Garden Court Chambers, Lincoln’s Inn Fields
We wandered through Bloomsbury,
Not quite like Mrs Dalloway:
‘Moments like this are buds on the tree of life.
Flowers of darkness they are’.
Nor like the Paris Situationists:
‘Under the paving stones – the coal vaults!’
But rather more like John Thewall,
On a democratic peripatetic:
Firstly at 40 Bedford Square,
And then to Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
Where we were greeted by our host and guide,
The genial David Watkinson
(Charles Dickens: ‘If there were no bad people,
there would be no good lawyers’),
And sundry revenants too:
For there IS Charles Dickens, reading The Chimes,
And there, Thomas Carlyle, and there, John Forster.
Next I saw Spencer Perceval,
Arm resting on the mantelpiece,
Deep in thought whilst warming himself at the fire,
Alarmed by the Luddite risings in the north,
With the consequent deployment of the army:
More redcoats saw action up there in the north,
Than in the Peninsular War against the French.
We processed to the stairs, that liminal world
Between the real, the ethereal and the fictive,
And there, stealthy and gimlet eyed,
Mr Tulkinghorn from Bleak House:
‘Mr Tulkinghorn is always the same, speechless repository of noble confidences, so oddly out of place and yet so perfectly at home’.
I glanced downwards as I climbed the elliptical staircase,
Was that a crimson stain on the oak floor?
There was the corpse of Lord William Russell,
Head freshly sewn back onto a crimson neck.
And over there, Sarah Siddons and John Kemble;
And there, Samuel Pepys and the Earl of Sandwich.
But who is this, gliding up the stairs?
‘We are never to get out of Chancery! We have come by another way to our place of meeting yesterday, and – by the Great Seal, here’s the old lady again!’
And so, we climbed the stairs with Miss Flite,
Up towards the oculus,
Unseen spectres observing us closely,
As my backbone went cold and I shivered
At the thought of the servant who may have plunged
To her death from this vertiginous landing;
And there, Susannah, the first Mrs Thelwall,
Pointing to the room where she suffered her final illness,
And pointing to where her husband paid court
To his young student, Cecil, - his next wife …
Some reports affirm that doors in this building
Open and shut of their own volition;
Ghostly footsteps are heard echoing
Up and down the elliptical staircase;
Does the ghost of a grey lady appear
From out of a blocked-up doorway,
To haunt the landing?
All I know is that this is no Cock and Bull story,
No Tristram Shandy story;
My back did go cold – but wait!
There goes Mr Thelwall out the front door:
Back to the real world and not the half-imagined:
The Masque of Anarchy calls,
Not the Masque of Comus;
And for me, too:
I wandered up to Little Turnstile,
Not quite like Mrs Dalloway:
‘Moments like this are buds on the tree of life.
Flowers of darkness they are.’
Nor like the Paris Situationists:
‘Under the paving stones – the coal vaults!’
But rather more like Thomas Spence,
At his Hive of Liberty Holborn bookshop,
And so, I fell down a wormhole of time again:
For there chalked on the walls and pavements
Of Spencer Perceval’s London:
‘Spence’s Plan!’
‘No Landlords, You Fools!’
‘The People’s Farm!’
Another worry for the home secretary –
These legends are chalked all over London!
Another worry for the prime minster:
Another furrow in Spencer Perceval’s brow,
Arm resting on the mantelpiece,
Deep in thought whilst warming himself at the fire,
In Garden Court Chambers, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
