‘There’s hell –’
The stink of derelicts lying drunk asleep about the doors, everything within them left in yellow pools on the stones, their feet and hair sodden with shared vomit as they lay and snored, oblivious of the din. All this and the piles of dogshit too, the curs lifting their legs to piss on sleepers, imitated by packs of brats, who made a jest of openly pissing on floors, turning them into slipways for the unwary walker – yes, this was hell. Or so I thought.
‘But it was only the prologue?’
Let me give you London straight and whole. I give you its poor men’s cottages and princes’ palaces. I give you its timbered tenements eked out with mud and plaster and blossoming with bed-bugs and beetles from the flowering graveyards on which they were built and into which they crept, the short-lived living nudging aside the dead for a while, butting into their eternal rest, trampling on their bones. I give you the houses of unlawful and disorderly resort, the habitations of beggars, the hovels of the jobless poor, dissolute, loose and insolent beings, and the stables, alehouses, shithouses, whorehouses, dicing-houses, taverns, inns, bowling alleys, into which they crawled and swarmed like flies. I give you the horses, cats, and dogs decomposing in the fields and streets, where the channels were choked by the eternal blend of shit and piss and putrefying blood, London’s horrible broth. When the sun came out this soup of the streets gave off a ghastly glitter and when it rained it streamed everywhere, a blackish porridge laving the bare feet of the shoeless populace, bathing its purulent sores. I give you the vagrants, the sacked and soaked scullions, the cursing cast-offs, the unemployables, the indescribables, the useless, the shifty, and the savage, the worse than worms, the last dregs of a population which in sheer incivility, coarseness, boorishness, and barbarity of nature yielded to none in the world: a city of shitheads, hardheads, hotheads, knuckleheads, knobheads, pissheads, and –
‘And heads?’
And yes, I give you the heads – the heads of London. On Bishopsgate, on London Bridge, on the Temple Bar – see the heads: stark symbols of the sheer savagery of the law. That black rain of birds I’d seen at Newgate swooped first on the severed heads, gorging on treason. A fresh head did not betray the appetite, beginning with the dripping eyeball, spitted on the beak – Out vile jelly! where is thy lustre now? – and so on down to the tongue, torn from the unprotesting mouth or ripped from the gaping neck.
‘That’s enough of heads.’
I shall return to the heads, by and by. But let me also give you the lacerated ape, the split dog, and the mauled bear whose howls die out in that red crater that was his throat. Let me give you the twitching heart in the hangman’s bloodied fist – the entrails trailing like Medusa’s hair from the hand plunged deep in the secrets of the Jesuit’s belly. Much more to come, Francis, of this fair city, and the place is full of frights and noises, long before you reach the Isle of Dogs. Hurry along Cheapside and Cornhill then, come with me now, and into Gracious Street. Go south to the river, the bridge, cross to the south bank and see all.
‘What do you see now?’
Looking north on London, I see it again, the Tower, perched opposite Olaf’s like some dark four-headed bird, bloody with prehistory and myth, gloomy with human wreckage and remembrance. See the freewheeling crows drift like black souls tethered to the turrets, and see higher still, soaring, the free spirits of the gulls, brushing the feet of God. Look now, how one solitary bird breaks the circle, goes winging westwards in its slow descent, past Baynard’s Castle and St Paul’s, to Blackfriars and the Temple, still soaring high above the spires and belfries of a hundred churches, the tall chimneys and roofs of windowed palaces. The water swarms with boats and the wharves with workers, and plumes of smoke are feathering the air, putting scrolls on the blue parchment of the sky. Follow that bird then, that white flash of wings drifting, spiralling downwards now, to guide you to the Thames, the long flowing ribbon of the great river – and a city dancing on its banks.
‘The great vein of London.’
It was a moving wood, a Birnam forest of masts east downriver past the marshes, Clink and Marshalsea, and thirty-five miles off – far from the filth and glitter of the world-touched capital – the sea pulled in its ships from Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and France. Closer to home, the river ran with the shit that slid in from the common sewer: two hundred thousand turds a day, and double that if every soul shat twice – and that’s some shoal to be rubbing shoulders with the schools of fish that swam among the leaping silver salmon. Three million shits a week, sweet Jesus, sufficient seasoning for your fish-dish, fit for beggar or queen, for your turd is a great leveller, there being nothing to say, when two float together in the Thames, whether one has issued privily from noble bowels, Tudor bowels, and the other from the beggarliest arse that ever opened in the filthiest open shithouse under the sun. Poison the fish, Francis? – we drank that water! And many’s the morning I dreamt of cupping a cold glimmer of Stratford sunlight in my palm, scooped from a Shottery brook.
Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.
The swans sang too, graciously avoiding the carcasses, like gentlemen on the field, keeping to windward of mortality. Dead dogs rolled unbarking on the tide, past the tall ships loading, unloading at the crowded quays their cargoes of wool and grain and leather and salt and silks and spices and barrels of tar and casks of wine; past the barges and boats bobbing like pilot-fish about the queen, out on the river; or in the Armada year, past barges hung with black for Leicester’s death, a school of dumb blind whales, mourning the queen’s sweet Robin. And so on down to Wapping Old Stairs, to Execution Dock, where the rats and sea-rovers rattled and rotted in their chains, hanged in their old familiar element, and drowned in the washing of ten tides, though one salt wash sufficed to end all breath, and three was law.
And at last to Deptford, to the rotting hulk of the Hind that had once put that golden girdle round about the earth – now gloomy monument to the faded glories of a man: all golden fire once and a burnt-out hulk behind.
Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.
Come back up river, come with me now – you can’t avoid the watermen, who wherried me many’s the time from Puddle Dock and Blackfriars stairs to Paris Garden, Horseshoe Alley, and so down Park Street to the Globe, or whisked me up to Whitehall, Greenwich, Richmond: a cold progress to the palace and a cold shilling from the king, or the sixpenny queen, for a winter play, and that was my payment for the colder penny pressed into the ice-hard palm of the waterman, whose curse was the curse of the Thames.
Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.
There was nothing soft about the song of the waterman. Listen and you’ll hear him, as we steal up river, hard at it among the clash of the watermills clattering like the tongues of shrews. He’s a worse babbler than a barber, a long-tongued scourge that sprays the chatter of his customers from one to another faster than pollen from the feet of a bee. A pothead too, though the playhouses make an afternoon man of him and keep him rowing sober. He’ll row like a slave to outstrip his mates and get back first for the following fare. Nothing will make him leave the river if there’s a solitary penny to be picked up north or south, and only a hard frost can teach him any decent manners. And if you care to hear the worst language in the world, bluer than any brothel, take a wherry for a penny and as you’re skimming like a bird and he’s happily cursing everything and everybody in the world since time began, just see what happens when you chance to mention good old London Bridge.
‘Surely a wonder to behold!’
The piers that held up the high arches were encased by starlings – islands that impeded the flow of the river turning it to a mad mill-race. When the tide was flooding, folk chose to get out and walk, re-embarking on the other side of the bridge and so robbing the boatman of a fraction of his fare.
What bone-brains built that bridge is what I’d like to know? Who needs it? This is your waterman’s refrain. Even the Thames itself, he says, ro
ars like a thing demented when it strikes the bridge that has intruded into its bowels. That bastard bridge – he says – sucks the shit from my arse – thus he curses – for if it wasn’t for that dry cunt of a crossing I’d bring in a thousand fares a day, enough to sink my boat with pennies by nightfall. I’d fuck the best whores in London and I wouldn’t work on Christmas!
‘He sings both loud and long.’
Your London boatman keeps time to his own imprecations with the pull on his oars, and keeps time to the oars with the flow of his oaths. I didn’t much like the bridge myself, except it kept me from the boatman’s cursing. Made of elmwood, they said – the worst wood in the world for the fire, burning slow like churchyard mould. A Snitterfield saying, that one. Doesn’t so much burn as rot, they’d mutter, as they spat on a grumbling log, dousing it with one good Snitterfield gob. Good in water though, rotting slower than a whore in hell, old Henry said, adding that elmwood answered much the same to flame or wave. Well, the waterman’s bane stood solidly on islands of this stubborn stuff that had been sunk deep into the river bed and it was hard to picture it cracking even on the crack of doom.
‘A safe crossing.’
From Fish Street to Southwark the road vanished into these archways. They were like dungeons, the buildings gloomed over your head, shutting out the light, and at dark doorways and windows up and down the street, an army of money-hungry merchants scurried like ants, each one scratching for a grain of profit. Even the waterman’s honest cursing bettered this suffocating ugliness. My way was the waterway.
‘Nothing to do with the heads, Will?’
Spiked up there on Bridge Gate, they compelled you to look, reluctant eyes riveted to their blind stare. You stood on the Southwark side, raised your head to look at the spiry skyline, and saw it through this macabre crowd of crowns, dead men’s noodles, swaying on javelins, some like big black juicy olives, onions on toothpicks, others long turned to skulls, like faded white moons haunting the sky.
‘A charming sight, I’m sure.’
An old legless wreck who begged there at the Gate-House could tell you every one for a penny, so he said, and whose had come off and whose had gone on, all the way back to Jack Cade’s time when his grandfather’s grandfather had taken part in the insurrection. The Cade head was up there, he swore, pointing to one of the spent moons, and my Lord Such-a-one’s and my Lord Such-another’s, remarkably like Cade’s for all their greatness. And there too were the Babington heads, recent arrivals, not yet peeled clean by the shitehawks or scoured by cormorant time. Grinning wasn’t the last thing they’d done before they died but the grins were starting to show. The truth ultimately does come through, my masters – and when it does it takes the shape of a skull.
‘A fine full penny’s worth there, Will.’
A long slow penny, and I never stood through the telling of it, though I paid it out for charity. And as you went under the arch to make your way into the city you couldn’t avoid this chilling reminder: that treason kills. It was a truth that tingled in your unbroken bowels and inviolate balls and the sharpness of it went in at your navel and out at your arse. I sweat to think of it.
‘You had good reason, lad – and close to home.’
Edward Arden. His head still stared unseeing across the city, as it had done since ’83 when first impaled there at the entrance to the bridge. He’d always wanted to see more of London – that was the grim family joke, for as the saying went, if you want a better view of the capital, try a little treason. Then, after the elevation of the scaffold, it’s up aloft with you, sailor boy, where the blue breezes blow, far above the London mob, in the uncrowded sky. A highly select society communes up there among the soaring birds, an exalted circle reserved only for the infamous. You are one of the chosen few, the company of hard core traitors – and the view is forever.
‘Never to come down in the world – a thought to conjure with.’
Not unless they took you down to make a drinking vessel of your skull, after it was heard said that quaffing from such cups could well prove curative for certain forms of illness. And the men who worked with metals in the Tower Mint, and were suffering the effects of poisonous fumes – they drank most avidly from these bony beakers that were thought to contain antidotes to death. If some found relief it was most probably from the wine they knocked back. Most of them quickly joined the owners of the skulls in the next world, well beyond drinking and disease and the noxious confines of the Tower. Not a place you’d want to be – on any day of the week, the Tower.
‘The ante-room to eternity.’
Eternity, I can shut it out with a blink – and when I open up again it’s the Tower I’ll show you, if you care to stay in my head. Stand on the south bank now and gaze at the city. When I first did so, it was Paul’s that caught my eye, but once I knew the city it was that four-headed reptile, that held me, stayed with me, that vault of so much human suffering, of sundered souls and bodies. There Gloucester’s blade wept blood for the butchered Henry the Sixth, Clarence’s murdered mouth drowned on malmsey, and the Yorkist princes died a dry but brutal death, their heads islanded on their pillows – but like their wine-logged uncle, they died for want of air.
‘Frightful, frightful.’
Founded on tears and corpses, its stones cemented by human blood, and at night its corridors and stairways stalked by the ghosts of all who’d come to the Bloody Tower through Traitors’ Gate. The young Princess came through this gate one pouring Palm Sunday, sat down on the drenched steps, and cried out in the downpour that she was the truest subject landed there. She knew that the headless body of her mother lay buried and bloodstained somewhere inside those awful walls, behind which was Tower Hill, darkened by the shadow of scaffold and gibbet. Many proud heads bent and fell on Tower Green, the lopped flowers of the nobles. The last of the Plantagenets bled horribly to death there. Margaret of Salisbury, stubborn old nob, refusing point blank to put her head on the block simply to let Tudor Henry’s head rest easier under its crown, and the poor old bitch was pursued by the headsman, who hacked her to death like a beast in the shambles, like a bolted cow.
‘The stuff of nightmares.’
Near the Green a little chapel, St Peter ad Vincula, received in chains the headless dead – or in Margaret’s case the butchered remains. Maybe she got a benediction, who knows, from the ghost of fish-blooded Exeter, inventor of the rack, fit triumph for the cold brother of glorious Henry Five. Margaret had died gorily but fast compared with those who went the Exeter way, and they were blessed indeed who went straight to the block, the last great privilege of the high born. Anyone who’d spent an hour lying on Exeter’s Daughter was glad to die. She knew how to fuck you up, all right, and even if you lived you were fucked for life. Every night of what remains of your life thereafter the bed becomes a rack, and instead of the glad blank of sleep, it’s back you go to lie in restless ecstasy. Lie with Exeter’s lass and it’s not like bedding down with any passing whore. Poxes come and go, but what you catch on the rack stays with you like a wife, till death do you part. Those who were racked in the Tower never walked out straight, never did anything straight again, and wished they’d never come out at all.
‘Better be with the dead…’
The black barge took them under Tower Wharf and through the gate, behind them the grating grille and the slow wet slap and sarabande of slime to ferry them like Charon to the Bloody Tower – an ugly exit from the world’s stage with its concupiscence and cares, and so into eternity, by Tower Green. One last look at the enormous emptiness of sky – oh, what infinite blue waste! – and then the last caress of all, clasping the block for dear, dear life. That insect scuttling fifteen inches from your head, the poor harmless beetle that we tread upon, is the very last thing that you will ever see, unaware of your end, your life, the business and desire that once were you… until the creature is suddenly floundering and drowning in your blood.
‘Too dark, my friend.’
A dying man plays
with sheets and shadows. What more would you see? The playhouses, palaces, brothels? where princes stepped in city shit, beggar’s or beast’s, a close weave, sodden in winter and in summer a filthy crust, frantic with flies. The poor lived just atop of corpses, human bones flecked the earth floors, gnawed by dogs, little to separate living from dead, and those above ground were often rotten before they died, as the old sexton said, and scarce able to stand the laying in.
‘But life, Will. Life!’
There were wild radishes along the Thames by the Savoy, sprouting from the joints of the stones like sweet cherry nipples. There was whitlow grass whistling softly in the wind in Chancery Lane and five-finger coming out of the wall in Liver Lane, though you had to sing willow in Pope Lane where the willows were long gone from St Anne-in-the-Willows and even the old remembered the willows no more. Yes, nature had her say – and in Stinking Lane, shanties sprang up in the city ditch and scumbags grew gardens out of shit. London’s poor. They lived like worms in turds in the entrails of the city: Liver Lane, Arsehole Alley, St Spittle’s in the Pissing Conduits, St Stoppage in the Bowels, Farting in the Fields, Fucking in the Halls, menses and afterbirth floating in the gutters. And the Fleet Ditch poured into the Thames its daily offerings of the city shit, well mixed with the grease and hair of measled hogs, the black slurp of the shambles, the entrails, hides, hooves, and heads of beasts. The Fleet River itself was navigable only by turds. Ships had given way to shit. Everything had given way to shit. London was an open artery of excrement.
‘A little harsh, Will, to the fairest city in the world?’
London offered the Newgate slaughterslops, the Fleet turds, the Tyburn leavings, the blown bodies of Wapping, the boiled limbs of traitors, the ripe heads, the pools of piss – and a city of nearly half a million armpits and more than a million and a half orifices, breathing, pissing, shitting, sneezing and snorting and spitting and hacking into the fog and filthy air God knows what in the way of human corruption, putrefaction, and disease.
Will Page 21
