Climbing the Fountain of Eros: Part 2
Anteros, Flower Girls, Musicians & Poets
Buy it once, you’ll buy it twice,
it makes your clothes smell sweet and nice.
It will scent your pocket handkerchiefs,
sixteen branches for one penny,
As I walk through London streets
I have your lavender nice and sweet,
sixteen branches for a penny.
i
Anteros: My Story
People confuse me for my better known brother, Eros. We are close, we do have similar traits, and I love him, so it’s ok. To be frank, I’m here to help him stop regressing into a childish sentimentality, or anything too reckless. It’s happening all the time of course. I only have to turn my back and:
Love hurts, love scars
Love wounds and mars
Any heart, not tough
Nor strong enough
To take a lot of pain
Take a lot of pain
Love is like a cloud
Holds a lot of rain
(Boudleaux Bryant, 1960)
There you go - I end up being a love coach, a heart healer, a balm for the broken. I just like to remind people every now and then, that it’s actually me, not him, on the monument in Piccadilly Circus. If you pay attention you will see that, actually, most people come to me, not seeking romance, but because they are love sick and need support.
In 1893 when I was first unveiled, in this most honourable form, my aim was to point steadily down Lower Regent Street towards the Houses of Parliament. I enjoyed this angle with its flight of fancy down past the BBC Paris Theatre, via the memorial fountain in New Palace Yard, through Big Ben, over the River Thames and on the flight path to Paris. I have good connections over there. I'm about connections. No connection, no love.
In 1925 I was removed for the expansion of the Piccadilly Underground Station. Scaffolding went up around me, and as my monument was dismantled, I said farewell to Mrs. Bonner one of my precious flower lady friends. She had been setting up stall on her pitch, at my feet, since at least the mid eighteen-nineties. I have always considered her a close collaborator. Sometimes a flower is an arrow in disguise. She knew that only too well.
Some of my fellow deities were not happy with the crude underground earthworks. Especially Gaia - she’s been given very little respect since the recent increasing aberration in human behaviours. She’ll get her own back eventually. Anyway, I was very excited to be promised a spot in the garden at the Tate Gallery, but that fell through because of the cost. Second hopes were dashed for a possible space in the London County Council’s County Hall, but that also proved to be too costly. What price love? I don’t remember too much what happened next. I was sedated and put into storage, until a suitable space somewhere could be found. Not exactly on ice, but a very cold dream. Finally, I woke up, dazzled, to find myself on a patch in Victoria Embankment Gardens. Not too bad, if not a little less the centre of attention and a bit lower in stature, on a mere concrete stand. My magnificent stepped base, somewhat prosaically, had gone to be stored at No. 195 Clapham Road, home of chief railway electrical engineer Peter McMahon and his wife Amy. It always makes me smile to remember that Peter's middle name was Valentine. Come to think of it, Amy's middle name was Beatrice. In his Inferno Dante's beloved Beatrice arranges for the poet Virgil to escort him down into the underworld. So, maybe not so prosaic after all. But, at Victoria Embankment Gardens, it was very good to be near the bandstand. Music, food, jollity, flirting, all that. Nevertheless, I was eventually longing to get back to the Circus. Sure, being a leafy park, there was plenty of seeding of hearts and swerving of affection, to be done, but it was all a bit tame compared to the vortex of the city. I was starting to get a bit off colour. My bow was wilting.
So, I was delighted to be invited over to Thames Ditton in Surrey, where Bronze Statuary Founder A. B. Burton, looked after me and gave me a complete clean up, before my triumphant reinstatement at Piccadilly Circus on the 27th December 1931.
I noticed the roundabout had been moved a bit, I was more to the east, my base was higher, due to some extra steps, but otherwise I felt back at home. I was looking forward to New Year's Eve: the most people I would have seen in years. So many hearts humming, so much goodwill to savour. However things didn’t turn out well at all. A reveller, one Hugh William McKenzie, a clerk from Lewisham - I will never forget his name - clambered up my fountain, hauled himself upon me, badly broke my bow and tore one of my wings. Abuse. I forgive him and love him, as is my nature, but at the time…well Gods have feelings too, you know. Removed for treatment and trauma, I was finally, thankfully, back by the end of January.
ii
After a few steady years of good work, fixing fidelity, firing up faith, falling in love with the flower sellers and a good many sights that made my feathers ruffle with joy, I started to feel uncomfortable. Mars, who’s had the audacity to claim he was my father, was thundering his way across Europe. Obviously, we have never got on, so I was relived that the public knew me well enough to get me well out of the way. I needed a well-earned rest anyway. So, in 1939, as World War II built up, I went over to Coopers Hill, an Estate by the Thames, above Egham, in Surrey.
After a long rest and with relief that Mars, having wreaked bloody havoc, had gone off under a dark cloud to hide for a while, I was re-sited, with a fresh direction of bow, pointing down Shaftesbury Avenue. I won’t even repeat the jokes and petty puns that were thrown around. The post-war humour was perhaps understandably bawdy, but what are we fighting for? I know my Lord and why I’m here. Anyway, that glorious return on the 28th June 1947, attended by several thousand spectators, was somewhat marred by heavy rain. I loved the crowds, but what really touched me, as always, was the presence of two familiar old flower girls, back in their places, as they had been for at least fifty years. It was like I had never been away.
I had been long witness to the flower girls struggles. They had always had to fight their patch, right back to when I was first unveiled. Back then in 1886, I overheard someone reading The Times out loud. They were recounting how the secretary of the Memorial Committee had hoped that the County Council would 'allow the flower girls, to whom Lord Shaftesbury was always a friend, to retain their position at Piccadilly-circus, so long as they conducted themselves properly, as they had hitherto done'.
In February 1925, as I mentioned before, when I was removed, for the construction of the new tube station, their livelihood was under threat. At that time there were ten flower girls. After the underground disruption, six found new stands round the Circus, two went to Leicester Square, and the others found a site near Park Lane specially provided by the Duke of Westminster. I heard that The Times marked these events with a leading article.
I also heard later that whilst I was away, in 1930, the Works Committee of Westminster City Council had revoked the flower sellers' licences to trade on my patch, arguing that the traffic was too dangerous. There was public protest and a leading article in The Times, which led the City Council to reverse their foolish decision in time for my return.
I witnessed the sad passing away of lovely Agnes, the last flower seller of Piccadilly, in 1973. To this day I can still hear her chant, Violets, violets, lovely violets. I can still smell her scent.
iii
A much misunderstood fact is that gods don’t just live in the past. The advantage of being immortal is that you get to take in a lot of culture. We live in the present and we have our mutable tastes over the centuries. My ears are fine tuned. It’s a divine privilege. I hear all the sounds of London and beyond.
Holst and his Planets is excellent, though the first movement is over-rated, in my opinion. I could hear The Beatles, just down on Lower Regent Street recording an early show for the BBC in April 1963. Love, love me do; With love from me to you. My songs of course. But look, Reggae is cool in my book. Sometime in May 1973 I could hear this solid beat coming from the very same Paris Theatre. Turns out it was a guy called Bob Marley. Man of my heart, big lover. I remember one song well, Kinky Reggae:
I went down to Piccadilly Circus
Down there I saw Marcus
He had a candy tar
All over his chocolate bar
I think I might join the fun (I might join the fun)
But I had to hit and run (had to hit and run)
See I just can't settle down (just can't settle down)
In a kinky part of town
I thought, well this man has certainly seen plenty of what I have. Though I'm settled with the kinky scene, myself. Morrissey's Piccadilly Palare captures another mood:
The Piccadilly Palare
Was just silly slang
Between me and the boys in my gang
"So bona to vada. oh you
Your lovely eek and
Your lovely riah"
I've heard the coded lingo a lot and find the Polari slang refreshing and not so silly as Morrissey elides. So good to see you, oh you, your lovely face and your lovely hair. And your lovely gladiolus. My arrow flies straight, but I celebrate harmless twisted desires too. I'm here to make sure no one gets hurt.
Many musicians and poets have visited me over the years. Good anterotic photo ops. I welcome singers, seekers, winged spirits, romantics of the heart and dreamers of the soul. Muhammad Ali (or Cassius Clay, as he was at that point), ran past me on a training warm up for his famous fight with Henry Cooper in 1963. The famous beat poet, and close friend of mine, Allen Ginsberg has hung out with me a few times. I witnessed him write at least two poems describing and recording the sights of the Circus. He called them Studying the Signs and Studying the Signs II. The first was composed in 1965, around midnight, on the night of the famous International Poetry Festival at Royal Albert Hall. The next day he had a meeting with the Western Buddhist teacher Sangharakshita at the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara, to whom he admitted his reading was not great and that he had been drunk. The second was written in August 1973, following a tour of the North of Britain and the day after a brief visit to Manchester, travelling in the company of Scottish poet Scott Eden. Earlier that day he and Scott had visited William Blake’s grave at Bunhill Fields. Ah, Blake and his arrows of desire - another of my timeless friends. He was baptised just down the road at St James’s Church on Piccadilly. I’m only sad that he died over fifty years before he could have had a chance to meet me in this particular monumental form. Allen’s scattergun 360° imagery makes me spin on my plinth.
…as a high
black taxi with orange doorlight passes around
iron railing blazoned with red sigma Underground—
Ah where the cars glide slowly around Eros
shooting down on one who stands in Empire’s Hub
under his shining silver breast, look at Man’s
sleepy face under half-spread metal wings—
(Studying the Signs, Allen Ginsberg, 1965)
iv
It has been a good long post-war stint. For the most part I have felt cared for and appreciated. I have often been climbed on, but generally people take reasonable care. I remember some young lads, in leather jackets in 1980, whom, from their accents, seemed to be down in London on an adventure from Shropshire. One of them got right up into the top water basin, the other in the lower, whilst the third took a photo. I thought a policeman gave them a overly harsh telling off, as I quite liked them. They had an innocent charm. One of them had an unusual symbol of a raven on his shirt. That was the one who I noticed later did a sudden sneaky scuttle into a seedy Soho doorway, leaving the other two awkwardly bemused, out on the street for ten minutes. He came out beaming though. Not quite my style, more up my brother's alley, but as long as he's happy. His raven shirt reminded me of something.
I’ve got a rapport with the six ravens over on the Tower Of London – they are great conspiracy. Jubilee, Harris, Gripp, Rocky, Erin, Poppy and Merlina are the current flock. They are good for gossip and keep me up to date with all the latest. Anyway, I was impressed when I heard the Shropshire lads mention a punk band called The Stranglers. I wasn’t big fan myself, a bit too dark and rough for me. But they were another band whose music I had heard emanating from the BBC Paris Theatre in April 1977. One of the Tower of London birds, I think it was Gripp, said he liked one of their albums. But I can’t remember what it was called.
Towards the end of the 1980s some careless revellers left me with fractured left ankle, a damaged thigh, and I was developing a badly rusted inside splint. The swinging on my wings was what hurt most though.
I had never been anywhere as far North as Scotland before, but that’s where I found myself for a convalescent restorative eighteen month break. Well worth the £250,000 bill. Makes me feel better about the Tate and County Hall fiasco. On my 1986 return it was time to focus my energies back down Lower Regent Street. Though I was very disappointed to find myself set further away from the centre of the junction on a patch of pedestrian pavement outside Lillywhites and the Criterion Theatre. Really, how can a Circus not be a roundabout? It will do for now. It's the people that matter. I can still see it all.
The 2021 European Cup football competition was a little overwhelming, I must admit. I wasn’t taking sides, but the England fans impressed me with their enthusiasm and desire. More monument climbing, of course, but only a few bruises this time.
v
Allow me to shift from Eros to Logos, from heart to head for a moment. I know – outrageous - but I am a shapeshifter and can fly through the orbits of many experiential options if I want. Piccadilly Circus - a vortex, a place of centripetal and centrifugal forces, spoken about by Sir Isaac Newton, who used to live five minutes away down on St Martin's Street in the early 18th Century. I don't want to dwell on Newton, he's logos in extremis. He wouldn't have liked me at all. Upon seeing the Earl of Pembroke’s renowned collection of statues, his dry comment was that his host was a lover of stone dolls. Literature and poetry apparently didn't land for him either, the latter he deemed as a kind of ingenious nonsense. But listen, what intrigues me is that he had quite a passion for the colour red – crimson draperies, crimson mohair bed with crimson curtains, crimson sofa – in fact, crimson was the only colour mentioned in the inventory of his belongings. Makes you wonder doesn't it? But back to the spin-cycle of Piccadilly. I do write poetry too, you know.
Centripetal
Drunk driving around a roundabout,
the banked turn of an aircraft
gate-crashing the gravity of Gatwick,
children's swings,
a pendulum of laughter,
the dizzy blinking merry-go-round
or horse bobbing carousel,
the arc of a conker before crashing,
the revolution of planets around the stars,
hotwired to the heavens,
a washing machine dryer dreaming
loops of a roller coaster,
the gentle turning of the London Eye.
Bodies compelled towards a centre.
Centrifugal
Being flung outwards in all those instances.
Leaning in to compensate as the car goes into a curve;
the belly goes one way as the plane goes the other;
the child could fly off the swing (and sometimes do);
the conker causes bruises;
Mars and Venus feel flights of fancy;
the socks want more than feet;
the roller coaster ride gets scary;
people on the wheel of the London Eye
have their heads turned towards me.
And I end up being the centre of gravity again.
It's beyond me.
vi
Footnote
Violets, violets, lovely violets.
According to flower seller Agnes Pegg, in a brief BBC 1955 radio interview, this flower seller's cry was used even in the summer season, when there were no violets. She noted that the chant was dying out by the mid-1950's.
After a fifty year career, Agnes was the last flower seller of Piccadilly Circus. Passing away in 1973, she had started as a ten year old when she helped her grandmother in the same trade. Her death was noted in the Evening Standard and other newspapers, and part of her funeral procession’s route went through Piccadilly Circus and past the Statue of Eros/Anteros. The funeral car was adorned with flowers from Covent Garden, the traffic paused and there was a brief respectful silence.