Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Re-crossing the now subdued living room he said goodbye to everyone and told Anne he’d be back by eight that night. He knew that some blokes kissed their wives goodbye when they went off to work, but like the great majority he thought that kind of thing was soppy and so did his Anne. Fastidiously scraping a last smear of porridge from the bowl their two-year-old son John, their little carrot-top, watched stoically as Ern ducked from the fire-lit room into the dingy passageway beyond, to fish his hat and jacket down from off the wooden coat-hooks and then be about his business in the city, somewhere John had dimly heard of but had thus far never been. There was the sound of Ernie’s shouted farewell to his mum, still on her night-soil rounds upstairs, followed by the expectant pause that was his mother’s failure to reply. A short while after that Anne and the children heard the front door close, its juddering resistance when shoved into its ill-fitting jamb, and that turned out to be the last time that his family could honestly say they’d seen Ginger Vernall.

Ern walked out through Lambeth to the north, the sky above a stygian forest canopy swaying upon the million tar-black sapling stems of fume that sprang from every chimney, with the sooty blackness of the heavens only starting to dilute there at its eastern edge, above the dives of Walworth. Exiting his mother’s house in East Street he turned right down at the terrace end and into Lambeth Walk, onto the Lambeth Road and up towards St. George’s Circus. On his left he passed Hercules Road where he had heard the poet Blake lived once, a funny sort by all accounts, though obviously Ern had never read his work or for that matter anybody else’s, having failed to really get the trick of books. The rain was hammering in the buckled gutters of the street outside an uncharacteristically quiet Bedlam, where the fairy-painter Mr. Dadd had been until a year or so before, and where they’d been afraid Ern’s father John would have to go, although the old man died before it had been necessary. That was getting on ten years ago, when he’d yet to meet Anne and wasn’t long back from Crimea. Dad had gradually stopped talking, saying that their conversations were all being overheard by “them up in the eaves”. Ern had enquired if Dad meant all the pigeons, or did he still think there might be Russian spies, but John had snorted and asked Ern just where he thought that the expression ‘eavesdropping’ had come from, after which he’d say no more.

Ern passed by the rainswept asylum on the far side of the street, and speculated distantly if there might be some antic spirit bred in Bedlam, squatted over Lambeth with eyes rolling, that infused the district’s atmosphere with its own crackpot vapours and sent people mad, like Ernest’s dad or Mr. Blake, though he supposed that there was not, and that in general people’s lives would be sufficient to explain them going silly. Down St. George’s Road heading for Elephant and Castle swarmed, already, a great number of horse buses, pushcarts, coal wagons and baked potato sellers dragging stoves like hot tin chests-of-drawers piled on their trolleys, a vast multitude of figures in black hats and coats like Ern, marching with downcast eyes beneath a murderous sky. Turning his collar up he joined the shuffling throng of madhouse-fodder and went on towards St. George’s Circus where he would begin his long hike up the Blackfriars Road. He’d heard that they had train-lines running underground now, out from Paddington, and idly speculated that a thing like that might get him to St. Paul’s much quicker, but he hadn’t got the money and besides, the thought gave him the willies. Being underground like that, how would it ever be a thing that you got used to? Ern was well-known as a steeplejack who’d work on rooftops without thinking twice, sure-footed and quite unconcerned, but being underneath the ground, that was a different matter. That was only natural for the dead, and anyway, what if something should happen down there, like a fire or something? Ernest didn’t like to think about it and decided that he’d stop the way he was, as a pedestrian.

People and vehicles eddied there at the convergence of a half-a-dozen streets like suds about a drain. Making his way around the circus clockwise, dodging in between the rumbling wheels and glistening horseflesh as he crossed Waterloo Road, Ern gave a wide berth to a broadsheet vendor and the gawping, whispering gaggle he’d attracted. From the burrs of chat that Ern picked up passing this pipe-smoke shrouded mob on its periphery he gathered it was old news from America about the blackies having been set free, and all about how the American Prime Minister had been shot dead, just like they’d done to poor old Spencer Perceval, back when Ern’s dad had been a boy. As Ern recalled it, Perceval was from the little boot and shoe town of Northampton, sixty miles from London to the north, where Ern had family upon his father’s side still living, cousins and the like. His cousin Robert Vernall had passed through last June on his way down to Kent for picking hops, and had told Ernest that much of the cobbling work that he’d relied on in the Midlands had dried up because the greycoats in America, for whom Northampton had supplied the army boots, had lost their civil war. Ernest could see it was a shame for Bob, but as he understood things, it was all the greycoats as what kept the slaves, the blackies, which Ern didn’t hold with. That was wrong. They were poor people just like anybody else. He walked across the awkward corner with its little spike of waste-ground where the angle was too sharp to fit another house, then turned left and up Blackfriars Road, making across the smouldering rows of Southwark for the river and the bridge.

It took Ern some three-quarters of an hour, bowling along at a fair pace, before he came on Ludgate Street over the Thames’ far side and the approach to the West Front of the cathedral. In this time he’d thought about all sorts of things, about the slaves set free out in America, some of them branded by their masters as though cattle, he’d been told, and of black men and poor people in general. Marx the socialist and his First International had been about more than a year already, but the workers still weren’t any better off as far as anyone could tell. Perhaps things would be better now that Palmerston was dying, as it was Lord Palmerston who’d held back the reforms, but to be frank Ern wasn’t holding out much hope on that one. For a while he’d cheered himself with thoughts of Anne and how she’d let him have her on the blade-grooved kitchen table while his mam was out, sat on its edge without her drawers on and her feet around his back, so that the memory put him on the bone under his trousers and his flannels, hurrying through the downpour over Blackfriars Bridge. He’d thought about Crimea and his luck at coming home without a scratch, and then of Mother Seacole who he’d heard about when he was out there, which returned him to the matter of the blacks.

It was the children that concerned him, born as slaves on a plantation and not brought there as grown men or women, some of them being set free just now across the sea, young lads of ten or twelve who’d never known another life and would be flummoxed as for what to do. Did they brand kids as well, Ern wondered, and at what age if they did? Wishing he hadn’t thought of this and banishing the awful and unwanted picture of young John or Thursa brought beneath the glowing iron he mounted Ludgate Street with the majestic hymn-made-solid of St. Paul’s inflating as he neared it, swelling up beyond the slope’s low brow.

As often as he’d seen it, Ern had never ceased to be amazed that such a beautiful and perfect thing could ever come to be amongst the sprawl of dirty closes, inns and tapering corridors, amongst the prostitutes and the pornographers. Across the puddle-silvered slabs it rose with its two towers like hands flung up in a Hosanna to the churning heavens, grimmer than when Ern had left for work despite the way the day had lightened naturally as it wore on since then. The broad cathedral steps with raindrops dancing on them swept down in two flights calling to mind the tucks around a trailing surplice hem, where over that the six pairs of white Doric columns holding up the portico dropped down in billowed folds, unlaundered in the city’s bonfire pall. The spires that flanked the wide façade to either side, two hundred feet or more in height, had what seemed all of London’s pigeons crowded on their ledges under dripping overhangs of stonework, sheltering against the weather.