Bleeding London

THE WALKER’S DIARY WRAPAROUND

It’s come as some surprise to discover just how much pleasure writing this diary gives me. I don’t quite know who I’m writing it for, but I have a sense that I’m not doing it only for myself. Perhaps I have half an eye on posterity. I hope that isn’t too silly or arrogant of me. I used to try to write when I was a soppy adolescent, and later when I first met Anita she encouraged me. She suggested I write a highly personal guide book to London, but I always thought there were enough unreliable guides to London. I didn’t want to add to the pile.

Besides, the problem I’ve always had with writing was that I could never finish anything. Personally I rather like the idea of unfinished works or interrupted masterpieces (‘Kubla Khan’, Edwin Drood), although I can see how a lot of people wouldn’t. But with a diary that’s not a problem. It ends where it ends. It can’t be a beautifully shaped artificial form. It’s the same shape as a human life. It ends because the life of the diarist ends. If you need to have a reasonable excuse for not finishing something, then death seems to me like the best excuse of all.

♦

I was sitting in a square formica booth in a snack bar in the Charing Cross Road, nursing a cappuccino in a worn white cup, pretending to read my paper. It was mid-morning and the place was empty apart from me and someone in the next booth, a woman aged about twenty-five. I am no longer shy about staring at people. I saw she had a sharp, narrow face, completely without make-up, but as I watched she began to apply mascara, eye-liner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil. Her eyes were set wide apart and they looked tired and sad and innocent, but as she worked on them they became more defined, more hard-edged, sexier. A slick of metallic blue and grey formed itself above each of her eyes, and finally she drew two long kitten points leading away from the outer comers. It made her look a little Japanese (and of course I thought about Judy). The woman worked hard, continually checking progress in a small circular hand mirror, and it took a long time. It didn’t look like a labour of love exactly, but it was something she knew she had to do.

I have been trying not to make assumptions about the people I see in London, not to jump to conclusions to reinforce the boring, limiting stereotypes. But if I had been forced to guess I would have said she was not a Londoner, not a native, that she was perhaps a tourist, though not on her first visit to England, or more likely a foreign student. I saw that she had a map on the table in front of her, but it was tattered and well-used.

At last the eyes were finished. I wondered if she was about to start on her lips, but she wasn’t. She put her make-up away, finished the coffee she’d been drinking and she was ready to go. As she got up she slipped on a pair of wraparound shades that completely hid her eyes.

♦

Walked along Wimpole Mews, the place where Johnny Edge-combe came looking for Christine Keeler and emptied a gun into the front door when Mandy Rice-Davies wouldn’t open it, finally taking a pot shot at her when she appeared at a window. Edgecome was only captured after a long siege at his home, somewhere far less desirable and glamorous than Wimpole Mews.

♦

I think the world is divided between those for whom time passes too quickly and those for whom it passes too slowly.

London is probably more enjoyable for people in the latter category than in the former.

The act of getting from A to B, whether it’s by public transport or in a cab or by car or on foot, always absorbs massive amounts of time. Partly it’s the matter of distances between places, the density of traffic, the inefficiency of public transport, but I suspect it’s more than that. The sheer nature of the city saps your energy and your ability to function. It’s fine if you want to kill time, you just make a short journey and before you know it you’ve lost an hour or more.

However, if you’re one of those people who’s always short of time the same rules apply, London still takes it out of you and that must be as maddening and frustrating as hell.

♦

In Lord North Street, a sign surviving from the war, painted on brick: “Public shelters in vaults under pavements in this street.”

♦

In Denmark Street (what used to be called Tin-Pan Alley), a young man with rock star looks and clothes was unloading guitars and taking them into a music shop. His image was very cool and hip and yet he seemed uncomfortable and self-conscious. I couldn’t think why but when he went to get the second load I saw that he was taking the guitars out of a Reliant three-wheeler, and a sweet old man, his father I thought, was sitting patiently at the wheel, doing a good turn, to his son’s excruciating embarrassment.

♦

In Ilderton Road, Rotherhithe, I saw a red sportscar with six raw eggs smashed on the bonnet.

♦

In New Cross, a shop specializing in chess sets, one of them consisting of London landmarks, with cab shelters as pawns, the Tower of London as rooks, St Paul’s Cathedral as bishops, equestrian statues of Cromwell as knights, the Post Office Tower as the king, and Thorneycroft’s statue of Boadicea as the queen.

♦

London always seems so strange in old movies. It’s more or less the London I recognize but it’s only ever half as full. There’s no traffic on the roads, there are no double yellow lines, no cars parked bumper to bumper. The hero’s car always finds a parking spot right outside Buckingham Palace or the Ritz, and nobody ever has to wait around for change from taxi drivers.

♦

I remember when I was a boy I used to read about India, and how on the streets of Calcutta people slept in shop doorways, and I was always very envious. It seemed so easy and convenient. If I went to London with my parents we had to worry about somewhere to stay, somewhere that needed to be booked in advance, that mightn’t measure up to my parents’ high standards, where the sheets might not be very clean, where the service might be unobliging, where the food might be bad. Today I see people sleeping in the shop doorways of London and I wonder if this is a sort of progress.

♦

In Amhurst Road, Hackney, a house with a bay window. The curtains were drawn, and there was a photograph of Peter Wyngarde as Jason King tucked into the window frame for passers-by to see.

In the front garden of a house in Navarino Road there was a seven-foot-high abstract black metal sculpture of a man.

The window of a basement in Greenwood Road, no curtains and inside a harsh strip light and several women dressed in white at sewing machines stitching pieces of white material together: a sign outside saying ‘Dressmaker’.

In Stoke Newington Church Street the building above a greengrocer’s was still painted with advertisements for a much earlier business. The biggest of the advertisements said, “Have your fountain pen repaired here.” What a wonderful, safe, decent world that invokes; not only a world where people actually used fountain pens (which seems quaint and old — fashioned enough in itself), but a world where somebody found it worth his while to repair them, where he could stay in business and make a living by doing it.

♦

Clanricarde Gardens, W2. I used to live in this road when I first left university. I shared a flat with three town planners. We had a party and the brother of one of them came along and said it was really strange, he’d been to a party in this same flat some years ago when it had been lived in by members of Status Quo. Towards the end of the evening somebody standing in the kitchen had been slashed with a meat hook.

A couple of years after I left, I read there was a fire in the street and several houses had been completely destroyed, quite a few people had died. I always wondered whether my former flat was involved. Today there was no sign there had ever been a fire and I couldn’t remember my old address, not even what floor the flat had been on.

♦

In Greenwich High Road, a hardware shop, and in the window amongst the spanners and hammers and paint brushes and watering cans there were half a dozen lurid pink vibrators for sale. A handwritten sign said ‘Personal Massager’, and the price was very reasonable.

In Straightsmouth, also in Greenwich, the front room of one of the little terraced houses was unfurnished and painted all white, and a bearded young man was pointing an old Super 8 cine-camera out of the window as I passed.

Greenwich, the meridian. You have to be impressed by our ancestors’ confidence, the fact that we were able to say to the rest of the world, “This is where time and space begins. If you want to be in step with us then you set your watches accordingly. If you want to know where you are, measure it from here.” And you have to be impressed, not to say amazed, that the rest of the world agreed. Those (I suppose) were the days.

♦

In a side street in Fulham, narrow, quiet, full of parked cars, I noticed a Ford Escort with steamed-up windows. That seemed only slightly strange but I peered at it, looked in and it was quite obvious that there were two semi-naked people inside having sex. I couldn’t make out faces or ages, but there was no doubt that is what was going on. Curiously enough the car had a personalized number plate: BOB 47.

♦

I was walking along Crystal Palace Park Road, and I saw an old woman with an easel and palette, working on a large watercol-our. It was very strange, an intricately detailed rendition of the old Crystal Palace as it might have been at the time of the Great Exhibition.

It was very good, very skilfully done, but of course it bore no relation at all to what was visible in front of us. The woman glanced round and for a moment I thought she was about to talk to me or explain herself, but she stared at me and obviously decided I wasn’t worth wasting breath on. She returned to her painting and I continued walking.

Later I thought perhaps she was trying to pick up on some sort of ghostly remnant left by the vanished Palace. It had had a long life there, from 1854 to 1936, although if it hadn’t burned down then, it would surely never have survived the Second World War.

Or perhaps they’d have dismantled it, like they did the glass roof of Cannon Street Station, storing the glass in a warehouse well south of the river for the duration. The warehouse, of course, was destroyed by a direct hit.

Another painter: at Kew I saw a young woman, an art student, I’d guess, fancy patterned leggings, big boots, hair dyed orange. She had an easel set up and she was gazing out over the river, and I was naively expecting her to be painting some tranquil London river scene, but when I got close up I saw she was making some violent abstract with a sort of crucifixion scene at its centre. Just another vision of London.

♦

Mortimer Market, a dark secluded yard off Tottenham Court Road, just a place I’d once had sex with Judy — no shortage of those. The whole of London is dotted with them. It’s hard to imagine, given my age, and my uxorious habits, that I’m going to have such wild sex ever again. That’s it for this lifetime.

Abney Park Cemetery, where, after great hesitation on my part, Judy and I had sex. Clink Street, close to Southwark Cathedral, where Judy fell to her knees and delivered a spectacular blow job. Heath Lane, Blackheath, scene of a rear entry penetration.

Let’s face it, Judy was special. How many girls lick your semen up from the surface of a map of London?

And then I saw her. I don’t know why I was so surprised. It was in Dorset Street, not so very far from where I understand she now works. She was on the other side of the road. I waved but she didn’t see me, or didn’t want to, and so I crossed the road and went after her. I only wanted to say hello. By the time I’d crossed she was quite a distance away and walking very fast. I had to break into a run to keep pace. It felt absurd, like I was chasing her, but I finally caught up with her and touched her, I thought perfectly lightly, on the arm.

She pulled away as though I was some sort of molester, a complete stranger, some London crazy who was bothering her. I don’t know whether she knew it was me or not but she let out a sort of scream. Everybody in earshot turned round, but it being London nobody did anything. That must have been when she realized she was going to have to at least talk to me. I just wanted to ask how she was, make sure she was doing all right, make sure she didn’t despise me. Unfortunately, she obviously does despise me. I said there was no need to run away from me. She said she’d be the judge of that. Then she told me to get lost, and I waved my A — Z, said I’d just been to Clink Street and had been thinking about her, about us. She said, “Fuck off and die, will you, Stuart.” And when I stood there all wounded and speechless, she added, “Not necessarily in that order.”