London Belongs to Me

New readers should be aware that the Introduction makes some details of the plot explicit.

London Belongs to Me is the capital’s great vernacular novel. Populist and proletarian, a generation before Sillitoe and Barstow, it is a work born from the living, beating heart of one of the world’s most‐used literary settings. Here is a novel packed with memorable period detail, a world of séances, bizarre political societies, smoky Mayfair nightclubs awaiting the next police raid, Nazi spies and stifling petty bourgeois gentility.

London Belongs to Me is not a complex novel. It features no struggle with fundamental human truths, no attempt to grapple with vital social or political questions. It is simply entertainment, a joyous romp through a slice of London life, unashamedly romantic and unforgettably humorous, written as if it had appeared in instalments like a Dickens epic. (Where Our Mutual Friend, written a hundred years earlier, begins with a body being fished out of the river, London Belongs to Me ends in similar fashion.)

Norman Collins does not rank as one of the great literary figures of the period. He is no rival to Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh. It would not be disrespectful to call him a popular novelist, a pulp novelist, concerned more with entertainment than enlightenment. Before London Belongs to Me Collins was enjoying growing popularity with titles like Penang Appointment (1934), The Three Friends (1935) and Trinity Town (1936) but London Belongs to Me (1945) was his tour de force and it sold 884,000 copies.

How Collins found time to write so lengthy a book remains a mystery, for while working on London Belongs to Me he was also the BBC’s Director of Overseas Service. He had previously been literary editor of the Daily News, the paper Charles Dickens edited, and deputy chairman of the left‐wing publishers Gollancz around the same time that George Orwell was providing the Covent Garden‐based outfit with Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

Early in the war, Collins joined the BBC as talks assistant, a role about as lowly and unmemorable as that of Orwell (who spent that period broadcasting propaganda from a basement office near Oxford Circus to an audience in the Far East that may have reached single figures). Unlike Orwell, Collins soon began to show a flair for corporation life – the endless memos and mindless meetings, the stifling censorship, the canteen serving Victory Stew washed down with Victory Coffee; the farce, frustrations and fastidiousness that came from working in so formidable an institution. Collins rose through the hierarchy at Broadcasting House to take charge of the Light Programme and, from November 1947, television, at a time when radio was considerably more important. (Interestingly, there is hardly any mention of the new medium in the novel.)

Collins animates London Belongs to Me with deft deadpan wit, often through the briefest strokes, the action veering between the local and metropolitan, the intimate and the public, through a series of barely connected, enticing vignettes. ‘What le Carré did for spies,’ claimed Adrian Maddox in Classic Cafes, a glossy 2002 homage to the vanishing world of working‐class, twentieth‐century London, ‘Collins does for shopgirls and nightwatchmen, accountants and publicans: real Londoners who sleep the night in London as well as work the day there. Real Londoners – some in love – some in debt, some committing murders, some adultery, some looking forward to a pension, some getting drunk, some trying to get on in the world.’

That world is the cusp of the Phoney Peace and the Phoney War, for the action begins on 23 December 1938 at exactly 4.30 p.m., as Collins makes clear, although there is no obvious political or social significance to that moment or date. The capital will soon crumble in the onslaught of the Blitz, and evil things are happening across Germany where Hitler has annexed the Sudetenland, the Nazis have trashed Jewish property on Kristallnacht, and slave labourers are constructing the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. Collins’s depiction of the soon to be ravaged landscape is far removed from George Orwell’s brutal version of impending war in the contemporaneous Coming Up for Air. Here there is no stoical resignation to man’s inalterable, impending doom but simply an examination of how a group of mostly working‐class Londoners deal with their everyday existence, the ephemeral and the enlarged, the important and the inconsequential, amid the incoming gloom.

The setting for London Belongs to Me is No. 10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, a lodging house broken up into apartments in what was then a mildly respectable inner London suburb, situated on the southeast bank of the river a mile in distance but a universe away in status from the seat of British power. Within are a broad range of loveable characters. There is Mr Josser, a ‘small, elderly man with a wisp of white hair that stood straight up like egrets’ feathers’. He is a clerk, one of the many thousands of derided but ultimately vital tiny cogs that kept the City’s wheels turning in those bureaucracy‐heavy days, a member of that most unromantic and menial of white‐collar workers whose very insipidity so inspired the Grossmiths’ The Diary of a Nobody. Or rather he was a clerk, for the book begins with his retirement from the office of Battlebury & Sons, Power Specialists in the City of London, and he is now staggering home with his gift for forty‐two years’ service – a clock, inevitably. Free of the burdens of work, he is now at a loss. He will miss the mundane and monotonous, the waiting in the rain for a tram, the daily grind, but also the reassurance of a warm undemanding workplace. He knows that life will now be easier but, despite a kindly wife, purposeless.

Mr Josser is at the centre of the micro‐London that permeates the novel. Solid, stolid, unambitious, reliable, he is the embodiment of the self‐possession and sobriety that Churchill turned to in the lean years of the war. He is not central to the action, because he doesn’t appear enough, but he is central to the novel’s raison d’être, which runs from his retirement, or ultimate lack of it, through to his inevitable and long‐expected departure to the countryside, where London no longer belongs to him.

Mr Josser’s return home to Kennington from his City workplace provides our introduction to 10 Dulcimer Street, and soon we are taking in a panorama of the other residents. Mr Puddy is about to tackle the first of several dreadful meals that dominate his existence. Connie, the failed actress and ageing nightclub cloakroom attendant, is sinking into the first of several lakes of mawkish tears as she contemplates her miserable, friendless existence. Kind‐hearted but desperate, she lives a small life of ersatz glamour through a tedious job in a glamorous setting. Elsewhere in 10 Dulcimer Street the delinquent young Percy Boon is absentmindedly stubbing out his cigarette in the butter dish. A simple youth, as fixed on secondhand thrills as Connie, in his case the fast cars/fast women American template, Percy soon descends into serious crime, committed as casually and unemotionally as in a US gangster film, which contrasts with the pre‐war English gentility that drives so much of the novel. Percy Boon’s crime provides London Belongs to Me with its main axis: the build‐up to the deed committed in a godless world of decaying, disappearing morals – a micro version of the mass inhuman nihilism emanating from Germany; the aftermath of the crime during which time Boon, still driven by hopelessly romantic dreams, appears impregnable; the inevitable arrest and arraignment; all these give London Belongs to Me a focus which Collins can return to at any time to allow his characters more dimensions.

In charge of 10 Dulcimer Street is the snobbish, widowed landlady, Mrs Vizzard, caught between the humiliation of letting rooms out to her social inferiors and her love of the rent they bring in. An ice maiden with strains of Miss Havisham, she thaws when she falls in love with the mysterious, romantic new tenant, Mr Squales, aka Enrico Qualito, soi‐disant professor of spiritualism. Is he really a brooding Italianate hero who has stepped out of the pages of a Giovanni Verga risorgimento novel, as he would like everyone to believe, or a phoney who would be more at home in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta? Collins places Squales in a series of superb comic scenes, particularly at an all‐Red Indian evening at Finsbury Park where as ‘Mocking Bear’ he is asked a series of vital questions by a ‘pale clergyman’, to each of which he returns what turns out to be the wrong answer.

‘Is there going to be war?’…

‘Naw.’

‘Will Hitler invade Poland?’

‘Naw.’…

‘Will Hitler die a violent death?’…

‘Yuh’…

When ‘Mocking Bear’ is forced into a corner about the date of Hitler’s impending doom he commits himself to 3 October 1940, a prediction that also turns out to be wrong. Pressed by his guests, Squales then descends into hopeless hyperbole. ‘Mocking Bear says peace in Pale Face Country… War clouds vanish like summer snow. Papooses play and squaws happy. Braves put away scalping‐knives and repair wigwam. Much pipe‐smoking. Bad eagle fly away with arrow in his breast.’

The book’s greatest force, however, is the underused Mr Puddy, a comic creation as cleverly outlined as a P. G. Wodehouse creation in a Psmith caper. Mr Puddy has ‘known better days’. He still dresses respectably but is hopelessly drifting from one dead‐end job to another, inevitably with less responsibility and a smaller pay packet. He inhabits a one‐dimensional universe where his sole concern is the content of his next unappetising meal. No gourmet and with no wish to sup with sophistication, Puddy takes a barely believable delight in his junk diet; anything as long as it’s tinned and cheap, which reaches its climax when he comes to stocking up in expectation of war. On the back of a postcard he makes his list:

Puddy’s comic worth comes from his appalling adenoidal difficulties. Nasal sounds – the ‘m’ and the ‘n’ – are beyond him and instantly converted into plosives, so that ‘cannon fodder’ becomes ‘caddod fodder’ and a more complicated construction like ‘Nothing coming in’ is rendered ‘Dothing cubbing id’. When a slapstick scene in his flat results in Squales slipping on one of his beloved tins, Puddy is full of incomprehensible remorse and apology that helps create a scene of slapstick genius:

‘What the hell happened to me?’ he asked.

Mr Josser glanced at Mr Puddy.

Mr Puddy coughed.

‘You drod on a sabbod,’ he said.

‘On a what?’ Mr Squales exclaimed.

‘On a sabbod. A Sailor Slice.’…

Indeed, food, or rather a debased mid‐twentieth‐century and very English version of it, is one of the novel’s many themes. The cartoon diet that so many Londoners followed until they were saved by paninis (sic) and chicken tikka masala, a diet dominated by locust beans and cod‐liver oil (with a dollop of Scott’s Emulsion), reoccurs with welcome regularity. ‘A cup of tea sweetened with glucose… the worst she’d ever had brought to her’, a ‘“Home‐Made Farm House Pork Pie” that should have been labelled “poison”’, bridge rolls and cress for the train, and, before a séance, an admission that the medium has not yet arrived followed by the vital query to a hungry punter: ‘Fish‐paste or sandwich‐spread?’

Here one important London Belongs to Me theme slips into another: spiritualism. Fascination for the afterlife was one of the great middle‐class fads of the early twentieth century, the pre‐war equivalent of house prices and global warming. Even the most sophisticated and intellectually advanced members of society succumbed. For instance Arthur Conan Doyle, towards the end of his life, devoted more time to the ‘Other Side’ than he did to Sherlock Holmes. In July 1930, six days after his death, the great author supposedly appeared at his own memorial service in front of 6,000 people at the Royal Albert Hall. Many said they saw him – well, a version of him – sent from beyond and sat in the chair provided, but there was no earthly proof that the late writer made it.

The dead permeate London Belongs to Me, but not tragically so. The spectres of the late husbands of the rich widows Mr Squales seduces shadow over the smooth philanderer; there is the ‘Blonde’ whose unfortunate demise takes Percy Boon out of his trashy world of snide looks and stolen cars; there is the passing of Uncle Henry, to the ultimate benefit of the Jossers; there is even, very briefly, a Mrs Puddy who must be looking down aghast at her husband’s refuelling, and there are all the phantoms who steadfastly refuse to come to life at the many séances. But let us not forget those who are alive; the extraordinarily memorable minor characters with their expertly contrived names: Veesey Blaize, the inconsequential lawyer; Otto Hapfel, the hapless Nazi later reincarnated televisually in the form of Herr Flick in the occasionally funny TV sitcom ’Allo ’Allo; Uncle Henry, the manic socialist greengrocer; Doreen, the selfish flatmate; the tarty Blonde as doomed as any Hitchcock heroine.

Indeed, any analysis of London Belongs to Me soon leads to screen comparisons, not just because of the all‐star cast that filled Sidney Gilliat’s 1948 film version (too much was needlessly changed and there wasn’t enough time to bring out the ambition of the novel despite the presence of Richard Attenborough and Alastair Sim), but because of the related Ealing comedies, particularly The Ladykillers, in which Alec Guinness’s ‘Professor’ Marcus is Mr Squales come to life, arriving at Mrs Wilberforce’s door with a menacing ‘You have rooms to let’ straight out of Mr Squales’ opening gambit to Mrs Vizzard in London Belongs To Me: ‘You have a room to let?’

Just as film historians now explain that the five gang members in The Ladykillers were meant to represent different strains of the labour movement and different members of Clement Attlee’s 1940s government, so No. 10 Dulcimer Street is surely a populist No. 10 Downing Street, its Palace of Westminster the South London Parliament, a powerless people’s debating forum with its full panoply of elevated ministers as ineffectual in the face of the impending hostilities as the real life House of Commons a mile north‐west was initially, its residents embodying certain strains of the British psyche at its most vulnerable and threatened, and certain characteristics of those in positions of power and influence at the time. Mrs Vizzard, superficially in charge but hapless in the face of the imminent drama, is prime minister Neville Chamberlain; Mr Josser, bumbling, kindly but ineffectual, superannuated, but with a surprising spark, is Sir Samuel Hoare, 1930s foreign secretary, whom Churchill sent far from London in 1940 at around the same time that the Jossers leave Kennington for the countryside; Uncle Henry, treasurer of the South London Parliament, exudes a chilly manner reminiscent of the then Chancellor, Sir John Simon; and Mr Squales, the strange outsider who assumes control, often exhibits many Churchillian tendencies. (Churchill was the guest of honour at the film premiere at the Leicester Square Theatre in 1948.) And then there are the more philosophical comparisons. Mrs Vizzard is the embodiment of unbridled capitalism, replete with all its vices: lust, greed, conceit, paranoia; Uncle Henry is the standard bearer of socialism with all its vagaries and inconsistencies, and Percy Boon with his lack of moral boundaries and flippant, remorseless, murderous tendencies, fits in perfectly as a metaphor for fascism.

Perhaps Norman Collins should have waited until the end of the war before starting work on London Belongs to Me. He could then have provided us with an even more sprawling work not only covering the entire period of hostilities, but covering more of London. Strangely this is a London in which the Tube barely registers – journeys are made mostly on bus and tram – in which the characters exhibit only the slightest interest in things that would have occupied most Londoners’ minds and time: football, cricket, the greyhounds, the music hall.

Today London Belongs to Me is mostly forgotten, a cult classic, rather than a staple on the must‐read list of well‐thumbed London books, although it was introduced to a new generation by retro chic pop group St Etienne with their 1991 track of the same title. London Belongs to Me is a B‐novel, epic but undemanding. It cannot be ranked alongside Of Human Bondage or 1984 as a complex, sophisticated novel of the capital, but it does take its place near the top of a league of London lite: warm, rich, metropolitan mini‐masterpieces like Alexander Baron’s King Dido and Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City. London Belongs to Me offers no overriding philosophy or message. There is no slick ending gathering all the loose strands together. It exists simply as soap opera, allowing us to watch its many characters move through two years of their lives, from the dismal days leading to war through to the blacked‐out dark days of the Blitz. No one really learns how their place in life works. No one gains much wisdom or wealth. Except the reader.