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‘I’ll send you a telegram,’ said Morley.
‘To where?’ said Miriam. ‘We’ll be in the Lagonda. And you’ll be on the train.’
‘Ah,’ said Morley. ‘Good point. You know, one day someone needs to invent some kind of mobile communication device. A sort of pocket telegram machine.’
‘I’m not sure it’d catch on, Father.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Morley.
‘It would just involve people telling each other they were on board trains.’
‘Ha!’ said Morley. With which he got up from the piano stool and dashed for the door. ‘Good luck then, you two. Until we meet again in Essex!’
‘Very good,’ said Miriam. ‘Goodbye, Father.’
‘No slacking,’ he called from the corridor.
‘No shilly-shallying,’ replied Miriam loudly.
‘No funking,’ I mumbled.
‘Although …’ said Miriam, turning towards me, and adopting her lounge position on the chair. ‘While the cat’s away the mice shall play, eh, Sefton?’
I needed a cup of coffee and a pick-me-up.
And a hundred pounds.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_76d38739-b850-54bf-9c79-d6c7d9f6d73c)
THE BOULEVARDS OF BECONTREE (#ulink_76d38739-b850-54bf-9c79-d6c7d9f6d73c)
DENMARK STREET is ideally situated in Soho, if for no other reason that it marks a kind of boundary and thus provides a perfect and speedy exit onto High Holborn and all roads east. I managed to persuade Miriam that I was in urgent need of a hearty breakfast, and this hearty breakfast once duly procured – in a neat little café opposite Foyle’s run by a family of natty Italians, with whom Miriam insisted on practising both her rudimentary Italian and her highly advanced arts of flirtation – we were soon heading off in the Lagonda across London.
London in 1937 was of course entirely different to the London of today, which has seen so many changes that have rendered many parts of it almost unrecognisable. If one aspect, one characteristic remains the same, however, it is this: for all its ugly wounds and gashes, and for all its hasty rebuilds and reconfigurations, east London remains the undisputed territory of the poor. Morley had a curious map on the wall of his study back in St George’s which showed an aerial view of the city marked prominently with all its churches, as though the Church Triumphant were massing and converging and sailing up the Thames towards Parliament, spires aloft like mainsails. To set out in the opposite direction, to move away from the centre, to go east, has always been to go against this flow of the great and the good and the godly, away from money and power, away from Christopher Wren, and out into unpredictable territory of Hawksmoor’s baroque, and crumbling Georgian terraces, and the squat fat brick and concrete mansion blocks that were then already replacing the old Victorian terraces. To go east was and is – and shall surely forever remain – to venture into the wild.
‘Dreadful,’ said Miriam as she gunned the Lagonda out along the Commercial Road and on into Poplar. ‘Can you imagine actually living here?’
‘I rather like it, actually,’ I said, as we proceeded at alarming speed onto the East India Dock Road and caught full sight of the great wharves of London’s docks, with their vast cranes towering above and behind like some giant backstage machinery for scene-shifting and which made the east London streets seem like a stage set where at any moment absolutely anything and everything might happen: tragedy, comedy, history, farce; the East London Palace Theatre of Varieties. It felt thrillingly alive, a place where things were being made rather than merely consumed, a place where lives were actually being lived and not simply performed, where a cat might look at a king, where a fool and his money might soon be parted, and where a little of what you fancy does you good. There were young children swinging high and wide around the lampposts, and mothers young and old were pushing prams, and people were going about their daily business, street sellers with barrels of herrings and bagels, and butchers and bakers and fishmongers, their goods spilling out onto the streets, a cornucopia of bread and fishes and strings of sausages, and men unloading vans, and newsstands, and cars and bikes and horses and carts: it was a kind of people’s paradise …
‘Oh come on, Sefton, don’t attempt your old communist nonsense with me. You’d rather live here, or in a nice flat in Kensington?’
‘To be honest I’d rather be living entirely elsewhere,’ I said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Miriam. ‘Everywhere is elsewhere, isn’t it? Otherwise nowhere is anywhere.’ She had certainly inherited her father’s eccentric logic. ‘But anyway’ – the subject had strayed away from Miriam’s favourite subject, Miriam, for long enough – ‘I have great news.’
‘Who’s the lucky man this time?’
‘Not that sort of news, silly.’
‘What then?’
‘I’ve been offered a column in a new magazine for women.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘What’s it called?’
‘The magazine? Woman, silly,’ said Miriam, ‘obviously,’ and, ‘Get out of the way, you little beast!’ she screamed, as we swerved in order to avoid a child no more than four or five years old, and dressed all in white, as though in an advert for Omo, who had run into the street chasing a ball, chased by a rather grubbier-looking older girl who fortunately swept up the young one in her arms before she made irreparable and very messy contact with the Lagonda. ‘Damned children! Aren’t they supposed to be in school?’
‘How much are they paying you?’
‘Paying me?’ said Miriam. ‘I have no idea, Sefton. I didn’t ask about payment.’
Which was really the great difference between us. Miriam was someone who never asked, or had to ask about payment: I was someone who was only ever really interested in payment. I wondered if she might be paid as much as a hundred pounds.
‘And what are you going to write about?’
‘My silly, empty way of life, what do you think?’ She flashed me a sarcastic smile.
‘Seriously though,’ I said.
‘Seriously though, Sefton, I am going to tell the truth about the lives of young women today.’
‘I’m sure people will be absolutely fascinated,’ I said.
‘I’m sure they will, actually,’ she replied. ‘I think it’s about time that women spoke out about their real lives, rather than pretending all the time to be second-rate men.’
‘I’d hardly describe you as someone pretending to be a second-rate man, Miriam,’ I said. ‘You’re more like a …’ I was going to say another species, but decided to hold my tongue.
‘Superior man?’ said Miriam.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Sui generis?’
‘Exactly,’ I agreed.
‘Good. Well, at least we’re agreed on one thing. Now do be a darling and light me a cigarette and remind me of the route, would you?’ (She was at this time, as far as I recall, happy to accept any cigarette from anyone: this was before she took up smoking exclusively De Reszke Minors, with their famous ‘Red Tips for Red Lips’, with whom she had some kind of advertising arrangement, connected to her column in Woman. Frankly, in the early years, if you’d offered her a pipe filled to the brim with good old-fashioned stinky Balkan Sobranie she’d have smoked it.)
We were now following the A13 out of London and into Essex: through Canning Town, with the views of Bow Creek and the Beckton Gas Works, and then on and up past Barking where finally you get to see the famous Becontree estate looming on the horizon. If you’ve ever been you’ll know that there is a kind of perpetual grey fog hanging over the place: all those houses and all those people, all that coal and wood being burned to keep them warm and alive, as though Becontree itself were an actual being, a slumbering beast, curled up and breathing out its slumbering beastly fumes into the unforgiving Essex sky.
From a distance the Becontree estate at first gives the appearance of a frontier town in Westerns – one half expects on arrival to find the old clapboard bordello ringing with the cries of good-time girls and grizzled crap-shooters, the saloon doors banging open as you stride in and order a whiskey and the conversation suddenly dies and you realise you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the sheriff’s office is under siege, and the gunslinger is in his buckskin shirt, squinting through the sun’s glare, riding onto Main Street to confront the bad guys in the big black hats – just as in the novels of Zane Grey, another of those writers beloved by Morley whose work seemed to me almost entirely without worth. (Morley’s great paean to the Western is of course Home on the Range: Life in the Wild West (1933), a book perhaps more wildly inaccurate even than any of his others, but which contains an intriguing account of his meeting with Buffalo Bill himself, when the old cowboy had been touring Europe during the early years of the century. Buffalo Bill, according to Morley, was much more than a showman. ‘Few men have done as much for our understanding of the lives of the American Indian,’ according to Morley. ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a circus with a purpose.’) But in reality Becontree was no Deadwood. It was no Dodge City, no Tombstone, Arizona. Borderland Essex in the late 1930s was like no other place at no other time. It was a place situated somewhere between the present and the future, stranded in a now that never was and could never be – a place entirely between the wars.
As we made our way down Becontree Avenue I was struck first of all not by the buildings but by the extraordinary sight of what seemed like never-ending rows of privet hedges leading off in every direction, all short and trimmed at regulation waist height and which made it look as though the actual buildings of Becontree were some kind of a weird garden planted in behind the hedges, almost as an afterthought, square, overgrown red brick flowers and shrubs. The Becontree hedges, perhaps more than anything else, sum up that dream of another England that Morley so admired and cherished, a perfect, planted petit-bourgeois green and pleasant land.
‘Ghastly,’ said Miriam.
A brightened, whitened East End
It was certainly strange – like a brightened, whitened East End, as though having been boil-washed and run through the mangle. There were tramways and cheap cars and uniform shopfronts all with identical awnings. There were long monotonous rows of houses, each with a handkerchief patch of garden out front, all equivalent in size and shape, except for those few homes set further back from the road around miniature greens, and odd corner sites that had young trees planted, and fresh, ugly churches. It all looked terribly clean and also rather Dutch; something to do with the pitch of the roofs, perhaps, and also the fact that everywhere one looked there were men and women on bicycles, furiously pedalling, as if the life of the nation itself depended on the men and women of Essex getting to work on time. And yet somehow, for all it looked longingly towards Europe for its architectural inspiration, it also seemed inevitably and undeniably American: the wide streets clearly built not for boulevardiers and bicycles but for cars and trucks and lorries, and the low-rise buildings not the stuff of the Low Countries but rather of the New World, the only ornament and interest the advertising hoardings that glued the streets together with Parkinson’s Biscuits, Eno’s Fruit Salts, Lavvo and Pumphrey’s Lemon Curd. We pulled over beneath a sign for Bile Beans, in a spot designated by another sign for ‘PARKING’, in front of a shop called Clifford’s, at the corner of Becontree Avenue and Valence Avenue. A convoy of lorries piled high with sand and gravel came thundering past, spraying fine dust and diesel fumes in their wake.
‘What on earth is this place?’ asked Miriam.
‘This,’ I said, ‘is the modern world. I’ll maybe get a few photographs,’ I said, ‘and then we can be on our way.’
‘Well, if this is the modern world, Sefton,’ said Miriam, ‘I want no part of it.’ Which of course is what made Miriam so thoroughly modern.
As I was carefully framing a shot for Morley, featuring the dusty boulevards of Becontree, and while Miriam sat smiling regally at the passers-by ogling both her and the Lagonda – not an everyday sight in south Essex, either of them – a man came sauntering proprietorially along the pavement towards us. His hat was pulled down tight on his head, his hands deep in the pockets of his double-breasted overcoat, and he had the kind of bullying walk that suggested he was prepared to pick a fight with anyone, at any time, and preferably now. It was Willy Mann, Mr Klein’s business agent and fixer. The last time I’d seen him was just the night before, when he was all shiny and naked in the Turkish baths: now, thank goodness, he was cooled off and dressed, though no less menacing.
‘Well, well,’ said Willy. He was the very definition of shifty, with a habit of moving and shrugging inside his clothes, as though avoiding a punch, or calculating his next blow. ‘Sefton, again.’ He nodded towards my cuts and bruises. ‘Trouble?’
‘Hello, Willy,’ I said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on.’
‘A joke, presumably?’
‘Don’t encourage him,’ said Miriam, lighting a cigarette.
‘Hello, hello,’ said Willy, removing his hat and going to shake Miriam’s hand. ‘You’re not with him, surely, a fine young lady like yourself?’
Fortunately Miriam was accustomed to compliments from men far more accomplished than Willy and was more than ready with a put-down.
‘“With him” in the strict sense of being accompanied by him, sir, yes.’ She paused and took a long thoughtful drag on her cigarette, effectively establishing her dominance over the conversation, over the cigarette, and of course over Willy. ‘But certainly not “with him” in the broader sense of having, possessing and thus, crudely and colloquially speaking, being in a relationship “with him”, if that’s what you’re asking, certainly not, no.’ She took another long draw on her cigarette and raised an eyebrow at Willy. ‘So it rather depends in what sense you were using the term, doesn’t it?’
‘Goodness me. Lively one,’ said Willy to me. ‘Not her who roughed you up, was it?’
‘I haven’t laid a finger on him,’ said Miriam.
‘More’s the pity, eh?’ said Willy, nudging me.
Miriam gave a furious little growl at this and flashed her ruby-red fingernails at Willy, cigarette aloft, one of her more alarming gestures, suggesting a panther – or some blonde equivalent thereof – about to pounce. ‘I suppose you’d better introduce me to your witty little friend here, Sefton,’ she said wearily to me. ‘Since you are “with” me, though only in the strict and obvious sense.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘This is Willy Mann, Miriam. Willy, this is Miriam Morley.’
‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance,’ said Willy, with, I thought, rather too much feeling in his ‘very’: Miriam tended to have an instant mesmerising effect on men. I recall there being one or two chaps in fact who proposed marriage within an hour of meeting her. I hoped Willy wasn’t going to embarrass himself.
‘And where do you boys know each other from?’ asked Miriam.
‘Sefton and I—’
‘Have a lot of mutual friends,’ I interrupted.
‘I didn’t know you had any friends,’ said Miriam, blowing smoke, as she liked to, as though in an aside.
‘Sefton always likes to play his cards close to his chest,’ said Willy. ‘I didn’t have you down as a man to be driving a Lagonda, for example.’
‘I think you’ll note that I’m driving the Lagonda, actually,’ said Miriam, from the driver’s seat. ‘Sefton is my passenger.’
‘Indeed,’ said Willy. ‘All the more remarkable, Sefton.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘what are you doing up around these parts, Willy?’
‘I might have asked you the same thing, old chap. Not your usual stomping ground, is it?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Miriam, on my behalf. ‘But here we are. And why are you here, Willy?’
‘Mr Klein has business interests up here,’ said Willy.
‘Ah, yes,’ I said, vaguely remembering what Willy had explained to me the night before.
‘And who is this Mr Klein when he’s at home?’ asked Miriam.
‘He’s a businessman,’ said Willy. ‘Good friend of ours.’
‘And what would be Mr Klein’s business in Becontree, of all places, if you don’t mind my asking?’ Miriam was cursed with her father’s curiosity.
‘Do you have half an hour?’ asked Willy.
‘No,’ I said.
‘It rather depends,’ said Miriam.
‘I thought perhaps I might show you something,’ said Willy.
‘Did you now?’ said Miriam. ‘And I wonder what that might be?’
She had a habit sometimes, I noticed, when she was talking to men, of moving her cigarette between her fingers very slightly and very carefully. She was doing it now – a subtle and expressive gesture.
‘You’ll have to trust me to find out,’ said Willy.
‘Hmm. What do you think, Sefton? Should we trust Willy here to show us something? Or should we not?’ And she again moved the cigarette ever so slightly between her fingers. She had us both in the palm of her hand.
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_a173d85f-bb44-5e2c-8ec3-490464fea5d6)
THIS IS ENGLAND (#ulink_a173d85f-bb44-5e2c-8ec3-490464fea5d6)
AS SO OFTEN, with so many people, and so many things, what Willy actually had to show us was something of an anticlimax. What he had to show us was a building site on Klein’s new development on the edge of Becontree. He was shouting facts and figures at us, vainly trying to impress Miriam, as lorries went thundering past.
‘You see, apart from the construction,’ he yelled, ‘there’s all the haulage and the materials themselves. So in the average house you’ve got perhaps forty thousand bricks, plus your lime and sand and cement, and then there’s your plaster and roofing tiles, fireplaces and what have you. Which is about a hundred and fifty tonnes worth per house, which has all got to be hauled to site somehow – plus your excavations. So you’re looking at quite a job.’
‘And quite a profit,’ said Miriam.
‘Exactly,’ said Willy.
‘So Mr Klein builds the houses, he provides the materials, and he provides the means by which the materials are transported? Is that right?’ said Miriam.
‘That’s right.’
‘Quite a business model.’
‘I didn’t know he was into haulage as well,’ I said.
