London Night Photo
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
- Marcel Proust
- Marcel Proust
At Streatham, we
learned by means of a newspaper add that a bedsitter was vacant at 160 Ellison Road in South London,
In the days that
followed, whenever I passed through the downstairs hall on my way in or out of
the house, I noticed through half-open doors that the light in the rooms downstairs seemed filtered and dim, as though all the blinds had been drawn down. The landlady, a Mrs Shepherd, was usually nowhere to be seen, or else she
appeared in a housecoat. It seemed she spent a large part of her life in bed. Not with
her husband, though. He was shorter than her, anxiously well-meaning and most
surely under the thumb. But he was helpful to John and me, as it was through
his good offices that we found work with a local building and decorating firm.
The head of that enterprise was a certain Mr. Quantrill, a gentleman in his sixties who kept his hair well
greased and shiny, and was unfailingly clad in a tweed jacket embellished with shirt
and tie. It seems an extensive circle of aging ladies of his acquaintance
required his services from time to time for their even more aging dwellings, and
he never lacked for work. He employed a couple of old codgers ten years older
than himself called Bill and Fred to do the semi-skilled work of painting,
while the more highly-skilled task of paper-hanging was handled by a fellow in
his forties called Bob who unfailingly laboured with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. Any brickwork or plumbing was contracted out to acquaintances of Mr. Quantrill.
We two newcomers were tasked for 44 hours a week doing the preparatory work of stripping old paper from walls and scraping peeling paint from woodwork or burning it off with a blowlamp before smoothing it down with sandpaper. Our boss paid us the minimum wage of five and tuppence ha'penny an hour and he habitually delivered orders to us through fixed lips that invariably twitched into an obsequious grin whenever the aging lady of the place materialized.
When he handed us our wage packets on a Thursday, we tore off the tops at once, drew out the crisp notes, two fives and a one, and tipped the thick coins into our hands. In the evening we'd don suits and ties and tramp through the little passageway at the end of Ellison Road and cross the little bridge over a pathetic little rivulet dignified by the name 'River Graveney' and emerge on Streatham High Road, where we slipped into the nearest pub. We visited several pubs in the course of an evening, and after closing time at eleven we stationed ourselves outside a bright window, misty with condensation, and munched hungrily from a crumpled newspaper at a slab of battered fish, crisp and golden on the outside and flaky and white and steamy on the inside, and at a jumble of thick chips doused with vinegar and sprinkled with thick salt.
On Friday nights we conducted
a tour of several pubs again, and then Saturday we often went to the dance hall
in Streatham, the Locarno
Sunday found us down almost to the last coppers in our pockets, and we used them to get entrance to a cinema, thus providing ourselves at least with a little warmth for the evening and two hours of maudlin occupation. I recall that that experience was like visiting a cinema in Canada in most respects but one: the end of the performance.
The film was just coming to a close when several of the spectators rose from their seats and, accompanied by other likeminded opportunists, hot-footed it for the exit.
“What’s going on?” I asked John.
I got no reply, but just then the last scene of the film faded away and the screen was instantly re-occupied by a black and white image of The Monarch, perched on a horse and masculinised in military tunic with epaulettes, and crowned with a busby and plume that pointed to the sky, suggesting, I submit, where this fantasy of a woman descended from, while the orchestral notes of God Save the Queen wailed in the great cinematic space. At once, the rump of audience remaining, which either relished this ridiculous exhibition of jingoism, or which had not been sufficiently quick to escape from it, rose deferentially in their descending ranks to have the absolving balm of a Sovereign Monarch applied to their plebeian eyes and ears. Well, the Queen of Britain is the Queen of Canada, too, but Canadians never abased themselves before her image in such a demeaning manner.
Locarno, Streatham, entrance
Sunday found us down almost to the last coppers in our pockets, and we used them to get entrance to a cinema, thus providing ourselves at least with a little warmth for the evening and two hours of maudlin occupation. I recall that that experience was like visiting a cinema in Canada in most respects but one: the end of the performance.
The film was just coming to a close when several of the spectators rose from their seats and, accompanied by other likeminded opportunists, hot-footed it for the exit.
“What’s going on?” I asked John.
I got no reply, but just then the last scene of the film faded away and the screen was instantly re-occupied by a black and white image of The Monarch, perched on a horse and masculinised in military tunic with epaulettes, and crowned with a busby and plume that pointed to the sky, suggesting, I submit, where this fantasy of a woman descended from, while the orchestral notes of God Save the Queen wailed in the great cinematic space. At once, the rump of audience remaining, which either relished this ridiculous exhibition of jingoism, or which had not been sufficiently quick to escape from it, rose deferentially in their descending ranks to have the absolving balm of a Sovereign Monarch applied to their plebeian eyes and ears. Well, the Queen of Britain is the Queen of Canada, too, but Canadians never abased themselves before her image in such a demeaning manner.
We spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights in our bedsit. I especially remember Wednesday nights when we lacked even a coin to insert into the electricity meter, so to save power we stretched
ourselves on the floor with the lights out picking the lengthiest cigarette butts from an ashtray and lighting them in the red glow from a single bar of an
electric fire.
Two or three
weeks after settling in Streatham, Tommy turned up and took the smaller
bedsit next to ours. He soon found a job on a building site and now the three of us did the round of pubs and dance halls. When forced to stay at home
through lack of cash we got up to some asinine pranks together to keep boredom
at bay. One night, I remember, we cut costumes from newspapers and took turns
making senseless speeches clothed in them standing on a chair, and one afternoon we made a
sign in big black letters that read: 'THREE GIRLS WANTED', and hung it in the
front window. This amused us. Not so the landlady. Our invitation remained in
place for just two hours before she came swooping up the stairs in her shroud
of a housecoat, demanding that our message be removed.
When the delights of a Saturday night in Streatham faded for us, we turned our attention to the great conurbation of London
Wow! What a
thrill seized that crowd then! The hum of talk now faded and a few twangy chords were picked on a guitar. Several tentative
taps were made on a drum and the singer would grasp his mike tightly and lift it to his lips. And then the whole place would ignite into wild, hypnotic, irresistible sound.
'Put on your red
dress baby/Because we're goin' out tonight!'
That number was the one that thrilled me most, but whatever the song, I was always struck by the contrast between
the intense vitality of the music and the placid professionalism of
the players, for they spurned any kind of gyrating or cavorting such as is common nowadays in place of a truly professional performance. Sweat trickled from their faces as they played, but they remained as still as stone, and the
singer held his mike to his mouth as if he would eat it. They gave me a
lasting regard for R & B music.
Sometimes I was
so high on music and beer - and my own new-found freedom - that I proved something
of an embarrassment to my friend John. One night, I recall, Tommy wasn't with us for
some reason. Maybe he’d left by then or maybe he was out with a girl. Anyway, we two emerged from the Duke of Wellington to await a bus bound for the Elephant
and Castle, when I was suddenly seized by an urge to climb atop the bus
shelter. Shinnying up to the top and scrambling to my feet there, I was delighted to
find myself on a lamplit stage some eight feet above the street. At once I began whirling about dementedly and screeching: 'Let's twist again like we
did last summer!' while from some lower region where ordinary mortals pursued their pitiful lives I detected the sound of John's voice carping about the performance.
"You're
making a show of yourself!" he complained.
Just then two
girls walking by stopped and shot a glance up at me.
"What are
you doing up there?" one asked.
"What are you doing?" I slurred. Then, hanging by my hands from my feigned stage, I jumped down to the ground.
"How about
a kiss, babeee?", I swaggered in complete inebriation.
To my surprise
neither resisted when I seized hold of them, one after another, and planted a
smacker on their lips, while John, forgetting his embarrassment and far from
carping now, followed my lead and took a turn too.
Tommy was a tall lad who wore thick glasses with thick frames, and both his grin and his cockney
accent were broad. He had a taste for swanky clothes, I recall, which he could acquire owing to the superior wages he earned from slaving away on a building site.
When he returned from work of an evening, his clothes were spattered with mortar,
his skin was grimy with dirt and his hair was grey with cement dust, but after soaking himself for some moments in the bath, he would appear spotless in a fashionable shirt, a fancy
tie and an expensive suit, poised for a night out.
His company was fun at first, but his conduct could at times be callous. It happened at least once, I recall, that he met a girl at theLocarno
His company was fun at first, but his conduct could at times be callous. It happened at least once, I recall, that he met a girl at the
And then one
night we saw a side of him previously completely hidden. We three had gone up to the
Elephant and Castle and taken a bus along the Old Kent Road
Thomas A'Becket: closed as a pub long ago
But young men
can be sensitive about such nonsense. It was a stain upon my manhood to be
out-drunk by a whole pint or more, and I'm sure John felt the same. That is
until we'd left the pub and got to our bus stop next to a wooden fence, chest
high, that enclosed a building site, where great concrete pillars and cross
members rose yellowly in the light from the streetlamps.
But our chatter and laughter rapidly sank when Tommy promptly whirled half-circle, made a clutch at the fence and vomited onto the turf beyond. He clung to the structure in silence for a time, and then suddenly climbed across to the other side. John and I glanced at each other in amazement and then, stepping up to the fence, we peered into the semi-darkness below. Tommy was down like a dog on the ground, the back of his head bent toward us in the shadow of the barrier, and he was scrabbling with his hands in the dirt and the vomit.
But our chatter and laughter rapidly sank when Tommy promptly whirled half-circle, made a clutch at the fence and vomited onto the turf beyond. He clung to the structure in silence for a time, and then suddenly climbed across to the other side. John and I glanced at each other in amazement and then, stepping up to the fence, we peered into the semi-darkness below. Tommy was down like a dog on the ground, the back of his head bent toward us in the shadow of the barrier, and he was scrabbling with his hands in the dirt and the vomit.
"Ah, what
are you doing?" I asked.
"I’ve
dropped mi fuckin’ tooth!" he wailed.
We had no idea
what he was talking about. But soon it was clear that he had a false tooth
that had come out with the vomit and dropped to the ground. I don’t think he
ever found it, because his mood was venomous for the rest of the evening, especially
when we missed the last train from Balham and had to walk three miles to get
home. The malevolence of his mood was made blatant when, passing a darkened cinema door, Tommy suddenly broke his stride and turned aside to a film poster display case and smashed its glass cover with his
fist. From then on John and I avoided his company whenever we could, and he soon found alternative logging.
One Saturday
morning, just before Christmas, John and I neglected to turn up for work, which
negligence cost us our jobs. Our 44 hours were supposed to include 4 hours on a
Saturday morning, but we often preferred to luxuriate in bed nursing our
hangovers, though that indulgence was bought at the cost of four hours’ pay.
But the entries in Mr. Quantrill's order book were probably looking somewhat sparse as winter wore on, and our present dereliction of duty gave him sufficient justification for disposing of us. John decided now he'd had enough of London Liverpool in time for Christmas. I moved back in with my grandparents at
Morden and turned my attention to getting another job.
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