The Lubetkin Legacy

Berthold: George Clooney

After two hours at the police station, during which every detail of my ex-bike’s spec was minutely noted down, the bored woman in uniform gave me a crime number and told me that it was very unlikely that it would ever be recovered, and she hoped it was insured.

‘Thanks for that,’ I replied.

Waiting at the bus stop, fatigue overcame me once more and tears started prickling my eyes and nose — sniff, sniff. I recognised the warning signs. Depression. Thief of delight. Cries in the night — Stop. Always look on the — Meredith. Not my fault. The childhood stutter. Immortal Bard can help. ‘What a p-p-piece of work is a man.’ Say it again. Slowly. Again. ‘What a piece of work is a man. Noble. Infinite.’ But without Mother’s cheerful cajoling, which had saved my sanity as well as my diction, how would I ever get back on track?

A fine rain had started and the bus shelter was jammed with people chatting or absorbed in their cell phones. I ached with aloneness. The 394 bus, when it arrived, had a banner advert across its side for the latest film starring George Clooney. He looked so fucking pleased with himself. We can’t all be George bloody Clooney but, God knows, I’ve tried. In fact some people might say that I’ve followed Clooney’s career with a mildly obsessive interest. Look, I’ve got nothing against the guy personally. He always seemed a perfectly decent type, and not a bad actor. It’s the unfairness of life that was bugging me. While the bus juddered and swayed homewards between the long featureless streets and squares of local authority housing that comprise this area of London, I drew up a mental balance sheet.

Similarities between Berthold Sidebottom and George Clooney

Profession: Actor. Eyes deep brown, with interesting wrinkles.

Smile: Clooney, self-deprecatingly lopsided. Sidebottom, passable imitation.

Date of birth: 6 May 1961. Yes, we share a birthday, and that’s what made the comparison so pointed.

Differences between Berthold Sidebottom and George Clooney

Hair: Clooney’s is dark, lightly streaked with grey, and waves elegantly around his rugged forehead. Sidebottom’s is largely absent — the hair, that is. The forehead is still there, thank God.

Height: Clooney, 5 feet 11 inches. Sidebottom, 6 feet. Ha ha.

Transport: Clooney (according to Google) owns a Piaggio scooter, a Harley-Davidson motorbike, a vintage Chevrolet Corvette convertible and a high-spec Tesla Roadster. Sidebottom until recently owned a bicycle. Now he is reliant on public transport.

Women: Clooney twice voted ‘Sexiest Man Alive’, twice married. Sidebottom? Well, you’d better ask his ex, Stephanie. There were of course persistent rumours that Clooney was gay, which he coolly batted away, refusing to confirm or to deny out of respect for his gay friends, he said. How PC can you get?

Residences: Clooney lives in a thirty-roomed villa overlooking Lake Como, and he also owns a luxurious 700-square-metre villa in Los Angeles. Sidebottom lives in a two-bedroom-plus-study council flat in Mad Yurt, Hackney, shared until recently with his elderly mother.

IMDb: We can come back to that later.

At the moment it was the question of residences that dominated my mind — or, to be precise, the questions raised by that nosy Penny woman. Now I’d shamed her by gawping at her naked ankles, would she seek revenge by getting me removed from the flat on the grounds of ‘under-occupancy’, if she discovered that Mother was not living there? Would my wheeze to move Inna Alfandari into the flat succeed in keeping those homeless hard-working families at bay? Was Mrs Penny under orders to sniff out instances of under-occupancy and send the undeserving sub-occupants packing? Did she already suspect me? Frankly, I’d done her a favour by saving her from that too-tight, too-green dress. She could return the favour by leaving me alone.

I got off outside Madeley Court and the bus pulled away with George Clooney, darkly dimpled, smirking his lopsided farewell. I gave him the finger. Let’s face it, I was thinking as I trudged homewards, living with his aged mum would have cramped even Clooney’s sexual style. As for his professional success, it was surely just the fleeting and shallow glamour of celluloid that gave George Clooney an unfair leg-up in his acting career. While I was playing a cool, moody Hamlet in the school production during my A-level year, George Clooney was just an extra in a crowd scene in Centennial, which, let’s be frank, was about as crap a TV show as you could get. At Highbury Grove School I’d been the star of the drama society, thanks to my mastery of all those Shakespeare soliloquies that Mother had drilled into me to conquer my stammer, first with a pencil in my mouth to keep my teeth apart, then a matchstick, then an imaginary matchstick. Daring to stand up and spout in front of an audience was exhilarating. Girls started to notice me. I developed a hunger for attention. My stammer melted away. At university I acted more than I studied, and then went on to drama school, while Clooney was still working his way through the ranks of film extras.

At twenty-one I was on the stage, under the name of Burt Side, in a succession of provincial reps, gradually progressing into leading roles. I didn’t mind the long hours and the grind — I had found my vocation, I worshipped the Immortal Bard, and I had dedicated my life to Art. George Clooney, meanwhile, played a supporting role in The Return of the Killer Tomatoes. In the same year that Clooney landed his first big role as Dr Doug Ross in ER, I was an acclaimed Antony at the Blackfriars Theatre in Boston (Lincs), recently married to beautiful actress Stephanie Morgan and new father of Meredith Louise, our baby daughter. I auditioned for the RSC and was offered a three-year contract.

Then in 2001 Meredith died, and everything went into free fall. In 2002 I split up with Stephanie and had a breakdown. While George Clooney moved on from O Brother, Where Art Thou? to Ocean’s Eleven, I underwent my first course of Prozac treatment. Four years later, when George Clooney won an Oscar for Syriana, I came out of the Friern Hospital and moved in with my mother on the top floor of Mad Yurt.

The sun peeped out briefly from behind the clouds as I walked across the grove, daffodils nodded all around me and white blossom was drifting from the cherry trees. For a moment my spirits lifted again. It wasn’t paradise, there were rats and graffiti. But even Lake Como must have its downside.

Some white A4 notices were stuck with sticky-tape to the lamp posts. Someone had lost a cat. It happened regularly. The residents of Madeley Court weren’t supposed to keep pets, so unfortunate animals were hidden away indoors, always on the lookout for a chance to break free. ‘Answers to the name of Wonder Boy.’ The black and white cat in the picture looked cross and confused. I peered into the shrubby area where the feral moggies dwelled, but I knew the cat, like my bike, would never reappear.

‘Hello, Bertie!’ called Mrs Crazy from her balcony. ‘How’s your mum?’

‘Fine!’ I shouted back.

‘I saw her took away in an ambulance.’

‘Just a twisted ankle. Nothing serious.’ The lie sprang easily to my lips — too easily, as it turned out.

Mother and Mrs Crazy had once been friends, but the latter had bought her flat from the Council in 1985 with some small savings from her late husband’s gambling proceeds, and Mother had never forgiven her. She claimed that all the troubles in Madeley Court dated from the break-up of public ownership when private speculators had got their claws into the estate and started it on a downhill spiral, for which grasping coiffure-obsessed fruitcakes like Mrs Crazy and Mrs Thatcher were personally to blame.

Mrs Crazy’s pretensions once she became an owner-occupier were particularly annoying to Mother, the wrought-iron window guards, the hanging baskets, the royal-blue front door and ostentatious brass knocker an affront to Lubetkin’s purity of line. The final blow came when Mrs Crazy, with support from Legless Len, mounted a coup that ousted her from the Chair of the Tenants Association. She’d always regarded Madeley Court as her personal fiefdom because it was named after her first husband, Ted Madeley, who’d wooed her and married her in 1952. Or 1953. She was vague about the dates, but his photo, framed in walnut, still hung on her bedroom wall. He was a big good-looking, dark-eyed man, who bore an eerie resemblance to moustachioed George Clooney in The Monuments Men. In fact he was only a few years younger than her father when she’d first met him at a Labour Party rally in Finsbury Town Hall in 1951. She was nineteen years old, sitting in the audience with her dad, and Ted was up on the platform smiling darkly alongside Harold Riley, Aneurin Bevan and Berthold Lubetkin, who was firing off on all cylinders about the right of working-class people to a decent home for life. Labour lost the election in 1951, but Ted Madeley won Lily’s heart.

‘It was love at first sight,’ Mum reminisced, sherry glass in hand, half a century later. ‘Only problem was, he was married with two girls, twins they were, Jenny and Margaret, dark haired like gypsies. You’d have guessed he had a bit of gypsy in him.’

They had moved into Madeley Court together soon after. ‘Berthold got the flat for me,’ said Mum. Later I read that the block was not completed until 1953. There were other inconsistencies in her stories, but as a boy, I was swept along by the glamour of it all, and never stopped to question the details.

I took the photographs down from the walls one by one and stowed them in a cardboard box with her papers in the boiler cupboard. There were bright squares on the faded wallpaper to mark where they’d been. Inna Alfandari, I supposed, would have her own photos to bring.