Recollected one week later, at Heathrow waiting for my return flight — and afterward, at home.
1) Two friends from different parts of my life recommended the Imperial War Museum, so after a late morning I ankled over there on the Underground. Through a lovely expansive park I eventually found my way to a big ol’ double barreled cannon or something, and I knew I was in the right place.
2) For big museums, my custom has become taking the elevator to the top floor galleries and working my way back down. Here that meant starting with the Lord Ashcroft Gallery on the fifth floor, dedicated to “people who faced adversity and performed acts of bravery,” most of them recipients of the Victoria Cross (not all of them men). As I continued through the seven aspects of bravery, I found myself thinking less about these acts of heroism and more about the diplomatic failures and/or imperialist greed that made those acts of bravery necessary.
2a) Next, galleries of paintings and other works of art from the battlefield, including John Singer Sargent’s famous Gassed. The attendant and I passed a few kind words about Sargent — she has just started to learn about him — and I suggested how wonderful it would be to see it exhibited alongside Sargent’s other WWI work at the National Portrait Gallery, a very large group portrait of British military officers of that war.
Sargent’s Gassed.
2a.i) I had never noticed a small background detail of Gassed, a football (soccer) game going on in the sunlit background. That said something.
2b) The remaining two exhibitions didn’t permit photos, for good reason. “Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict” was the first. There was a sign near the entrance that this exhibition was not appropriate for children under a certain age (14? I no longer remember), so I was disturbed to see an unattended boy who appeared to be under the age of ten trying to get in. It’s not up to me to discipline other people’s children, but I did sort of murmur “I don’t think this exhibition is for you.” It covered all the uncomfortable topics: rape, the “comfort women” of WWII, the shaving of Frenchwomen deemed to be collaborators after the war, venereal disease . . . everything. I was relieved when that boy went elsewhere without getting in.
2c) And from there I went to a deeply moving permanent exhibition about the Holocaust. Again, photos were not permitted. The exhibition began with the way of life the war eliminated, with photos and artifacts of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The pace picked up with the ascension of H****r, and details, documents, and artifacts of immigration and escape appeared, including a full array of someone’s official documents who went through the entire process. And then the descent into the ghettos, camps, and the evil Final Solution. Parallels to the present confronted me at every turn. It was difficult but important.
3) After that, I didn’t have it in me to see the rest of the museum. And the shop had so much through traffic that there was no place to stand and just contemplate a book display. So I escaped into the warm and warming sunshine, walked the actual Lambeth Walk, and found something most tourists don’t look for.
4) Which would be Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, once the amusement park of Regency London (and before and after), now just an urban park scorched by the current drought that could only be of interest to me. Why do I even know about Vauxhall Gardens? Old movies, of course! In Forever Amber, Amber and Bruce go off to its earliest incarnation, Spring Gardens (known for grottos that facilitated amorous assignations), and James Mason and Stewart Granger resort of fisticuffs there over Phyllis Calvert in The Man in Grey. In its heyday season tickets were made of sterling silver, and the Prince of Wales always bought one.
A Llondon llama!
4a) As mentioned, none of that Regency magic remains. But wonders present themselves, as part of the park is given over to farming, including pens of sheep, goats, and llamas, of all things. So, how awesome was that?
5) With apologies, already this last week of my trip is folding together like the sticks of a folding fan. But I think it was on this day that I almost witnessed a tragedy going back to my hotel from Gloucester Road station. The intersection at the station was small but complicated; there was a left turn lane curving into the next street, so pedestrians had to cross first to an island, and then across the perpendicular street. One curious thing about London is that the walk signs are not always to go all the way across the street. So, I watched both a car and a woman enter the intersection, and the car almost hit the woman. They both stopped, but then they both started on their way again. And again, a third time, the woman getting in front of the car at last forcing the driver (a man) to stop. Once the woman was across, they had an altercation — understandably the man was upset — and at least I heard the woman acknowledge that he had the right of way after he pointed it out to her. But I did not hear her apologize. She continued on her way — shoulders hunched in her white blouse — while the driver was now stuck behind a red light because of her insistent unawareness.
5a) And people wonder why I don’t want to drive.
