Now and in Kings Cross

So what is this about then?

It's about now and in England, but where is now and what is England? On one level, of course, it's undeniably a cold Tuesday afternoon in January 2009. And I'm sitting in a flat in Kings Cross. But lots of things are bouncing through me; my memories, my hopes, and those experiences that I've picked up second hand. Those latter coming from family, from reading, from listening, and from imagining.

This locale, this city, this country, is chock full of traces, of ghosts, of leavings. A small island of many souls. Within a few minutes walk of here is where Arthur Rimbaud stayed with his mother and sister, where Kenneth Williams spent his childhood, where Bob Dylan played his first London gig. Every street you walk you step in the footsteps of someone memorable.

Of late I've started to become intrigued by London's experience of the last war. In November I stood on the Stone Gallery of St Paul's, and looked out over the surrounding area, but simultaneously I was thinking about those nights of bombing and how the city all around the cathedral burned. I've seen the graphic footage a few times and it stays with me.

I also find myself thinking, in places like Borough Market, at the Market Porter on dark afternoons, how it must have been scurrying home by the river, across the bridges, down the platform, before the raids began. I used to think how lucky I was to have avoided the war. Now I wonder if I mightn't have missed something astonishing.

Now And In England is a line from the Four Quartets of T.S.Eliot, from Little Gidding to be precise. It's a group of poems written during the war that take a mystic, transcendent viewpoint of England, that open hidden pathways and forgotten byways, touching lost causes and unremembered sacrifices.

In 1979 I wrote a dissertation on the Four Quartets. I went deep into Eliot and many of his lines remain with me to this day. They often come into my head unbidden, like old friends. So they probably shape my experience of London and England, even now.

That's Eliot reading the conclusion of the last poem.