If they leave the Tower the kingdom falls, so after seven prime ministers in ten years I thought somebody ought to check
Sunday, the Number 9 Bus Home From the Tower
Let me say who I am, as I have not kept a diary since I was eleven and that one had a lock. I am twenty-two. I have a degree in English that I am not using and a job in the book department of a very large shop in Knightsbridge, where I sell cookery books to people who have cooks. I live in the box room of my great-aunt Cordelia’s flat off Brompton Road, rent-free, in exchange for doing her crossword clues about pop music and reaching things.
What I actually care about is London’s stories. The myths. The ghosts and giants and things under the pavement. My dissertation was on legendary London in English literature, and I got a first, and nobody has asked me about it since.
So I have decided to ask myself.
The Legend
Everyone knows this one. There must always be ravens at the Tower of London. If the ravens leave, the Tower will crumble and the kingdom will fall.
There are supposed to be at least six. They keep seven, to be safe. A spare. There is an official with the title of Ravenmaster, a Yeoman Warder, who looks after them. Their flight feathers are trimmed so they do not go far.
The story usually comes with Charles II attached. His astronomer complained the birds were getting in the way of his telescope, the King said get rid of them, and somebody warned him of the prophecy. So he moved the astronomer instead. To Greenwich.
It is a wonderful tale. I am sorry to report it is almost certainly not old.
The Awkward Truth
I spent a week of my third year in a library trying to find the ravens legend before the reign of Victoria. I could not. Nobody can. Scholars who have looked much harder than me say the first mention of ravens being kept at the Tower at all is from the 1880s, and the prophecy about the kingdom falling turns up later still. A lot of people think it took its present shape during the Second World War.
That was when it mattered. The Blitz frightened most of the birds away or killed them. The story goes that by the end only one or two were left, and that the Prime Minister himself ordered the flock made up again. Whether or not he did, the idea took hold. Britain had nearly fallen, and the ravens had nearly gone.
So the “ancient” legend is younger than my great-aunt.
I do not think that makes it less interesting. I think it makes it more. A myth that was made up recently, by a frightened country, to reassure itself, is a better story than one handed down from the mists.
Why I Went
I had the day off and I had been reading the news, which I try not to do.
There was a line in a report from the summer that I could not get out of my head. It said the new man at Number Ten was the country’s seventh prime minister in ten years.
Seven. I am twenty-two. When I was twelve there was one, and he had been there a while. Since then I have lost count twice. One of them lasted less time than a lettuce, according to a newspaper that put a lettuce on a webcam to prove it.
I do not have strong politics. I vote, and feel faintly ill afterwards. But seven in ten years seemed to me the kind of number that, in an old chronicle, would be followed by “and there were portents.”
So I got the District line to Tower Hill and paid an alarming sum to go in and count.
The Count
There were six on the green and one in the enclosure sulking. Seven. I counted three times.
They are enormous, close up. Much bigger than a crow. They walk about like bouncers. One of them took a crisp out of a child’s hand with a precision that was frankly professional. Another was saying something that sounded very like “good morning” in a deep voice. They are mimics. I had read that and not believed it.
A warder in the full Tudor outfit was nearby. I asked him, feeling silly, whether any had ever got out. He said that in the eighties one was last seen outside a pub in the East End, and another was formally dismissed for attacking television aerials. I looked it up on the bus. Both are in the record. The second one’s papers say his conduct was unsatisfactory.
So the kingdom’s safety rests on seven large birds, with a history of absconding and vandalism.
Ravens in Books
Because I cannot help it, some literature.
The raven has always been an omen in English writing. In the old Welsh stories, the giant king Bran, whose name means raven, had his head buried under the White Hill, which is where the Tower stands, to guard the island from invasion. So there may be something much older behind the Victorian story after all, even if nobody can prove the link.
Shakespeare’s ravens croak before a murder. In the ballads they sit on a dead knight and discuss eating him.
And Dickens had a pet one, called Grip, who talked, and bit the children, and whom he put into a novel. An American poet read that novel and reviewed it, and said the bird should have been made more of. A few years later he wrote his own raven. So the most famous bird in American poetry is the grandchild of a pet that lived off Marylebone Road.
When Grip died, Dickens had him stuffed.
What Omens Are For
Here is what I think, having stood on Tower Green being looked at by a bird.
An omen is a way of saying you are worried without having to say what about. The Romans watched which way birds flew. We count ravens. It is the same thing. You pick something outside yourself, something that cannot be argued with, and you let it carry the feeling.
A country that has had seven leaders in ten years is unsettled. It does not quite know how to say so. But it goes on paying a man in a red coat to make sure there are always seven ravens. That is the same number, I notice. I expect it is a coincidence.
Monday
I told Great-Aunt Cordelia at breakfast that I had counted and they were all present. She said, “Good. I should hate to have to move.” She has lived in the flat since 1961.
A customer left a printout in the shop last week, from a paper called the London Prat, and I have been reading it at the till when nobody is looking. It has been going as long as my great-aunt’s tenancy. Its British satirical news on the Tower ravens treats them as the last stable institution, and its London satirical news about omens made me snort in front of a woman buying a book about sourdough. There is an American one too, she said, Bohiney Magazine, where the national bird is an eagle and nobody trims its wings.
Seven. All accounted for. As you were.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
