Daughters of Albion (Lampitt Papers Book 3) by A N Wilson

Author:A N Wilson [Wilson, A N]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-09T05:00:00+00:00

Here, the imported labour force of the nineteenth century had crammed their sickly and ever-expanding families into mean terraced houses; here, ten-year-old factory hands had swarmed in tenement buildings. Sometimes, the sheer indignity of the life of the poor, even when viewed from a perspective in time or place where it might be imagined that life has improved, has a power to oppress and torture the soul. Lloyd George and Vernon’s dad, and later Clem Attlee and Stafford Cripps and Vernon himself, had done their best to make existence more endurable for subsequent generations. That could not alter the fates of those who had lived and died like slaves in this place, their stomachs pinched with hunger, their lungs clogged with soot, their brains wandering through God knows what corridors of despair which only alcohol could numb.

Kentish Town deepened into brick-blackened Camden. On my left was the tube station, infested, as always, with human wreckage, blue-nosed contemplatives clutching ragged blankets to their shoulders and wodges of newspaper to their knees; shiny-faced inebriates, eyes swollen and cut, murmuring snatches of old songs; a woman who might once have been a flower-seller, a black straw hat rammed jauntily over scrubs of unwashed hair, sprawled in a pool of unidentifiable liquid, her neck and shoulders pressed against a newspaper-placard reading CLOSING PRICES, her bulbous legs spreadeagled on the chilling paving-stones and coming to a halt in a pair of dusty brown shoes from which the soles were yearning to part company. Could they, these people, remember who they were, or once had been? Was there any link between the bodies slumped there and the undeveloped limbs of their childhood, when their lives had been all in the future, rather than a fuddled nightmare past? I turned into Parkway, where more such figures lingered in doorways. The pavements were also full of sober men and women, all on the move. Thin-faced crones in headscarves, lighted cigarettes at ninety degrees to their sharp noses, paced homewards to evenings of solitude.

The comparative architectural elegance of Arlington Road, as I turned into it for the last few yards of my walk home, did little to console. Sadness in that sort of mood seems the only truth. To be conscious is to be sad, and anything else seems like an illusion. Approaching my own front door, I was visited by self-disgust. I had gone to Twisden Road as a voyeur, I had intended it as a guerrilla raid in some emotional war that I was fighting against Rice Robey inside my own head. Now, I felt merely that I had intruded on his privacy. Having met Mrs Paxton, it was no longer quite possible to regard her as no more than a joke – ‘the Great Attachment’; nor would I ever be able vicariously to enjoy accounts of her rages against Rice Robey, accounts which I would now believe to be lies.

Entering our common drawing room, I found Felicity sitting by the gas fire. A thick pile of foolscap typed pages was balanced on her knee.

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