How lucky we are to live in lovely England and to visit her
glorious capital of London! We have been visiting the city this weekend to help
our eldest son relocate from New York to a very attractive flat in Hampstead on
the edge of the Heath. The sun has shone and this privileged enclave looks its
idyllic best. Then the idyll is shattered by three Jihadi extremists murdering
7 innocents on London Bridge and at Borough Market and injuring many others,
proclaiming “This is for Allah!” How can we react to this turmoil?
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| A corner of Hampstead Heath |
My instinct is to dismiss the evil perpetrators as beyond redemption, accentuate all positives and all beauty and dig into the deep well of our national resilience. My physical surroundings here can hardly be bettered; my son’s rented flat is on a floor of a late Victorian villa once the home of the 1940s radio personality Professor C E M Joad. The rooms are spacious, the ceilings are high allowing large wall mirrors, there is much cheery coloured glass in the 1920s manner, and there are intricate stone fireplaces, one of which boasts scagliola columns and about 100 Delft tiles. Outside at the back is a ravishing secluded veranda giving views over an incomparable series of private gardens. On one side purple azaleas and white blooms vie with horse chestnut trees, in front of me as I write high stately elms preside over a myriad of clambering red roses, bushes, arbours and exotic plants, not to mention a large turreted folly below which a stone lion patrols watchfully. The owners yesterday cooked a sweet-smelling barbecue and a doting mother crooned the old nursery rhyme “The Grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men” to a gurgling infant stretching his legs experimentally on a lawn blanket. Beyond is a vast copper-beech and an abundance of hedges and flora I cannot possibly identify. I can only identify the scene as indubitably English and civilised.
Just across the road at the front of the house is one of the
many access paths to Hampstead Heath, an ancient park of 320 hectares,
criss-crossed with densely wooded narrow paths, opening up to sunny glades,
fringed by crowned oak-trees, for picnics or earnest confabulations; you get
splendid views of distant London – only 4 miles away.
The Heath is a haven for all Londoners, walkers, cyclists,
joggers, swimmers for the many ponds, art-lovers (Robert Adam’s Kenwood with
its terrific Iveagh Bequest paintings adjoins) and, in these permissive times,
gay cruisers. It is a playground and pleasure garden which Londoners need and
deserve.
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| Affluent properties in Hampstead Village |
Hampstead Village has always been a favourite. Higher than
the metropolis, it was a haven from plague and then a fashionable spa with
healing waters in the 18th century. It later acquired an artistic,
even a bohemian air, and harboured writers and a covey of Labour politicians
including Hugh Gaitskell, Anthony Crosland and chaotically eccentric Michael
Foot. Its MP was until 2015 the strident Leftie film-star and champagne
Socialist Glenda Jackson. I regret the disappearance of second-hand bookshops
and certain hostelries rather more than the politicians. Now under the
ownership of rich hedgies and celebrities, somehow the iconic painting Work by Ford Madox Brown (1865) depicting
drain-laying labour on Heath Street no longer epitomises the Hampstead we see
in 2017.
Such are the gorgeous sights and smells of London today. The
sounds are more likely to be singing in my head in these tempestuous times. I
find appropriate Purcell’s Welcome Ode to James II of 1685 “Britain, how great
thou art” sung exquisitely by counter-tenor James Bowman. Perhaps more simply,
I suggest we set aside all those who promise much and deliver little, promoters
of fear and dismay, merchants of disunity and electoral bribes – a plague on
all their houses! – and instead proclaim our self-confidence and self-belief
singing There’ll always be an England.
SMD
05/06/2017
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Copyright Sidney Donald 2017
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