No Darkness but Ignorance

The Statues of London is a large, heavy and expensive coffee table book. It was recommended by a reader and in spite of its drawbacks I’m pleased to own the tome.

May I briefly digress? A few days ago, I wrote this: Jean-Pierre Léaud – does the name ring a bell? If you are a cineaste you will be shouting “yes, 400 chimes”. A picky reader emailed that the film title translates as blows, not chimes, unaware that I am prepared to sacrifice accuracy for a feeble joke. So I own the tome and look at the book.

It was published almost yesterday; 2009. It is already out of date. I was walking across Leicester Square on my way to The National Portrait Gallery. Leicester Square has been dug up for ages but now is open for tourists to lounge around and buy cheap theatre tickets. In the centre there is this statue.

I didn’t notice that a circle of ground level water jets have been installed around the statue. As I took this snap an unexpected spurt shot up my trousers. The Statues of London makes the point that “there is nothing on the plinth actually to tell you that the statue is of Shakespeare; instead the inscription commemorates the donation of Leicester Square as a public garden by the MP Albert Grant in 1874”. Now “William Shakespeare” has been added to the inscription.

He nonchalantly leans on a pile of books with a scroll in his left hand. It reads ” where there is no darkness but ignorance”. The full quotation from Twelfth Night puts it in context.

Malvolio. I am not mad, Sir Topas: I say to you, this house is dark.
Feste. Madman, thou errest: I say, there is no darkness
but ignorance; in which thou art more puzzled than
the Egyptians in their fog.
Malvolio. I say, this house is as dark as ignorance, though
ignorance were as dark as hell; and I say, there
was never man thus abused. I am no more mad than you
are: make the trial of it in any constant question.

It is a peculiar quotation to choose when there is such a rich choice.

The other side of the road from The National Portrait Gallery is this austere memorial to Edith Cavell in marble and granite, unveiled in 1920.

She is a nurse from Swardeston near Norwich. She ran a nurses’ training school and clinic in Brussels that in the war became a Red Cross hospital treating the wounded of both sides. She became part of an underground network helping wounded Allied soldiers to escape, was arrested and shot by a German firing squad. After the war her body was brought home and is buried in Norwich Cathedral. There is this memorial to her outside the cathedral. Her London memorial depicting her in a nurse’s cloak is used as a perch by pigeons. I hope  some people recognise her courage and stoicism as they walk past.