Been riding broomsticks since she was fifteen.
Jimi Hendrix
Nothing now seemed strange in the narrow streets and the long brick terraces and the grey slate roofs with their clustered knots of chimney pots that I pondered from a window aboard the Air Canada plain that had carried me back to England’s pleasant land and was now whirring and turning above the vast metropolis of London. Oh, England, England - how I had yearned for you since my return to Canada nine months ago! The experience was kind of like coming home, although - strangely enough – I had just left ‘home’ some seven hours before.
With my feet planted firmly on solid earth again, I fled the hectic terminus burdened with my bags and boarded a bus bound for the nearest Underground Station, which was Hounslow West in those days, for the link to Heathrow had not yet been built. Two rocketing train journeys through dark underground tunnels conveyed me to the end of the Northern Line at Morden,
Morden, Surrey
where I boarded another bus for Rose Hill, before dragging my bags up Green Lane to 9 Evesham Road and knocking at the door.
Opening it, my Aunt Dolly stepped back in surprise (rather than delight, I mused) when she recognised her vanished nephew standing on the path, for she’d heard not a word concerning my return to England. But I stepped inside trembling with excitement at my plan for taking my cousin Terry by surprise when he retuned from work. But my excitement subsided when I was told that, instead of heading home after work, he would travel up to North London to join his girlfriend Gwen for his evening meal. Dolly rang Gwen then to say that I was back in England. When I took the receiver, Gwen sounded delighted to hear me, suggesting I should join her and surprise Terry when he came in.
Opening it, my Aunt Dolly stepped back in surprise (rather than delight, I mused) when she recognised her vanished nephew standing on the path, for she’d heard not a word concerning my return to England. But I stepped inside trembling with excitement at my plan for taking my cousin Terry by surprise when he retuned from work. But my excitement subsided when I was told that, instead of heading home after work, he would travel up to North London to join his girlfriend Gwen for his evening meal. Dolly rang Gwen then to say that I was back in England. When I took the receiver, Gwen sounded delighted to hear me, suggesting I should join her and surprise Terry when he came in.
That afternoon I took the Underground train up to the Archway, where I trudged up the road where Gwen and her mother lived, casting an embarrassed glance at the house where that bungled ‘love scene’ with Rita had taken place some 16 months before. Gwen, at least, was pleased to see me, and I told her why I was so unexpectedly back in England. She chatted happily about the snare we’d set for Terry until a knock sounded at the door. She disappeared to answer it and I heard Terry’s voice sounding in the hall.
I was seated in a corner of the lounge, the hall door to my left, so that when Gwen returned with Terry, he was turned away from me, still talking. He rambled on for a moment and then, his gaze drawn by the direction of Gwen’s, turned and caught sight of me. Then, swivelling thirty degrees, his head nodding backward and his eyes goggling wide, he stared at me speechless. I got up with a greeting and grasped a hand that came up like the lever of a machine. His stupefaction lasted for some seconds, but when he came to himself I related the story once more of why I was back in England. Bit by bit the talk took in events since we’d last met, but now and then he’d cast a crooked smile at me and just slowly shake his head.
I slept for two nights on a camp bed in the Wright residence, but on the third day my Uncle Vic took me aside to say that the ‘arrangement’ was not ‘convenient’. How is that for a sample of benevolence toward a nephew visiting from abroad? Scarcely a fortnight before in Vancouver I’d been welcomed into the home of a couple who were complete strangers to me! Again, with second sight, I see that my path back to Morden had been soiled beforehand. Doubtless, the news of my ejection from the family home had come a couple of months before, attended by how many slanders sanctioning it?
Launching a fresh quest for a place to lay my dejected head, I bought a newspaper. Scanning its ads page, I detected that a bedsit was vacant in West Wickham.
Launching a fresh quest for a place to lay my dejected head, I bought a newspaper. Scanning its ads page, I detected that a bedsit was vacant in West Wickham.
When I’d located the place and knocked at the door, it was opened by a stout elderly lady who showed me an upstairs room and a downstairs kitchen she said I could share the use of with her. The set-up seemed suitable, but then she spoke in rosy tones about another ‘young man’ who’d lodged with her recently and oh, what fun they’d had together!
Well, I hopped the old girl would not be too disgruntled when I proved something less than a barrel of laughs, for despite my recent attempts to tap the life inside me, I was still rather a serious young man, not least because I’d been unaccountably flung out on my ear three times by my own kin! But the room was suitable and the rent was reasonable, so, settling the matter at once, I took possession of the room and moved in later that day.
I now went round to see McClain. After accounting for my return to England, I asked if he had any intention of ever returning to Canada. No, he hadn’t, he said. Well, what, I asked, did he find so likeable about life in England to persuade him to make it his home? Maybe his answer would cast a little light into the shadowy corners of my own motivations. But all he could say was that he was fond of English humour.
Now that is an asset I neglected to mention in my former report of England’s seductions. There was no doubt about it. English people had a very well-developed sense of humour. That was shown not only in their everyday lives, where almost any situation could supply ingredients for a joke, but also in their radio and television programmes and in their films, which were indefatigable in fabricating laughs from the raw material of the national life.
It is also to be remarked here that the fellow who had come ‘beat’ to England seemed now to have assumed certain airs of Englishness as easily as he’d formerly adorned himself with a pair of Bermuda shorts, for when in some exchange about accents I expressed the view that people in our position usually ended up with a ‘mid-Atlantic accent’, he said:
“We-ooh, ah d’ya fink ah fee-ooh, awf cockney and awf Caneyedian?”
That remark didn’t sound at all Canadian to me. Nor was it meant to. It was intended only to show that he had acquired airs of Englishness as easily as he had adopted aspects of Americanism by donning a sweatshirt and Bermuda shorts.
When I told him I was in need of a job, he said he was then working for the South Eastern Electricity Board based at Croydon, and that if I liked to apply there I’d likely be taken on.
Croydon, 1960s
He was right. I was taken on – inducted more like. It was like joining the army again, for the first thing I had to do was go to the ‘stores’ and get my kit, which consisted of a long navy blue serge coat like a greatcoat, a pair of navy blue overalls, a pair of black leather boots, even a couple of pairs of heavy socks to wear in them! Pay was about fourteen pounds a week.
I was attached to a band of three men whose job it was to transport electricity transformers to building sites, where they were deposited in prepared locations. The ganger was a stout, middle-aged man called Harry, who wore a flat cap. The driver of the delivery vehicle was called Bob, a man who spoke only if spoken to, and there was an old fellow called George, coiffured with a flat cap too, who’d pick wild mushrooms in the fields whenever he got a chance. All wore old suit jackets over their overalls, for I suspect they’d long outworn or outgrown their greatcoats.
The first thing they did on arrival at the yard for work at eight every morning was to climb the stairs to the canteen to get a cup of tea and a sausage roll. Furnished with this repast, they would then descend to a cloakroom where, seated on benches amongst the hanging coats, they gnawed at their sausage rolls, sipped their cups of tea and gawped at the tabloids they’d bought on their way to work. There was no conversation. They might as well have been cows chewing their cud. When my new workmates learned my name and the fact that I came from Canada, that was enough for them. From my second day on, I brought a newspaper too.
At about half past nine, Harry decided it was time to do some work, so off he toddled to the works manager to get instructions for the morning’s job. He came back with a scrap of paper and led us to a shed where a throng of torpid transformers stood looking this way and that like puzzled sentinels awaiting transportation to places where they would be set humming to provide the electrical energy that delivers light and heat to human enterprise. His little paper in his hand, our leader then led us through the grey-painted formation of appliances, stooping here and there to check an information plate and occasionally consulting his sheet, until at last he laid a podgy palm on the impassive object of his search and took formal possession of it with some such words as:
“’Ere ‘e be.”
It might very rarely have been a monster, shoulder high and three foot square, sprouting cooling pipes on all sides, so that all of us had to put our shoulders to the job, or it may be our cargo was just several squat box-shaped gadgets, knee-high and maybe a foot by a foot and a half square, so that we could take one each on a hand truck. Once we’d put our payload in the back of the wagon by means of the tail-lift, I climbed in with old George while Harry took the passenger seat in the cab before we set off for our destination, often through the open countryside. At there final resting place, we’d site the small transformers under cover, while a large one might be manoeuvred onto a concrete pad poured for the purpose and left there in the open air like a lonely lookout.
Our task despatched, we’d head under Harry’s leadership for the nearest café, and when we’d settled ourselves round a table inside, the tabloids were unfurled once more and heads were dropped to peruse them. For five or ten minutes, the only sounds that emanated from our table were those of crockery clinking and pages rustling, but when we’d drained our cups and maybe tickled a tealeaf off our tongues, our mentor would invariably sit back in his seat and release a sigh as if preparing to make a speech, and after a moment or so would reveal the conclusions of his deliberations:
“Right, if we hang on here till ten past (eleven, he meant), by the time we get back to the yard it’ll be too late to do another job before lunch.”
The others would look up from their papers, sniff and sit a little straighter in their places for a second, as if to show their appreciation of this delicate piece of planning, and then bend their heads to the their tabloids again.
Once back at the yard, we’d creep into the cloakroom again and lurk amongst the coats till twelve, at which time we’d trudge upstairs for lunch. I always made the most of this meal by choosing meat, potatoes, two veg and a desert – invariably treacle tart and custard, unknown back in Canada – for it was the only proper meal I got each day.
In the afternoon, the same pattern was repeated (that is, we typically completed just one job) except that our return to the yard was occasionally delayed until just after five o’clock, finishing time. If we happened to roll up before five, we’d park in a nearby street till five past five and then nose through the gates. On asking the meaning of this peculiar procedure, I was informed that by five past five the bosses would have all left for home and our counsellor and guide would book us in two hours overtime.
Veteran as I am now of many English winters, I’ve often seen how the endless grey skies and the chill dampness of the air bite deep into some people’s souls and make them want to bite too. Such a one was Harry, who insisted on calling me ‘Canader’ instead of calling me by my name, and singling me out for ridicule because I was different from him and his cronies and much younger too. I just had to bear his jibes because, first, he was the boss and, second, I was still too much of a foreigner to have access to the means of defence and attack that a born and bred working-class Englishman might have had in his arsenal, so that I was vulnerable on two counts: as a dependant and as a stranger.
The newcomer, a big, meaty-faced fellow in his twenties was initially diffident and not at all ill-disposed towards me, but as he grew more familiar with his new social surroundings he grew bolder and began harassing me like Harry did. Certain kinds of people, I’ve noted, have a strong need to identify themselves with a group. That’s all right. But some of them, it seems, can maintain that sense of group identity only by abusing those who for one reason or another (history, background, culture, psychology, physical traits) are not very strongly identified with the group. This is the basis of racism, and these were the days when it was common in England to see appended to advertisements of accommodation the words: ‘No coloureds’.
It is also to be remarked here that the fellow who had come ‘beat’ to England seemed now to have assumed certain airs of Englishness as easily as he’d formerly adorned himself with a pair of Bermuda shorts, for when in some exchange about accents I expressed the view that people in our position usually ended up with a ‘mid-Atlantic accent’, he said:
“We-ooh, ah d’ya fink ah fee-ooh, awf cockney and awf Caneyedian?”
That remark didn’t sound at all Canadian to me. Nor was it meant to. It was intended only to show that he had acquired airs of Englishness as easily as he had adopted aspects of Americanism by donning a sweatshirt and Bermuda shorts.
When I told him I was in need of a job, he said he was then working for the South Eastern Electricity Board based at Croydon, and that if I liked to apply there I’d likely be taken on.
He was right. I was taken on – inducted more like. It was like joining the army again, for the first thing I had to do was go to the ‘stores’ and get my kit, which consisted of a long navy blue serge coat like a greatcoat, a pair of navy blue overalls, a pair of black leather boots, even a couple of pairs of heavy socks to wear in them! Pay was about fourteen pounds a week.
I was attached to a band of three men whose job it was to transport electricity transformers to building sites, where they were deposited in prepared locations. The ganger was a stout, middle-aged man called Harry, who wore a flat cap. The driver of the delivery vehicle was called Bob, a man who spoke only if spoken to, and there was an old fellow called George, coiffured with a flat cap too, who’d pick wild mushrooms in the fields whenever he got a chance. All wore old suit jackets over their overalls, for I suspect they’d long outworn or outgrown their greatcoats.
The first thing they did on arrival at the yard for work at eight every morning was to climb the stairs to the canteen to get a cup of tea and a sausage roll. Furnished with this repast, they would then descend to a cloakroom where, seated on benches amongst the hanging coats, they gnawed at their sausage rolls, sipped their cups of tea and gawped at the tabloids they’d bought on their way to work. There was no conversation. They might as well have been cows chewing their cud. When my new workmates learned my name and the fact that I came from Canada, that was enough for them. From my second day on, I brought a newspaper too.
At about half past nine, Harry decided it was time to do some work, so off he toddled to the works manager to get instructions for the morning’s job. He came back with a scrap of paper and led us to a shed where a throng of torpid transformers stood looking this way and that like puzzled sentinels awaiting transportation to places where they would be set humming to provide the electrical energy that delivers light and heat to human enterprise. His little paper in his hand, our leader then led us through the grey-painted formation of appliances, stooping here and there to check an information plate and occasionally consulting his sheet, until at last he laid a podgy palm on the impassive object of his search and took formal possession of it with some such words as:
“’Ere ‘e be.”
It might very rarely have been a monster, shoulder high and three foot square, sprouting cooling pipes on all sides, so that all of us had to put our shoulders to the job, or it may be our cargo was just several squat box-shaped gadgets, knee-high and maybe a foot by a foot and a half square, so that we could take one each on a hand truck. Once we’d put our payload in the back of the wagon by means of the tail-lift, I climbed in with old George while Harry took the passenger seat in the cab before we set off for our destination, often through the open countryside. At there final resting place, we’d site the small transformers under cover, while a large one might be manoeuvred onto a concrete pad poured for the purpose and left there in the open air like a lonely lookout.
Our task despatched, we’d head under Harry’s leadership for the nearest café, and when we’d settled ourselves round a table inside, the tabloids were unfurled once more and heads were dropped to peruse them. For five or ten minutes, the only sounds that emanated from our table were those of crockery clinking and pages rustling, but when we’d drained our cups and maybe tickled a tealeaf off our tongues, our mentor would invariably sit back in his seat and release a sigh as if preparing to make a speech, and after a moment or so would reveal the conclusions of his deliberations:
“Right, if we hang on here till ten past (eleven, he meant), by the time we get back to the yard it’ll be too late to do another job before lunch.”
The others would look up from their papers, sniff and sit a little straighter in their places for a second, as if to show their appreciation of this delicate piece of planning, and then bend their heads to the their tabloids again.
Once back at the yard, we’d creep into the cloakroom again and lurk amongst the coats till twelve, at which time we’d trudge upstairs for lunch. I always made the most of this meal by choosing meat, potatoes, two veg and a desert – invariably treacle tart and custard, unknown back in Canada – for it was the only proper meal I got each day.
In the afternoon, the same pattern was repeated (that is, we typically completed just one job) except that our return to the yard was occasionally delayed until just after five o’clock, finishing time. If we happened to roll up before five, we’d park in a nearby street till five past five and then nose through the gates. On asking the meaning of this peculiar procedure, I was informed that by five past five the bosses would have all left for home and our counsellor and guide would book us in two hours overtime.
Such was the oddity of British working life in the 1960s. Harry didn’t book overtime every day and he never booked more than two hours. “One should never be greedy,” he cautioned, “or the bosses might get suspicious”. Suspicious! They must have known!
And only a few short weeks before I’d been working like a convict on a chain gang for the City of Winnipeg. In Canada, it seemed, as in the States, you got paid substantially more money than you did in England, but you had to work for it. I just couldn’t understand the rationale behind a system where low wages were paid for little work. I mean, wouldn’t it make more sense to employ fewer workers and demand more work for decent rates of pay? Instead of that, another hand was added to our gang!
The newcomer, a big, meaty-faced fellow in his twenties was initially diffident and not at all ill-disposed towards me, but as he grew more familiar with his new social surroundings he grew bolder and began harassing me like Harry did. Certain kinds of people, I’ve noted, have a strong need to identify themselves with a group. That’s all right. But some of them, it seems, can maintain that sense of group identity only by abusing those who for one reason or another (history, background, culture, psychology, physical traits) are not very strongly identified with the group. This is the basis of racism, and these were the days when it was common in England to see appended to advertisements of accommodation the words: ‘No coloureds’.
Of course, those addicted to that manner of harassment are careful to choose victims that appear vulnerable for one reason or another. The newcomer had not the intelligence to realize that I seamed assailable only because I dared not requite Harry for fear of jeopardizing my livelihood. He failed to see that I had no reason to put up with any abuse from him. So it was that one day, one damp, grey autumn day, after Harry had just vented his frustration with the weather on me and for the fact too that he was just simply bored with lack of activity, he, the new recruit, joined the fray. Shaking with rage, I strode over and screamed a stream of abuse into his face like I once had done to a fellow officer cadet in the army. My present workmate never censured me again.
One morning inside the transformer storehouse, Harry indicated for our attention one of those knee-high devices already mentioned. One of us tilted it back while another shoved the bottom plate of a hand truck underneath it. When it was ready for movement, the others all clapped a paw on it’s top as if it were some sort of ceremonial offering. But I kept my hands to myself, for I couldn’t see the point of joining this performance. This was patently just a one-man job. Why pretend that it needed four? It was comical enough to watch the thing being wheeled out by one man, while two others raised alongside bent over, trying to keep their fingers on it!
“Canader, get your hand on it!” Harry hissed.
That demand rattled me because it implied I was lazy. But it wasn’t at all a case of laziness. I could hardly see how there was even space to squeeze into this scrum to get my hand on it. And I’d have felt so ridiculous!
“What for?” I asked. “Do you want me to take it? I’ll do it myself!”
But no, he didn’t want me to take it. He merely wanted me to perform a part in this pantomime. But my view was that I was not paid for pantomime, I was paid for work, and I knew from experience that I was already capable of far more real work than any of these comedians. It was very doubtful that any one of them had ever done a serious day’s work in his life.
In the end, Harry threatened to report me to the boss. Right, I thought, if he reports me to the boss, I’ll tell the boss just how little these tea-swigging, sausage-roll scoffing, tabloid-scanning sloths actually did in a day! Not only would I tell him that, but also I would tell him how the greater part of their work could be done by two men, never mind five! Admittedly if the boss acted on that advice, I’d be out of a job! But I was angry, and jobs were not that difficult to find in those days.
That afternoon I was ushered in to see the boss after Harry had had a short conference with him. Well, I never got a chance to say a thing! I was not even asked to account for my behaviour! It was simply enunciated to me that I had to do what I was told to do or I’d be out on my ear. And then I was ushered out the door. So from that day on, no matter how small the job was, my hand always appeared in it.
Evidently, I was being paid for pantomime.
Shortly after I’d made the move to West Wickham, I visited Janice at nearby Eden Park. I recall setting the scene for a little romance by sharing a settee with her once more in the television room, but then she ventured to tell me she’d developed some spices of disease that was ‘all through my body’. What! in the relatively short time since I'd last seen her? I wasn’t sure whether she was telling me the truth or not, but I felt she was giving me the brush-off. I never saw her again.
In the course of time, I got down to the business of doing some work on my correspondence course. I read Pride and Prejudice, which I enjoyed immensely, although it had left me cold in school. The reason for the difference was that by now I’d acquired a measure of real life experience to which I might relate the subject matter of books. After all, what else was Jane Austen doing but mocking the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of her society. Wasn’t I, too, learning to mock the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of my own society?
I wrote the required essay on the book and sent it off by post, but a whole two months elapsed before I got it back. I was at first delighted to find a mark of eighty percent affixed to the piece, but then baffled to find it naked of annotation. How could you ever get a hundred percent from this invisible teacher, I wondered, when he left you in the dark about his reasons for docking off twenty percent? Here was more hypocrisy. The ‘course’ I had paid thirty-three dollars of my hard-earned bakery money for was in fact quite useless to me, just another piece of pretentiousness. I never bothered to do any more assignments, I just read the books.
On October 15th I travelled up to Crouch End in North London to attend the wedding of my cousin Terry and his fiancé, Gwen. All I recall of the affair was that only bottled beer was served in the aftermath and that I had had only a couple before it ran out. What a biting contrast to the Ukrainian weddings I had attended in Winnipeg, where bear had flowed like water and guests danced to the sound of accordion music.
One night in October, I joined McClain and some of his mates in the Swan at West Wickham.
The Swan, West Wickham
They were discussing an upcoming party to be held at the Eden Park Hotel to celebrate, if I remember correctly, the twenty-first birthday of Eddie, Janice’s brother. Would I like to come? Certainly I would like to come. Although McClain’s mates held little interest for me and he himself hardly more, I thought there might be a girl or two in attendance, in addition to Janice, a girl I’d quite possibly not wholly given up yet. For girls were still very much an interest with me, despite my string of disappointments and disasters with them. In fact, I happened to be eyeing one up just at that very moment.
“What’s that girl’s name?” I asked McClain, nodding towards a barmaid pulling a pint.
“Margaret,” he replied.
When it was my turn to buy a round, I rose and approached Margaret. She was very thin and small-busted but I’d always had a weakness for thin women. She was pretty, I thought, with a lively manner and a warm smile. Very approachable too, she was, slipping easily into talk with me. Seemingly she knew about the party.
“Are you going?” she asked.
“I will if you go,” I said.
“I will if you go,” I said.
I don’t recall that there were many more than half a dozen at the ‘party’, including Margaret and me. She was certainly the only girl there. Even Janice was lacking. From what I could see it was just another piss-up for McClain and his rugby-playing chums, and a pretty poor one at that. I don’t suppose they knew any girls. Nobody took any interest in me, though my background was so dramatically different from theirs and I’d just arrived from Canada, but once they’d got a bit of drink in them a somewhat vulgar interest was directed at Margaret.
She’d perched herself on the edge of a table and I’d slid beside her. Several smutty remarks were then tentatively tried, and when these failed to awaken a response of shock or outrage, one of these rugby-loving wonders, one of these aficionados of male communal ablutions, who’d planted his posterior on Margaret’s other side, decided to try his amateur hand at the only kind of amorousness he could comprehend, that kind which would never conceive of approaching any female other than from behind! He passed his hand to the back of Margaret’s blouse and began snapping the elastic of the bra underneath.
Angrily, I thrust his hand away, for I’d marked Margaret out for my own. Not that I feared any competition here, no, for I felt that this forward, all too forward, bungling scrum-half halfwit was just showing himself up. No, I was angry because I felt that he was humiliating her. I may not have been the world’s greatest lover, but at least I felt a respect for women and would never have attempted to shame them. But Margaret’s response to the affair was something of a puzzle. Why had she not dug an elbow into the ribs of that impertinent chimp? Well, she was surely the most self-possessed girl I’d ever met.
From that time onward, Margaret and I went out regularly together. It was just a week or two after that episode, when I walked into the Swan and found Christine seated at a table there. Every time I had entered the place, I dreaded meeting her. I didn’t know what I was going to say. But the encounter proved a little less awkward than I’d anticipated, for I think she’d already discovered that I was back in England and going with Margaret.
“She won’t be any good for you!” she gloomed at me.
What? That sweet-faced, sweet-scented, self-assured little girl, whose enchanting smile would bring a spring breeze to the wintriest of spirits and kindle a spark in the coldest of souls! I’d take a chance!
Margaret lived in a flat with her father and her younger sister at Shirley. I can’t recall if the mother was dead or if the parents had separated. She worked in an office at nearby Croydon. As she also worked a couple of evenings a week at the Swan, too, I propped up the bar in there at those times, exchanging a few words with her while she pulled pints or just gazing at her while she went about her business. Then, too, there is a lingering, melting, memory of seeing her off at a bus stop afterwards, following a brief interlude in a dark shop doorway with my hands perambulating inside her coat and my mouth browsing her face and neck and wringing kisses from her lips.
On Friday nights we would meet somewhere and go out to a pub for the evening, and on Sundays I usually took a bus to the family flat where we would get intimate on the settee if there was nobody else at home, as seemed often the case, since both father and sister apparently liked to be out and about. Margaret was not marked by any sexual reticence, as she was a virgin no more, but we never dared to make love there, as you never knew when you might hear the twist of a key in the door. More than once this was the signal for a rapid and embarrassed buttoning and zipping and a quick spring to a sitting position just before the door opened.
The passing weeks saw us settle into a steady relationship. We were a ‘couple’ now. In acknowledgement of this happy state, one day I asked her for a picture of herself. At our next meeting she brought me a black and white photo, not a snap, but a proper portrait, though not a professional one. When I asked who’d taken it, she replied that she knew a fellow who practised amateur photography and that she sometimes modelled for him. At that, half a dozen hackles of jealousy sprung up on my neck. Who was this fellow? And what was her relationship with him? I wanted to know.
“Oh, he’s only a friend,” she smiled.
I rarely saw my landlady, even avoided her by using the kitchen only when I thought she’d settled into her lounge for the evening, for I was not the slightest bit interested in having any ‘fun’ with the old girl. Sometimes I wrote letters, and it was by letter that I arranged to go up to Heathrow one day in the middle of November to meet my old friend Willard Stangl, who was to begin a planned visit with me in England for some four months.
But how to get to Heathrow in time for the early arrival of Willard’s flight, a Saturday? My solution was to put myself to the cost of hiring a car for the weekend. Taking a day off work for the occasion, I went off to Croydon on the Friday morning and later returned to West Wickham, the proud temporary possessor of a shiny new red Vauxhall Viva.
1966 Vauxhall Viva
Hopping out in front of my flat, I was just reaching for the key to the front door when my landlady opened it.
“Give me the key,” she said acidly, holding out a senile hand.
What’s this? I wondered. What does she want my key for? But I never asked that plain question. I just lamely handed it over. What she said next I can’t recall, but I quickly learned that I was being booted out once more. Why? God knows. I racked my brain about that matter again and again, but could only come up with the presumption that I had profoundly failed to procure any ‘fun’ for her. But what was I to do now? Here I was without even a bed to lay my own head on and Willard coming tomorrow!
Luckily, I was not without friends. I got hold of Margaret as soon as I could and explained the situation to her. That night I slept on the settee of her father’s flat and next morning we were driving up to Heathrow to meet Willard with the news that we had no place to live. Back at Croydon, we scanned the Accommodation to Let column of a local newspaper. Then Margaret got on the phone and arranged for Willard and I to move into a double bedsitter on Avondale Road, South Croydon.
You may be certain we used the car to do some sightseeing on the Sunday, all three of us, before its return on the Monday, but I don’t know how Willard occupied himself during the days while I was at work during the week. On the following Friday, however, I didn’t feel right just leaving him at home alone while I went out for the evening with Margaret, so I invited him along. Thereafter he was with us every Friday night.
Now Willard was an intensely quiet type. He’d grown up on a farm some seven miles from Winnipeg and he’d left his heart there – either in the wood pile or the horse trough or the hayloft. Certainly he lost his virginity in the hayloft. He’d never really been comfortable with the hum and buzz of city life, even a city the modest size of Winnipeg, so what induced him to come to a cosmopolitan place like London is a bit of an enigma.
But here he was, looking about serenely and absorbing everything in that quiet imperturbable way of his that demanded nothing of anyone and made no fuss about anything. By contrast, my own nature, though essentially shy, had always been highly excitable. What excited it now was first the consciousness that I was back in the country I loved, second the discovery in one of its denizens a girl I was coming to care for, and third the gratification afforded by this new opportunity to renew my close companionship with my old friend Willard.
This giddiness got a rare hold on my fancy one Friday night as we three left a pub in Croydon and walked to the Town Hall, where Margaret always caught her bus home. At the bus stop, I passed the time by parodying T.H.E. Cat, the fatuous protagonist of a television series of the time in which some suave cove clad in black togs tom-catted about on rooftops apprehending malefactors and saving maidens from disgrace.
This giddiness got a rare hold on my fancy one Friday night as we three left a pub in Croydon and walked to the Town Hall, where Margaret always caught her bus home. At the bus stop, I passed the time by parodying T.H.E. Cat, the fatuous protagonist of a television series of the time in which some suave cove clad in black togs tom-catted about on rooftops apprehending malefactors and saving maidens from disgrace.
Well, flushed with this foolishness, my excitement ran so high that night as to be eyeing the heights of the Croydon Town Hall opposite. Damned if I wouldn’t scale the place like that sham television tabby. So off I crept across the road on my soft cat’s paws and tiptoed tail poised to a portico whose columns and roof showed faintly grey in the faded illumination from a streetlamp.
Photo of Croydon's old Town Hall, showing the portico I climbed in 1966
I now applied my alcoholically animated cat-like skills to this ancillary structure and in a couple of minutes I was on the roof of its portico. But now, overawed by a gloomy blank wall, I was at a loss about how to proceed. I looked down and across at the bus stop where the figures of my friend and girlfriend were dimly visible on the pavement. What if the bus came? I’d better get down.
Scrambling down now and jogging across to the bus stop, I revelled in imaginary rounds of applause and shouts of encouragement, for though I’d failed to scale the entire Town Hall, I felt I’d secured a wreath for my forehead and a place in the chariot of those who’d at least stood upon its portico. But no such plaudits were mine. I was greeted with steely silence. Oh ye idolaters, so apt to fall on your knees before the counterfeit feats of mere media mannequins, have ye no word for men of solid, though modest, accomplishment!
The bus we awaited never came. As Margaret had no alternative means of getting home, I suggested she return with us and stay the night in our room. She agreed. My pulse throbbed. As there were only two beds in the room, her agreement meant she was consenting to sleep with me. She was consenting to honour me with her precious feminine charms! My imagination was now tantalised by delicious visions of love, fantasies of gratification almost past human imagining. But then a voice, a profoundly unwelcome voice, sniggered somewhere in the shadows.
“Stargazer!” it taunted, “Who are you fooling? What do you want with a woman? Hasn’t it been proved again and again that for the things a man does with a woman you are not man enough!”
Mentally, I blocked my ears on the way back to our bedsitter where the three of us crept upstairs in the dark. When Willard and I had each got into our single beds, Margaret stripped to her bra and panties before climbing in beside me. Kissing her face and caressing her slim body, I was enmeshed in the archetypal love of man for woman, but the doubts still lingered. Margaret remained passive and Willard was yet awake. An excuse not to perform? Surely she would not want an approach anyway with my friend sleeping in a bed three feet away.
Then I simply slid down an incline into a well of booze-induced sleep. I don’t know how much time had elapsed when I awoke in a flood of sexual stimulation. Margaret was making advances. But though the temptation was great, no consummation followed. The old anxiety about inadequacy was still strong in me, coupled with worries about waking Willard.
December came round and Christmas, and then the new year was at hand. What to do to celebrate New year’s Eve? Willard and I finally decided to hire a car and drive up to The Empire, a dance hall in Leicester Square, along with Vince – whom I’d got back into contact with – his friend, Tom, and of course Margaret. In retrospect I may say that my relationship with Margaret had become a little strained. I think I am sincere when I say that my feelings for her were undiminished, especially since there had been little or no opportunity for sexual fulfilment. But her manner toward me had altered. I remember laughing about something that amused me on the way up to London and she called me ‘a bastard’. I tried to ignore her tone of asperity, taking it as an expression of lovers’ tiffs, for I never got angry at her. Anyway, I couldn’t dream of leaving Margaret.
The Empire Dance Hall, Leicester Square, 1950s
At the Empire, we chose a table on the upper level, unfortunately with no view of the dance floor. We had several rounds of drinks and then Willard went off to nose about a bit, to look for a girl, I suspected. I was happy with everything, the beer for a start, but also the dance hall, the music and my Margaret. At one point she went off to the ladies', so that Vince, Tom and I remained round the table chatting and laughing. Neither of these two ever went off to look for a dancing partner. Apparently they’d both formerly been victims of fickle femininity and had decided that, for the future, it was better to steer well clear of women. In fact both were marked misogynists. After a time, Vince got up and disappeared, but several minutes later he came back with a face of great gloominess.
“Colin,” he said, “Margaret is dancing with Willard”.
“So what?” I said.
“They’re dancing close together.”
Was there something in his tone conveying a hint of self-satisfaction at having been proved right?
“Ah, they’ll be back in a minute,” I said. I really couldn’t believe that my girlfriend Margaret or my friend Willard would …
But they didn’t come back in a minute. We sat on and on for fifteen or twenty minutes, all three of us now with a look of great gloom on our faces, mine painfully genuine, theirs, I felt, just a cover for a certain smugness underneath.
At last I got up and said, "Where are they"?
My companions rose and we tramped downstairs like an avenging trio to catch the culprits in the act.
I looked out over the hardwood floor in the direction where Vince’s finger pointed, and discerned amongst the swaying couples the figures of Margaret and Willard practically melting into each others’ arms. The sight made me wince and I was seized with a sensation of bitterness at this betrayal in a friend I valued and a girl I cherished. Mixed with this sensation was a feeling of perdition at love forsaken and a profound self-contempt for the gullibility that had failed to perceive even a single sign of this looming disaster.
“Right,” I hissed. “Let’s go!”
I’m not sure what my object was at that moment. I just wanted to get away from that unpleasant sight. We left the Empire then and found the car where I had left it in a nearby side street. I got behind the wheel and Vince and Tom got silently in the back. I suppose they were just awaiting the issue of this little drama. I didn’t know what to do now. I couldn’t just drive off and leave Willard and Margaret stuck way up in London. There would be no buses now.
We waited.
Half an hour passed and then I saw, in the rear view mirror, a male and a female figure rounding a corner in the light of a streetlamp. Reaching the car, Willard climbed in the back and Margaret stepped into the front beside me. I took the offensive straight away.
“What are you doing in the front? Why don’t you get in the back with him!” I spat, jerking my head backwards.
I don’t recall exactly what was said after that, but Willard said nothing at all. Likewise Vince and Tom, who were really only here in the capacity of spectators. The scene was played out completely between Margaret and me. I kept insisting angrily that she get in the back, that she belonged in the back with Willard, and not in the front with me. She protested vigorously, without, however, assuring any continued affection for me. Admittedly, the demand was highly impractical. She would have had to negotiate her way into the back with Vince and Tom, whom she’d only just met that evening, but I wasn’t being practical. I was just giving vent to my feelings.
At last my anger slackened and I drove off.
When Willard and I were alone at last, I taxed him with the affair. He was sheepish. I don’t suppose he’d expected any drama like the one he’d just witnessed could ever emanate from any conduct of his. After all, no such dramatics ever attended any carnality he had witnessed between cows or horses. Obviously, she’d just waggled her ass at him and he was powerless to resist.
Thus it was that the year 1966 disintegrated almost at the same moment as my love affair with Margaret.
Next morning, I took advantage of my hired car to drive down to Shirley on the pretext of retrieving a book I’d lent my former girlfriend. I had to see her just one more time and try – try what? To make her love me again? Forlorn hope. At her house, she brought the book out to the car and sat next to me to exchange a few words. She was sorry it had to turn out like this. She hoped I would find someone else. At the end, I remember, she opened her door and I grasped the gear shift, ready to go off somewhere, anywhere, to be alone for a time. She put her hand over mine, gave it a little squeeze and murmured,
“Good-bye.”
I had the impression she rather relished this role of angel of consolation to a rejected lover. God, what everlasting actresses women are! This one was rather like my second girlfriend, who sent me a letter sympathising with me for loosing her!
But I was stunned at Margret's veritable bravado when, later that day, she breezed into our bedsitter with a proposal to make: we three would continue to go out together, only she would be with Willard instead of me.
“You must be joking!” I jeered.
Then, turning to Willard, I said miserably, “If you and Margaret take up with one another, I will have to leave.”
She looked expectantly at Willard then and waited for his word. After a moment he said,
“I can’t leave Colin.”
Of course he couldn't. He'd be in London all on his own.
And then she disappeared from both our lives forever. Good-bye indeed, Margaret, little actress. You didn’t realise you were performing in a morality play. In angling for Willard, you rejected me, but in return for your pains all you got in the end was a rejection from him.
And I bet she was bonking the photographer, too!
Along with how many other buggers? I wonder. Suddenly, the bra strap snapping episode sprouted new meaning.
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