London Blues Page 5

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Come and visit me when I’m in London.’

  ‘I will. You got any sweets? Anything at all?’

  ‘There’s a Crunchie bar over there if you want one.’

  ‘Yeah. Good. Where you gonna get the dope when you’re in London?’

  ‘West Indians have always got it.’

  ‘I was reading that they’re brought up on it.’

  ‘Something like that, George.’

  ‘You’re really going, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I told you. Lots of reasons. I need a change from all this. I don’t see much opportunity in Rochester. I don’t want to spend all my life here.’

  ‘Yeah, but you said the other day you don’t know what you want to do.’

  ‘I know I said that. If you don’t know what you want to do then you don’t stay somewhere where there’s little opportunity to do anything. You go somewhere where there’s lots of opportunity to do different things. Like London.’

  ‘Like London?’

  ‘Yeah, like London.’

  ‘Hey! I didn’t know you had Earl Bostic’s Flamingo!’

  ‘Yeah. You can have it when I take the train out of here. Now, this little three-paper beauty is ready, so let’s light up and get our feets to do some walking!’

  ‘I’m with you, brother.’

  ‘Into the night life ….’

  GEORGE TREADWELL: We’re already history! He was right. That was over thirty years ago. It’s like we suddenly jumped from then to now. All those years! Yet if I close my eyes I can still see myself sitting in the room in that armchair. Listening to the music. Hearing the trains going by. Smelling the soot. Inhaling the joint and getting high.

  A few weeks later Tim was gone. He got the train to London and started a new life up there. Goodbye Rochester. I looked after some of his things and he came back and got them a few months later. I went to see him a couple of times … that would have been late 1959, early 1960. And then we sort of lost touch. My business started to take off and I got married and we started a family. I often thought of Tim. Still do.

  How old would Tim be now? Well, I’m fifty-six this year and he was a couple of years younger than me so that would make him about fifty-four. I can’t imagine him in his fifties. There was something Peter Pan-ish about him. He’s always stayed in my mind at the age he was when I first met him.

  Something very odd happened a little while ago concerning Tim but I’ll tell you about that after we’ve had dinner.

  Part Two

  1

  All the Things You Are

  You do your best with what goes on at the time.

  – Max Roach, quoted in Ira Gitler’s Swing to Bop (1985)

  I DIDN’T WANT to be stuck in Rochester for the rest of my life and if I hadn’t made a move then I would never have done, so, on Friday 19 June in the Year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine, at the beginning of the seventh regnal year of your Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, in the midst of what would prove to be one of the finest summers of the century, at a little before 3 p.m., after having had a farewell drink with the local lads, I picked up my tattered cardboard suitcase which contained 50 per cent of my worldly collateral, amongst which a toothbrush, a comb, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and a 12-inch long-playing microgroove record of Thelonious Monk small group recordings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, I walked along the Banks and down the High Street to the station where I caught what I thought was the first available train to London which, as it turned out, did not go to London, resulting thus in numerous changes and delays too boring to recount here that ended up with me not arriving at Charing Cross until 8.30 p.m. on this aforementioned Friday.

  On the journey up I found a copy of Queen magazine someone had abandoned. I read about the Aston DB3 that could do 120 m.p.h. and only cost £3,358 with purchase tax, about debs in pearls and twin-sets who have coming-out parties that cost £500, about the actress Valerie Hobson who is now married to a Tory millionaire called Profumo (odd name) buying at an auction a fur coat that used to belong to Lady Docker for £80, and I take out my wallet and count my life savings and I have exactly £23 12s.6d. to show for nearly twenty-two years of existence, and I consider myself ahead of the game.

  It was too late to do much when I got to Charing Cross so I caught the Circle Line underground to Bayswater and started looking for a cheap bed-and-breakfast hotel in which to stay. I’d been to this area before and I knew there were quite a few places over here. Most of them were full of tourists (it was June, after all) or too expensive but I eventually found a place that was almost empty. It looked more like a common lodging-house than a bed-and-breakfast hotel and it was situated at the Hyde Park end of Inverness Terrace. The outside of the building was crumbling and peeling and water dripped out of the rainwater pipes on to arc-shaped patches of moss. The sign over the entrance porch hung at an angle and said ‘The Ararat Continental Hotel’ and it looked like it was evacuated during the war and no one had ever come back. It was £1 4s. a night and for that I got a box room out the back with a hard bed and for breakfast a kipper, a cup of coffee and three pieces of toast.

  The next day, a Saturday, I spruced myself up and went down to Soho. I thought if I’m in London I might as well work in the centre. So that’s what I did. I went down to Soho and just worked my way up and down the streets going into every place that was open and asking if they had a job. I didn’t mind what I did until I got on my feet. Now Saturday was not perhaps the smartest day to look for a job but after a good few hours’ non-stop tramping about I got a job that was not bad to begin with and has now become pretty good … of its type. I got it on the Saturday and I started on the Monday.

  I’ve been in this job for six months now. I average working about 72 hours a week over six days. I get £10 12s. a week clear, which is not bad – about the same as a beginner policeman only he has got to pay tax and that. But I do a lot more hours. I started on £6 for a 40-hour week but my hours and responsibility increased – Mr Calabrese, who is the sole proprietor of the Modern Snax Bar at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Wardour Street, is getting old and wants more time to himself.

  At the Snax I work as washer-upper, coffee maker, sandwich maker, sweeper-upper, and errand runner for Mr Calabrese, Mr Emilio Calabrese, who is as old as the century and who arrived on these shores in 1920 from, where else? but Calabria down in the boot of Italy. He was interned during the war for being an enemy alien but harbours no grudge against the British.

  We’ve got a 1940 Wurlitzer jukebox in one corner but it doesn’t always work. Mr Calabrese usually prefers Housewives’ Choice and Workers’ Playtime on the radio and all that Light Programme stuff but I don’t want to hear Godfrey Winn (known in Fleet Street as ‘Winifred God’) introducing records and Patti Page singing Mockin’ Bird Hill. When he’s here we have the radio on and when I’m in charge it’s the jukebox, not that there are many records on it I care for. It’s just that it’s a bit better than the BBC.

  We get a pretty varied clientele here. We get freelance strippers and girls from the Windmill. Actors and actresses from the theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue. Taxi drivers. Musicians around the corner from Archer Street, usually when they’ve been turned down for work (we’re cheap, they go elsewhere when they get a booking). Maltese ponces. Retired spivs. Trainee thugs and crazy self-styled hoodlums in suits that are two sizes too big. Prostitutes, black and white and mixed, but mainly white and mainly old enough to be grandmothers and none of them with a heart of gold, least not the ones I serve espresso to. They go on like the old guys in the dockyards about the last war and how good it was for business and how well they did with all the servicemen and Yanks about. Business was never better. The best news you could ever give them would be to tell them that World War III has just begun. They’d love you for that.

  After I got fixed up with the job I had to get somewhere to live and that p
roved a little more difficult. There were plenty of places about but the suitable ones, the ones not too far out (because I didn’t want to spend too much time travelling to and from work) and in an OK sort of area were too expensive, while the places I could afford had frontages on Skid Row and were in out-of-the-way places, and you’d always be plagued with the thought as to whether you were going to wake up in the morning or not.

  The place I eventually found was just around the corner from the Ararat Continental, funnily enough. In fact, not around the corner, but straight up the road, on the continuation northwards of Inverness Terrace the other side of Westbourne Grove – Porchester Road, no less, as scummy a thoroughfare as ever graced the capital. Everything changes once you cross Westbourne Grove – it comes down a peg or two. But this suited me. A largish room on the second floor of a terrace for £3 12s. a week. Perhaps expensive for the area but all right in its own way. Albert Terrace, Porchester Road, London W2.

  The terraces here are all pretty run down, all let out into rooms. Nobody has done work on them for years. There’s a few local people here, but there aren’t many of them now I’m told. They die off and are replaced by people like me. People from outside London. Transients. Transients with great expectations who’ve arrived in London to seek their fortunes. Folks on the move. Folks on the run. In from the provinces (and even other countries), here to do, like me, what they couldn’t do back home. They’re in London to find something or to forget something; perhaps both even. After a while most of them have their hands so full just surviving they forget what originally brought them here. They slide from being ambitious to being merely on the make. Their eyes glaze over and they develop a stare fixed on infinity. Frank in the room opposite me is just like that.

  He’s from up north somewhere. Durham maybe. Works as a barman in a rough old pub near Paddington station. He’s a compulsive gambler, running up big bills with what in this area passes for the Mafia. They may not be organised but they’re nasty. He’s had a few beatings. He also borrows off them: ‘five for six’. Like the serfs in the Bible – the interest grows faster than he can ever pay it off. He’s trying to outpace the treadmill, but he’s spent so much time on it he doesn’t know any different. He wants it that way. He likes it that way. It’s a drug he couldn’t survive without. Debt is his destiny. If he was free of debt he wouldn’t have a purpose in life.

  That’s Frank.

  Then there’s Brizio downstairs, the Italian.

  He says he’s a tailor but I don’t think that’s true. He does something pretty lowly in the garment trade. He’s been here since just after the war, yet he still lives in a dosshouse like this. He’s addicted to buying new suits and seems to have a new one every week. If you saw him walking down the street you’d think he was some nabob from the Italian embassy. He buys new suits to impress little secretary girls and typists.

  He wants an English wife. English women like well-dressed men, he thinks. Therefore he’s got to dress well and that’s all he ever does. He’ll exist on a loaf of bread for a month. Cash can’t be diverted from clothes.

  South of Westbourne Grove there are plenty of nice houses in between the hotels. Big smart cars, quite a bit of money. But it’s going downhill, it’ll soon be like our area: crumbling tenements, absentee landlords, the rootless and the restless. It isn’t as bad over here as it is to the west in Notting Hill – there the houses are crammed with West Indians newly arrived.

  Westbourne Grove. Westbourne means the place to the west of the bourne or stream, according to a book on place names I borrowed from the library which I have yet to return. It is impossible to believe there was anything like a stream here. Hasn’t around here been built over since Creation? Could there ever have been green fields, woodland, meadows, and a bright flowing stream dancing over glistening pebbles here? But there was … and somewhere it still flows.

  I often vary the way I travel back home from the Modern Snax Bar, just for the sake of it, but I always travel into work the same way. I take a lazy stroll down Queensway and catch a bus on the Bayswater Road opposite Kensington Gardens. It takes me about ten minutes at this clip and it’s about the only exercise I get. Queensway has an air of raffishness and bohemian dissolution about it which I like. There are quicker ways of getting to work but this suits me. It isn’t so good when it is smoggy – it’s bad to breathe it in and you have to wear a scarf around your face.

  I always buy a newspaper from the newspaper man who stands outside Bayswater station. He’s a frail old man with snow-white hair and a tatty, wispy beard who looks like the wind could blow him away. No matter what the weather he is always wearing the same heavy full-length army coat. A coat that looks like it could match him year for year. One day I asked him what the silver badge was he wore on his lapel. He said he was an ex-serviceman and had been wounded on the first day of the Somme during the First World War.

  I catch a bus outside Queensway station. There’s an old accordion player who stands on the corner here playing a never-ending medley of pre-war popular tunes. He doesn’t open his eyes and may be, for all I know, blind. I don’t know what time he begins in the morning but he’s always there when I arrive just after 7 a.m. There are very few people about and I wonder who he’s playing for? Perhaps himself?

  The bus takes me past Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, which is why I sit upstairs on the right-hand side: there are good views across the parkland. I am back in the country then, day-dreaming of Arcady. I get off at a stop nearly opposite the top of Wardour Street and then it’s only a few minutes’ walk down to the Snax Bar. There’s an old shoeshine geezer here and every Friday he shines my shoes (with Kiwi polish – nothing less would do!). I give him a shilling and he says, ‘God bless you, guv.’ He really does.

  Wardour Street is where all the film companies have their offices, and Wardour Street is in Soho. And Soho is the Sin, Sex, Scandal and Crime Capital of the World. The reason I know this is easy – the News of the World tells me it is every Sunday … and why would they make it up?

  Soho is also, according to the same newspaper, the following: the Racket Capital of the World (why not of the Universe?), The Shame of a Nation, The World’s Worst Red Light District, The Evil Web at the Heart of a Nation, The Sink of Sinfulness (‘sinfulness’ doesn’t really pack a punch and, besides, the phrase is The Sink of Iniquity, but it lacks alliteration, and how many readers would know what iniquity was?), The Den of Degeneration, The Vortex of Vice (what else begins with a V?), The Pervert’s Playground (the apostrophe was wrongly positioned, it was about several of them), and for those readers who take a shine to a biblical allusion, Britain’s Brazen Babylon, Lucifer’s Lot and Satan’s Square Mile (it’s a lot less than a square mile. A square mile would take in Mayfair and Fitzrovia), and so on. The papers say this when they’re exposing the odd petty criminal here because with this accident of topography that petty criminal can then be painted as Public Enemy Number One, a Master Mind, a Notorious Mister Big. This is Soho. Anywhere else he’d just be a little hoodlum, a delinquent. Here he’s Important. Reality and reportage aren’t stored in the same jar, least not in these parts.

  There’s a tarnished trinity at work here: the cops, the criminals and the newspaper hacks. It’s a three-sided conspiracy with each side playing an equal part. The small-time criminals want to be portrayed bigger than they are, it increases their standing, makes them feel better. This, naturally, makes the police look better when they collar them. The public can see that they’re not just arresting no-hope amateurs, they are arresting Major Figures. Now, of course, the bigger the arrest the bigger the story and this is where the journalist plays his part. This is the Sinful Symbiosis operating daily in the cheap papers. What a merry-go-round, and no one to shout boo!

  I can think of a personified example to illustrate the trinity of cops, crooks and Fleet Street hacks.

  There’s a journalist who comes into the Snax Bar about twice a week named Desmond. Desmond Raeburn. He must be in his l
ate forties, perhaps older. A big guy with shifty eyes and a clammy handshake. He has this air of intrigue and conspiracy about him, like a corrupt detective: I know something you don’t know. He can ask if we have any bacon sandwiches and you feel like you’ve got to be careful in your reply. Charlie who works with me says he’d sell his mother down the river for a tip-off and I think he’s right.

  He looks a lot older than his years. You can smell the drink on him across the room. White, white skin. Eyes that have almost disappeared. Dirty greasy glasses. A half-smoked cigarette permanently in the corner of his mouth. Traces of his last meal always in the corners of his mouth too. A manner that is simultaneously ingratiating and intimidating. He’s the chief crime correspondent of one of the Sundays, ‘Scotland Yard’s Most Trusted Correspondent’, ‘The Reporter with the Ear of the Metropolitan Police’ and, in his own words, ‘The Crown Prince of Crime Reporters’.

  Desmond would not know how to investigate a story to save his life. He writes what the police tell him to write. He’s a publicity agent for the coppers pure and simple. His office should be in Scotland Yard not Fleet Street. They call him in, give him the bare details and he jazzes it up and makes them look like the Lone Ranger. All detectives are ‘gang-busters’, ‘crime-fighters’, or ‘knights in the war against crime’ who ‘wage war’ on the underworld with ‘scarcely a thought for personal safety’ and are content to know ‘the job is done’ and ‘the citizens of London can sleep peacefully in their beds’. This sort of drivel is trotted out every weekend. The close relationship doesn’t end when the copper retires. Then we get the obligatory Murder on My Manor: The Memoirs of Detective-Chief Inspector Backhander (‘As told to Desmond Raeburn’). Plugs for the book follow in his column over the next few weeks and this saves work as Desmond can then recycle what’s written in the book (which is just recycled from his column anyway). He gets paid for the same stuff three times. Nice work if you can get it.