Sometimes graffiti have a relevance to the immediate locality-“James Bone is a bad kisser” or “Rose Maloney Is A Thief”-where they serve as silent messages, the written equivalent of drum-taps in the jungle. But there are also more general admonitions. In one of his prose works Thomas More quotes a fifteenth-century slogan written upon many walls-“D.C. hath no P”-which can perhaps be deciphered with the help of More’s summary that it “toucheth the readiness that woman hath to fleshly filth, if she fall in drunkenness.” One may surmise that D.C. denotes “drunken cunts” but the “P” is mysterious.
Any particular year, over the last thousand, will provide its own litany of curses, execrations and imperatives. In 1792, for example, these were some of the graffiti: “Christ Is God … No Coach Tax! … Murder Jews … Joanna Southcott … Damn the Duke of Richmond! … Damn Pitt!” In 1942 the most prominent graffiti remained “Strike in the West Now!,” and in the later part of the century the two most formidable slogans were “George Davis Is Innocent” and “No Poll Tax.” The city seems almost to be speaking to itself by means of these messages, in a language both vivid and cryptic. Some recent graffiti have been more reflective in tone-“Nothing Lasts” painted upon a brick wall, “Obedience Is Suicide” upon a bridge in Paddington, “The Tigers of Wrath Are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction” inscribed above “Rangers,” “Aggro,” “Boots” and “Rent Revolt” on the corner of Basing Street, Notting Hill Gate-the last being a potent example of the phenomenon of clustering. A wall may remain inviolate for many years but, as soon as one graffito is placed upon it, others ineluctably follow in competitive or aggressive display. Aggression can often be associated with sexuality. Many of these messages have an anonymous sexual intent which suggests isolation as well as desire-“Oh please don’t cane me too hard master … 23/11 I am 30 I have a/place at Victoria SW/I love dressing up I am wearing/pink panties now.”
The proper locale for these harsh and impersonal messages of love is, naturally enough, the public lavatory. It has become the principal source of all urban graffiti; here, in confinement and secrecy, the Londoner speaks to the entire city with words and signs that are as old as the city itself. One attendant told Geoffrey Fletcher, the author of The London Nobody Knows, that “the lavatory in Charing Cross Road was the place to go if you want the writing on the wall … make your blood run cold, it would.” In fact London lavatories have been notorious for centuries, and in 1732 Hurlo Thrumbo printed at Bethlehem Wall, Moorfields, a compilation entitled The Merry Thought or the Glass window and Bog House Miscellany. We may extract from these some of the more salient and, perhaps, immortal epigrams. From the “bog-houses” of Pancras Wells comes
Hither I came in haste to shit
But found such excrements of wit
That to shew my skill in verse
Had scarcely time to wipe my arse.
There then ensues a dialogue or chorus of other costive notes in which “write” is frequently rhymed with “shite” and “London” with “undone.” The anonymous authors’ clothing is “undone,” literally, in the London “bog-house”; but perhaps there is also a more plaintive suggestion that they have themselves been “undone” in London. From the “bog-house” by the Temple comes
No hero looks so fierce in fight
As does the man who strains to shite
and upon a tavern wall in Covent Garden
There’s nothing foul that we commit
But what we write and what we shit.
Sometimes there is a grand riposte to this city scatology. “It is the vanity of degenerates,” one Londoner inscribed, “to write their names here.”
The other principal source of London graffiti has always been the prison house, from the inscription of Thomas Rose upon the wall of the Beauchamp Tower in the Tower of London-“Kept close/By those to whom he did no wrong. May 8th, 1666”-to the cell of a modern prison where one inmate has written “You may be guilty/But what must this/be like for those/who are not.” These men also have been undone in London. Thomas Mehoe writes in 1581: “bi-tertvre-strange-my-trouth-was-tryed-yet-of-my-libertie-denied,” with words painfully but carefully inscribed with an iron nail. They are still preserved within the Tower, and in that ancient prison are many carvings, crosses, skeletons, death-heads and hour-glasses carved as tokens or symbols of suffering. There are words which are supposed to provide comfort-“Hope to the end and have patience … Spero in Deo … patience shall prevail” which can be contrasted with the graffiti found in the modern London prison-“Home by May … This is where I spent most of my life … It was just one/time I never got away by someone who got caught … Treat me carefully/I’m seven years/bad luck.” In many inscriptions the prison itself seems to be treated as an image of the world, or of the city, which will perhaps lend further significance to another graffito found upon a London wall-“I cant breathe.”
CHAPTER 19. All of Them Citizens
There are other kinds of anonymity. Dickens knew of a woman, seen in the streets about the Strand, “who has fallen forward, double, through some affliction of the spine, and whose head has of late taken a turn to one side, so that it now droops over the back of one of her arms at about the wrist. Who does not know her staff, and her shawl, and her basket, as she gropes her way along, capable of seeing nothing but the pavement, never begging, never stopping, for ever going somewhere on no business! How does she live, whence does she come, whither does she go, and why?” Dickens saw her many times; he never knew her name, and she could not have seen the famous novelist as he passed her and, perhaps, looked back.
I used to pass a dwarf, dressed in old clothes and with wizened features, who in a hoarse voice would direct the traffic at the crossroads of Theobalds Road and Grays Inn Road; he was there every day and then suddenly, in the summer of 1978, he was gone. There was, even more recently, a young West Indian who would walk up Kensington Church Street dressed in silver foil and with balloons tied to his wrists. A gentleman, known colloquially as “The King of Poland,” used to walk barefoot along the Strand in red velvet robes and with a wreath upon his head. He, too, vanished without warning.
These London particulars have their own locale and are rarely seen beyond it; they are the sprites or spirits of a specific place, and belong exclusively to the city. There was the “musical small-coal man” of Clerkenwell who, after his daily round was over, organised concerts in his lodgings in Jerusalem Passage; he died when as a practical joke a ventriloquist, known as “Talking Smith,” pretended to be the voice of God proclaiming his doom. There was Lord Queensberry, “Old Q,” who every day sat at the window of his house at 138 Piccadilly; although he had only one eye, he leered and winked at every pretty female who passed in the street. And there was “the afflicted girl-white faced and expressionless” who sat for many years close to the Horse-Shoe of Tottenham Court Road, “oblivious of time and inured to suffering through all the noise and tumult.”