Benny Green on a child's London
The fact that London is inhabited by two entirely different species is so indisputable that for most of the time it goes unnoticed. But stand at, say, the booking office in Fenchurch Street Station, or Waterloo, or Victoria, in the rush .hour, and observe the extraordinary behaviour patterns of Species A. Its physical movements are rapid, its bodily tensions alarming, its philanthropic tendencies nil, its facial expression either disenchanted, distracted, or concentrated fiercely on a point about three feet in front of its own boots. Clearly the native habitat of Species A is no more than a dire impediment, an urban obstacle course to be navigated in the quickest possible time. Observe then Species B, either in the forecourt of the British Museum, or in the tunnel linking the Arsenal underground station with Highbury Stadium, or in the foyer of any theatre. Where Species A was doltish and irritable, Species B is open-mouthed, radiant, flabbergasted, above all expectant. In fact, so beguiled is Species B by the environment that instead of watching its own feet, it can hardly look where it is going and tends therefore to fall over them instead. Evidently Species A, the adult, must be seeing one London, while Species B, the child, is experiencing quite another.
And there is no question that the child's London is an altogether more attractive Place. The child accepts London as an entity, an attitude, a corporate being, while the adult, who had all the faith and imagination knocked out of him years ago by property speculators, architects, the GLC and London Transport, regards it as an extortion racket, a bedlam, an inferno, a nonsense, a great sprawling accident that long ago drifted out of control. To put it another way, the child believes in a city, While the adult is reconciled to a town. And as the city will always be a finer concept than the town, it is by no means a pointless exercise locating the essential differences between what a child thinks it sees and what the adult would rather not look 'at,
To oversimplify it a little, but only a little, children appear to enjoy those aspects of London that are traditional, the museums and public buildings, the statues and exhibitions, the pageantry, the great thoroughfares and places of mass entertainment. Children find it enriching that the big clock at Westminster should not only keep good time but also disclose the source of the opening shot of ITV's News At Ten. They are gratified to learn that on a November morning every year the Lord Mayor's coach turns into a pumpkin, or at the very least into a side-street, that the river-buses still ply for hire at Charing
Cross, that the big cats still pace their cages at Regent's Park, that there are still Ptolemaic corpses mouldering at the British Museum, still Gilbertian effigies posturing at the Tower of London.
There appear to have been very few additions since my day, the Planetarium, Battersea Fun Fair, just possibly the Post Office Tower. But for the most part, the child's London remains a highly coloured dream-city still untouched by the palsied hand cf progress. Indeed, almost the only ritual I loved which has now vanished is the Christmas morning football match. In my time the kick-off was around 11.30 am, but these days professional footballers make a habit of spending Christmas in consultation with their accountants, disputation with their clubs and altercation with each other, so there are, sadly, no more Christmas morning football matches.
But most else seems to have survived. During the last three or four months, spurred into activity by the impending despicable campaign by the state to extort money from all those citizens desiring to render themselves less insensitive, I have been doing the rounds of the museums with my small son while it is all still free. And I am pleased to report that most things appear to be very much as they always were. At the Natural History Museum that vast blue whale still hangs arrested in mid-flight, a spectacular tribute to the taxidermist's gloomy art, while downstairs those elephants still contrive to look larger than you expected, and yet at the same time smaller than you expected, to say nothing of being hairier than you ever dreamed. At the Science Museum I am still able to make the models work by turning those little wooden handles, and still unable to understand what scientific principles they are supposed to demonstrate. And at the V and A, it is still half a day's march from the constables hanging around the entrance to the Constables hanging up on the first floor.
There is one other facility available to London children which in these self-mobile days might get overlooked. I sincerely hope that the primacy of the motor-car will not deprive too many children of the wholly pleasurable experience of examining the workings of the London underground train. My own son and heir regards the automatic doors as a miracle only slightly less stupendous than Johnny Morris, and having recently learned to read he has decided that any world where they plaster the inner walls of the trains with comics and cartoons must be a good world. I suppose he is wrong about that, but somebody else will have to tell him so.
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