Tuesday 22nd: Mathilde, Monday, School Trip

Mathilde knows two stories about the history of the city and its waterways, two stories that overlay and lap over each other, sometimes revealing things, and sometimes obscuring. The first story is the one that she has learned with her body, senses, and emotions: the story that her family have taught her, the one she’s learned sitting on her relatives’ shoulders, the one she’s glimpsed from her bike, the one she’s constructed from family photographs, anecdotes and misheard conversation; the story she’s shared with her friends growing up, and which is hidden from everyone outside her peer group; the one she’s experienced and felt, and which she can speak of with conviction and authority. The second story is the one she’s learned from books, teachers, politicians, art galleries, grand buildings and statues: the sanctioned story that the nation state tells about its values and its history.

They coincide, often, those two stories, but she still feels the tension between them when she’s telling the kids something – some fact or narrative – that coexists near a junction where the stories diverge or mesh. Which interpretation to choose? The conservative, surface-smoothing conventionality, or the sanctimony-puncturing personal aside that reveals a grittier, more multi-faceted reality beneath the even planes of the well-worn platitude? The mess and inconclusiveness of lived reality, or the idealised closed loops of the traditional narratives of improving material wealth and health, the unstoppable upward curves of progress and civilisation, the morally neutral and invincible dissolution of the world in the universal acid of capitalism?

What to tell the kids? How much to give away? How much complexity and ambiguity to include? Along with the moral dilemmas of objectivity/subjectivity, and of abusing her position of authority, she worries about tainting their innocent vision with the dirty pollution and ugliness of the world, and about the danger of painting an unflattering picture of a country and history that she genuinely loves, and which she considers – despite its failings and its half-closeted skeletons – to be the acme of freedom, liberality and democracy.

And yet, and yet…there’s always the pull of the truth, and her desire for sincerity and authenticity, and for even-handedness. As the barge moves down the river between non-descript black warehouse walls, smoke burbling from its little chimney, she’s thinking about the militia man opposite the café, thinking about how he abused the power invested in him, using naked aggression to threaten and cow her – to say nothing of the brutal mistreatment of the Russian. If she was half as moral and courageous as she likes to think she is, she wouldn’t have scurried back into the safe anonymity and distance of the café interior: no, she’d have said something – some intelligent, measured, non-aggressive and yet penetrating comment that would have made the militia man feel both stupid and ashamed. (She’s always lived – personally and intimately – in a world where intelligence and wit hold the whip hand: where people never resort to violence, but instead are disarmed by the superior intelligence of other people. The militia man, she knows, doesn’t live in that kind of a world. Despite her resentment of the unfairness of might being right, she knows that is an unanswerable authority. She must keep silent: her liberal, impotent, defeated silence [rooted in her lack of self-regard and her terrible fear of rejection??])

The warehouse walls pale, sprout satellite dishes, glass-fronted balconies, and expensive wood trim as the river widens and opens out into one of the old basins: docks in the heart of the city where barges and small ships could unload their cargoes from around the Empire and feed their goods straight into the burgeoning markets of the 17th century metropole. This particular dock, she tells the children, specialised in tobacco and ivory: the freshly-imported goods, smelling of the sea journey and of the lands where they originated (she leaves out the less-savoury smells that she knew would accompany goods and crews on those killing journeys), those goods were hauled straight out of the cargo holds by wall-mounted cranes – look up, to the left of that red-painted panel, and you can see the mounting block and the arm (the jib) that swings out over the water; the cranes swung the barrels and bales onto the projecting wooden platforms [technical name?], where toiling labourers would heave the goods into the warm, dark interiors of the warehouses. Then rich merchants would come and agree the prices for the goods, and sell them on to the people at the markets that are on the other side of the warehouses – we’ll visit one of the remaining markets later.

In this picture, the Empire was the world’s first economic superpower, an honest broker that took the risks to open up the world to trade, as part of a civilising mission that enabled the growth of the world’s wealth and the spread of the values of classical liberalism and democracy: everyone could be equal in a meritocracy of wealth: it was just an indisputable fact that there were some people and groups that were more equal than others, and these were the groups that the nation had to treat with; to do anything else would have been to interfere with the divine and profound order of nature – not something to be tampered with. It was one of the Empire’s proudest boasts that it never tried to enforce its beliefs and systems in any of the territories that it traded in or found itself settling or administering; only where economic recalcitrance, political instability or insurgency threatened the well-being of country or native people would the Imperial army or navy be forced to take action. As soon as order and stability was restored the Imperial forces would withdraw to their barracks or off-shore moorings, and the peacetime administration would be returned to the appropriate local authorities (or their Imperial representatives/proxies, where appropriate). The Empire was a fundamentally peaceful and beneficent force for civilisation and [??].

(c. 990 words)