Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Light Me Up
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Dear Travel Journal,
To rest my wandering, weary feet and people watch, I’m staked out on a wood-slated park bench in Russell Square, a block from the British Museum. This is the area of London where the aristocrats in the novel Vanity Fair frolicked.
A gentleman dressed in the distinguished manner of a British Lord—dark suit and vest, monogrammed shirt, pocket watch with chain—is seated at the other end of the bench. He only needs a cape and walking stick for me to imagine him living in Victorian times.
He volunteers that he is partial to the Assyrian collection in the Brit Museum. He says he is a barrister and an aficionado of Beef Wellington. And a London history buff.
Here is a man used to walking on whichever side of the street he fancies. A man used to people patiently listening to his words.
He has a cadaverous face as if he has already prepared himself for burial. He speaks with a soft authority. Like a professor determined to impart all that he knows to his students.
For some unfathomable reason, he assumes I am interested in London’s 1500 remaining gas-lit streetlamps. Before I have time to change the subject, he makes me his audience of one.
His monologue begins. He insists I check out a lamp post at Audley Square near Hyde Park. The lamp post is chunky at the base, painted black. Like an alley cat on the hunt for rats, its utility depends on not standing out. It was used by Russian spies as a Cold War dead letter drop. He speaks as if only he knows its history.
“Here’s something to tell your American friends. The word limelight comes from London’s West End theaters. In the 1800s, filaments in gas lamps were coated with lime to create a bright, white light. People said the actors were in the limelight.”
To illuminate the city’s sidewalks in the 19th Century, streetlamps, my self-anointed docent explains, sucked biogases from the sewage system. On Carting Lane—Farting Lane joked bawdy Londoners—not far from Covent Garden, guests of the Savoy Hotel are probably clueless that London’s last remaining “sewer gas destructor lamp” is right outside the hotel.
“Back then,” he recounts, “street lighting was so dim and the streetlamps so far apart that Boswell had sex with prostitutes on Westminster Bridge. Criminals flourished and drunks urinated in darkened privacy.”
Just as his verbal tour is getting X-rated, he pulls out his pocket watch. “Pardon, but I’m meeting a friend at the club,” he says. I am left alone to people watch and consider the gassy sewage beneath me.
On the streets of London, people are rushing to catch double-decker buses, attend lunch meetings or rendezvous with a lover. They belong somewhere. Other people are waiting for them, expect them, need them, care about them.
Under the kind of white daylight usually associated with hospital surgeries, modern art museums or morgues, passing Londoners enter, then hurriedly leave, my line of sight. Without people, a city in stasis—like a decommissioned streetlamp—rusts away, loses its purpose, dies.
From my spot in the shadows, I see them. They don’t see me.
