We walked everywhere in those days. I didn’t know anyone who owned a car, and waiting for a bus or a tube took too long, so Gerry and I would stride from Chelsea to the West End to see every new film in the opening week. Afterwards, we would wander through Soho to Jimmy’s in Dean Street for a mouth-watering stew that fell off the bone, and finally a languorous wander through the park and home. They were translucent days. The atmosphere in London was brimming with optimism and days seemed to be got through without too much worry about the future. The future was far away and plans could wait.
After strolling from Sloane Square to the World’s End, stopping every few minutes to say hello to a friend or acquaintance, the children of Chelsea parents congregated in the same place every Saturday morning. The children of aristocrats and of bankers, of artists and of mothers who lived above the shops, the children of World’s End boys, all spent hours over lukewarm cups of coffee in the Picasso on the King’s Road, or Guys and Dolls on the opposite side of the road. The cafes were teeming with beautiful boys and girls as everyone table-hopped in search of the elusive address of the party rumoured to be taking place that night. From the Picasso we’d move on into the Pheasantry, now a Pizza Express but then magnificent artists’ studios, where painters Timothy Whidbourne, Martin Sharp and Nigel Waymouth all had studios.
King’s Road had few shops in those days but the ones there were, were original, one-off places where you could buy a dress no one else would have, and your boyfriend could order a bespoke suit in midnight blue velvet. It wasn’t what it is now, a sort of dreary Oxford Street with endless franchised clothes shops, ordinary staff and formulaic coffee bars. The boys had Granny Takes a Trip, Hung On You and Dandy Fashions to buy their funky, romantic clothes, and I once spent a whole week’s wages on a loud statement of a man’s coat in orange and green checked Harris Tweed from Quorum, Ossie Clarke’s shop. A beautiful crêpe de chine dress and an embroidered cardigan could be picked up for a reasonable price in the Chelsea Antique Market and there was never a chance that anyone else would be wearing it.
London was more segregated, everything happened in a much smaller radius, and friends were more localised. We went to Blaises, the Speakeasy and the Scotch of St James but more often we went to friends’ houses. We walked from Lord North Street to North End Road, from Earl’s Court to Olympia, and everywhere surrounding and in between. Parents were never there, so we sat cross-legged on expensive Persian rugs, smoking weed and listening to the blues, to bluegrass, to soul, to Hank Williams and Janis Ian, to The Rolling Stones, to Smokey Robinson and The Lovin’ Spoonful, to Love, Carole King, and The Holy Modal Rounders, to Blood, Sweat and Tears, to Randy Newman and The Impressions, to Lenny Bruce and the Byrds and, of course, to Bob Dylan. Since his first album, every subsequent one was cause for celebration.
Sunday afternoons were spent listening to the eccentrics at Speaker’s Corner, swimming and boating in the Serpentine, and lying on the grass in Hyde Park, enjoying the free concerts from The Rolling Stones, John Sebastian and The Who, amongst others. Money didn’t come into the equation; people didn’t talk about it or think about it, or the people I knew didn’t. Our wages paid for rent, the cinema, the theatre, cigarettes, a new book and a new record once a week. What more could you want?
My friend Nonie had secured me a job at the Hungry Horse restaurant in the Fulham Road, where I sat in a little cubby-hole taking reservations and doing the bills, while the stream of glamorous regulars, including Francis Bacon, would take a stab at eating the delicious home-made pies. After work we would walk to Nonie’s flat, where her boyfriend, the tailor Nigel Hayter-Preston, would be sitting cross-legged on the floor, pins in his mouth, shears in his hands, creating something exquisite from suede or leather. Oh how beautiful was the reversible black suede jacket with brown leather lining he made for me, and the cream suede coat with drop belt he made for Maeve.
Gerry and I read like people possessed. When I first met him, he had read two books, What Makes Sammy Run and Absolute Beginners, and for his birthday I bought him ten more – ten seminal books that would, if I’d got it right, point him in the right direction. From that day on he never looked back. We sat side by side in my mother’s sitting room, with the bar heater full on, quietly reading to ourselves or reading to each other. We devoured everything we could lay our hands on. We bought paperbacks from W. H. Smith in Sloane Square and we ransacked Maeve’s bookshelves. We read Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Verlaine and P. G. Woodhouse, Nathaniel West, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Rosamund Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen, Keats, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Jerome K. Jerome, Patrick White and Basil Bunting, Wilkie Collins, Maupassant and Gunter Grass, L. P. Hartley, e. e. cummings and Patrick Hamilton, Henry Greene, Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Parker, Walt Whitman, Ronald Firbank and Robert Frost, Flaubert, Carson McCullers and Anthony Powell, Huysmans, Eudora Welty and Christopher Isherwood, James Purdy, Conan Doyle and Hardy, Balzac, John Cowper Powys and Edith Wharton, on and on and on. We couldn’t stop. We were novices to literary criticism. Nothing had been ruined by being taught or dissected. We were just hungry, passionate and intoxicated, and all we cared about was the utter joy with which these books infused our souls.
Loving the huge novel, and loving the huge novel with a sequel even more, I was nervously looking forward to beginning Proust. I liked the idea that the next six to nine months were accounted for, stretched in front of me, taken care of, but I worried that I might find the books too difficult. Instead, I found that, like Dickens or the Russians, they were straightforward and completely readable. I adored the closeted world I settled into, loved the slowness of the pace, when a character entering an anteroom could take three pages until he finally opened the door and walked in. Those twelve volumes told me more about human nature than any other books I’d ever read. I decided that, if I were ever asked by a Martian to describe a human being to them, I would suggest that they read À la Recherche du Temps Perdu because everything they could possibly want to know about society and class, love and loss, jealousy and manners, etiquette and attraction was there.
Never again, I promised myself, would I question why so and so was with so and so. It took Proust to explain that there was no explanation. People fell in love with whom they fell in love with, and there was no point in trying to work out why. If you could be bothered to look, it usually became clear in the end. He might be an unprepossessing-looking chap, but he was witty and strangely sexy, and she might not be as exciting as you might have hoped for your friend, but she was warm and she laughed at his jokes.