London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
A very good afternoon to you London Walkers, wherever you are. It’s Sunday, November 30th. And here it is, your daily London fix.
I’m just back from my Sunday morning Hampstead Walk. Just me and one walker this morning. It was like riding the thermals over Hampstead in a Piper Cub. Just me at the stick. One passenger along for the flight.
Picked up the Observer on the way home. A front page splash photo. Tom Stoppard 50 years ago, looking like Adonis. And a ring of fire caption, something Tom Stoppard said: “Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.” Talk about landing centre stage under a single spotlight! Never truer words about words. Twice as true here. This is a podcast, after all.
And there you go, that’s our lead-in. This one’s going to be about Tom Stoppard, who died yesterday.
And here’s a show-stopper for you.
It’s slightly personal, this one. Mary knew him.
She worked with him. Was in his wonderful play On the Razzle at the National Theatre. In her words, he was a lovely man, a joy to work with. And regularly did things left us all in awe. He was often at rehearsals. If there was a stretch that wasn’t working he’d say ‘give me a bit of time,’ retire to a dressing room and come out half an hour later with a completely reworked, rewritten passage that did work.
So, yes, ave atque vale – Hail and farewell, Tom Stoppard. How did it feel under this roof. Well, the first feel, as the news came in, wasn’t so much shock as a kind of quiet.
A thinning of the world.
As though a light that
had always been there,
flickering with wit and quickness and curiosity,
had finally gone still.
Tom Stoppard was 88.
A generous span of years.
Yet even long lives can leave
an ache behind them.
With Stoppard, the ache is gentle.
Not sharp,
not overwhelming.
More like the soft emptiness you feel when a room has been
tidied
and someone you love
has just stepped out of it.
He began life far from here.
Tomáš Sträussler,
a child whose early years were shaped
by flight,
by loss,
by the vast machinery of history.
He spoke of it much.
Not for decades anyway.
It was as though he had set those shadows on a high shelf,
where they couldn’t quite reach him. England became home.
The English language became
his instrument.
And he took to it with a kind of
grateful astonishment,
savouring the shades and
turns of the language
like a man discovering colour after winter.
You can hear that wonder in
his early plays.
Especially,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A play that feels as if
it’s been conjured out of thin air.
Light,
nimble,
philosophical,
playful.
Two minor characters wandering
through the tangle of fate.
Asking the big questions with
the innocence of children and
the anxiety of grown men.
It’s a play that smiles at you even
as it reaches for something profound.
Tom Stoppard had a gift for that.
A gift for the delicate balance.
The sparkle that hides
a note of sorrow underneath.
London recognised it instantly.
Here was a voice that was
clever without cruelty,
joyous without naïvety,
profound without pretension.
A difficult balance.
Tom Soppard made it look effortless.
His plays continued, each
with its own shimmer.
Jumpers.
Travesties.
Arcadia.
And later, The Invention of Love.
Always the language,
delicate and musical.
Always the mind,
curious and restless.
But there was something else too.
A kindness.
A gentleness of spirit.
The older he grew, the more
that gentleness revealed itself
in the work.
And then,
at the far end of his life,
he stepped back into
the shadows he’d long avoided. Leopoldstadt.
A play about family,
about loss,
about what happens when
the tide of the twentieth century sweeps through the fragile rooms of
ordinary lives.
It was a reckoning.
A return to
the questions of his childhood.
To the relatives he lost.
To the world that
might have been his
had history not shifted under his feet.
He wrote it with care.
With humility.
With a tenderness that
stills you as you listen.
A play that feels like the quiet turning of a key in
a long-locked drawer.
People who worked with him –
Mary among them –
speak of his gentleness too.
A man who sat at the back of rehearsals with a soft smile,
hands folded,
as if grateful for the miracle of
hearing his words spoken aloud.
Never grand.
Never pompous.
A man who understood the
enormous privilege of being heard.
It feels right to remember that, today. Not just the cleverness.
Not just the glitter of the language or
the intellectual somersaults.
But the man who carried it all lightly. Who seemed,
even in the midst of acclaim,
slightly surprised by it.
As if he had tiptoed into
a great banquet by accident and
been welcomed all the same.
London will feel his absence.
The theatres certainly will.
Walk past the National these next
few nights
and you might sense it.
A soft quiet at the edges of the building. A kind of respectful hush.
The city knows when
one of its great lights has gone out. Especially one who loved its rhythms.
Its low sky,
its conversations,
its river moving steadily
through the dark.
He once wrote a line that
has been quoted so often
it risks becoming threadbare.
Every exit is
an entrance somewhere else.
But today it feels fresh again.
True again.
Another of his gentle paradoxes
that hold a deeper wisdom
beneath the surface.
Stoppard has made his exit.
Where he enters now is
for others to imagine.
Into the memory of anyone
who loved theatre.
Into the future stagings of
the plays that will outlive us all.
Into the shelves of libraries and
the hands of young actors discovering, perhaps for the first time,
the pleasure of a line that turns just so.
Tom Stoppard died yesterday.
And the feeling isn’t despair.
Instead it’s something quieter.
A gratitude,
softly spoken.
For the life.
For the words.
For the way he
used the English language
as if it were a fragile instrument capable of infinite songs.
The world’s a little quieter now.
But the silence isn’t empty.
It holds the echo of his voice.
The lingering warmth of
a mind that delighted in thought.
A heart that, late in life,
found its way back
to its own beginnings.
A poet of ideas who never forgot that ideas,
in the end,
must be carried by people,
and that people are tender,
breakable things.
We remember him not
because he’s gone,
but because the light he cast is still here.
And we speak his name softly today.
Tom Stoppard.
You’ve been listening to This… is London, the London Walks podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com.
Home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company.
London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just-the-right-size walking tour company.
And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything.
It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £25 a walk. But you cannot get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for.
And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a searching question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world?
You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do whatever you have to do to attract and keep the best guides in London – you want them guiding for you, not for somebody else.
Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing.
It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason people who know go with London Walks, it’s the reason we’ve got a big following, a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality.
It’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished, in many cases distinguished professionals:
By way of example, Stewart Purvis, the former Editor (and subsequently CEO) of Independent Television News.
And Lisa Honan, who had a distinguished career as a diplomat (Lisa was the Governor of St Helena, the island where Napoleon breathed his last and, some say, had his penis amputated – Napoleon didn’t feel a thing – if thing’s the mot juste – he was dead.)
Stewart and Lisa – both of them CBEs – are just a couple of our headline acts.
Or take our Jack the Ripper Walk. It’s the creation of the world’s leading expert on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow, the author of the definitive book on the subject. Britain’s most distinguished crime historian, Donald is, in the words of The Jack the Ripper A to Z, “internationally recognised as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper.” Donald’s emeritus now but he’s still the guiding light on our Ripper Walk. He curates the walk. He trains up and mentors our Ripper Walk guides. Fields any and all questions they throw at him.
The London Walks Aristocracy of Talent – its All-Star Team of Guides – includes a former London Mayor. It includes the former Chief Music Critic for the Evening Standard. It includes the Chair of the Association of Professional Tour Guides. And the former chair of the Guild of Guides.
It includes barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, a former London Museum archaeologist, historians, university professors (one of them a distinguished Cambridge University paleontologist); it includes a criminal defence lawyer, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre actors, a bevy of MVPs, Oscar winners (people who’ve won the big one, the Guide of the Year Award)… well, you get the idea.
As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note… come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks.
And that’s by way of saying, Good walking and Good Londoning one and all. See ya next time.