Human Flower Project

Sunday, August 08, 2010

On the Way to a Prom

Memory and the Proms—Royal Albert Hall’s eight weeks of daily concerts—bring John Levett to London. Happy birthday, with rose ‘heps.’

Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain, Hyde Park
Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

Last Thursday was my birthday. I answered mail until noon. It never used to be like this.

The group of photographers that I have the privilege of working with is having its annual show, opening next week and going through to September. We’ve got seventy-five entries this year, our largest number since we began back in 2007. It’s a fine group. We never get bogged down in the technicalities of the process; we’re just there for the images, for the back-story, for the sharing. We’ve got enough energy & enthusiasm for the first timer as for the old pro and sometimes you’ll not know the difference. People keep coming, people keep coming back; that’s always the best judge that something’s right about a group. The mail box keeps growing too.

I once knew the secretary of my local Labour Party in south London. He kept a large bag of pennies & ha’pennies in the bottom draw of his desk. Whenever anyone new came in and asked if they could help out he took out the bag and said: “People keep dropping their small change into our collecting boxes & I never get around to counting it. Do you think that’s something you could do for me?” It never failed. Everyone wants to be useful. So the mail keeps growing and the jobs keep getting done and the show opens and we all wonder at how it got to look so wonderful. The mailbox is the bag of pennies. Everybody gets to be useful.

That’s why you answer mail ’til noon on your birthday.

I broke. Sun was up; I hadn’t noticed. I took a mug of nuclear-strength tea and my book of the month (Austerity Britain by David Kynaston: social history without compare) out to the deckchair under the now-ripening heps of early-aging summer; a chapter read thence to the station.

I can’t read histories on the train. Too many conversations, too much mobile-phoning. Currently my ‘train books’ are re-reads of post-war fiction: Flight into Camden, This Sporting Life, Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving, the ‘London’ trilogy by Colin McInnes. Strange reads; reminders of how much time we spent trying to keep warm; how long London stayed a bomb-site; how we courted. Now King’s Cross: Larkin’s walls of blackened moss still visible in parts.

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