
The second part of David’s two parter (scroll down for yesterday’s Part One)… When last we met, he was warming to the topic of Zeppelins (pictured)…
“…Then in Hampstead – well, strictly speaking in the Vale of Health (Hampstead's village within a village) – there’s this. It's from a letter the novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote. He was living there at the time.
‘We saw the Zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid the gleaming of clouds... quite small, among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it were splashes of fire as the shells from earth burst...It seemed as if the cosmic order were gone, as if there had come a new order*... So it is the end – our world is gone, and we are like dust in the air.’
Quite a contrast to our Vale of Health of a Sunday morning – especially the two white swans on a pond!”
(*In an upcoming post David explains why that long-ago, World War I aerial bombardment damage has survived – and, conversely, why there's so little World War II damage left. Stay tuned.)
In yesterday’s post, David wrote "Hampstead is London's skybox." That also happens to be the first note David sounds in his chapter on Hampstead in our book LONDON STORIES. Here are the opening bars: "Hampstead is London's skybox. It's fabulously well appointed. It's steeped in privilege. It affords the best views in London…"
David guides both Hampstead and (Shakespeare's and Dickens' Old City) this (and every) Sunday.
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