The Memory Chalet (6 page)

But off the busy High Street, there was another, quieter Putney: the established late-nineteenth-century suburb of mansion flats, subdivided Victorian terraces and Edwardian brick and stone villas, typically “semi-detached” but often quite sizeable. There were row after row, street after street, block after block of these often graceful buildings, strikingly homogenous in décor and facings. More attractive than the interminable interwar suburban sprawl of southeast London, less ostentatiously prosperous than the luxuriant, tree-lined avenues of northwest London, Putney was unmistakably and reassuringly middle class. To be sure, there were upper-middle-class enclaves, predictably located up by Putney’s ancient heath and on the slopes of the hill that led to it; and there were working streets like the river-fronting Lower Richmond Road where the aspiring poet Laurie Lee found cheap lodgings and his first job after arriving in London from deepest Gloucestershire. But for the most part Putney was comfortably and securely in the middle.

Our own flat was chilly and uninspiring, rising three stories above the hairdressing shop where my parents worked. But it had the distinctive quality of backing onto Jones Mews: one of the last of the stable alleys where the residents and tradesmen of the town had kept their animals. In those years the Mews still served its traditional function: two of the six stables in the alley leading away from our back door were occupied by working animals. One of these—a bedraggled, skinny apology for a horse—slaved for a rag-and-bone man who would drag it out of its stall each morning, shove it carelessly between the shafts, and head out to collect what, by the end of the day, was often a substantial haul. The other horse fared better, working for a blowsy, chatty flower lady who had a stall on the common. The remaining stables had been converted into sheds for local artisans: electricians, mechanics, and general handymen. Like the milkman, the butcher, the flower lady, and the rag-and-bone man, these were all locals, children of locals, and beyond. From the perspective of Jones Mews, Putney was still a village.

Even the High Street was still rooted in a self-contained past. There were already, of course, “chain stores”: Wool-worth, Marks & Spencer, The British Home Stores, etc. But these were small outlets and far outnumbered by locally owned shops selling haberdashery, tobacco, books, groceries, shoes, ladies’ wear, toiletries, and everything else. Even the “multiples” were somehow local: Sainsburys, a small store with just one double-window, still had sawdust on its floor. You were served by polite, slightly haughty assistants in starched blue-and-white aprons, resembling nothing so much as the proud employees in the photograph on the back wall showing the little shop on the day it opened many decades before. The “Home and Colonial” grocers further down the High Street carefully distinguished between its overseas and home-grown supplies: “New Zealand lamb,” “English beef,” and so on.

But the High Street was my mother’s territory.
I
shopped on Lacy Road, which boasted an off-license whence I was dispatched for cider and wine; a small tailors’ establishment; and two “sweet shops.” One of these was generic and modern, at least by ’50s standards, offering fruit gums, packaged chocolate, and Wrigley’s chewing gum. But the other—darker, danker, dirtier, and otherwise depressing—was far more intriguing. It was run (and, I assume, owned) by a shriveled, mean-spirited old crone who would resentfully weigh out from an array of large glass bottles a quarter-pound of gobstoppers or liquorice while grumbling at the impatience and sartorial insufficiency of her customers: “I’ve been serving grubby little boys like you since the old Queen’s jubilee, so don’t try to fool me!” By the old Queen, of course, she meant Victoria, whose jubilee had been celebrated in Putney in June 1887. . . .

There was still something Victorian, or perhaps Edwardian would be more precise, about the feel of the side streets. Up those solid stone steps, behind the heavy window treatments, one could imagine bespectacled spinsters offering piano lessons to supplement their meager pensions—and one did not have to imagine it, since I at least was taught the instrument by two such ladies, both living in what I recognized, even then, as genteel poverty. I had school friends whose families occupied a floor or two of the imposing villas near Dover House Road or up Putney Hill, and was vaguely impressed by the sense of solidity and permanence given off by these buildings, even in their modern subdivided state.

Putney had its loose ends too. The riverbank was still semi-rural and largely untouched—once you got past the ever-so-slightly commercialized strip near the bridge, where the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race began. There were boathouses, houseboats, the occasional tug, abandoned skiffs rotting gently into the mud: living evidence of the river’s ancient business. At Putney the Thames is still actively tidal: at times a narrow stream lazily bisecting great beaches of mud, at others close to overflowing its scruffy and rather under-secured banks when a ferry or pleasure boat, on its way from Westminster Bridge up to Teddington or even Oxford, sweeps under the bridge and into the great bend embracing Craven Cottage (Fulham’s Football Ground) on the opposite bank. Putney’s river was messy, inelegant, and functional; I spent a lot of time sitting by its edge and thinking, though I no longer remember about what.

We left Putney when I was ten years old, drawn out to the verdant Surrey fringes by my parents’ brief flirtation with prosperity. The house on Kingston Hill, where we lived for nine years until my parents ran out of money, was larger than the old flat; it had a garden and a front gate. It also—oh joy!—had two toilets, a very considerable relief after the experience of no. 92 and its single water closet two icy stories down from my bedroom. And there were country lanes in Kingston for the aspirant cyclist to explore. But I never really got over Putney: its shops, its smells, its associations. There wasn’t much by way of greenery, except at the edges where commons and heaths had been left as nature planted them. It was urban through and through, though urban in that informal, generous way so characteristic of London: a city that—at least until the disastrous urban “planning” of the ’60s—had always grown
out
rather than
up
. I’m no longer at home there—the High Street today is no better than it ought to be, a featureless replica of every high street in England, from its fast food outlets to its mobile phone stores. But Putney was my London, and London—even though I really only lived there as a child and left forever when I went up to Cambridge in 1966—was my city. It isn’t anymore. But nostalgia makes a very satisfactory second home.

VII

The Green Line Bus

F
or some years at the end of the Fifties, I went to school on the Green Line bus. The Green Line, publicly owned like all London buses in those days, was a division of London Transport providing long-distance bus connections across London, typically starting out in a country town twenty to thirty miles outside the city and terminating in a comparably distant town on the opposite side of London. The bus I used, the 718, was routed from Windsor in the southwest to Harlow in the northeast, halfway between London and Cambridge.

The Green Line was distinctive in a number of ways. It was green, of course, not just on the outside but in the livery and finish inside as well. The buses were typically single-decker, in contrast to the conventional London buses of the day, and they had folding electric doors that closed with a swish. This feature also distinguished them from the open-backed double-deckers of central London and gave the Green Line buses a cozy, reassuring, and rather warm feel. Because they covered such long distances for a regular bus line—the typical Green Line route entailed a trip of over three hours end to end—these buses did not stop at most of the standard bus stops but only at occasional interchange points. Despite going no faster than the average London bus, they were thus nevertheless an “express” route and could charge a little more for their services.

The color and nomenclature of this service was not fortuitous. The Green Line buses invoked and illustrated a long-standing principle of London’s urban planning: their terminuses were strategically located athwart or beyond the “Green Belt” established around London in the early decades of the century. The latter constituted an early exercise in environmental preservation as well as in the provision of open space for public leisure and pleasure. The British capital in those days was thus carefully contained within a belt of open land: variously parks, common land, old-growth forests, undeveloped farmland, or open heath, all of it inherited from earlier royal or municipal or parochial property left in place so as to assure the preservation of the countryside of southeast England, perennially under threat from the unconstrained expansion of the Great Wen.

Despite the helter-skelter ribbon development of the interwar decades, and the even less appealing public and private housing projects of the 1950s, Greater London had been more or less contained within its belt of greenery; sometimes no more than a few miles deep, but enough to distinguish the city from the country and to preserve the identity and particularity of the towns and villages on its farther side. The Green Line buses thus reflected in their name, their routes, and the distances they covered the largely successful aspirations of a generation of planners.

I, of course, knew nothing of this. But I think I instinctively grasped the implicit message of these buses and their route managers. We, they seemed to say, are the moving spirit and incarnation of a certain idea of London. We begin in Windsor, as it might be, or Stevenage, or Gravesend, or East Grinstead, and we finish up in Harlow or Guildford or Watford, straddling London as we go (most Green Line routes passed through Victoria Station, Marble Arch, or both). Whereas the red Routemasters scurry back and forth across central London, their passengers leaping on and off at will, we Greenliners box the city, acknowledging its astonishing scale but asserting, in our distinctive routes and endpoints, its necessary limits.

I
sometimes essayed those limits, riding the line from one end to the other just for the sheer pleasure of seeing woods, hills, and fields emerge at each end of my native metropolis. The Green Line “team”—there was a driver and a conductor to every bus—seemed distinctly sympathetic to this ostensibly pointless childhood exercise. They were not paid much more than the drivers and conductors of the red buses—none of the employees of the London Passenger Transport Board could boast much of an income in those days. When I started using their services, the busmen had only just come off a bitter and prolonged strike. But the “mood” of the Green Line men was quite distinct. They had more time to talk to one another and to the passengers. Because their doors closed, the interior was quieter than that of other buses. And large parts of their route were so very attractive, in that settled, comfortable way of the leafy outer suburbs of postwar London, that the bus itself—despite being upholstered in much the same way as all other London buses of the day—somehow
felt
plusher and more comfortable too. And so the driver and conductor seemed to me at least to take a greater pride in their vehicle and to relax into its routine more than other busmen.

The conductor, paid a little less than the skilled driver, was usually but not always a younger man (there were hardly any women). His function was ostensibly to keep order and collect fares; but since large tracts of countryside were often covered with relatively few passengers and stops, his task was hardly preoccupying. In practice he kept the driver company. The driver in his turn was part of the bus (his compartment integrated into the interior body) and thus often well known—sometimes by his first name—to passengers on his route. There was no question of the loneliness of the long-distance driver on the Green Line buses. Whether there was a question of class is another matter. Because the Green Lines cost more and picked up passengers from the suburbs as well as across the city, many of their patrons were probably a class or so removed from the typical bus user of those days. Whereas most people who took red buses to work in the 1950s would not have been in a position to commute by car even if they had wished to, a goodly share of the Green Line business in later years was lost to automobile commuters.

Thus whereas drivers, conductors, and passengers on the inner London buses were often drawn from the same social groups, Green Line commuters were more likely to be middle-class. This probably resulted in the reproduction on the bus of some of the patterns of deference still endemic to British society at large. It also made the buses quieter. However, the rather palpable pride that the Green Line teams took in their bus—they spent more time on it and were less likely to be moved to different services at short notice, in particular the drivers who had to learn long and complicated routes—compensated in some measure for these social hierarchies. The result was that everyone on the bus felt quite pleased with themselves, or seemed to. Even at the age of eleven I remember thinking that the bus
smelled
reassuring, more like a library or an old bookstore than a means of transport. This otherwise inexplicable association probably drew on the few public places that I associated with calm rather than noise and bustle.

I
continued to use the Green Line buses into the mid-Sixties. By then I was chiefly catching them late at night (the last Green Line in those days usually left its depot around 10 PM), returning from Zionist youth meetings or a tryst with a girlfriend. The Green Line at that time of the evening was usually on time (unlike the red buses it ran to a published schedule); if you were late to the stop, you missed it. In which case I would be doomed to a long and cold wait on a station platform for the rare night train, followed by a cheerless and tiring walk home from some inconveniently sited Southern Railway station. Catching the Green Line thus felt good, a comfort and a security against the chill London night and a promise of safe, warm transport home.