Human Flower Project

Kensington Gardens: A Next Time


First horses, first boats, first statues—John Levett returns to Kensington Gardens on the first sunny day of spring.


imageGeorge Frampton’s Peter Pan statue at Kensington Gardens, donated by J.M. Barrie

Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

I currently have an exhibition in a photography gallery in south London, a project that I’ve been working on and off for about fifteen years. It’s a reworking of what remains of the family ‘album,’ what after years of dismemberment and destruction could appropriately be described as the family paper bag.

The project was about my relationship with my mother and all the deceptions and avoidances on both our parts during her lifetime. The exhibition is the formal end of a personal walk through a life and its unintended consequences. It would be daft to write that all loose ends have been tidied up, contradictions resolved, resolution of conflict achieved, closure has descended. Nothing closes; you take the baggage with you to death. What I achieved was a ‘settling’—not of scores or debts but an understanding that sits ok with me and that I can carry around. That’s not a bad place to have arrived at. I have no intention to return to it but I never trust myself on matters of remembrance.

imageKensington Gardens

early April 2010

Photo: John Levett

The exhibition opened last Thursday, the same day that the long grey of early spring broke long enough to break out the shorts along with it. I took the earliest off-peak up to London and cracked open a double espresso and skinny lemon at my favourite Starbucks on Euston Road. People I know have a problem with this. Drinking at Starbucks is, with people I know, as good as taking a baseball bat to a newborn polar bear or publicly hanging a Zapatista infant on the nearest Judas tree. I’ve given up explaining that given the whole scumbag of twenty-first century capitalism entering the stage of recognising its own limitations while giving out tickets to the stadium of ecological meltdown and the circus of peasant proletarianisation, it doesn’t matter where you buy your over-priced caffeine fix—you’re still jollying along with the system. Don’t take the Starbucks route? So where’d you get your shoes mister, where’d you buy your car, enjoyed your weekly shop at Tesco did you? I know the people in Starbucks Euston Road. They’re fine people on crap wages keeping down a job.

Now let’s get on.

I finish writing the poem along with the coffee that never stops and start trekking up Euston Road. Earlier this year there was an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery of Frank Auerbach’s Rebuilding London paintings. They were a total revelation to me. I’d never seen them before and knew nothing of them. He began them at the moment that he began to find his own art and at the moment that London was rebuilding after the war. London’s rebuilding again. I’m walking around snapping what interests and snapping what’s left of the buildings Auerbach took for his subjects. Something will come of it but I’m not sure what. I’m walking around waiting for something to come up that takes me along with it. Until it happens I just snap whatever’s going up or coming down.

I’m walking towards Kensington Gardens. I go along Marylebone Road then cut through the streets towards the John Lewis building on Oxford Street; Auerbach made a lot out of it so I spend time too. I wander off snapping the generic fifties and sixties blocks towards Marble Arch.

imageThe Albert Memorial

Photo: John Levett

Why Kensington Gardens? There are times when I’m in London for stuff that involves me directly: a talk, a presentation, a group meeting, chairing and lecturing. Apart from the monthly photographers’ group meeting where I am amongst my people, I get nervy about these events. I’m trying to second-guess questions and answers and how to respond to the smart arse who’s out to get me. That insecure! Often I take myself off to a gallery show somewhere, walk a part of London that’s totally new or walk a path that’s totally familiar and part of the comfort zone network that I’ve located in various parts of the capital. Kensington Gardens is one of those.

It’s the place that I first came to remember as place: somewhere that could be returned to and maybe catch again the first experience and play the whole scene out and maybe get the same goodness from doing it. That matters as a kid. I have a memory of sitting on a wooden floor in a white-walled room striped with sun and shadow. My mother told me that this was a flat in Brighton when I was less than a year old and I was shoving nails into the electric socket before being shot half across the room. So no returning there.

Kensington Gardens was different. My mother and I were homeless after the war and went to live in Chapel Street in Belgravia where my Aunt Blanche was a cook. We were given an attic room and I can remember one night being held while I looked down on the floodlit street below. I researched later and found it to be a night scene filmed for Carol Reed’s ‘The Fallen Idol.’ I was about three at the time we lived there.

image

In the Italian Gardens, Kensington Gardens

Photo: John Levett

My mother was busy looking for somewhere to live less precariously and find work to pay for it, so Blanche used to take me for walks in the Gardens. This was special. There was a lot of green for starters and you could run and fall over and get up unbloodied. There was the bandstand to run around, the Peter Pan statue to run around, trees to run around and a round pond which took a bit more effort. What I remembered most was that it was a different land. The first statues, the first sculptures, the first horses, the first rowing boats; what else I must have thought? More next time. At last I had a place that was worth a next time. And so it turned out to be and it never palled. There used to be replica model sailing ships on the pond with retired admirals attached and kids like me with the nailed-together version. There was always an ice-cream; always a carry-home from being worn out. Always a return.

image

The round pond—without boats today

Photo: John Levett

When I want to stay untroubled by anything I walk west to the Gardens. There are no boats on the round pond anymore and there’s a gate surrounding the bandstand. Kensington Palace fits into the Princess Diana Memorial Walk (all those flowers and still no miracles) which segues into the Princess Diana Memorial Memorial (still no unrequired crutches tied to the railings). Ice cream is doled out alongside traditional burgers from the Royal Parks officially-appointed dolers-out. Anything nickable is tied down or surrounded by steel but there are still deckchairs to be had. There used to be an avenue of trees close by Kensington Palace at one time which were felled sometime in the ‘50s allegedly to allow for the accommodation of a STOL aircraft to evacuate royal folk in the event of a nuclear attack. Wouldn’t want those royal folks having to hunker-down under the stairs like the rest of us.

When I’m not there for a session of nerve-distraction I’m there for the Serpentine Gallery. It mounts fine shows. I recall 1989 and their ‘Success is a Job in New York’: Andy Warhol’s early work before he became Andy Warhol. It was an autumn show and I’d just returned from a holiday in New York, six weeks after starting up in my own publishing business, one week after seeing Michael Clark dance the dance of a lifetime, one week before seeing Merce Cunningham dance the dance of twenty years earlier with © Andy Warhol Inflatable Cushions, and two months before the end of the greatest decade of my then-life and the start of my never-regretted rush to self-destruction (halted). So … the memories keep coming.

imageChildren live out G.S. Watts’ monument to Physical Energy, Kensington Gardens

Photo: John Levett

I was by the round pond before queuing for Rostropovich at the Albert Hall and his playing of the Dvorak cello concerto at a prom at the time of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. I was there at the end of a romance and there missing the start of one. I was treated to an ice-cream there by a Third Secretary of the Soviet Embassy—a no-longer-used ploy to seduce primary school teachers to the purposes of the People’s Democracy. I preferred sleeping under a tree there to listening to Allen Ginsberg drunk at the poetry reading of 1965 attended by at least a small town of people if ‘60s hippie memoirs have any currency. I was passing by on the other side the night Dylan passed though in 1965 (again? some year that!) on his way to the end of ‘Don’t Look Back.’ Rostropovich and a Russian Fancy Dan preferred to Ginsberg & Dylan. Priorities intact.

And then there was my father, known as Uncle John. He worked a street away in Exhibition Road at Imperial College. He took me around there when I was about thirteen. He tried his best to interest me in science but I was still intent on becoming a missionary at the time. We walked through the gardens on the way to a Lyons Corner House for a fry-up. He meant well.

Last Thursday after ice-cream I bussed back up the road to Hyde Park Corner and walked down to Chapel Street. I had passed by but never walked down it since the post-war days. I knew the house number from conversations years ago with Blanche before she died. Standing there on the opposite pavement and looking up at the attic window seemed a reasonable way to bring the project to a close. I snapped it and stayed a while. I rushed through the journey from then til now, had a brief weep, walked off for the opening. Drained but settled.


Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/11 at 10:28 AM

Comments

what i love about London is that you can really wander anywhere
on foot
and it’s all magic
as is your writing
best wishes
India

Posted by india on 04/15 at 08:34 AM
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