CALLING NEW ZEALAND - A NEW ZEALANDER ON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE

by DAVID LOW. 14-15 minutes.

The other day the air-raid siren sounded just as I was about to cross Westminster Bridge. Westminster Bridge is a good 250 yards' sprint with not even a drainpipe for cover if Hitler's perverted pups start to play their games, which is a familiar hazard for Londoners just now. As I walked along with, I hope, as much dignity as the circumstances allowed, I remembered that Macaulay the historian had written somewhere a prophetic passage about a future time -

> future, that is, so far as he was concerned - when a New Zealander should, in the midst of a vast solitude, take this stand on a broken arch of standing on Westminster Bridge - would view the ruins of London. Now, London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul's - as I'm a New Zealander myself, the parallel was striking, except that it was Westminster Bridge, sketch anything I was in too much of a hurry to stand and indulge in philosophic contemplation, and in any case quite a lot of London hasn't been ruined.

In fact London has been very little ruined. Compared to, say, Chungking, London can hardly regard itself as more than a slight case of ruin. Statisticians calculating how long it will take at the present rate of demolition - allowing 4% of buildings in the first year - to reduce London to the condition of ancient Carthage, make it forty years. Hitler is now 50 years old and may be expected to have lost interest long before that. In the meantime the pigeons still eat out of your hand in Trafalgar Square in the sunshine; St.Paul's still looks like an etching in the evening mist from a bus top (not that I should advise you as a general thing to hang about it much in the evening); Piccadilly still is the centre of the world and looks like it, although, of course, one may now sometimes have to jump a few barriers to get to it; the Albert Memorial is safe; The Thames hasn't dried up; and the London shops, with very few exceptions, are open as usual - as a placard says in one little shop which has had its front neatly blown out, "More open than ever".

London is still the mysterious place where resides history, and endless interest, but of course visitors of the future will probably see changes.

-2-

The things which non-Londoners find interesting about London are a source of wonder to the natives. Visitors always seem to want to visit one of the 10 genuine residences of Charles Dickens or to gape at Westminster Abbey or the Caledonian Market or to poke round the Tower or the British Museum. No Londoner would dream of going to the Tower or the British Museum unless he had to. So far as my own observation takes me I should say that these institutions are practically supported by visitors. I know East End Londoners who have been to the West End about twice in their lives, and I know Londoners of Mayfair who have never been to Lime house in their lives and, see no reason why they ever should go there. Visitors from abroad think of London as a collection of "sights". But to the Natives the "sights" are only background, not felt with the same exciting clarity as they are by the strangers seeing them for the first time in reality after, perhaps a lifetime of sentimental anticipation. Busses, undergrounds, offices, shops are much more the living symbols of the Londoner's daily life - his normal life, I mean. Just at present the living symbols are the underground shelters and the coffee-stalls after an all-night sitting.

However, if some old landmarks disappear, sightseeing charabancs will no doubt console themselves with new tours around the spots where places used to be. Rome and Athens have not lost their charms because the Coliseum and the Parthenon are not complete. And it is undoubtedly true (no thanks to Hitler) that if bombs destroy our beauties they may also with moderate luck destroy some of our uglinesses, which the more public-spirited of our citizens have long striven to do, but fruitlessly. Even in the heat of righteous indignation, the optimistic eye sparkles at visions of possible new glories. X Perhaps now we may get a London with an East End which is not a public disgrace, worthy of the good men and women that live there, instead of the slums that have just been destroyed; perhaps we may get a few modern avenues instead of the network of narrow twists and turns inherited from the Romans - who had no motocars; perhaps, even, we may get rid of some of the statues which London xis Smith and Mary of Forgotten Heroes with which London is littered. Hitler's bag of statues so far is small.

-3-

Only two. A report that the top had been blown off the Albert Memorial proved inaccurate, to the chagrin of those who fuss with this public question.

Now, about this native Londoner. I'm a cartoonist and it's part of my business to boil down the characteristics of peoples into convenient symbols. When I began as a cartoonist in New Zealand years ago I used to draw only two sorts of Englishmen - one swell one with buck teeth, top hat, spats and monocle, called Featherstonehaugh or Cholmondeley, who was always saying "Bai Jove!" And one somewhat thicker one with a fat face and cap, that said "Ow, I say!" I pictured them doing stupid things like going out rabbiting in golf suits, or trying to milk cows at the wrong end. All nonsense, perhaps, but acceptable to the view of young New Zealand.

The compliment was mutual. For on this side of the world there existed similar misconceptions about 'New Zealanders'. Most English people thought of "colonists" as wild fellows with beards, living a primitive life in the big open spaces, on horses, in red shirts and gumboots.

There may have been some basis once for these conceptions of British character, but if so they have long since disappeared. So far as London is concerned I can say that it is inhabited by ordinary decent people, not essentially different from ordinary decent people everywhere. "Ordinary" and "Recent" are trite words. The world has been reading a lot about Londoners lately; about their superlative qualities of courage, self-sacrifice, and endurance under one of the most searching ordeals of their history. Opinions differ, of course. Through the myopic eye of Dr. Gobbels we are perverted sensualists "licking our lips at the thought of our approaching doom"; in Italy we are all dead (official). To Soviet Russia we are an inexplicable phenomenon about whose conduct there is something suspicious somewhere; while to the U.S.A. we are all heroes. Well, it is very gratifying to have the rest of the world swooning with emotion at one's fellow-citizens. But when I say "Good morning" to my neighbours next door after a noisy night, we all look as usual

-5-

charity to a suffering old Jewish woman or a kind word tossed
to an enslaved Pole are offences earning the concentration camp
or the lash. It is the strength of Londoners to-day that they
are the head and forefront of the ordinary decent people everywhere,
the representatives of ordinary decency throughout the world in the
defence of the simple humanities.

The Nazis hold otherwise, of course. They propagate the lie
that this is a war of Imperialism, in which the British Empire
fighted only to keep its winnings. They constantly seek to
segregate us nationally. They would love us to work up to a
good old Mafficking mood, matching our boasts against their boasts,
imitating their fatuous national pride, flaunting our race
superiority, our John Bull, our Britannia, for that would justify
one of their fundamental denials of progress; the denial that the
progress of humanity can grow otherwise than upon the basis of a
narrow arrogant nationalism; the denial that the love of a people
for their native land can show itself otherwise than in crude
selfishness and pride in the destruction of others. That is what
these fools call patriotism. There is a different conception of
patriotism. There are patriots who would wish their people to
excell not by depressing others below their own level, but by their
example pointing the way for all peoples to higher standards of
well-being.

This is the faith of the hopeful ones who hold that the final
outcome and concummation of all human effort is in the producing
as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed and happy-hearted
human creatures. The economic and social problems of the present
day are formidable, and they have not been made easier by the
blundering stupidity and frustration in the past. The hopeful
ones obstinately hope on to solve them in an orderly fashion,
without sacrifice of, but on the contrary with increase of the
measure of freedom, dignity and responsibility humanity has already
won. Against them they have those who would deny all such hope
and who demand that the world give up the struggle, accept defeat

-6-

and resign its manhood to their so-called New Order, New Economics, New Efficiency. New Order! The oldest order in the world, the order of the master and the slave. New Economics! The economics of perpetual war. New Efficiency! Efficient only in the production of human misery.

That is, I think, what this war is all about, why the British Empire is at war, why London is a battle-ground, why there are so many young New Zealanders about, and why I have to hurry when I cross Westminster Bridge. As I walk off I pass on my left an enormous statue of Boadicea looking like Winston Churchill in night attire driving a couple of stone horses against invading legions 2,000 years ago. To my right is the delicate filagree edifice - an edifice, please, not a building - of Parliament, the House of Commons, the symbol of our struggle for the common man, our unremitting striving toward orderly growth to the fuller life down the centuries, with before it the statue of Cromwell, the middle-class Englishman who didn't like stupid tyranny and so got up and kicked it out. And so across the road, from where down Whitehall I can see on his column Nelson, the capitain who disposed of the last well-headed despot who tried to invade Britain. I won't pretend that I would be unmoved, but I should not consider London dead if these monuments were all blasted off the face of the earth. These are but stones, symbols of realities in the souls of men. The realities are proof against bombs and can only be destroyed by our people themselves. But I should think London worse than dead were it, like another great city across the Channel, to buy immunity for its body at the expense of its soul. Woe to such a city; for its walls will be a reproach to it for ever and the monuments of its fathers will sneer. This fate is not likely to happen to London. Londoners are tough. To those of you in New Zealand who are worrying about us, let me tell you of one old lady of Stepney. She had her house blown up over her head. When, after having been extricated and given the cup of tea which is the British comforter in all emergencies, she was asked how she