First Story to be posted-The Old Lady of London.

Congratulations Paul. Fantastic story. Thanks for putting this clever and illuminating piece together. Just click on written stories above to find The Old Lady of London. This is one wanderers take on London town. Any more Londoners with a story to tell?

The Old Lady of London

Paul Wood

In 2005 I made a journey of my own through London. It was in the early days of a 12 day walk up the river Thames to its source. I was relishing the prospect of the scenic stretches of rural England that lay ahead but Docklands and the City, however, were just a bit that had to be got through on the way.

I had always felt rather intimidated by London. Something about her makes you feel like Dick Whittington; a wretched nobody drawn in by her golden reputation; in search of opportunity and a future with hope. She dictates her terms and makes you painfully aware of your nothingness in her eyes. Perhaps the dreadful proclamation of Richard II after defeating the peasants rebellion in 1381 still hangs in the air,

“You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seek equality with Lords are unworthy to live…Rustics you were and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage not as before but incomparably harsher.”

To give her some credit she’s probably moved on a bit from those days. She’s had reformers like Booth, Wilberforce and Shaftesbury to contend with for one thing. Yet still for every suitor London embraces as a lover, a thousand are denuded of humanity and left to die in her office blocks and alleys. And her favours remain so highly prized that under her expansive shadow a mass of humanity sacrifices relationships, health, integrity and children on the altars of financial gain or survival.

That day I walked in along the towpath was different though. Maybe coming in up the Thames helped me to begin to know London differently. It is an older power than London, there long before London was. The flood barrier reminded me that the Thames could yet turn, like a lion on its tamer, on the city whose fortune it has made. It could, in Rudyard Kiplings words, roll down a deep and dreadful rebuke “…when mob or monarch lays too rude a hand on English ways…”

And so as I walked in I found myself emboldened to tell London a different story to that of Dick Whittington or the hundreds of thousands of commuters who serve at her table each day. I told her that I had not come to get anything from her; neither fame nor fortune, neither living nor opportunity. I had everything I needed and actually she was dependent on me. She has grown fat on little ‘rustics’ like me on the treadmill of prosperity or survival, unquestioningly yielded to her ways. She still depends on us…in fact she’d be nothing without us.

I thought; what if we were to look her in the face and tell her we won’t be what she wants us to be? What if we were to tell her what we expect of her? Canary wharf seemed unmoved by my bold assertions, and the Tower reminded me that London punishes subversives harshly. She has friends in high places and little people who dare to be so bold should have friends in places higher still.

But in truth, we do, don’t we.

Strangely, having got all that off my chest, I found London, far from provoked, a lot more amenable that day. My step was lighter. Perhaps underneath all this wretched brutal history and all the financial centre of the world bluster there is an old lady who is surprised and a little touched that some grandchild might want to visit her for her own soul’s sake and not for what he can get from her.