I moved to London in 1984. Despite being almost 40 years after VE Day, the place remained squashed in the deflated brownout of that make-do-and-mend era. To an American whose imperfect grasp on the national psyche was based on repeated spins of Jethro Tull’s cynical masterwork, Aqualung, as well as the sadistic interpersonal relationships at the heart of great British films like The Servant and The Red Shoes, I was excited by the seedy ennui of this world capital. Even its dangers were enervated: the bowler-hatted curb crawlers in Grosvenor Square; the cheap thrill of falling off the back of an open Routemaster
As I toiled through the years doing hard time as a Londoner, the dangers began to sharpen their focus. A small IRA bomb blew up a phone box outside Paddington Green Police Station across the street from where I lived. A huge IRA bomb turned Bishopsgate into a snarled wreckage of steel and uttering office papers. A neo-Nazi nail bomber targeted Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho. Islamist fanatics destroyed peoples’ lives on 7/7; the Westminster Bridge and London Bridge attacks. It’s the kind of violence that instils the plucky stoicism I wildly misinterpreted as wan giving up when I first moved to that bedsit off Baker Street.
