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Quote by Ruth Downie

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Medicus

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Ruth Downie

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“The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.”

PastTimeHistoryLondon
Book:The Private Patient
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“And to be fair, society is a lot more equal now. The main proposals in the Beveridge Report have been put into practice, we've been promised full employment, there's Nye Bevan’s health service, there's proper education for walks of life, and even with the rationing we're better fed now as a nation than we've ever been. This new Britannia is looking good, but where I think we're going to have a problem with letting the old Britannia go. It's clear the Empire had its chips, with India ready to abandon ship, but what's the betting that will try to hang onto our status as a grand world power, up there with Russia and the Yanks, despite the fact we’re in debt to her eyeballs? We can have the decent country we've been guaranteed, or we can keep up the illusion that we're still a great one, but I can't see that we'll have the money to do both. And knowing us, we'll probably decide that destitution is not too bad, so long as you can dress it in the Union Jack waistcoat.”

HistoryJingoismBritannia
Book:The Great When
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