Walking in the Shade (55 page)

My bank said no, absolutely not, not that area, had they not said so already? But Len said he could get me fixed up with a mortgage, no trouble at all, and I could take his word for it the place was structurally sound, for in those days they built to last. No, don't bother with a survey; he had already had it surveyed. And so I became a customer of the National Westminster Bank. My father had worked in his youth for the Westminster Bank. So much had things changed that when I told the manager that my father's great nightmare was always that he might be in debt, or rather fall into worse debt than he was in, the man was quite shocked and said that the whole point of banking was to lend money. And so I had a mortgage and a loan to do the place up. This was far from doubtful and dubious finance; on the contrary; but what was dubious was Len's vagueness about the status of No. 60. There was a possibility, said he, that it could be scheduled for redevelopment, but I had to realise the Greater London Council often had houses scheduled for years. Besides, they would have to compensate me. I have always taken chances, and that is what I did now. I never regretted it, for I could not otherwise have afforded a house in an area where I wanted to live, and I did take that step away from freebooting freewheeling unloanworthy bohemianism, which is what suited me, to being a property owner and deserving of respect and of overdrafts, even if every penny was borrowed. But I could not begin to live in that house until it had been done up, and Len knew a builder, let us call him Doug, another like himself, free and easy, you can trust me, and he would see the house done up as it deserved.

I took Peter and one of his friends to stand outside the house. ‘There's the house. I've bought it.' The two boys were silent, looking at the dark-brown flaking exterior in the shabby street. ‘Look,' I pleaded, ‘it will be very nice, you'll see.'

That house could have been kept as a museum, a time capsule. The first thing that had to strike the outsider was its extreme discomfort. It was on three floors, two rooms to a floor, over a vast basement. There was no proper heating, only tiny fireplaces. In such a house, I kept reminding myself, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin lived, wrote their high-minded thoughts, and they must have been cold all the time. Over every ill-fitting window hung dirty rags of cretonne. The four rooms on the two top floors had been bedrooms and recently let out to lodgers, for in each were coin meters for electricity. On the two landings were gas jets, the flame four inches away from the wallpaper, and they were still in use. The electricity was dangerous; wires trailed, the holders were cracked. There was one ceiling light in each room. One lavatory for the whole house, a cement bowl in the basement, with a cracked porcelain cistern and a chain pull. The basement was once the kitchen, with the coal-burning kitchen range still functioning, and the old copper for boiling clothes, a great cone-shaped copper basin sunk in cement, with a place for the fire under it. The mangle was there, and the ironing table, and its steam irons. There was a bath—unused—vast, stained brown, and cracked. The great enamel jugs that had once been carried up the rickety stairs with hot water still stood, stained and chipped, on the range. Up those stairs had been carried meals to the little dining room, which overlooked a neglected back garden, with a view on to the roof of Unity Theatre. I never went to Unity Theatre in all the time I lived in that house, because it had fallen into its dogmatic, strictly party-line time.

The first thing to be done was a damp course in the basement. Then a cork floor went in, and soon it became a warm and pleasant low-ceilinged room, the nicest in the house. The front ground-floor room was a kitchen, with the big dining table we all seemed to have in the sixties. The ground floor back, once the dining room, became a bathroom, large, luxurious by then British standards. The first floor was the living room. The dividing doors came out, but later I was to regret getting rid of those folding doors, painted red and gold, and the wood shutters, which were thief-proof, and, later still, the fireplaces. For as we were all doing then, the fireplaces were plastered over and the mantelpieces abolished.

I had to fight radiator by radiator with the central-heating people.

‘You don't want a radiator in the bedroom, love. It's unhealthy.' This was how they thought then, and some people still do.

‘I want two radiators, because here in your specifications it says to achieve such and such a level of heat there must be two.'

‘You'll regret it.'

And in the bathroom: ‘You don't need a radiator in the bathroom. The steam will heat it.'

‘Yes I do, and a heated towel rail too. Please put them in.'

‘Well, you're paying for it, but I don't like to see you waste your money like this.'

And why was I doing this fighting? Why was not a surveyor doing it for me?

I was saving money, for Doug had said there was no need for an architect or a surveyor, trust me.

Doug was a small firm. He employed two workmen on a regular basis and electricians and carpenters as he needed them. He had done the basics: damp course, the cork basement floor, making most of the floors good, some of the rewiring, and the windows. Then he went bankrupt. He came to tell me, looking not at all unhappy about it. ‘I have bad luck,' he said. And then off he went to the Mediterranean on a holiday with his girlfriend. He had gone bankrupt several times before. I was enough out of tune with my times to be shocked by this.

There I was with a half-done house, no builder, no one to fight in my corner, but then everything came right. The two workmen employed by Doug—he had left owing them two weeks' wages—said they would finish the house for me, I could employ them myself. Everyone I knew, friends and experts of all kinds, said I would be mad to do it, I'd live to regret it: they would cheat me. In fact, the men were wonderful, and everything was easy. I paid them top-level union wages, once a week, and a good bit over, because they were saving me the profits of a builder, and they brought me bills for the materials they used. They called themselves the Two Pirates, they were Jack and John, and they had worked together since they left school, twenty years before. Jack was a large slow fair man, with calm blue eyes he fixed on your face while he told you about his mum, who looked after him, for he had never married, and who cooked all his favourites, so why did he need a wife? John had been married. He was spry and full of energy and apparently the boss in this partnership, but when they had to make decisions they stood looking at each other and then came to a silent agreement, and John turned to me and said, ‘No, you don't want a shelf there, love; look, you wouldn't be able to put your hand to it comfortable; better there.' Or they would show me why a floor needed to be not relaid but only to be patched, and why an electric-light socket should be just there.

When it was time for a carpenter, they brought in a mate, Jimmy, whom I think of to this day with affection. He was a tall, much too thin grey man, and he was sad, for his wife had run off, and his two children had grown, and he was alone. He had a bad cough and that shadowy look that says, This one won't be around for long. The three men had often worked together. They would sit drinking tea around the trestles they had set up in the kitchen to stand on to paint the ceiling. They asked me to sit with them, and we gossiped about this and that. Jack and John both told me, separately, that Jimmy was the salt of the earth, and their manner to him was protective, considerate, tender. Jimmy did all the carpentering up and down the house, often putting me right when I made suggestions he knew were a mistake. And then there was another man, the electrician, Bill Connolly. I knew Bill until he died twenty years later, and at intervals he would recall how the three of them were in the kitchen, and suddenly my two feet appeared through the ceiling, for the floorboards had been taken up and there was only plasterboard. They were good for a laugh, my feet, for years.

And in fact we all had many good laughs, and my knowing friends, dropping in to find out how I did, would discover us all sitting around in the kitchen, and they might want to sit down too, but the men said, ‘Time to go back to work,' and went. They knew I had been warned against them.

Jack, the fat pirate, was heartbreaking for reasons he never suspected. He loved to draw and paint, and wanted to put friezes of Bambis and Donald Ducks in every room. He was disappointed when I said no, and told me about the houses he had decorated with flowers and rabbits and robins. He made me presents of cards with cartoon animals. As soon as we sat down, a pencil and paper would appear, and he would start. He was an artist, he said, but when he used the word, he meant only what he knew, for he had never been introduced to real pictures, real art. He had never been to an art gallery. When I said they were free and anyone could go, he looked guilty, but reproachful too. I showed him reproductions, and he was full of admiration, but not as if they could have anything to do with him. Yet even his Mickey Mice and his Bambis had something original about them. If there was ever a case of a village Hampden, he was it.

But I wasn't spending all my time in Charrington Street, for I needed money and had to earn it. I had not written for money before—that is, not from an inner need or pattern but from an outside demand. And yes, it does weaken your real strengths. For your real work, which is an invisible-to-others growth curve—the growing point—is one thing, the real thing, and the rest is hackwork, no matter how skilled it is, how well it turns out. Apart from a couple of sketches written for
The New Yorker
, I had not written for money….No, the truth compels me to state: twice an impecunious friend and I had attempted frankly commercial film scripts, but you cannot write successfully for money with your tongue in your cheek, and these dishonest ventures had come to nothing. Serves me right, I had thought. Now I was secretly seeing myself as a fallen soul, yet there was nothing wrong with what I wrote for television. On the contrary. Quite soon I was to be one of three writers doing the Granada series of Maupassant stories, with Hugh Leonard, the Irish writer, and the Granada executive Philip Mackie. We sat around a big table and dealt the stories around like playing cards. ‘I want “Boule de Suif”!'

‘No, I'm having “Boule de Suif.”'

‘Then I'm having “The Diamond Necklace.”'

‘I want “La Maison Tellier.”' We all knew enough French but used English translations as well.

It was a wonderful series. Granada Television at that time was taking the kind of risks no television company would take now. They did series of Saki stories, A. E. Coppard, Somerset Maugham, Maupassant, and others, each of thirteen hours, with three one-hour plays and the rest of two or three tales each. Top-level directors, actors, writers, designers. So little did television value itself that it wiped them all. And yet these series were among the very best things ever done by television. ITV could be brave in those days too. Stella Richman did wonderful things for them, using all the best talent available.
Half-Hour Story
and
Blackmail
are still remembered. Again, ITV destroyed them all.

Sometimes you want to put your head in your hands and weep, or howl with incredulity, because of this our great country, Britain. If television films of this quality had been made in any other country in Europe, they would be cherished, honoured, preserved, seen as national treasures. There would be festivals for them, as we now have festivals for classic black-and-white films. At the least, there would be archives of the work of the best directors, actors, designers, and writers of the time. But no, this is Britain—so into the wastebin with them all.

 

I reckon that to live in London costs a good third of one's resources—that is, the actual money. Then there is the time spent looking for a place to live, and once you have one, then the continual repairs, plumbing, roof, windows, and so on—the real cost of owning a house. Is it worth it? A thousand times, yes. London is a cornucopia of delights.

Time was running out, I had to leave Langham Street, and still the house was not decorated. While the pirates worked on serious things, like floors and walls, a group of us, friends and Peter and I, stood on chairs and trestles and ripped layers of wallpaper off, seven, eight, nine, ten, and even more, and the layers at the bottom were Victorian, beautiful, on heavy thick paper. If you held a wad of the paper, then in your hands was seventy years of social history, of information, but into the bonfire at the back went all the coils and shreds and tatters of wallpaper, and the cracked and decaying linoleum that once had been shiny and good, and the worm-eaten wood from the floors, and old shelves and the rags of curtains. But the substance of the walls was solid, and when you looked under the plaster the lathes were new and clean, and the bricks bright and new. That was a solid serious house, built to last.

Not a quarter of a mile away, streets of these houses were being pulled down. It was the beginning of the sixties and the heyday of official vandalism. When I said to the Pirates it was a tragedy that these good houses were disappearing in clouds of dust and debris, they thought and said yes, when you think of it, they are just like the houses in Chelsea; we were working down there on our last job, weren't we, Jack? weren't we, John? Yes, we were, that's right, John, that's right, Jack. You can't buy those Chelsea houses now, not unless you've got more money than you or I are going to see in our lives, isn't that right, Jack? isn't that right, John? That's right, John, you're in the right of it there, Jack.

I used to walk up and watch those houses come down, and my heart ached. I saw crash into dust the house the Sommerfields had made into a little paradise. Where it stood now stand coldly hideous grey council flats, hundreds of yards of them.

I was in the newly fitted kitchen when an official from Camden came in, a left-wing councillor, and said, contemptuously waving her hand at the little knot of streets we stood in, ‘The sooner we clear all these people out into the new council flats the better.' And I said, ‘But this is an old working-class community. They've been living here together for decades.'