Woolf’s London (Rooke I)

In London, I found Mrs. Dalloway. I bought the flowers myself. I heard the chime of Big Ben, interrupting my days, my ways. I saw myself in other people, and imagined how my consciousness might dip into theirs. On my first day in there, I decided to become a local. I knew there would be no point in trying to see London as Woolf saw it while playing the tourist. I didn’t try to see the sights. Instead, I investigated the rhythms of the city. I followed the crowds. I let myself be fascinated.

From my hotel on Bloomsbury street, I wandered to and through Regent’s Park, one of Woolf’s favourites. I laid in the grass under trees she might’ve known. I walked around, found cobblestones and fountains, and people—people wherever I looked. I sat on long green benches and told my jet-lagged eyes to people watch. This was one of the tasks I’d set for myself, my first step toward embodying the characters in her books.

Strangers came and went, stayed and sat. I listened to their chatter, their quips, their tattle; I saw how they walked, what they wore, where they stopped—as if these things would somehow suggest who they were, where they went, what they came from. I paid attention to the types of people who drew my eye, and I asked myself why. Like Woolf, I invented stories for them.

On the main thoroughfare, there, by a map, was the most colourful couple I had ever seen. They were fashionable in a way that suggested they’d stopped paying attention to fashion in the mid-80s. The sunlight dappled on them, for them. They looked like they’d waited their entire lives to be there; as if they’d done the whole thing, marriage, kids, jobs—but couldn’t quite wait the last year til retirement, and they’d left their meetings early, told the kids they weren’t invited. They had abandoned their suits and skirts and finally embraced the complementary technicoloured lives they’d always held close within them. They were extraordinary because they were newly liberated from the ordinary.

That afternoon, with my jet-lag-drunken perspective set on the public passersby, I saw pieces of myself in other people, lived in their lives for a time, until the sun went down, until my stomach stirred.

I accidentally stumbled upon Tavistock Square while exploring the city, which made finding Woolf’s bust feel all that much more magical. Woolf and her husband lived at 52 Tavistock Square (the blue, circular plaque commemorates this now gone London home), and the Square itself was another of her old haunts.

There were people everywhere on this day, making it difficult to get a photo of the park without a stranger wandering into frame. I think Woolf might’ve liked that though. London is the type of city you share with strangers, no matter whether you’re a local or tourist. It couldn’t be my experience without also being theirs. Strangers, I learned, are part of the scenery here.

People watching was something London quickly taught me I had never done properly before. Woolf called it ‘street haunting’: “Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.” In Regent’s Park, I sat on a bench and looked at people who sat on benches and walked the broad walk. In the National Gallery, I looked at people looking at paintings, taking photos of themselves in front of paintings. In Tavistock Square, I looked at people sitting and talking on the grass, I looked at Woolf’s bust overlooking it all. At the end of it, I felt that connection. And in a city like London, it was a liberating sort of illusion.