London Blues Page 3

  ‘I mustn’t get my hair in a mess. I’ve only just had it done.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘I don’t want what it cost me going down the drain. Seven- and-six it was.’

  ‘That’s steep. We don’t charge that.’

  ‘Let’s do a dress rehearsal.’

  ‘Can’t you just film it?’

  ‘We have to get it right.’

  ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘I’ve put the electric fire on … full.’

  ‘I’m all goose pimples now.’

  ‘It won’t show on the film.’

  ‘Can I put the gas fire on?’

  ‘If it worked you could.’

  ‘Belongs in a museum.’

  ‘Put that Beatles record on.’

  ‘It’s Please, Please Me.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘This bedcover is filthy … don’t you ever wash it?’

  ‘Are we ready?’

  ‘Where did I put the spoon?’

  ‘It’s on the bed there … the other side.’

  ‘Here it is.’

  ‘Leave it there.’

  ‘Are you both ready?’

  ‘I am … yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want to run through it again?’

  ‘Ready? Ready … OK, then. I’m going to start the camera … and don’t get in the way. The camera has to see everything. Everything. But don’t look into the camera. I’ll tell you … as we go along. OK? Running. Now. Action!’

  A dowdy run-down pre-war council estate in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. A house more run-down than the others. A battered, rusted Ford Capri jacked up in the front garden and adjacent a redundant washing machine with weeds growing up around it.

  The woman standing by the front door looks like Elaine’s grandmother would have looked in 1963. But it’s Elaine herself. She’s wearing black slacks, a white blouse, a red bra. White high-heeled shoes. She’s been married twice and divorced twice. She looks lived-in, as they say. She was fifty last week.

  ‘It wasn’t me and anyway I can’t talk to you as I’ve got to pick my granddaughter up from the nursery.’

  That evening when she was all alone she would look into the bathroom mirror, explore the intricate topography of her face, and say, ‘I was young and silly then … but very attractive … very attractive.’ She would stare into her eyes for some time and wonder: where have those thirty years gone?

  A crematorium. Neat and ordered. Avenues of remembrance. Trained creepers and pruned roses. A tired fountain.

  Here’s a plaque set in the wall:

  BRENDA JENNIFER BUTLER

  7 July 1944 – 3 March 1965

  ‘Now in Heaven’

  Our Precious Daughter

  Mum and Dad

  She was crossing the road. Walking across the Edgware Road just south of Kilburn. Two black guys in a stolen car, stoned out of their minds. Hit and run.

  I look at the plaque again … one of the two memorials to her existence.

  NICK ESDAILLE: Perhaps the sixties, the 1960s, started at midnight on 1 January 1960? Perhaps they started half an hour later? Perhaps they didn’t get going until 1966 when Time magazine had that cover story about ‘London – The Swinging City’? Was it 1966? I’m not sure. Yeah, it was 1966. Yeah, I always remember that because it was the same year as the Moors Murders trial. Perhaps … perhaps the sixties, the 1960s ….

  This Yucatan is really goooood!

  So … so … what I’m saying is … that you … is that you can ask a dozen different people and you’ll get a dozen different starting dates. The sixties, I always think, didn’t really get going until about 1964 and didn’t end until about 1972 or 1973. The early 1960s were, in every way, the fag end of the fifties – post-war austerity, drab, predictable … and not very imaginative or stylish.

  You see the 1940s didn’t end until about 1956. Then it was the 1950s until 1963 or ‘64 or so.

  So Tim, you know, was a child of the 1940s who came of age in the 1950s and when he was out and about in London in the early 1960s it was still very fifty-ish. But I think he was, in his own way, one of those formative guys who sort of … uh … pointed the way. He was heading in the direction a lot of other people would go, but a good few years earlier. I suppose you could say he was one of the precursors of Swingin’ London, in his own way … even if his was a life on the margin.

  Yeah … paranoia … paranoia … there was a lot of paranoia about then. In fact it was a child of the sixties. No, it wasn’t all dope related. Dope paranoia is local, personalised stuff. Pretty small beer: me and my friends and whether that guy in the bar is going to shop me to the local drug squad. That kind of thing. Part of the drug culture. What I’m really talking about is what you might call political paranoia. Political in the big sense of the term. Conspiracies that affect the way we live and the way we perceive things. Conspiracy theory, if you like, as opposed to the ‘accident’ theorists like … like, say Christopher Andrew and his ilk. These guys see all sorts of conspiracies with the left wing … communist and socialist conspiracies all over the place, the enemy within and all that, but as soon as someone thinks they see a right-wing conspiracy or plot these guys are on the platform shouting ‘Conspiracy theorist!’ You know, as a put-down.

  I date it from 1963, the paranoia. There were two events then that got it rolling. First, the arrest and alleged suicide of Stephen Ward, the osteopath at the centre of the Profumo Affair. And then, a few months later, Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly shooting John F. Kennedy. But this was a double whammy: two days after Jack Kennedy got it Oswald got it too! Shot in the police basement in Dallas by a small-time Mafia hood, Jack Ruby!

  Now, who really was Stephen Ward? Who was Oswald? Who was Ruby? Thirty years later now, are we any the wiser? Are we any the wiser in real terms? We know a bit more, sure, but we don’t have any definitive answers. Plenty of surmises. Plenty of hunches. But no smoking guns. No true confessions.

  There was, I think, a mutually reinforcing feedback between the drug paranoia and the political paranoia. A dope smoker who is pretty sure that the local drug squad is up to no good – you know, licensing dealers, selling off seized quantities, fitting up people – is more likely to look at Lee Harvey Oswald and think, hold on a minute! What’s really going on here? What’s the real score? What’s the subtext?

  I can’t speak for other countries but for the generation that grew up here in the 1950s and 1960s dope got you looking at things in a different way. You found yourself questioning things your parents never did. That political sophistication may be the only valid legacy of the sixties. We’ll see.

  Nobody has the Big Picture. Even people on the inside don’t have it, but, of course, their picture is a lot more comprehensive than the one you put together on the outside. I don’t think Timmy ever thought he had it or, if he did, he never confided it to me. Nothing much at all was known at the time. The odd strange occurrence, the odd half-digested rumour, the odd suspicion. Nobody was sitting down and trying to put it all together. You couldn’t catch it in a single focus. When you are working on a newspaper you hear things all the time. There’s a kind of overload. You prick your ears up when there is something that is of immediate use. But the rest? It goes to the back of your mind … then out of your mind. Unlike American papers we don’t have journalists working long-term on Big Stories. Your typical hack wants the big one placed on his desk – all trussed-up and oven-ready.

  Sure, I was interested in these things and I made all sorts of inquiries and spent a long time with Tim but where could I have gone if I had nailed it? Do you think any sheet in Fleet Street would have touched it? Those were the days when every newspaper editor used to have a photograph of the Queen on his desk. These were the chaps who went to church every Sunday. God. The Queen. My Country. Truth was an unstable commodity that changed from day to day.

  What was it that Carlyle said about history? History is pres
ent politics. Uh-huh. These guys would have told you truth is present politics. Nobody had to lean on them and say ignore this one, old boy. They didn’t have to be told this. They knew what was expected of them. Now it’s changed a bit, but not that much. There are other outlets now and television too and there you’ll find some of the best shit-stirring investigative reporting around.

  So, you hear this type of thing and you can’t do much with it. And you can’t do much with it because you haven’t got the half of it. It’s like being blindfolded and let loose in a library. You know it’s all there but how are you going to find what you are looking for?

  Tim didn’t have the full story. Couldn’t have. But he sensed that there was something going on and he sensed that he might have been manoeuvred but he didn’t know why and, really, how. You can be used and not realise you are being used. You can also be used, realise you are being used, but misunderstand why and how you are being used. He got wind of something being afoot but that was it. You know something’s there but you don’t know what it is.

  2

  Sometimes I’m Happy

  And diligently noting decaying rumours and dissolving memories.

  – Caroline Severin Out of Nowhere (1967)

  ROCHESTER. About 25 miles east-south-east of London. It was here that the Romans, like the Britons before them, forded the River Medway some nine or so miles upstream from where it empties into the Thames estuary.

  Charles Dickens was here. Didn’t he spend his early years in Chatham, a mile or so down the road? And here too is ‘Cloisterham’ of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’ uncompleted last novel. And nearby are the marshes where at the beginning of Great Expectations Pip encounters the escaped convict. This is where I will be going.

  To start to know your subject, start to know the places he (or she) grew up in, lived in, died in. Place is very nearly person. Know something about the place and you’ll know something about the person. The topography of Tim is drawing me in. But first I need a cup of coffee.

  I drive out of Rochester, over the bridge and across the river to a place with the bewitching, adjectival-sounding name of Strood. Its name is its most attractive feature. Then off to the right and under the sweep of a railway viaduct and past the Steam Packet, a little Victorian pub built of stock bricks.

  The road rises and threads its way through the Medway town environs and then it begins a gentle and deliberate descent and ahead I see the rolling chalkland and its open fields.

  Now there are derelict railway lines and disused army earthworks, overgrown cattle paths and droves, pre-war bungalows ‘modernised’ to look like Texas ranch houses and electricity pylons taking seven-league steps to a monumental power station over by the estuary.

  A little way past Lower Stoke the road crosses the here infilled Yantlet Creek, then a level crossing on a lonely railway track and you enter the Isle of Grain. There’s a sign that says so, but now it is an isle in name only.

  Isle of Grain. Parish of St James. And in that Saxon intermediate division between the parish and the county, the hundred, this is the Hundred of Hoo.

  He that rideth in the Hundred of Hoo

  Besides pilfering Seamen shall find dirt enow.

  – Ralph Holinshed Chronicles of England (1587)

  Ahead, now, is the vast BP oil refinery. All pipes and towers and minarets glistening in the fading sunlight. At night it must look like a scene out of Blade Runner. And here a sign that says KENT TERMINAL but, more aptly, should read TERMINAL KENT.

  The Island of Graine lies very flat and low; the greatest part of it consists of pasture and marshes, the vast tracts of the latter in the neighbourhood of it, and the badness of the water, makes it a very unwholesome place; so that the inhabitants mostly consist of a few Lookers or Bailiffs, and of those who work at the salt-works, and such like, who have not wherewithal to seek a residence elsewhere.

  – Edward Hasted The History and Topographical Survey

  of the County of Kent (1782)

  Here too are the saltings and the marshes and quays and wharves of the estuary waters where the coastal birds still bravely adjust to every fresh incursion into what has been their habitat since their ancestors first leapt from the trees. Here is the snipe, the sandpiper, the moorhen, the wild duck, the tern, and a hundred varieties of gull.

  There’s a gentle rise in the road and ahead is the village of St James’s, more usually known simply as Grain. But village is the wrong word, it provokes images of some pastoral scene. Grain isn’t like that now. It looks like a transit camp for refugees.

  There are some old cottages on the left and then ahead the small Church of St James with its tiny squat tower that, at 31 feet, does not reach the height of the nave. This is a Norman church of masonry and mortar that replaced an Anglo-Saxon wooden structure that was old and decaying a thousand years ago.

  The road continues past the church and by some ageing cottages and then the High Street becomes a mere trackway, its metalling chipped and disintegrating, past what remains of the cottages of Willow Place, and there a scruffy carpark strewn with dented beer cans and emptied ashtrays and dog shit. Here, beyond the sloping grassland and the geometrical concrete blocks designed to prevent the Germans invading, and beyond the weathered groins and piers and half-submerged abandoned barges on the mud flats, is Father Thames himself, emptying into the North Sea. Then a panorama of Essex coastland that shades gradually into the grey swells of the sea and the grey swirls of the sky.

  Here is the end of the road. It goes no further. This is the end of the journey for us, but here was the beginning for Timmy. For here on the Feast of St Brocard, hermit, 2 September that is, 1937, a Thursday, just back there towards the church in a cottage now demolished, George Eric Purdom was born.

  Now the watery light of the morning merges with that of the afternoon and memories are stirred.

  MRS FLORENCE MIDDLEMOST: I’ve spent all my life on Grain. I was born here in 1918 just as the Great War ended. Mum and Dad had come down here from Gravesend. We lived in a clapboard cottage down near Home Farm. Dad used to put these poles up in the garden with a platform high above the ground and the herons used to come and nest. I think that’s one of my earliest memories.

  I never called him Tim or Timmy. I always called him Eric because that was his name.

  Eric’s mother was Joan and we were at school together at the National School by the church (the same school Eric went to). I had been there for a couple of years before she came. Her parents moved over from Borstal around 1930.

  Joan lived with her parents just the other side of the church in Willow Place but that’s not there any more, the cottage they lived in. Joan was a few months older than me, or I might have been a few months older than her. I can’t remember now. We were very close friends and spent all our time together when we were young.

  Joan had several boyfriends and then … well, you know what happened and it’s too late now to sweep it under the carpet. She was expecting. She wasn’t the first unmarried girl in Grain to have a baby and she won’t be the last. I think her mum and dad were very upset to begin with but they made the best of it.

  A bonny, fat little baby was Eric. He was always called Eric by us here, but George was his first name. I don’t know why that was so. And I certainly never called him Tim or Timmy. I don’t know where that came from.

  Joan never said who the father was and everybody used to whisper that it was him or him but nobody knew for sure. I think I know. I think it was one of those American engineers who worked down at the oil refinery where Port Victoria used to be.

  I got married that same year Eric was born and didn’t see much of Joan after that. When the war broke out she left Grain and took Eric to stay with her mother’s family up in Nottingham or Northampton until the war was over. I spent most of the beginning of the war with my little boy and girl in Oxford while George, my husband, was away in the Army. Then we came back to West Malling for the rest of the war and back to Grain in 19
45. Joan and Eric came back soon after that and then Eric started school here by the church, where Joan and me had gone.

  Eric was a lovely little boy, always full of energy and high spirits. A real handful. Also, very obliging. He used to carry my shopping back home for me, lend a hand in the garden and so on. A little gem.

  Joan married some time in the early 1950s and went to live in Rochester. I don’t know who she married. I think my friend Edna said he was a printer.

  The last time I saw her and Eric was in 1953. She came back to visit. And I know it was 1953 because that was when we had these great floods and we couldn’t get off the island. We were stuck here, we were! All of the Kent coast and the Essex coast too was under the sea.

  I never saw Joan again after that visit though we still used to exchange Christmas cards. And then one year I didn’t get one and I knew something had happened to her. She had died of cancer in St Bartholomew’s in Rochester. A long illness, I heard. Very sad. She was a good woman … and it will be nice to meet her again when I pass on.

  Eric, I think, went to work in the dockyards. A welder, or it might have been in the machine-shop. I really don’t know.

  I didn’t know he went to London … what is he doing now? Is he married? Does he have a family?

  VICTOR COULSON: Mrs Middlemost! I remember her very well. Is she still alive? She must be getting on for eighty! A real battle-axe in her day. She used to give us kids such a rucking if she ever caught us getting up to no good.

  Apart from her and Tim’s mum there was nobody else up there I would ever want to meet again … and Tim. I wouldn’t mind having a pint with him again.