London Blues Read online

  The blonde takes his semi-flaccid circumcised member and begins rubbing it, deliberately and purposefully. She then sucks it with not much enthusiasm, barely taking more than its head in. The brunette comes over for a suck and does it with gusto, showing the blonde how it should be done.

  The guy is now as hard as he’s ever likely to be. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls the blonde towards him. She climbs on him with her back to the camera and he’s soon inside her. He supports her buttocks with his hands, parts them for the camera and gently moves her up and down. Her co-operation seems zero. The brunette kneels down in front of them to get a better look. Now the girls change position for another few feet of 8mm footage.

  The brunette climbs off and kneels down on the bed. The guy stands up, turns, parts her buttocks and starts to fuck her from behind. The blonde manoeuvres herself round on the far side so she can caress the other girl’s back. The detail isn’t too clear from this distance and I wonder why the zoom lens isn’t used for an anatomical close-up.

  The guy withdraws and the blonde flops down with her legs open waiting for him. He seems to have some difficulty getting into her and then he’s in and she’s off staring at the ceiling again. The guy fucks her in what must be a difficult position, supporting himself on his right arm so that he’s well above her, with his left leg at an awkward angle, so that the punters won’t miss any of the action. Not that one can make out much from this distance. Again, why not a zoom? The brunette sits on the other side of the blonde caressing her breasts.

  The guy withdraws quickly and the brunette reaches forward and rubs him as he ejaculates over the blonde’s breasts. The blonde turns her head away to stop any come ending up on her face and then slowly gazes down at her breasts as if to say: what on earth is that?

  The brunette leans forward and pulls the now detumescent penis to her mouth for a final quick suck. She then turns and scoops some come in a teaspoon that has appeared as if by magic and offers it to the blonde who opens her mouth and takes it in. She probably didn’t swallow it, but whether she did or not we will never know as the film now cuts to a title card, again the black marker on white card:

  That’s all, Folks!

  THE END

  Copyright NGN MCMLXIII

  Another card follows:

  Watch out for our COMING attractions!

  And then:

  THE MIRACLE WANKER

  FLORENCE OF ARABIA

  and

  SPLENDOUR IN THE ASS

  Soon on a wall near you!!

  Whoever made this had a rare sense of humour, certainly for the genre. The allusive coming attractions would seem to validate the joky copyright line of MCMLXIII (1963): the originals for these punning titles were all feature films released here in London in 1961 or 1962, years I can remember pretty well, cinematically speaking, as I had just left school and went to the pictures regularly, usually twice a week.

  This was the first sixties porno film I had seen in nearly twenty years. I had forgotten how amateurish they were. Not only amateurish but almost simple and innocent, like a saucy Victorian pin-up. Artless and unaffected. I remembered that everyone in them looked like someone you could have gone to school with. They were the kids next door and the film could well have been made next door. Now the porno films from Germany, America and Scandinavia are shot professionally in good colour, with sync sound, incidental music and glam girls tarted up and expensively dressed like a page three bimbo opening a supermarket (well, in the opening scenes anyway – they soon strip off). But I guess it’s what you’re used to, what you grew up with. If I’m honest with myself I have to admit there’s a nostalgia factor in the appeal of these loops. They’re the first ones I saw, they are the ones I associate with my youth, with parties where I smoked my first dope, with the whole sixties whirligig.

  The first blue movie I ever saw was at a party in a church in Chelsea, or rather a small chapel that had been converted into a house by a newspaper photographer who then lived there. I went with a girlfriend called Sarah Breakspear who I can still vividly recall after all these years. The only redhead I’ve ever gone out with. In the middle of the party someone switched on a little 8mm projector and we all enjoyed an hour’s worth of sleaze. It was fun, there was a lot of laughter. Try doing that at your average party now.

  I’m thinking about the film and the sixties generally when I get an epiphanic answer to the question as to why the zooms lens was used in the first half of the film but not the second. The reason was simple. The guy who appeared in the film was the director/cameraman. Of course! When he was in front of the lens there was no one to operate the camera. He was the auteur (if stags are allowed such a thing) and, further, it was his room the movie was shot in. After all, didn’t he look the sort of guy who would have a picture of Bird on his wall?

  The video had continued turning after the end of The Boyfriend’s Surprise Visit … showing nothing but solid black. But now there was movement and sound – the end credits of Get Carter were rolling, but I wasn’t taking any real notice. I was still thinking about the blue movie. Who was the guy? What was his background? Did he make any other loops? Where is he now? What’s he doing? Who was the blonde? Who was the brunette? Where are they now? Did they travel by bus, underground, taxi or car to the shoot? What did they do immediately afterwards? What did they work at? Where are they now? If they’re married, do their husbands know about their work in the movies? Why did they appear? How much were they paid?

  The Boyfriend’s Surprise Visit. Not a very original title but then the whole genre is formula stuff right down to and including the title. Boyfriend implies in this context a sexual relationship, and if he’s surprising his girlfriend she’s obviously doing something naughty. What you think you’re getting you usually get.

  Years ago I had an inventory of British dirty films seized by the police from a wealthy collector and dealer who lived in St John’s Wood. I remember going through the list and thinking how dreary and unimaginative the titles were. There were some 500 of them. Nearly half were of The Boyfriend’s Surprise Visit kind – titles like Caught in the Act, The Handy Man, The Casting Couch, Geisha Girl, Night Nurses, and so on. The next largest group were the explicitly direct, Get Fucked, Arse Lovers, Dildo Delights, and similar. Out of this long list only three were really memorable – two for their humour and the third for its sheer bizarreness. The humour award goes to Los Effectos de La Marihuana with Incestral [sic] Home in second place. This is what passes for urbane wit in this neck of the woods. The oddest title was stolen from a British theatrical musical of the 1940s written by Ivor Novello: Perchance to Dream. What a genteel title for a fuck film even if it does feature a dream sequence.

  As I lay in the darkness edging into sleep the film kept running through my mind. Who were the girls? Who was the guy?

  The director’s name I would later discover was Timothy Purdom. Well, that was the name he sailed under in the early sixties. He was christened George Eric Purdom. His friends called him Tim or Timmy. Why? I don’t know. And I never did find out.

  George Purdom. George Eric Purdom. He wasn’t an Eric. There was nothing about him that was Eric-ish, or George-ish. Given names that were misnomers, both of them. He was a Tim or a Timmy, the name suited him far better. A name he could live with. But where are you now, Timmy? Where indeed?

  Timmy’s a mystery all right. A real mystery. But, as I would discover, he was a mystery in an even bigger mystery. Forget about answers, we don’t even know the questions.

  This is a lost mystery of Lost London.

  I step off the underground train, walk along the platform and up the stairs. There is no ticket collector so I drop the ticket into a waste-bin and continue bouncing along in my new Reeboks and out on to the street. Queensway. Back in the 1960s it was a bohemian sort of place whereas now it seems mainly populated by Arabs, the less well-off Arabs, the ones that can’t afford Sloane Street and thereabouts.

  It’s a cold Sunday afternoon
and big rain clouds are massing in the sky, yet the place is as bustling as Oxford Street on a Saturday morning.

  To the south is the Bayswater Road and that part of Hyde Park that dissolves into Kensington Gardens, while to the north is Westbourne Grove where I now head. Up past the old Whiteley’s department store on the left, now revamped as some co-operative boutique collective with flags flying at high mast above it, and then across the Grove.

  I continue, in an easterly direction, past the road that leads up to the Porchester Baths, past the old ABC Cinema.

  I turn left on to Porchester Road and stop. I’m standing outside the Royal Oak pub, a place that looks like it must have been here for a hundred years or more. It’s a pub with more local than passing trade I would guess, an unprepossessing place that probably hasn’t changed since the war and one that won’t until the day a developer gets planning permission to demolish and redevelop, then it’ll become part of what it already seems – another part of Lost London.

  And there’s Timmy drinking at the bar, just in there, only a few yards away from me … but nearly thirty years ago. He’s part of Lost London too, the Valhalla of Memory. All the parameters are right except for that of Time. We could have met. Yes, indeed.

  I turn my head slowly. I know what to expect from sly peripheral vision glances. What was there is no longer there. I’m dealing in the vanished. The stuff of memories. The London that is gone.

  Here was Albert Terrace, built in the late 1850s or early 1860s. A tall terrace of mid-Victorian stock design – open basement, mezzanine, plus three storeys. Brick with stucco. Built originally for the middle levels of the middle classes who could not afford to live in the swankier area to the south along the Bayswater Road (which itself was for those who could not afford the airy elegance of Cubitt’s Belgravia on the other side of Hyde Park). One family (and servants) in each house with their horses and carriages kept around the back in the mews. But a special configuration of late nineteenth-century topography and demography resulted in the terrace descending into cheap multi-occupancy … and the plaster cracked and the wallpaper peeled and the carpets on the stairs got more and more threadbare while the rainwater pipes rusted and bracken and moss sprouted in the hopper-heads.

  I raise my head slightly and then slowly open my eyes and see what used to be there. I picture it as it was. Then I see what is there now and I see how the whole corner of Porchester Road and Bishop’s Bridge Road has been redeveloped in clean crisp brick. Gone is Albert Terrace and the mews behind and the other buildings. The past has been jettisoned like the rubble of Albert Terrace. Spacious expensive apartments rising high and protected above Westbourne Grove and the Royal Oak. And here incorporated into the design at street level is a Pizza Express facing the south, and a Budgen’s supermarket fronting Porchester Road. There is where Timmy’s crowded and untidy room would have been, just there I would say, behind an ornamental balcony that also no longer exists. Now a sheer wall of brick.

  This corner here is murmurous with time. Somewhere the past is still the present. Somewhere … there’s music …

  How high the moon?

  Tim is now loading a reel of 8mm black-and-white film into the movie camera. A Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk record might be playing on his portable record player. It’s the early 1960s and then when you were young your future, your life, had only one limitation and that was your imagination. If you could think of it you could do it. Anything was possible. It always is in the past.

  ‘Hi. Come in.’

  ‘Sit down … would you like a drink … or something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You got any Pepsi?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I’ve got some lemonade … I think.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re Elaine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You work with Brenda?’

  ‘No. We’re just friends.’

  ‘Elaine and me went to school together.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Yeah. Elaine works in a shoe shop.’

  ‘In the West End?’

  ‘Marble Arch.’

  ‘But I’m going after a better job.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It will be if I get it.’

  ‘I hope you do.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘This your place?’

  ‘I live here. Yes.’

  ‘Not very modern, is it?’

  ‘Suits me.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Brenda says you’re going to pay us £10 each.’

  ‘A tenner each … that’s right.’

  ‘We get paid now?’

  ‘As soon as we’ve finished.’

  ‘Yeah. What’s this going to be called then?’

  ‘I haven’t decided.’

  ‘See, he doesn’t know. I asked before … said he didn’t know.’

  ‘Well, probably something like Surprised by the Boyfriend.’

  ‘You’re the boyfriend?’

  ‘I’m the only fella here.’

  ‘What have I got to do?’

  ‘We can run through it … run through it in a minute when I’ve got the lights fixed … but it opens with you two alone here and you start getting fruity and playing with each other.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. And then I discover … I surprise you when I walk in and we have a threesome.’

  ‘So you appear in it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who looks after the camera when you are … doing it?’

  ‘Nobody. It’s on a tripod. It looks after itself.’

  ‘I don’t want to get pregnant.’

  ‘You won’t. I’m not going to come inside you.’

  ‘I’ve got to catch my bus at nine o’clock.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of any of these records … where do you get them from? I haven’t heard of … any … this lot.’

  ‘Jazz shops.’

  ‘Jazz … I don’t like jazz.’

  ‘Where are the records from these Cliff Richard sleeves?’

  ‘There aren’t any. I just have the sleeves.’

  ‘You just collect sleeves … so it looks good?’

  ‘No. They’re props for this … the film.’

  ‘Props?’

  ‘Just props … in the film.’

  ‘Don’t you have anything worth playing?’

  ‘There’s a Beatles EP there somewhere. Put that on.’

  ‘The who?’

  ‘The Beatles … you know … from Liverpool.’

  ‘I like Cliff.’

  ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘You know Roy?’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘My boyfriend.’

  ‘That Roy.’

  ‘Yes. He’s my new boyfriend. He works in a record shop. The Melody Bar … in Charing Cross Road.’

  ‘That sounds exciting. Can he get records cheap?’

  ‘No. But Cliff Richard went in there last week and there were riots … and the police were called. Summer Holiday got to number seven in the Hit Parade this week.’

  ‘Did he meet Cliff?’

  ‘Yes … and he got his autograph for me!’

  ‘Can he get me one?’

  ‘If Cliff comes back in the shop, he can.’

  ‘He’s the tops.’

  ‘Even my old gran likes him.’

  ‘Everyone does.’

  ‘Even the police.’

  ‘And Elvis does too.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Yeah. I heard this geezer say it on the radio.’

  ‘When’s he going to be ready?’

  ‘Soon. He has to get all the lights and that right. They pay him a lot of money for this. That’s how he can pay us a lot.’

  ‘Only a tenner!’

  ‘That’s more than I earn a week at Maison Eve. And you don’t earn that selling shoes!’

  ‘I never said I did, did I?’

  ‘It’s good … for an hour’s work.’
<
br />   ‘You see those photos in the paper today of Elizabeth Taylor wearing all that jewellery? Over £100,000 worth!’

  ‘What I saw today was a really nice black dress in a boutique in Old Bond Street. It was six guineas and I’m going to get it.’

  ‘That’s nice. I’m going to save it. We’re getting married soon and we need every penny.’

  ‘To Roy?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Does he know you’re doing this?’

  ‘Course not, stupid!’

  ‘Let’s just run through it … are you sure you two don’t want a drink?’

  ‘A drink?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This isn’t going to be shown over here, is it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. I told you. It’s being exported to Thailand.’

  ‘Thailand?’

  ‘That’s miles away, Brenda.’

  ‘Thailand? Near India, The other side of India … so don’t take your holidays there!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Thailand. In Thailand.’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so. We only ever go to the coast someplace. Someplace … like Ilfracombe … or Cromer.’

  ‘I’ve been to Cromer.’

  ‘Lots of boys there.’

  ‘But more in Ilfracombe.’

  ‘We went in my dad’s Dormobile.’

  ‘Lucky thing!’

  ‘Yes. He saved really hard for it.’

  ‘I don’t want to miss my last bus.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘I’ve got to get up early in the morning. I’m helping my sister-in-law.’