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excerpts
from
issue#10... “Annette,”
she said, “ze climate ’ere is vairy damp, all
London’s little brick ’ouses look ze same, and
Eengleesh napkins are vairy smoll. C’est
impressionant.” She was deep in Shoque de Culture - not
surprising, as we were on the slowest and most inner-city-degraded part
of the 176’s route, the long crawl down the Walworth Road
between the Shell garage and Camberwell Green. Next to the bus, a vairy
smoll paper napkin was drowning in a dark brown puddle in front of a
Wimpy. Outside a phone box, a child stood still and weeping as, inside,
his mother’s arms flailed hope out of existence. I handed Fab
a Malteser - a bomblet of comfort to counteract the gloomy vision. She
let it melt on her tongue, nodding with appreciation. And once home in East Dulwich with bags unpacked and a cup of camomile in
her hands, she was shown an English napkin larger than ten centimetres
square, and cheered up a little. Far
from bringing peace to the nation’s bomb-scarred cities, the
ending of the Second World War heralded an unprecedented crimewave. The
full impact of this epidemic of lawlessness, fuelled by commodity
shortages and the black market, was felt in London. As well as products
such as sugar and clothes, unlicensed guns could be purchased from the
flamboyantly dressed spivs who prowled the bleak post-war cityscape. A
high proportion of those guns were probably battlefield souvenirs,
smuggled into the country by returning servicemen. When the
Metropolitan Police announced a brief gun amnesty during 1946, 18,000
firearms and over a quarter of a million rounds of ammunition were
handed over. By 1947, a staggering 10,300 Londoners between the ages of
fourteen and twenty were convicted members of criminal gangs. Alongside
these fresh-faced gangsters, there were the established criminals, not
to mention an estimated 17,500 deserters who, without the ration books
necessary to buy most items of food, had to break the law in order to
survive. The
bus turned serenely past the Swiss Cottage pub, chastely quaint in the
middle of its roundabout, and I reflected on the curious fact that,
regardless of how many long evenings one spends there, looking at the
snowshoes on the wall by the stairs, one is never sufficiently
convinced that a Swiss person has ever set foot in them or, indeed,
within 500 yards of the place itself. Streets
of Edwardian terraced houses have seeped towards the Palace, engulfing
the old racetrack, and a car park suffocates the site of the Victorian
era Japanese village constructed by real Japanese workmen. Antiques
fairs have taken the place of Bella the Performing Mare and her Great
and Novel Trotting Act. An air of absence pervades the Phoenix Bar.
You’d never guess, as you sit and sip a pint of bitter, that
you’re within feet of the spot where, above an admiring
crowd, Professor J.S. Baldwin of the USA ascended into the sky
clutching a rope under a hot air balloon, before letting go to release
his parachute and drift across the quiet suburban streets to land on a
Highgate roof. (On returning to earth he was presented with a bill of
£5 for damages.) MP
William
Huskisson, having already cheated death once, when a
horse fell on him during his honeymoon, found fame as the
world’s first railway fatality after being hit by
Stephenson’s Rocket just outside Newton-le-Willows. Yet,
despite being a nineteenth century cove, he’s been
immortalised not
in waistcoat and stovepipe hat, but wanly draped in a
consumptive’s bedsheet, limply fingering a scroll; or maybe
it’s a gift for Mrs H., who gave up on the honourable member
shortly after realising there was, frankly, only so much one could
blame on a horse. Maybe
it’s because I’m from a market town that I prefer
markets to shopping centres. Although if you want anything more exotic
from the fruit & veg stall in my home town than potatoes, swede
or onions, you’ll have a problem. Not so in Chapel Market.
Here, we have butternut squash, chard, mangetout, big bunches of
coriander, pineapples, star-fruit. For ready-made food, there is
takeaway sausage & mash, pad thai and spring rolls,
Manze’s pie house with its marble tables, the Indian Veg
£3.50 vegetarian buffet, and four caffs: Café
Millennium, Café Titanic, Café Perfecto... and
the legendary Alpino’s, which is English food in an Italian
style run by a Chinese family. You’d
like London as it is now. But not that much. When I moved back after
our time on the coast, I found it hard to cope with the lack of space.
You have to seek it out, like you have to seek out the friendly faces.
Woolwich is a pretty friendly place. People in red Ford Escorts keep
driving up to me while I’m out walking to enquire if I want
to buy a laptop. Actually, it may well always be the same person in the
same car. I’m not sure it’s always the same laptop. And
then I bump into a cute British girl with a quaint accent who keeps a
Rubik’s cube in her purse and my mind immediately leaps into
action, conjuring up scenes from our inevitable first date to... well,
who knows quite where, my mind is a tricky beast, and never seems to
factor in my inability to have normal social interaction with a
stranger of the opposite sex. But I still continue to think that maybe,
just maybe, in this new setting, in this new scene, I can go off and
achieve just part of that dream. In
1919, a cabbie leaving the Pimlico shelter in a slightly distracted
state of mind - he later blamed a particularly spicy sausage - missed
his turning on Vauxhall Bridge Road and discovered a whole new part of
London south of the river. When he returned, five days later -
wild-eyed, unshaven, a Crystal Palace pennant lolling limply from his
lamp - he began to regale his colleagues with tales of all the strange
and awful things he’d seen. Scared and bewildered, they hit
him repeatedly until he stopped. Then, having spiked his tea with
absinthe, they painted him blue and dumped him on the steps of Charing
Cross police station. But it was no good: the world had changed. It’s
not uncommon for the ponds of our London parks to be encircled by keen
fishermen at certain times of the year. Each with his own low-slung
chair, thermos and pot of fishy appetisers. Some even set up green
camouflaged tents, pitched discreetly between benches, from which they
can hunt overnight. The rest of us laugh and seem unable to understand
the attraction of sitting by a pool of water small enough to converse
across and barely ten feet from the edge of the South Circular. And
surely they catch the same sorry fish repeatedly; whose mouth must now
be one of the most heavily pierced in all of London. Most
of our time outside lessons had been spent discussing not only which
handsome men we would marry but also what profound and worthwhile
things we would do with our lives - because the nuns had always
instilled in us a belief in our own worth. “We are
not,” I remember Sister Fiorentina once saying, as she
perched cross-legged on the edge of her desk in one of the new
“shortie” habits some of the younger nuns were
wearing - hers also had an arrow on the back, as she had a thing about
Steve Marriot, though Mother Superior had been assured it was just a
very pointy crucifix - “mere sexual playthings, to be
pleasured against our better nature by people who claim to know the
drummer but don’t really, and then left backstage in runny
mascara and laddered tights to order our own taxi home.”
It’s to Sister Fiorentina that I owe my love of metaphor and
thus, you could say, my career as a writer. She really was a great nun. Terry
looked around in horror. The square stared back. He was surrounded; the
whole of the outside of the square had turned in on him. There had to
be a way to appeal to them but, dressed as a man-sized orange with the
Spicy Nell logo emblazoned across his chest, proving his innocence, he
could see, was going to be a little difficult. In desperation he
whirled around and saw that, to the north, up Sloane Street, everyone
was too busy retching to block his exit. It was his only chance. With
his legs poking out the bottom of the orange suit, he waddled off as
fast as he could, oblivious to the Number 19 bus tearing round the
corner. I
once went for a job interview in darkest Coulsdon, a journey that
involved a forty-minute ride in a slam-door train that ran
approximately once an hour, a muddy twenty-minute walk down a
semi-rural A23, and - unless I’m very much mistaken - being
posed questions three by a weird bearded bloke in order to cross a
bridge. Yet when I answered the interviewer’s enquiry about
where I’d grown up with the word
“Romford”, she responded, with a sharp intake of
breath: “That must be a bit of a trek into town.” When
Dr Ellman first asked me why I had so many clippings about Lisa, I
shrugged. I genuinely didn’t know. “Tragic
Beauty” Lisa - the unknown girl from the sticks
who’d just landed a part as the young Boadicea in a
controversial new play at the Royal Court, instantly condemned by Mrs
Whitehouse as "shameless filth", to quote the placards outside on
Sloane
Square - had excited the tabloids to quite vertiginous heights of
prurience and sentimentality; but it was only when the Sun interviewed
her flatmate, Jane, and I recognised Jane’s photo, that my
interest became more than passing. Not that I actually knew Jane; but
she was another actress, so we’d probably crossed paths at
some shoot or party; less than a year into my job at Terry’s
studio, I was already getting quite blasé about actresses
and models. I
passed a Young’s pub, with benches along the riverbank, and
ye olde English Budweiser brewery. Then it got muddy. Really muddy. I
found myself stomping through swampy puddles. The mud slopped in
through the holes in the sides of my Converse trainers and bathed my
feet in brown gloop.
The Ship had been my next temptation, but with jeans that looked like
I’d just got back from Glastonbury and feet that looked like
they’d been dancing for pigs, I saved myself the
embarrassment. I
scampered along to number 69 and had a
nice chat with Fr George, during which I established that Fr could
stand for Father or Friar, as he performs both functions, and also that
he used to teach English before having “a midlife
crisis” - his words, imparted with a peculiar air of
self-deprecation and self-awareness that here he was, a man in his
fifties, running a monastery in a terraced house in Brockley and, well,
here he was. He also told me how grateful they were for the
now-legitimately-theirs filing cabinet. Although as soon as it had been
placed in its new home, he added, the drawers had ceased to open; which
had caused some concern, on both a spiritual and a practical level. Readers,
I've been a fool. I've been a fraud. I've been a charlatan (and people
always said if you narrowed your eyes I looked like Tim Burgess). You
probably thought that my London knowledge was as rich and as deep as a
single malt, as wide and as broad as Janet Street-Porter's rictus grin.
But I have a gap in my nous bigger than the one that’s not
actually in Watford or the N1 Centre, and the shame of my ignorance
blights my soul - I feel as a Catholic priest might after accidentally
inspecting a choirboy's ruff. You see, the chink in my armour has
always been the size and shape of that parcel of land wedged south of
the South Bank, west of Deptford, north of Mitcham and east of
Battersea. There, for me, lurked roads less travelled, bus routes
untrammelled. But, lo, I have taken them. And I have arrived. All photos by Matt Haynes. |