A young girl with eyes like the fish-pools of Heshbon sits outside a butcher's shop on an upturned crate. Her fingers are covered in rings, and when she laughs she throws back her fuzzy head, exposing her plump, olive-coloured throat, as Moons of Delight have been doing throughout the history of the Orient.
She is beautiful after her kind. In five more years, however, she will look like a side-show. Her lithe grace, her round face, her firm, white neck will be submerged in regrettable tissue. The eye passing over her façade will find it impossible to excavate her recent beauty. ”

“ Sometimes the keeper, frock-coated and white-spatted and gardeniaed, can be seen conducting a tall, stately woman through the high magnificence of the halls a woman who looks with a smile at many a relic of childhood; and people whisper "The Queen!"
To the Londoner this place holds more of interest than any other museum, not excepting the unfortunately entombed Guildhall Museum.
The whole history of London, dug up out of London clay and peat, is here for inspection. The finest collection of Roman pottery, found among the roofs of London, is on view. ”

“ Thrones rock and fall, dynasties fade like mists. The world changes. Two thousand years pass by, and a new race of men come to power. They pick Cleopatra's Needle out of the sand, enclose it in a huge steel cylinder, give it a deck, a keel, a rudder, put a crew aboard and tug it across the sea towards England. Prosperous winds favour the voyage for the first few weeks; then, in the dreaded Bay of Biscay, Cleopatra's Needle pitches with such violence that the tug's captain cuts her adrift with her crew aboard her. ”

“ O the wild dreams of London! The old man who starves himself that he may search year after year for a document which conceals a coronet is only less tenacious than the elderly virgin whose sole passion is the belief that somebody way back in history "did her down" over a will. There are humble, ragged people who must be positively shocked when they cut a finger and discover that their blood is just ordinary red. ”

“ In the sound of the picks you could hear the voice of the new age—or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which ever you liked! These great houses round which centred the wit, the beauty, the scholarship, the politics, and the art of the eighteenth century have outlived their day. London has crept up from Ludgate Hill like a tidal wave and over-whelmed them.
Devonshire House stood, strange and incongruous behind its feudal wall, like the Lord Mayor's coach in a traffic hold-up. Great hotels and shops grew up and shouldered it, and still it stood there dreaming, it seemed, of a vanished paddock ”