In the late 1930s, as an ex-art student, I was often in the West End of London, a frequenter of galleries and exhibitions. I became aware of a man who attended the same events. From the first moment I noticed him, I felt that his face was familiar. He was a man of medium height, black haired, black eyed, with a look so ravaged by horror and grief that it was startling. He surely had been to hell and back. So regular were his appearances that I light-heartedly referred to him as my Ghost. I do not wish to imply that he was in any way pursuing me, nor I him; the encounters (barely that) were quite by chance, and not always in art exhibitions.
One evening, having a drink with friends at the Café Royal, I noticed him, melancholy, dark and tormented, at the next marble table. On another occasion, alone in the Lyons Teashop in Piccadilly, engrossed in what I was reading, I felt a slight chill. I looked up to discover my Ghost sitting at the pink glass table, directly in front of me.
Again, I was travelling with a friend to stay with her relatives in Coventry; a gloomy journey on a gloomy November evening. We took a corridor train with sliding doors that gave access to each carriage. As the train rattled through the Midlands, the door to our compartment was slid open; my Ghost stared in, shut the door immediately and disappeared.
War came. Lives were in upheaval. One evening, back in the Café Royal, I saw my Ghost, this time in uniform. Years passed, the war was over. I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue with the friend who had shared my train journey. ‘He looks familiar,’ she said. A man in the crowd, in civilian clothes. ‘It’s my Ghost,’ I replied, ‘out of the army.’
No further sightings took place until 1952, at the private view of the Mexican Exhibition at the Tate Gallery. Passing from one room to another, I recognized my Ghost in dinner jacket and black tie. He approached me, as if to shake my hand; realizing he did not know me, he dropped his hand and sidled off. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘if he’s been haunting me all these years, perhaps I’ve been haunting him.’
Next day, I spotted him coming out of the post office on the corner of Knightsbridge and Wilton Place. A few weeks later I saw him in Southampton Row. I was then working for the Ganymed Press, near Holborn, and thought that, sooner or later, as he seemed to be in the ‘art world’, my man would be sure to turn up. He did. One day, returning to the office after lunch, I was confronted by my Ghost sitting at the desk. My assistant was on the phone to my boss, who was upstairs. ‘Mr Roberts,’ she said, ‘Mr Mervyn Peake is here to see you.’
[Ann Baer]
Being myself, at that time, of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who are technically called street-walkers. Some of these women had occasionally taken my part against watchmen who wished to drive me off the steps of houses where I was sitting; others had protected me against more serious aggressions. But one amongst them – the one on whose account I have at all introduced this subject – yet no! let me not class thee, Oh noble-minded Ann —, with that other order of women; let me find, if it be possible, some gentler name to designate the condition of her to whose bounty and compassion – ministering to my necessities when all the world stood aloof from me – I owe it that I am at this time alive. For many weeks I had walked at nights, with this poor friendless girl up and down Oxford Street, or had rested with her on steps and under the shelter of porticos…
One night, when we were pacing slowly along Oxford Street, and after a day when I had felt unusually ill and faint, I requested her to turn off with me into Soho Square. Thither we went; and we sat down on the steps of a house, which to this hour I never pass without a pang of grief, and an inner act of homage to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory of the noble act which she there performed. Suddenly, as we sat, I grew much worse. I had been leaning my head against her bosom, and all at once I sank from her arms, and fell backwards on the steps. From the sensations I then had, I felt an inner conviction of the liveliest kind that, without some powerful and reviving stimulus, I should either have died on the spot, or should, at least, have sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all re-ascent, under my friendless circumstances, would soon have become hopeless. Then it was, at this crisis of my fate, that my poor orphan companion, who had herself met with little but injuries in this world, stretched out a saving hand to me. Uttering a cry of terror, but without a moment’s delay, she ran off into Oxford Street, and, in less time than could be imagined, returned to me with a glass of port-wine and spices, that acted upon my empty stomach (which at that time would have rejected all solid food) with an instantaneous power of restoration…
Some feelings, though not deeper or more passionate, are more tender than others; and often when I walk, at this time, in Oxford Street by dreamy lamp-light, and hear those airs played on a common street-organ which years ago solaced me and my dear youthful companion, I shed tears, and muse with myself at the mysterious dispensation which so suddenly and so critically separated us for ever…
About fifteen shillings I had employed in re-establishing (though in a very humble way) my dress. Of the remainder, I gave one-quarter (something more than a guinea) to Ann, meaning, on my return, to have divided with her whatever might remain.
These arrangements made, soon after six o’clock, on a dark winter evening, I set off, accompanied by Ann, towards Piccadilly; for it was my intention to go down as far as the turn to Salt Hill and Slough on the Bath or Bristol mail. Our course lay through a part of the town which has now totally disappeared, so that I can no longer retrace its ancient boundaries – having been replaced by Regent Street and its adjacencies. Swallow Street is all that I remember of the names superseded by this large revolutionary usurpation. Having time enough before us, however, we bore away to the left, until we came into Golden Square. There, near the corner of Sherrard Street, we sat down, not wishing to part in the tumult and blaze of Piccadilly. I had told Ann of my plans some time before; and now I assured her again that she should share in my good fortune, if I met with any; and that I would never forsake her, as soon as I had power to protect her…I hoped to return in a week, at furthest, and I agreed with her that, on the fifth night from that, and every night afterwards, she would wait for me, at six o’clock, near the bottom of Great Titchfield Street; which had formerly been our customary haven of rendezvous, to prevent our missing each other in the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street. This, and other measures of precaution, I took; one, only, I forgot. She had either never told me, or (as a matter of no great interest) I had forgotten, her surname. It is a general practice, indeed, with girls of humble rank in her unhappy condition, not (as novel-reading women of higher pretensions) to style themselves Miss Douglas, Miss Montague, &c., but simply by their Christian names, Mary, Jane, Frances, &c. Her surname, as the surest means of tracing her, I ought now to have inquired; but the truth is, having no reason to think that our meeting again could, in consequence of a short interruption, be more difficult or uncertain than it had been for so many weeks, I scarcely for a moment adverted to it as necessary, or placed it amongst my memoranda against this parting interview; and, my final anxieties being spent in comforting her with hopes, and in pressing upon her the necessity of getting some medicine for a violent cough with which she was troubled, I wholly forgot this precaution until it was too late to recall her…
I quitted London in haste, and returned to the Priory; after some time I proceeded to Oxford; and it was not until many months had passed away that I had it in my power again to revisit the ground which had become so interesting to me, and to this day remains so, as the chief scene of my youthful sufferings.
Meantime, what had become of Ann? Where was she? Whither had she gone? According to our agreement, I sought her daily, and waited for her every night, so long as I staid in London, at the corner of Titchfield Street; and during the last days of my stay in London I put into activity every means of tracing her that my knowledge of London suggested, and the limited extent of my power made possible. The street where she had lodged I knew, but not the house; and I remembered, at last, some account which she had given of ill-treatment, from her landlord, which made it probable that she had quitted these lodgings before we parted. She had few acquaintances; most people, besides, thought that the earnestness of my inquiries arose from motives which moved their laughter or their slight regard; and others, thinking that I was in chase of a girl who had robbed me of some trifles, were naturally and excusably indisposed to give me any clue to her, if indeed they had any to give. Finally, as my despairing resource, on the day I left London I put into the hands of the only person who (I was sure) must know Ann by sight, from having been in company with us once or twice, an address to the Priory. All was in vain. To this hour I have never heard a syllable about her. This, amongst such troubles as most men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest affliction. If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other – a barrier no wider, in a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity! During some years I hoped that she did live; and I suppose that, in the literal and unrhetorical use of the word myriad, I must, on my different visits to London, have looked into many myriads of female faces, in the hope of meeting Ann. I should know her again amongst a thousand, and if seen but for a moment. Handsome she was not; but she had a sweet expression of countenance, and a peculiarly graceful carriage of the head. I sought her, I have said, in hope. So it was for years; but now I should fear to see her; and her cough, which grieved me when I parted with her, is now my consolation. Now I wish to see her no longer, but think of her, more gladly, as one long since laid in the grave – in the grave, I would hope, of a Magdalen; taken away before injuries and cruelty had blotted out and transfigured her ingenuous nature, or the brutalities of ruffians had completed the ruin they had begun.
[Thomas De Quincey]
Paul Raymond shifted fractionally in the hot tub, and a droplet of perspiration fell from a ringlet. His signature bouffant had thinned a little at the crown, it was true, but it still flowed to his shoulders like al dente vermicelli. (What was it about purveyors of gentlemen’s entertainment and their barnets? Stringfellow was the same.) ‘More Krug, Steve?’ offered Raymond, propping himself on an elbow and reaching for the sweating bucket.
I raised a wrinkled thumb. ‘Be rude not to, Paul,’ I said. Not for the first time, I reproached myself for misjudging my host. Like many others, I had been ready to believe the caricature of the publisher as a miserly misanthrope, passing his declining years by stroking gold bars in his lonely condo. Through the wreaths of my cigar smoke, I considered the still-vital octogenarian in front of me and wondered that anyone could doubt his credentials as a liberator of post-war London, who had brought a welcome dose of honesty to our confused and hypocritical attitudes to sex.
At that moment, the Japanese doors sighed ajar, and stepping towards us through the nimbus of moisture and tobacco came Lorelei and Roxanne, shrugging off their robes, and then Susie and Lucy, and Tammy and Sammy…
Dear reader, it wasn’t like that. No, it wasn’t that way at all. I’ll admit that when I began to chronicle the disappearance of the Raymond Revuebar, Britain’s original strip joint, I half expected – do I mean hoped? – to wind up in a steamy spot alongside its founder. But in the event, the clinch I found myself in with Paul Raymond was a long way from the pleasures of the assisted Jacuzzi. On the contrary, I felt the hot breath of the powerful Raymond organization on the back of my neck. The business of the Revuebar was titillation, the tantalizing withholding of juicy material. In this respect, Raymond and his people had a holistic approach, as much a feature of the boardroom as of the dimly lit cockpit of the stage itself. A man by the name of Carl Snitcher, who is chief executive of Raymond’s property empire, Soho Estates, has a practised way of saving your time and his when you inquire whether Mr Raymond might be willing to – ‘No, he wouldn’t,’ says Mr Snitcher, before you’ve even finished asking if Raymond would speak to you in person. Despite this, I was soon standing in the lobby of a mansion block in Piccadilly that didn’t look worth the money it must cost to live there: I knew that Raymond had a bachelor pad near the Ritz Hotel and by chance I had stumbled on the right place at the first time of asking. In the hallway, which had been camouflaged in a colour scheme of sub-fusc, I secured the displeasure of the doormen, and indeed others on the Raymond payroll, with a patently under-rehearsed story about ‘an appointment’. Nonetheless, I found myself returning more than once to Arlington Street, SW1, blowing on my hands and stamping my feet and hoping for a glimpse of the man who had revolutionized London’s nightlife, not to mention the opportunity to snatch a word, if you’ll overlook the expression.
But all of this lay ahead of me when I set out to chart the decline of Raymond’s fleshpot. It was due to be reincarnated as a gay bar. Out were going all the trappings and appurtenances of the old hetero mosh pit, one supposed: the hoppy kegs in the cellar; the desultory puck of air-freshener in the well of the urinals, the Velcro carpets. And in were coming toney, tongue-in-cheek fixtures and fittings, as demanded by a more sophisticated clientele. I wondered what all this reminded me of, and realized hotly that it was what youread about in every other phonebox in London. The Revuebar was pre-op.
From the south, the club was approached by way of Shaftesbury Avenue, which was effectively the grid reference of the magical destination ‘London’s West End’. Turning off this theatrical thoroughfare into Rupert Street, the visitor all at once beheld the scintillating signifier of the Revuebar itself: the name of the gaff, spelled out in neon. There was talk of preserving this throbbing masthead, but it was out of sight behind scaffolding in 2005 and Westminster Council said it had no knowledge that the sign would be listed. The northern means of access to Raymond’s pleasuredome was from Berwick Street, a tributary of mighty Oxford Street. People from out of town were well advised not to go too far to the west along this strip before making a left, and in any case a change of direction was overdue by the time one reached Marks & Sparks, coincidentally the site of the pox doctor where Thomas De Quincey bought his first wrap of opium. Assuming that you were safely proceeding along Berwick Street, the sight of market barrows and the nosegay of fruit on the turn announced that the Revuebar was close at hand. Strictly speaking, it was not on Berwick Street itself but at 11–12 Walker’s Court. The revamp of the venue saw not only its name removed but also proud armorials such as ‘The Festival of Erotica’ torn down. The onlooker found his eye drawn to a relic of an earlier life, a plaque for ‘Maurice House’. It was little wonder that the old name had fallen into disuse: ‘Maurice House, Walker’s Court’ had the ring of warden-controlled accommodation rather than an amphitheatre of unwithered flesh. The plaque had come to light on the club’s one architectural conversation piece, the bridge over Walker’s Court. The bridge is an enclosed walkway, suspended above a narrow strand of sex shops and Italian caffs, and as far as I can see it’s the only reason for calling Walker’s Court a court at all. It is a low bridge, so low that a man standing on the pavement beneath might almost brush the underside of it with his outstretched fingers. In any other setting, this squat rampart would be ugly, laughable: a dirty cladding of concrete which attempts to imitate stone without remotely coming close. The whole thing is too heavy for the supporting buildings to bear, aesthetically if not structurally. With its leaded bay windows, it is a mockery of a romantic fantasy, Ivanhoe’s penthouse. But by virtue of its very improbability, it casts a strange spell. A folly such as this might awaken in a man’s breast a courtly daydream of a beautiful exotic dancer trapped in a tower, who offers to let down her hair extensions to any punter bold and trim enough to shin up them and claim her.
Despite Soho’s renown or notoriety as London’s red-light zone, history shows that it took a while to get the old girl in the mood. As late as Elizabethan times, Soho was nothing but water-meadow, and the story goes that it acquired its name only in the late seventeenth century, when the Duke of Monmouth, who had a place in the West End, uttered the rallying cry of ‘So-hoe!’ at the Battle of Sedgemoor. When Casanova himself had digs in Greek Street, the Soho we know today was still no more than a twinkle in his roving eye. In fact, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the place got a reputation for carnal pursuits. Prostitutes working the Strand and Haymarket repaired to rookeries with their temporary patrons. These comings and goings were recorded by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Not only a horror classic but also a prototype account of Soho low-life, the story notes that the typical thoroughfare boasted ‘a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and women of many different nationalities passing out, keys in hand’. By the end of the First World War, Soho had determinedly made its bed, and has been lying in it ever since. Girls were to be found on the streets from the late afternoons, as shops and offices closed for the day. From midnight until cockcrow, a shift of heavily made-up older ladies patrolled Glasshouse Street, no more than a garter’s throw from the Revuebar. As the novels of Graham Greene remind us, many of Soho’s prostitutes between the wars were French or Belgian, known locally as Fifis. Gangsters set up stables of girls on Rupert Street and Brewer Street. Ed Glinert, a one-man gazetteer of London, says that coitus was frequently interruptus thanks to ‘men with cameras bursting in and taking shots that could be used for blackmail’. By the 1950s, there were an estimated 5,000 working girls in Central London. A policeman walking up Shaftesbury Avenue one evening encountered 100 girls soliciting before he’d got as far as Cambridge Circus. These scandalizing antics were not to be endured. The forty-shilling fines handed down to prostitutes were having no effect, so these sanctions were reinforced by the big stick of imprisonment for third-time offenders. The result was that working girls were swept off the street overnight.
This was the hygienic, hosed-down scene that confronted the new owner of Maurice House, the thirty-three-year-old Paul Raymond. In the late 1950s Raymond was a former comb salesman and a failed mind-reader. But he had experienced a eureka moment on the variety circuit when he realized that he could persuade a couple of girls who were sharing the bill with him to take their tops off for an extra ten shillings each, an outlay which he more than recouped at the box office. Raymond was born Geoffrey Quinn in Liverpool in 1925: he shared his birthday with the noted authors J. G. Ballard and Tibor Fischer. Chalk it up to healthy adolescent curiosity, if you will, or to a precocious talent for his future line of work, but at fourteen Raymond was peeping through a keyhole as his aunt undressed. He was educated by the Jesuit brothers at St Francis Xavier’s College in Liverpool, the alma mater of Gerard Manley Hopkins. ‘If there’s any spanking on the curriculum of Raymond’s clubs and his magazines,’ said the Liverpool Post, ‘we know where he got the idea from.’ Raymond left school at fifteen and went to work as an office boy with the Manchester ship canal before a brief spell down the mines (he lasted a week).
Wartime found him doing his best to avoid national service by force-feeding himself sandwiches of saccharin before his medical. A pal had told him that chain-eating sugar butties would fool the unsuspecting stethoscope into picking up signs of a heart condition. But Raymond was passed ‘A1 fit’ and joined the RAF as a bandsman. During his two years in uniform, he supplemented his forces pay by flogging grooming products as well as nylons and petrol coupons. ‘I was a total spiv,’ he has said of this period of his life. The demobilized Raymond made a living of sorts in show business, first playing the drums in a dance band and then setting up as a clairvoyant after buying the act from a clown on Clacton Pier. The fee of £25 included a book of secret codes, a crib of apparently workaday phrases with which the mystic’s assistant could guide the great Raymond to his uncanny insights. Not that he went by that name on stage: if he and his then partner had been lucky enough to have their own dressing room, the name on the door would have been Mr and Mrs Tree (as in ‘mystery’). Poor takings suggested that Raymond had no future in the mind-reading business. The masterstroke of putting topless women in front of a paying audience came to him not a moment too soon. In 1951, he went on the road with the Festival of Nudes, his own personal tribute to the rather better-known carnival which was then attempting to raise post-war spirits.
The Revuebar, which opened in 1958, was not the first London venue to feature nude shows. Around the corner at the Windmill, women had stood and shivered in the altogether for years: famously, the Lord Chamberlain had decreed that the models were not allowed to move. Raymond spotted a loophole in the ruling and registered his Revuebar as a club: the striptease had arrived. Raymond and his activities excited the loathing of papers such as the Daily Mail from the outset. In 1961, Raymond was fined £5,000 for keeping a disorderly house. The judge censured the ‘filthy, disgusting and beastly’ Revuebar. But the business was an unstoppable success: by 1965, its owner had made half a million pounds. Raymond grew rich on membership fees, as Soho’s old faces duly noted. ‘Made millions out of standing orders,’ the underworld figure Billy Howard told his son as they stood in Walker’s Court, admiring the photos of ‘attractive showgirls, scantily clad in feathers and sequins’. ‘To get in youhave to be a member. Most of the customers have got a few bob, they’re down here for conferences or meetings, they have a few drinks and end up here. Fill in the membership form with their bank details and every year it comes out. Most of them only ever go in the place once, but they just keep on paying.’
Carelessness, or embarrassment, kept the bankers’ drafts rolling in. According to Michael Connor, who wrote a biography of Howard, The Soho Don, ‘Bill obviously thought the way Paul Raymond had achieved this cash flow was a clever angle. The operation itself…was stylish. Not only were the sets a talking point, Mickey Spillane, the American thriller writer, had remarked that the Girl in the Golden Fish Tank was the sexiest girl he had ever seen.’
The terrible burden of conceiving and bringing to the stage Paul Raymond’s increasingly spectacular productions was borne for half a lifetime by the Revuebar’s former artistic director, Gerard Simi. ‘I have lived with spangles, with glitter, but I am not duped. I see through it.’ I found Simi taking some time off at his home in north-west London before committing himself to new projects. He was telling me about video directors with whom he’d recently had some dealings. ‘They are so pretentious,’ he went on. ‘You meet them and they are all talking about “my work”. Well, here is my work, thirty years of work.’ Simi ran a hand over transparent wallets of photographic prints, a fraction of the 3,000 images he had saved from the Revuebar and which he hoped one day to bring to the public between the covers of a coffee-table book. One snap captured a pair of young women in minimalist sportswear apparently under-going a searching workout. Simi was ‘persevering’ with a text to accompany his glossy souvenir. ‘I write better English than I talk,’ he said, the accent of his Corsican childhood unmodulated by long exposure to the stews of Soho. In the bearded middle-aged man it was possible to descry the young hoofer who had arrived penniless in London. ‘I had a saucepan, to cook food in the hotel. I suppose it was illegal.’ Simi has calculated that the curtain rose 22,000 times on his shows. ‘More than The Mousetrap,’ he said. In excess of two million people came to gawp at his productions. How many routines had he choreographed at the Revuebar? Pah, too many to count, perhaps 1,000. Raymond, the former vaudeville turn, had prided himself on being an impresario. As well as the Revuebar, he bought the Whitehall Theatre and transferred a successful farce called Pyjama Tops from the United States, throwing in added nudity. Its success led to a run of shows including What, No Pyjamas? and Yes, We Have No Pyjamas. Despite their emphasis on bare skin, the plays were judged to be oddly wholesome by the critics. Sex was on show but it was also sent up. Raymond’s most ambitious production was the Royalty Follies of 1974, which cost £300,000 to put on, a princely sum thirty years ago. The climax saw a live dolphin removing a woman’s bikini with its bottlenosed snout. Like Raymond’s other blockbusters, the Follies was rolled out to what might be called the legitimate theatre, and the dolphin played for many nights at the Royalty on Kingsway, now the Peacock Theatre. The responsibilities of backstage staff included installing a tank for the mammal, and lowering semi-naked models through trapdoors in the proscenium arch, which had been purpose-built to allow airborne entrances: ‘tart traps’ as they were inevitably known. The official history of the Peacock claims that the dolphin failed to adapt to its new life in showbusiness. ‘Sadly, the conditions proved far from congenial for poor Flipper, who passed into legend as the only ghost the theatre boasts: a spectral squeaking, not unlike a crying baby, to be heard desolately wailing in its now abandoned and rusted prison…’
Gerard Simi’s role behind the scenes was recognized in 1997 when Raymond sold him the Revuebar. ‘I made money out of it, £7 million a year,’ Simi told me. Around us were some of the fruits of his labour. Tropical fish pouted like showgirls from behind their glass. Simi’s living room was dominated by a huge television set. Behind its shutters, it was like a deserted chateau. The money had bought Simi time to develop his gifts as a portraitist. On an easel, a work in progress celebrated an unabashed gym-rat who was entwined in a sash or perhaps a bedsheet. Yes, the money had been good, but where had it gone? ‘By the end of Saturday night, we had all this money,’ said Simi. ‘By Monday, most of it had disappeared, on this and that.’
By the time Raymond had unloaded the Revuebar, it was the centre of his empire in name only. He had enriched himself by diversifying into men’s magazines. At the self-consciously classy end of his adult library – I’m thinking of titles such as Mayfair and Men Only– editorial was shoehorned between the pin-ups, in an echo of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. Heartbreakingly, this convention is observed to the present day, as though the staff have a touching faith in the taste and breadth of interest of their readership, or simply cannot bring themselves to break it to the old boy about the unconscionable charcuterie that is the mainstay of rival publications.
Not even Raymond’s portfolio of one-handed journals could compare with the property business that he was building. Ironically, his opportunity came after a crackdown on the proprietors of sex boutiques, the successors of Conrad’s Adolf Verloc and his ‘dim shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish’ in the London of The Secret Agent. The purge drove many tenants out of Soho in the mid 1970s. In their wake, property prices fell, and Raymond followed along behind, buying up Soho by the street. By the time he was done, it was estimated that he owned between a third and a half of the area. In recent years, his assets have included the freehold to Ronnie Scott’s, Sugar Reef and Soho House. Nor had he severed his ties with the Revuebar entirely, it turned out. In one of the last interviews he gave, he told the Estates Gazette in 1990 that he had made his initial venture into property as long ago as 1958, to prevent his club from falling into the hands of Soho villains. ‘It was the time of Jack Spot, Billy Hill and other gangsters. The wrong type of people were beginning to encroach on me. The protection racket said I wouldn’t last more than three weeks, so, to safeguard my interests, I bought the freehold.’ Raymond said that it was the best deal he ever did. There was still one last little drink in it for him in 2004, when he put up Gerard Simi’s rent from £150,000 a year to £275,000.
It would have been even more but Simi managed to talk Soho Estates down from their original figure. However, the landlord wanted the new rate backdated to cover the nine months it had taken to conclude negotiations. ‘It was an astronomical sum,’ Simi told the Independent at the time. ‘But still I managed to find it. I was only two or three days late. But they sent the bailiffs round one night, saying, “We are coming to close your place.” That was the thanks I got for keeping the Raymond Revuebar alive. I was very, very disappointed.’
Carl Snitcher pointed out that the rent rise at the Revuebar had been agreed, not imposed. ‘So we agree it between us and then that’s the rent, and so it does go up. But that’s the real world. And then what do yousay, as a landlord, in circumstances in which everyone has agreed a rent? That, for sentimental reasons, youwon’t enforce it?’
Simi didn’t want to talk about it any more, he said, about how he came to sell up and the Revuebar finally closed its doors after nearly half a century. The far Finchley Road was a susurrus through his French windows. ‘It’s not about finding work. I could go and work in Austria now.’ Simi snapped his fingers. But he mourned the sophistication that had been the hallmark of his shows, the choreography, the sparkle. ‘There is no market for striptease today. The boys all used to come down to see us in Soho on a Saturday night but they don’t come any more. They think it’s all one big gay village now. Lap-dance bars have taken a lot of the business away, so have the sex shops. People go in there for a quickie, as I call it.’
Simi told me that he still spoke to his old boss on the phone. But later he admitted that it had been several years since they’d had a conversation. ‘He lives very quietly, counting his money,’ he said. ‘You know the customers always used to ask me, “Show me the seat where Paul Raymond sits,” but the truth is that we hardly ever saw him. He liked to give the impression that he loved the club, arriving in his Rolls Royce, but really all he was interested in was the bottom line.’ Raymond became one of the richest men in the world, with a personal fortune estimated at £600 million in 2004. But his personal life was less enviable. His relationship with his two sons had been strained. A famous affair with the former porn star Fiona Richmond was a distant memory. ‘She has a family now,’ Simi said. Raymond’s daughter, Debbie, who had seemed likely to inherit the empire, died of a drugs overdose in 1992, and the old man was seldom seen in public again after that. John Walsh of the Independent, covering the funeral of the writer Jeffrey Bernard at Kensal Green five years later, reported that Raymond had turned up to pay his respects to a fellow Soho legend. Walsh found him ‘unrecognizable’. Carl Snitcher of Soho Estates wrote to the Evening Standard in January 2004 to correct a story that the paper had run about Raymond. ‘Although he doesn’t come into the office all that often, he is still the chairman of the company and is involved on a daily basis with matters pertaining to the business,’ wrote Snitcher. ‘To say that he “spends most days in his dressing gown, dyes his shoulder-length hair yellow and doesn’t cut his fingernails” is untrue. Last week he attended his granddaughter’s eighteenth birthday party in fine form. His fingernails were cut, he was not in a dressing gown and his hair was certainly not yellow.’
Raymond didn’t lack for posh grub, living as he did between the Ritz and Le Caprice. He could take his constitutionals in Green Park. When I went into his apartment building and said, ‘I’m here to see Paul Raymond,’ one of the doormen dialled the penthouse. But it was no good. ‘I’m afraid he’s not in,’ said the doorman, giving me a wary look. I thought of the long-running Private Eye cartoon strip which had celebrated Bernard and the Coach and Horses in Soho, with its invariable caption: ‘Jeff been in?’ I wrote to Paul Raymond care of his condo and I’m still waiting for a reply.
The day came when the Revuebar was reopening. It was a fully-fledged gay bar now: it was post-op. I hesitated to tell Gerard Simi that I had an invitation to the launch party but he said he wanted to hear all about it. He made me promise to ring him and tell him how it went.
As is often the way with these things, the grand opening of Too2Much became a last-minute rush. The boys and girls who had been taken on behind the bar and in the cloakrooms arrived on time, but their hot pants didn’t turn up. I heard all this from a strapping cigarette girl called Joy, a nice lad in leopard skin and a stovepipe hat. The essential layout of the Revuebar, and many of its fixtures, had been retained. In the red plush of a wall, I made out what looked like a circular panel. Had it once held a lifebelt, for use in emergencies in the dolphin tank? I opened the panel to find a rack of fuseboxes. In the larger of the two bars, Gerard Simi’s beloved proscenium arch had been preserved – would I really call him and tell him this, I wondered – but the curtain would not be rising that night. There would be no writhing floor show, no naked motorcycle display team. Instead, there was a metal pole on either side of the bar, as though what everyone was actually attending was the launch party of a fire station. Pole-dancing! The stainless shafts were as infra dig as a teasmade in the bedroom of a country house. In the small upstairs bar, beneath a mirrored ceiling, I selected a cocktail and a seat. Woody Allen’s professed wish to be reincarnated as Warren Beatty’s fingers came to mind: there must be men out there – sad men, if youlike – who wouldn’t mind coming back as the Naugahyde on the Revuebar’s storied banquettes. The club was at the back of the mind of every fond survivor of the Swinging Sixties, and anyone else who toasts that era. Its bump ’n’ grind revues, which anticipated ‘live bed shows’, were like a photographic negative of John and Yoko beneath a coverlet the colour of innocence. (The connection between Raymond and the Beatles was cemented in 1967, when scenes for The Magical Mystery Tour were filmed at the Revuebar.) In the States, home of Playboy, the girls had large hair and good teeth and all lived with Hef on a bunny ranch. In London, after air raids and rationing, our sexual proving ground could hardly fail to be less sunny, less redolent of vitamins in the milk, and so a different kind of menagerie had emerged. Pigeon-chested, gyrating in their ‘birdcages’, the girls of the Revuebar might have been strutting their stuff in a wheezy-making coop or loft. It was all of a piece, somehow, when a 1970s television series inspired by Raymond’s Soho was called Budgie.
I might add that it took me a long time to make my way from the main bar to the smaller one. Between the one and the other, I pushed through a door and was transfixed to find myself floating above London in a glass gondola, just as high off the ground as a man’s outstretched fingers could reach. From my aerial bathyscaphe, I looked down in wonder on the serried blazons of Soho. There was the sign for Slinkys – ‘for the liberated and enslaved: corsets, rubber, leather, lingerie, SM equipment…’ – and over there, the fluorescent earnest for the Café Roma (the classic espresso bar was another threatened tenant of the West End). I was on the bridge over Walker’s Court, now revealed as the bridge of sighs at the University of Life. Not unlike Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, youmight think, I travelled on through the night in the prow of Paul Raymond’s abandoned flagship.
Each man kills the thing he loves, as a Soho low-life might tell you in his cups. Then he would wake up and scrounge a cigarette and remind you of the punchline, the unillusioned motto of red-light districts the world over: what’s love got to do with it?
[Stephen Smith]
Charing Cross Road, I must have walked up and down it two or three thousand times. Perhaps ten thousand. Who knows? How to calculate a figure with any form of accuracy when it traces back forty years to my early teens? Can’t I make a stab in the dark, like Simenon when he purported to have had sex with 10,000 women in his ‘need to communicate’? A figure later reduced to around 1,200 by his second wife. Whatever the number, this dynamic road plays a major part in my autobiography. It has been a spine to my life, as it is to Central London. Or, alternatively, the aorta, the main artery of the body. My life would have been very different if Charing Cross Road hadn’t been there to support and launch me.
As a young child my grandma used to take me to Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons, followed by tea in Lyons Corner House. The photographs, reinforced by family stories, tell me that’s what we did. I have absolutely no memory of those events aside from the images. Did we only go that far? What else did we do? Didn’t we set foot in the Charing Cross Road? I could ask my sister, she’s a wealth of information on childhood memories. But I won’t. I don’t need to remember the forgotten.
To walk. Always that pleasure. Even now. Another street will just not do; if chosen, it’s for the exotic nature of the detour, not to experience the pulse of my life. This street has become an addiction. I’ve needed it ‘to communicate’ with myself, to make me understand the complexities and confusions of my life, though I cannot say that I realized that point until I was around nineteen. I had chosen a college in Chelsea because of its image, a sense of ‘bohemia’ – the Chelsea Set, with their Chelsea boots, those Cuban-heeled wonders bought from Anello & Davide, the theatrical footwear shop that was once to be found in Charing Cross Road. I had also chosen Soho as another fixed point for its sense of risk and sexuality – enhanced by its Italian delicatessens (my mother came from south of Rome), though probably as a ruse to cover my sexual awakenings and leanings.
Great Newport Street came to my attention as a jazz home for Ken Colyer’s Studio 51. Not that I favoured that form of New Orleans ‘Trad Jazz’ – but I was aware, each time I walked past, a few yards away in Charing Cross Road, that jazz was played there. I did get to visit it later when a friend of mine, the poet Pete Brown, formed a band, one of many, that included the then session musician Johnny McLaughlin.
Studio 51 was to catch my eye again when I came across Patrice Chaplin’s book Albany Park (the area of Sidcup that borders on where I live). I discovered that she grew up a couple of streets from where I’m now sitting at my desk. Her story plots the course of an escape from the suburbs to the wider world, via early trips to London to visit Studio 51 and other nearby jazz haunts and all-night cafés around Soho. Later she was to venture to America, to the West Coast, and marry – into the famous film family whose surname she now bears.
More in keeping with my mood was Ronnie Scott’s, at that time in a basement in Gerrard Street. I was too young to visit the club, and the knowledge that it was in Chinatown didn’t help. Any image of Soho, no matter how sordid, I have always felt comfortable with, but all images of Chinatown spooked me in those days, and perhaps still do.
Charing Cross Road was where people in the music business could be seen, walking to Denmark Street or elsewhere. Heads turned when someone like Hendrix in his multicoloured clothes would pass. On one occasion, in June 1967 at the Saville Theatre, round the corner in Shaftesbury Avenue, Hendrix opened his set with the title number of Sergeant Pepper. The album had been released that week. The audience, which included the Beatles, were amazed. Perhaps Hendrix had heard it at UFO, the underground club where all the great musicians used to come, and where Pepper would have been played on the sound system between live sets. Not would have been, but was: I was there that Friday night. Like many major albums it was played straight through. Hendrix only needed to hear something once to absorb it for future use.
Earlier, when I was at college, I found myself attached to the street as another world of dreams opened. I had been approached by a woman who looked like Sophia Loren. She wanted me to model for her agency, the Marjorie Jones Agency, which had its office at the end of Charing Cross Road, along William IV Street. At college I had not been aware of many gay men, now I was faced by a room entirely occupied by gay male models. My preference was always female and I tended to park myself in their changing room. I started my part-time occupation at the same time as a woman who later came to fame on the silver screen: Charlotte Rampling.
In my short stay as a model I was offered free hairdressing, and used to go to one of the best, Robert James, who had a little salon upstairs in an alleyway opposite Studio 51. An alleyway that led to Chinatown. But having my hair cut too frequently left me feeling the draught. I wanted my hair back. From that day I’ve never stepped inside a hairdresser’s shop, though for many years I saw photos of myself extracted from hairdressing magazines and stuck in their windows.
*
I soon determined that I would much prefer to work in a bookshop. As far as the Charing Cross Road was concerned that meant Better Books, which was more like an Arts Centre, given that there were benches for people to sit on and a coffee machine. My fellow workers were all poets: Bob Cobbing, Lee Harwood, Anthony Barnett, Paul Selby. Our visitors, visitors as much as customers, were poets, writers, artists, and all manner of famous faces. The shop was more than a shop. Downstairs, in a squalid and damp cellar, theatre events occurred. Or, more precisely, Jeff Nuttall’s ‘People Show’ started its illustrious history. The ‘People Show’ was the most extreme form of fringe theatre, what many might term ‘performance art’. I witnessed shows that were a total assault on the senses. I saw Laura Gilbert hanging upside down from a meat hook, suspended next to the whole side of a cow that had been strung up for a few days, left to fester and rot, perhaps even to achieve a maggoty state. ‘A Nice Quiet Night’ was the title. Laura swung from the rafters, distraught, racked with tears, baited by Mark Long and John Darling – until a member of the audience tried to intercede and confront the pair, insisting they take her down. The terror was real, nothing to do with acting. Mark and John turned on this man, a well-known psychiatrist, and berated him. ‘Who said this was acting?’ In another show, ‘Golden Slumbers’, Laura walked around naked, except for black fishnet stockings and a rose taped high on her navel, besieging Syd Palmer, who lay in bed, playing with himself, while Mark and John stuck their heads through a backdrop and added comments. The words might have gone, but the visuals remain clear before my eyes, whether wide open, or tightly closed. Today Nuttall’s presence is there for all to see, larger than life, acting in films like Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Macon.
For poetry readings, we drew curtains across the shelves to prevent excessive stealing. Stealing was rife from the professionals. No matter how hard we watched them during the day they always managed to secrete books under their coats, art books in particular, as they turned and made for the front door. We couldn’t challenge them unless we had proof. Occasionally one of us would walk to the door if we suspected a professional at work and stand there, to let them know we were wise to their activity, the gauntlet thrown down for them to take the risk of being confronted. Checking the shelves after their departure, we could not believe a book could vanish despite close scrutiny. Poets were the most incompetent book thieves, or ‘borrowers’, as one told me some years later. We watched them clumsily sticking books away in a bag, or beneath their jackets. If only they had asked, they would have received a good deal. Many a poet or artist – David Medalla, for example – would spend the day seated on a bench, reading and making notes as if in a regular library, and then appear with a volume and ask if we had a less expensive, shop-soiled copy of the same. For some reason we used to find just such a copy on the floor, a footprint on it. Not worth its price, now. Sold. Or Heathcote Williams, who used to turn up a few minutes before closing, whisk around the shelves collecting a pile of books, place them high on the counter. Bob Cobbing would glance at the pile, then at his watch – fifteen minutes after closing time – and nominate a rough estimate. Heathcote would leave to devour another trove of earthly delights. Arts patronage at its best.
On Friday nights I worked at UFO, the club at the top of the street. We stayed open most of the night, pushing on until everyone was dead on their feet. I used to depart around five in the morning, observing the remains of the audience collapsed in corners, waiting until public transport started. For me it was a matter of walking down the road and, keys in hand, entering Better Books, to stretch out on a bench and snooze until the others arrived, just before ten-thirty.
Memories of the shop come and go. Customers like the actor James Coburn – who didn’t believe we actually knew our stock: no need to check the shelves for 50 poems by e. e. cummings. Jean-Paul Belmondo was wary that we recognized him at all. Burroughs announced himself with: ‘I’m William Burroughs.’ Francis Bacon, never prepared to look for anything, always asked us to search and fetch.
When our wing of the shop was closing down, the cream being folded back into the more traditional sections of the shop next door, I bought up or removed some of the remaining copies of magazines like Kulchur. I used a borrowed car, one Sunday, to take away a handful of boxes. I was instructed to do that, otherwise loads of rare items would just be junked. As I understood it, the owners were closing us down because we were losing money, or not making enough profit (their role as unwitting arts patrons was not appreciated). They justified their decision by stating that they disliked the prominence given to Burroughs and his Naked Lunch. Of course, once they had disposed of the thriving but nasty avant-garde aspect to their shop, they sold Burroughs’s books like any other. Why turn away sales? The shop that remained under the illusion that it was Better Books never recovered, even though it limped on, in one form or another, for years. All the loyal customers transferred their allegiance to Indica, run by Barry Miles in Southampton Row. And later northwards to Compendium, in what was then a peripheral area called Camden Town.
I was fortunate to find a bookshop that gave me my first steps into the world I wanted to enter. One of those who led me deeper into this world was Colin Wilson. In my teens I had discovered his book Adrift in Soho in the local library. It was that title, with the salacious word ‘Soho’ and its implications and propositions, that made me pluck it from the shelf. Reading a copy I later acquired, I note that the pub opposite Better Books, Molly Moggs, on the corner of Old Compton Street, was one of the first places at which Wilson’s hero stopped when he descended on the metropolis in the 1950s. ‘The whole city,’ he adds, ‘was a part of the great unconscious conspiracy of matter to make you feel non-existent.’ But Wilson had a presence in my life. The novel led me to The Outsider and the pursuit of various references (Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche); each leading to further paths, avenues, alleyways, fields, vistas. A personal labyrinth, a paradise to my imagination. Wilson’s books had a considerable part to play in determining my direction in life.
Another bookshop, better known than anywhere I worked, was Foyles. The shop was famous for its accumulation of stock, no clearance sales, back stock lost among endless shelves; no stocktaking. You could find books, out of print for years, still at the original prices. Here was a dream outlet for small and independent publishers who could always send in a rep to top up the stock, deliver them in the afternoon with a bill to be paid a few days later. A system I knew very well when I worked for Fulcrum Press, publishers of David Jones, Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lorine Niedecker, Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, Tom Pickard and numerous other notable or reforgotten poets. Foyles solved many a cash-flow problem.
The name suggests antiquarian quaintness, dominated by its formidable lady owner. This might have been true, but with its chaotic organization, and perhaps because of its low-pay practices, members of staff had other ways to secure a more clandestine reputation. Stories abound of drunken lunch hours, after-hours sprees. In the early 1990s, when I was friendly with various staff members, I would drop in to hear about the sexual activities that occurred in darkened corners, in cupboards, under the stairs, in the toilets. On more than one occasion I walked smack into couples half perched on the edge of their pleasures. Sympathetic members of the higher echelon were adept at turning a blind eye, remarking that it was just young people having fun, no different from their own youth. Lines of cocaine along the counter probably didn’t strike home.
Bookshops have risen and fallen over the years on Charing Cross Road. At different times I have frequented one more than another, but the road has always been a road I can’t keep away from. Each bookshop, when I’m standing outside it, is like a bookcase. Each offers memories and obsessions. Reading a building is like casting one’s eye over a bookcase, looking for something that is not to be found, an item on the top shelf, hidden on the cornice. On a window ledge. A word, a turn of phrase, that remains frustratingly out of reach.
Further down the road, a decade ago, I was gazing up at the façade of one particular building, checking to see if I had the right number, as I had to deliver a package to a friend of a friend, who would take it across to Germany. I recalled that I had visited that same block of apartments many years before, a block I must have passed time and again and entirely forgotten. Not that the young woman had slipped my mind, or the events of our relationship, often extremely humorous. I have never again seen such an enormous bed, one that unfurled from an equally enormous sofa. Unfortunately, it wasn’t her own apartment, but one she was looking after for a few weeks while the wealthy owners were abroad.
The thought recurred when I read that T. S. Eliot used to have a flat there, or the use of one, as a secret retreat when he wanted to escape from his wife. I wonder whether his memories were as pleasant as mine.
Do I pursue the implications for a trip down a road in my memory? Or do I leave it to ‘decay’? Decay is a major factor in the thinking and composition of Morton Feldman. ‘Decay, departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing – leaving us rather than coming towards us.’ Decay as an aspect of memory, as a key to forgetting, is my interest. Do we always wish to have our memories refreshed? The nuisance of photographs is that they create revivals of our memories, not always just single notes, sometimes complex chord impositions, opening out vast arrays that we never really wanted to revisit. The photograph of my grandma in Trafalgar Square, of me with her in Trafalgar Square as a child, has always been an early remembrance. At that time family photographs were a rarity, we cling to those we have in our possession. There is a photograph of my mother in Trafalgar Square too, feeding the pigeons, taken at the same outing: my sister has it framed on display in her home. I try to reimpose that image in preference to the one of my grandma that has been lodged in my head for far too long – particularly since I discovered, after my mother’s death, the abominable way that my grandma treated her. It started when she arrived in this country to join her husband. Her telegram was ignored and she was left stranded on the doorstep until my father returned from work. I cannot forgive my grandma, teetering on the edge of the abyss in my esteem, countless excuses offered to justify her persistently disagreeable behaviour. It seems so unfair that the reward for her approach to life should be longevity, and that she should not only see her husband into an early grave, but also outlive her son, my father.
Until recent times there was only a trace of cinema in Charing Cross Road, one of the sleazy outlets of the Jacey chain. I can barely remember occupying a seat, except to sit and watch Yoko Ono’s Bottoms film, which had a short season, its billboard viewable from Better Books. I went to see if I could recognize the characteristics of my own posterior on the big screen, wobbling along, shot in the early hours, after a session at UFO. I was taken back to an improvised studio in a Mayfair flat. Today there are only the passing faces of those in the film trade, their editing rooms and offices in this area. Always intriguing to note how films can change the location when they adapt a novel. Watching The Russia House, in connection with some research on Lisbon, I noticed how panoramic shots across the Alfama offered a sunnier and more acceptable disposition than the more subdued but piquant setting of John le Carré’s novel.
How to erase that image of my grandma, that image of me with my grandma, feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square? I seek the photo. It isn’t here; I must have already taken the decision, some years ago, to exclude it from my collection. Perhaps my sister has it? Don’t inquire. I can’t erase the photograph from my memory. I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Not writing about it doesn’t cancel its existence. I should accept that life is not only the pleasant images. Each street has aspects that might be unsavoury or that might create unsavoury memories. That I wish to exclude my grandma from my memory, for all her nastiness, not only to myself, but also to the rest of my family, particularly my mother, has become paramount. It has crept up on me without warning. It fills my head like a bulging burden. And so, instead of writing about a street in upbeat terms, touching on happy memories, hopes and aspirations, I find a lingering aftertaste of my grandmother traced on the screen, the canvas, the page. Despite my efforts to grind her into the earth, I find her eidolon becoming dominant. It seems to be growing beneath my feet – as if a dehydrated image, having been watered, swelled up out of all proportion. I even discuss my grandma with my sister, as we drive to the supermarket on one of our regular shopping trips.
When I was a teenager I was taught a method of accomplishing feats of memory, recalling numbers, objects and names in order. I was called upon to treat it as a party piece. I think the book my father used was called The Art of Memory. No, it was more salacious, something like How to Improve Your Memory. A garish yellow cover. Not that I had a bad memory. In fact I think it’s good, just unfortunate.
Perhaps what is really niggling away inside me is that particular photo of my grandma, not all photos of her. No others seem as offensive as this one. Why should this be? Because the set of two photos is taken from the same outing, only a few years after my mother had arrived from Italy. It is obviously taken by a street photographer. It looks very professional. Very glamorous. My mother is dressed up for a day out, as they did then, just after the war. My mother is feeding the pigeons in the same way as my grandma, except that my grandma has me with her. I have seen other photos taken through the years of my grandma, but in this one I am with her, not with my mother. She might have rejected my mother, but she had not rejected me. She was probably paying for the day out and she wanted me, alone, to be her possession in the photo. That is obviously what is upsetting. A rare ‘proper’ photo, as they say, rather than the usual informal family snaps. A posed image that would undoubtedly survive because it looked crisp and professional. I have to be fixed in a smile with my grandma. That’s the point, the real issue I have to come to terms with.
My activities in the poetry world overlapped with performance art. Kathy Acker was another who traversed writing and art, a part and product of the New York scene. Her readings were performances and her writing techniques were as much inspired by the visual arts as by literature. Though we met in Amsterdam in the late 1970s, then in Paris, pursuing a correspondence before she moved to London, it was rare to see her around town. Our paths diverging rather than crossing. The last time we met was in the Charing Cross Road. We were both on the way to other appointments, but promised to make contact again, to have an extended conversation. It never happened, illness and death intervened. Kathy was a writer who painted with words. Beckett said it was the shape of the sentence that was more important than the meaning.
I remember the way I had to divorce myself from my family and start afresh. Perhaps it is the suburbs. Hanif Kureishi, who comes from the neighbouring town of Bromley, notes: ‘Culture is rather sneered upon in the suburbs. You’re considered to be getting above yourself or it’s seen as pretentious or financially not viable.’ Only when youhave established yourself, not necessarily in the arts world, but within yourself, is it possible to live again in the suburbs – where youcan work in peace, making sorties to the centre…to the Charing Cross Road.
My memory is untrustworthy. Studio 51 was not a haunt of Patrice Chaplin: as I appreciate when I browse her book again. Other clubs and coffee bars are noted, but not the one I felt sure was included. Does it matter? Other memories have surfaced and played a role in the walk along the road. The choice is to keep writing, to pursue what I’ve been trying to pursue – while I am walking on the edge, there is still that chance to find something more.
Maple syrup. Out of the blue I think: maple syrup. When we went to Lyons Corner House it wasn’t to have afternoon tea, or cakes or scones, but to have waffles with maple syrup, something I had never had anywhere else. That was our childhood treat. No wonder I’ve lost the taste for waffles over the years. I could have chosen other locations to explore, but each would have a different emphasis, each would have turned up different reminiscences, even if they would not have been at the heart of the matter like Charing Cross Road.
[Paul Buck]
‘Heart of the Matter’ by Paul Buck is extracted and adapted from a much longer essay on the Charing Cross Road entitled ‘Street of Dreams’ that was written for a French publisher, and still awaits publication.
It feels as though times of intense energy and experiment come in waves. And in between are periods of consolidation or just ‘treading water’ or even a strong conservative reaction reversing it all. This is how it seems in the Arts, at least, though maybe it’s a continual process and that sense of waves is more to do with personal history than anything else.
But for me the mid 1960s were one of those wave crests. (Younger readers’ eyes glaze over at this point.) And one of the main centres, catalysts, for all this energy in London was the bookshop at 94 Charing Cross Road started by Tony Godwin, who had also revolutionized the design of Penguin Books. It was called Better Books. It was two shops really. One had a more general stock and the other, in the basement, specialized in poetry, film, drama, but most of all books on what was new, whether it be John Cage or Timothy Leary. It was near unique as a shop where you could find those rare imports and ‘little press’ books and pamphlets and heaps of duplicated/mimeographed magazines bursting their staples. It was a place of discoveries.
From about 1964 the shop, or the second shop, which was by then in a separate premises just around the corner in New Compton Street, was managed by a series of people who were involved in far more than just the book trade. The list includes the poet and publisher Bill Butler, editor and writer Barry Miles, concrete poet, sound poet, publisher and instigator Bob Cobbing – and, briefly, myself. It was a fluid organization. For some periods I worked as bookshop assistant, others as a packer, and even as a manager. Between times I’d wander off for stays in the US or Greece, and then come back to a Better Books job. Among other workers at the shop I remember the writers Anthony Barnett and Paul Selby and the poet and artist’s model David Kozubei.
What made Better Books so very special for me? It was a whole series of events held there that opened my and many other minds to all sorts of new possibilities, new worlds. It was Gustav Metzger putting small mechanical sculptures in the window that over the days were to destroy themselves and did. It was columns, totem poles, of burned books created by John Latham. It was the London Film Makers’ Co-op putting on a showing of Kenneth Anger’s films, including Scorpio Rising. It was Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga showing some of their films. It was poetry readings by the ‘New American Poets’ such as Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jerome Rothenberg – as well as British poets like Bob Cobbing with performances of his sound poems, or the Austrian sound poet Ernst Jandl.
It was Jeff Nuttall taking over the basement and creating an installation, a miniature world that you entered by pushing your way through a tunnel set with phone directories. After that was a narrow passage lined, either side, floor to ceiling, with TV sets. Walls of blurred sound and distorted images. Then a seemingly peaceful grotto with a fountain, fake flowers and grass, and a dish with a piece of rotting meat. You eventually got out by crawling along a narrow pipe and sliding down into a round nest filled with chicken feathers. All the senses had been assaulted during your journey. (On the opening night the art critics didn’t appreciate ending up covered in feathers, nor did they appreciate an over-enthusiastic Nuttall associate pouring paint on them through cracks in the floor above.)
The shop, because of these events and because of the range of books and magazines it held, became a magnet for anyone interested in new writing, new ideas, new directions. This in turn made it an important meeting place for the like-minded and not so like-minded – along with the usual sprinkling of nutters. It would be a centre not only for people in London but also for those outside, who, when visiting, would usually call by to inspect the latest publications. Jim Burns would even come down on a Saturday all the way from Preston just to check out what had come in.
The shop itself finally closed in the early 1970s after going through a series of owners, including the publisher John Calder. The times changed and there was now a different atmosphere from the heady free-ranging 1960s with its welcome foolishness, its optimism and its experiments, good and bad. In a way it had lit a fuse for much that would appear in future years.
There’s no moral to this story. A fire flared up. It came, it went, and the people involved – those who survived in one piece – followed their own paths, overlapping at times, at others solitary. A shared, often distorted, often blind memory, but a memory that had an edge.
[Lee Harwood]
Tom Raworth could be said to be the first English poet to deliberately assault the structure of language and come up with something quite new; the first considerable English poet whose professionalism refused the defining standards of established disciplines and attached itself to the high position of attacking the profession itself. English genius has been driven to absurdity by madness and perversity. English genius has never been urbanely at home with absurdity, with the unreasonable, with the unsystematic, with the illegal. Raworth spent a good deal of energy making sure that important American work was smuggled into the land. He published it in his magazine Outburst at a time when such writing was unavailable elsewhere, when the academic world was almost perfectly sealed. He was in fact first known as an editor and typographer; no one knew he was a poet in 1960. When his poetry did emerge in the late 1960s he could be seen to be facing towards Paris rather than New York. Consequently his closest influence is Gertrude Stein.
Like Stein, the area between the lines is a no man’s land. Unlike Stein, whose lines are mono- or biolithic, the interaction of images within the line (or stanza) is rich and ultimately romantic. The multilevel interplay of images has a long-standing tradition in Rimbaud, Lautréamont, the Surrealists, Arp, Schwitters. But all these previous image-spinners were hysterics, grotesques. There is no menace in Raworth’s imagery. There is no Freudian symbolism. There is no alarm. All Raworth’s images have a seductive pull on the senses. They colour the inward retina, they tickle the palate, they wake half-forgotten sounds in the ear. Thus they have the lucidity of small jewels and the whole poem, built on its intervals of disconnection, is most delicately decorated, the fine handiwork of a master criminal, a consummate piece of cool.
The kind of cool that is Raworth’s particular vehicle is not American, is not so physical, is not so swinging or black. It is the cool which is the articulation of pride and arrogance that the young of the English working class formulated for themselves in the 1950s. It is the cool of the drape suit and the blue suede shoes. Tom Raworth was, and remains as far as attitude goes, a Ted.
The current image of Teds, now that the teenage culture has spread into a far greater diversity, is one of antediluvian crudity. They are regarded, if anything, as synonymous with rockers. In the 1950s the reverse was the fact. Rockers were practically dressed, for the open air, for dirty bikes and transport cafés. They were scruffy, nomadic and loud. Teddy boys had cultivated an elaborate etiquette, an incredible pitch of vanity. They were foppish.
Raworth’s home and his family are in turmoil. Wife and kids are shrieking everywhere. There is no money and there is no food. Tom stands before the mirror. Without any effeminacy he is quietly seeing to the hang of his tie, combing his hair, his moustache. It isn’t that he’s going anywhere or that anyone is coming to see him. It isn’t that he’s unaware of the turmoil around and the issues indicated. He is just putting first things first, seeing to his own image with a certain calm authority.
This urbanity is founded on the clear ground afforded by an icily preserved toughness, even a cruelty. The voice always even, in anger, in love, the same balanced note. A little throaty, as though cigarette smoke had but hours ago dried tears. The statements short and summary, near-whispered out of a scarred mouth…
*
‘The first job we did together was an Estate Agents. A friend had an aunt working there, and she told him a house had been bought for cash one Saturday afternoon and they hadn’t had time to bank the money. We met at the dance hall with a vague idea of establishing some sort of alibi. At eight-thirty we left, stole a van from the car park (the only motor with the keys left in it) and drove there. The office was on the main road and the lights were on all night. Parked the van in a side street and went down the road at the back. A narrow lane along the back of the building. We counted off the windows. Pitch black. Don went over the wall first while Joe and I crouched behind it. Silence. Ten minutes passed and Joe got nervous. Let’s go he said. Don’t be a cunt I told him, what about Don? Leave him he said. I shoved him. Do what? What if he had some sort of accident in there? You want us to just piss off and leave him? Get over there and see what’s happening. He went over the wall. I waited. Five minutes. Then a crash of breaking glass. I started to walk away, but no one came, nothing moved. So I went back and climbed over. Reached the back of the office, avoided pieces of broken glass on the ground and climbed in. Don and Joe were in the back room looking at the safe. What happened? I asked Don. I got here, he said, I take out the pane all carefully, I lay it down, then what does this four-eyed git do but come tramping along like a fucking elephant and walks straight over it. Joe blinked. Prick I said to him. He blinked again. And look at this fucking thing Don went on, pointing at the safe. It was immense. Until that moment I’d not really thought about it. Had imagined it as something about the size of a biscuit tin that we could cart out to the van and crack later. But it looked larger than a fridge. One keyhole and a handle. Well we’re not going to open that Don said, unless we shove this cunt’s thin head in the crack and use him as a fucking lever. He nodded at Joe, who was trying to lift an enormous adding machine from one of the desks. We can get a fiver for this he said. Don pushed him. You tiny-minded bastard that’s just about your mark. You think I want to risk two years for a fucking glorified abacus? Joe stared at him. You think you’re really hard he said, if I had my shooter here you wouldn’t be so bleedin flash. Piss off I told him, I bet youstand in front of the mirror every night waving it about and thinking you’re Dillinger. Oh you two piss me off he said, always bleedin nagging. Then I lost my temper. Stamped on his foot, and as he bent, kneed him in the mouth. Two of his teeth came out and my leg began to bleed. Fuckin HELL Don said, where the fuck do you think you are? We’ll have the law round before we’ve even nicked a pencil. OK I said. And helped Joe up. You SHIT he kept saying, what youdo THAT for? Don was moving around the room: it must have been the manager’s office. We can take these…he pointed to two small typewriters. And that cigarette box, that lighter. Have a look through the desk…I did. There were a couple of paper knives, stapler, some odds and ends. Youwant to try that? I asked, pointing at the safe. I did he said, it’s locked well enough. We couldn’t open it. Even from the back? He shook his head. Maybe if we had the tools and more time. But not after all that row. Better take what we can and go. Look for your teeth I said to Joe. If the law find them they’ll use them as evidence. If they can bear to touch them said Don. We left and drove back. Dumped Joe near the dance hall. Arranged to meet him in the morning to sell the stuff to a dealer in Woolwich. What shall we do now? Don asked. I don’t feel much like going home. Nor me. Let’s have a motor somewhere. We can put this back in the morning.’
Essex University. Summer arts festival. Groups, poets, dancers. Over the golden lea somebody is roasting an ox in the afternoon heat. They are not roasting it very well. The outdoor auditorium, with grass steps and concrete steps, carries overtones of Roman ruins and Nuremberg mistakes. The university pop group amiably does its crust. I am MC. Tom, Val and friends sit among the sparse audience and turn on. Later there is beer and more beer. All the people I meet are on the verge of dislocation. I am. My thirteen-year-old daughter has disappeared, run away to London. Having completed my MC job I have half an urge to take a swift train to London and search for her up and down the bowels of night-town. But the relief of getting off the concrete stage lets in the anxiety. The anxiety mixes with that of others and lets in the alcohol. The bar is a row of social knots and in each of these social knots people are laughing and drinking back sudden lets of tears. Tom, the practised stoic, is even jaunty among this. So that when finally I don’t catch the train to London, and my remorse accentuates my complete hopelessness about my daughter, when finally I’m carried from the bar weeping like a lost toddler, it’s Tom who carries me. ‘Cheer up, Jeff,’ he says, with that even, throaty voice. ‘Two best writers in the land, youand me. All is not lost.’ Like much of what Tom says, the remark reaches a point subtly beyond irony, as though the joke were not so much the exaggerated claim as the ludicrous truth of it.
He put me to bed in a lecturer’s luxurious office-study. Mysteriously I awoke in a cottage. All the birds in the world were singing out over the fields of cabbage. The world was alight.
It’s difficult for me to imagine Tom Raworth without thinking of light. Some people are most readily imagined in beds, or pulpits, or motor cars. Tom is most readily seen in environments of light. Somehow the sparseness of his movements and the dry unsparing way he selects his remarks, his bold version of himself, emergent out of shyness – ‘Manchester’s a long black wall. I drove along it once. That was Manchester, somebody said’ – accentuates the liquidity of a place, and the liquidity of a place is sheer light.
The nerve of Tom, like any nerve, is quickened by pain. ‘Come in,’ says Val at the door, with a black eye. ‘I want youto bloody well see this.’ She takes me in and shows me Tom. Tom’s face is purple today. The eyes are terrible, the whites all red. There is a density to the flesh of his temples as though the veins beneath had congealed. The tiny fronds of his unaccounted scars stand white and delicate. ‘Hi Jeff,’ says Tom, his voice like a machine’s. ‘And shall we all drink tea?’ I ask.
The room where they lived then was big and sparse. Tom kept the Methedrine in neat glass jars. It was before drugs were fashionable or even commonplace. Tom was cheerful with drugs, confident always, accepting none of the hysteria stemming from the laws about drugs, accepting none of the hysteria stemming from the law about anything. Methedrine, thought now to be the most dangerous of the narcotics, contrives just that sense of warm flight and total licence that lets a writer replace his craft with his invention.
There were new books all the time at Tom’s. The kids kept coming in and Val would scream them back out again so that she and Tom could carry on their marriage like a couple of knife fighters.
Between bouts Tom paced the room. He sat on the couch in perfect profile, even his repose was poised. He stood before the mirror and pulled no face, just stood looking. He played a lot of Tamla Motown records. He moved ever so slightly to the rhythm. He made collections of postcards and souvenirs. He arranged his books as he arranged his face, impeccably. Much of the time he was impervious to interruptions of his thinking and his looking. The rest of the time he could be murderous. He would never answer the door. He would sometimes not see people. He could coolly abuse a friendship in a way that somehow made a friend doubly loyal. There was a man called Mike who was unlimitedly tolerant.
‘Seen this?’ asks Tom.
‘Oh don’t get out that fuckin book,’ shrills Val. ‘It’s horrible, horrible.’
Tom shows me a book of photographs of war wounds, lips ripped off the gum, eyeballs lidless, skinned bone.
‘Interestin,’ says Tom.
At that time I thought Tom had done the A6 murder. The first time I met Tom was at a party where the murder widow was present. There she was, sitting beside me on the divan, and there was Tom, cool, dry-talking, with an impressive and almost imperceptible scar, curiously bloodless among the winey flushes. ‘Are you terribly unhappy with your husband?’ I asked sourly. ‘I think so,’ she said, ‘when youconsider that he was murdered.’ The revelation and my own absurdity in the situation was like something written by Tom. I couldn’t get it out of my head that this was an ironic situation Tom had contrived, to meet me, anonymous in the presence of his victim’s widow. Tom introduced me to Genet’s novels.
Tom Raworth produced Outburst and made poetry available to Englishmen. With Barry Hall he set up Goliard Press. Edward Lucie-Smith wanted to strike an agreement with Goliard Press to print books edited by him and financed by the German scrap dealer George Rapp. Rapp went around to the press and was talking about putting money into it. Barry and Tom were printing, and Rapp was trying to find out some sort of basis for agreement. But all his chat had at the back of it the idea of editorial control. Finally he said something like ‘I don’t understand you. What do you think the best arrangement would be?’ And Tom said, ‘Just give us the money and fuck off.’ That was the end of that.
Later, when Goliard merged with Jonathan Cape, Tom hauled himself off to Essex. No efficient criminal can sign treaties with the legislators. No lone dog comes to the hearth. The possibilities are terrifying.
[Jeff Nuttall]
They were taking up the paving stones along the street. The skin is so thin; the earth and trees so powerful. With one heave the houses could all come down. So easy to wear a groove in the brain; the same relays click each time. For six weeks now there’s been a poster on the wall near my home. In large black letters it says SUMMER ENTERTAINMENTS IN PARKS, and each time I read it as SUMMER ENTERTAINMENTS IN PARIS. Same thing with Shopfitters which I always read as Shoplifters. When I sense I’m going to bump into someone on the pavement the only solution is to look away and keep walking in a straight line. Once the eyes hold, all those dance steps and the final collision is inevitable.
*
August 1966. Staring with my eyes out of focus (in this dark do I focus on anything?) through the train window. Raindrops trickling down look like floating puffballs. As we pick up speed their tracks swing towards the horizontal. Each back garden has thrown out a brick wall towards the train and captured a tree. Dark embankments, the earth dark. Looking back as the track curves, a narrow bridge vanishes into the foliage on either side, slightly out of true. Entering the tunnel. A grease smear on the window. My reflection blurred.
The way it could have gone, thinking like that. But no way left for the audience. What I want is a kaleidoscope, not a telescope. Now, their tracks merging with the gloom, the drops move across the glass like ball-bearings over black oil. Not right for this time.
What I must do. Is. Investigate the shape of a life. Somehow reach the solid body. Like the machine they use at Locks for fitting bowler hats. A nest of movable rods that finally reproduces the true shape of a head. Every bump. To push them all in until I reach something solid. Round and round, like peeling an onion. Like this…like that…I hate those phrases. The first try can’t be true. Each time plane down another area. As time runs out I need a record. Truth and the ear. The vanity itself part of the fact. The struggle to get the thing, and not the many neat and true-looking other terminations. This is the body of what went on when we met, underneath the words. The real feelings, seasons, weather. The other noises that were more important to me as we talked. To leave myself open, with trust. I shake your hand. And again it is impossible. I know even now there are things I will leave out; things I will distort. But that is also the truth. If the skeleton is false in parts I can’t remove or replace them now. Sunlight on the road as she met me that morning. Sometimes she couldn’t remember. There was a card from Ron she said. Oh yes she said, he said Frank O’Hara died two days ago.
At least I was never arrested for anything good. That month I had to stop myself because I was convinced Americans were incapable of love, listening to them talking to their wives, the same words we use, I couldn’t believe it. Because they’ve never been bombed. That was after I found out Pearl Harbor was on Hawaii, not the mainland, and all the time I’d been giving them credit for that at least. Losing cohesion, my arms and legs slightly out of time. I went to the library and took out books I already had at home.
There was this man, she said, and, youknow, his left eye was somehow turned, all you could see was the red. And at school, when somebody wouldn’t share something, cakes, sweets, we’d say think of Freddy Lane’s watery eye when you’re eating that.
There were peacocks in Danson Park at the beginning of the war, in an enclosure next to the Olde Englishe Rose Garden. The trams went down to Woolwich, a jumble of tracks at the terminus in the square. Picking my way across them coming home. When they remade the road, after the trolleybuses started, we used the tarry wood blocks on the fire that winter. Spitting stones across the room as they burned.
Jimmy I met in the West End. He’d been drifting around there for years. Had got a job in a shop selling pornographic books, films and photographs. He was only the front man; the job lasted until the shop was raided. The average time between raids was four months, but a friend of his had lasted seven. Of course the shop never closed; just changed name and manager. He said it was interesting for the first couple of days. Odd people coming in, and looking through the stock himself. But after that it was a drag, sitting there six days a week. But the money was good. £5 a day cash, no tax, no insurance stamp, no deductions. So he was making £30 a week clear. The day he was arrested he would get £50 and the £5 daily would continue until his trial. The owners of course paid all costs, fines and so on. If he was sent to jail, £5 a day would be paid into an account for him while he was inside. And there was a bonus system. £20 extra a week if the shop’s takings exceeded £100 a day…and he got that bonus every week he was there. I’ll tell yousomething he said to me. I’ll tell youwhat the best-selling photograph is this week. It’s a bird dressed in a frogman’s suit, all youcan see is her eyes, and she’s tied to this kitchen chair with a piece of rope. All the old boys are going nutty over it. Can’t understand it. I mean what can they get out of that?
[Tom Raworth]
I got off a boat called the Gloucester City, which was carrying grain, pig-iron and a 1934 Rolls Royce. It docked at Avonmouth. I was completely broke. Mrs Cook the First had taken literally everything I had. So I got on the train, arrived in Paddington and I’d got two shillings, max. I went round to the French –’cos I thought to myself at least I can afford one of Gaston’s halfs of bitter because they were only one-and-a-penny in those days. I ordered at the bar. Everybody said: ‘Well, haven’t seen you for a minute or two. Thought you were dead.’ It was as if I’d never been away.
I was drinking at the bar when a young fellow, who’d been at Eton with me by the way, came up and said, ‘Well, how’s it going, Morrie?’ And I said, ‘A bit unsteady, actually.’ He said, ‘Would you like a job?’ So I said, ‘Youbet!’ I thought, I don’t care what it is, this can’t go on. I’d got ninepence. He said, ‘Right, finish that off. Have a glass of champagne. Just got time for a bottle.’ I said, ‘Good.’
He said, ‘Right – taxi.’ And we were speeding off. We’d picked up some other people – who I found out were my future fellow directors. I said, ‘I wonder if anybody, since we’re in this together, could lend me a fiver?’ Which was quite a lot of money in those days. ‘A fiver?’ Alan Peel reached his hand into his pocket, pulled out a roll of notes, about £300, and said, ‘Have that.’ He said, ‘There’s plenty more where that came from.’ And by five o’clock that evening I was managing director of five property companies. I signed all the share certificates, all the transfers, all the company documents. The lot.
The retiring chairman, who was a poor old MP, can’t remember his name, said: ‘Gentlemen, are youtrying to commit financial suicide?’ And I said, ‘My dear fellow, you’ve just committed it.’ We were in business.
And what an extraordinary business it was. I was leading a totally different life. At twenty-seven youdon’t mind at all. I was associating with people I didn’t know existed, except by reading about them in the newspapers. I’d always wanted to write, though I’d never been successful at it. I thought, ‘I’m living a novel a day here.’
When we were doing banking, which was my thing, people would come round and say, ‘We shall be needing £15,000 in cash by midday.’ I had to go to the bank – youneeded nerves of steel – and say, ‘Well, Mr Smith, I think we should probably be moving this from No. 1 account into No. 3.’ ‘Oh, that’s quite all right, Mr Cook.’ What we were doing in the property business, we had five sites. We owned the sites. We were making ‘starts’ on houses and then selling them. Actually they were only about two bricks high, but, according to the company prospectuses, they were all ready to walk in, everything except the latchkey. We were taking deposits on continuing building work. The work, once we took over, quickly ground to a halt. No builders were actually contracted. We were basically working for someone called Charles Da Silva, brilliant conman. I saw him fifteen days before he died and we went back over all that. He said, ‘Youknow, my dear fellow, what fun that was.’ Black as your hat, Charles. Oxford. His uncle was High Commissioner of Ceylon. What a lovely man! Terrific! A remarkable person. He was always known as the Colonel. I used to watch him in action. My heart used to bleed for the punter, because I could see it twelve foot high on the wall. I couldn’t understand why the punter didn’t see it. It was like a rabbit mesmerized by a snake. But what the Colonel couldn’t do, he couldn’t gamble. I mean he was racing all the time. Used to live in front of the television, for the racing, and he never got it right. Never had less than £5,000 on a horse. Never. ‘What’s running at Worcester Park at half past three? Right, I think we’ll have Hind Legs.’ I’d say, ‘Charles, I’m no great racing expert…you can’t possibly win.’ ‘I’ve got a very hot tip.’ That’s why Charles needed me to go banking the whole time.
In my quest for information, I found myself doing the most remarkable things. As a result of which I invariably ended up skint. I had a taste for very expensive girlfriends. I did actually find myself, 1965, with a girlfriend on my hands who was costing me more and more. I ran into Bobby Katz and he said, ‘Why don’t youhave a go at selling books? Porn.’ I said, ‘Terrific.’
We were in the French – where else? All my operations started there. Headquarters. So he said, ‘Come up and get started in St Anne’s Court,’ which is where it was all happening in those days. The very first day I was working a man dashed in with blood all over him and a gun in his hand. Luckily he ran out again. You got some peculiar people. So much so that at one point we had a notice up behind the counter saying THE FOLLOWING MPS WILL NOT BE SERVED. Two Conservative, two Labour. Like a football match, two all! We had magistrates among our regulars, the most amazing people. MPs used to come in and say it was for a parliamentary inquiry. Bobby said, ‘They’re trying to get something for nothing. Bloody MPs, who needs them? Wankers. They won’t be served.’ Every time we took £100 in the shop, bottle of champagne. Pop. Terrific!
The harmless stuff was all out the front and then the heavy punishment, bondage and the movies were in the back. It was what they call ‘visual and explicit’. I did suggest to Bobby that it might be interesting to have something a bit more upmarket. ‘Upmarket?’ he said. ‘Look, this place has to run to so much profit per square centimetre. I know what the punters want. They’re queueing up.’ I could see his point. I miss Bobby. I was very fond of Bobby. There are stories I can’t tell in public. They still make me split my sides. I can’t really tell them. A pity.
It matters where you are born. Not just the country or the city, the burg or the hamlet – but the precise location, its height above terra firma, its positioning in the welter of the world; for this is the still point at the exact centre of the ever-expanding shock wave of your life.
For years it mattered to me that I had been born in the Charing Cross Hospital. Not, you understand, Ralph Tubbs’s air terminal for the pathologically grounded on the Fulham Palace Road, but the old Charing Cross Hospital, slap-bang in the middle of London. Here, I fondly felt, I was ushered/expelled into life but paces from the Strand, the high-tension cable which connects the financial and regal powers of the land. Here, I considered, I was within dandling distance of the eight fake statues of Queen Eleanor that mark the spot where – Dr Johnson averred – ‘The full tide of human existence is to be met.’ Here, I was convinced, on a clear day of profound stillness, Bow Bells might be heard, their brassy clanging hammering me into the shape of a Cockney.
It pleased me to believe that Benjamin Golding’s hospital, founded in 1818 in Suffolk Street, and transliterated a few years later to 28 Villiers Street, was my fount. I liked even more the vile Terry Farrell development the Thatcher era shat down atop Charing Cross Station, and which I felt certain obscured my very origins with its lumps of concrete, curvilinear steel and smoked glass. Liked it, not least because I ascended the windy decks while it was under construction, in my then capacity as a lowly corporate puffer, and looked out on the bend of Thames, pewter under a leaden winter sky.
How wrong I was – about everything. It wasn’t until I set out to discover precisely where I was born that I found out the painful truth: far from old Charing Cross Hospital being razed, it has instead been transmogrified…into a police station. I was propelled into the world two hundred yards north of where I had thought – and so the wonky trajectory of my life was amply explained. I identified the building from a photograph in the Museum of London archive. It occupies the triangle formed by Agar Street, William IV Street and Chandos Place, and is now separated from the hubbub of the Strand by a scarified, paved area. Designed by Decimus Burton, the foundation stone of the new old Charing Cross Hospital was laid in 1831. Decimus Burton, purveyor of sculpted blocks of hard cream to the Regency and then the Victorians. Decimus Burton, whose fantasies on the neoclassical stud Regent’s Park and line the margins of Hyde Park. Decimus Burton – the Terry Farrell of his day.
I suppose there is a niceness to this disappearance: pioneering healthcare replaced by paranoid law enforcement; blind birth giving way to the blinkered investigation of death. There’s a niceness also about the way that the new Charing Cross Hospital compromises the debatable land of Fulham and Hammersmith, dragging the centre of town out there, only for it to be Dead on Arrival. The new Charing Cross Hospital is a very nice hospital, it has hundreds of beds, it treats all comers. It has a pioneering transgender clinic – but no facilities for examining its own metamorphosis.
I went to see the old hospital – and, cycling along Exeter Street, was honked loudly from behind, then shouldered into the kerb by a monstrous American SUV. ‘What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?’ I bawled at the driver, and he, not understanding that this was a rhetorical question, halted with a squeal, got out, came over to where I was struggling to dismount, said, ‘Who d’jew fink I am, some fucking punk?’ Then hit me in the face. Salt blood and toothy fragments filled my mouth. A stagehand from the theatre on the left was shouting – a mobile phoner outside the restaurant on the right was shouting as well. The anti-sophist was already back in his shooting brake and squealing around the corner. I had received a natal blow and was breathing heavily. I stood in the ever-expanding shock wave of my own life, and – since the stagehand had got the licence number – I called the police. After all, it’s not often youget the opportunity to summon help from your birthplace.
A day later I went to speak to the detective constable in charge of the case. She wanted to get photographs of my extremely minor injuries and flesh out my statement. Being in the lobby of the police station felt like a homecoming. I could imagine my father, that quintessential interwar man, striding up and down the stage-shaped space, under the smoked-glass sconces, while waiting for news of my arrival. Behind the duty desk there was a board full of missing-persons notices and appeals for assistance in murder inquiries: Camilla Gordon last seen alive leaving the Blue Bunny. DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS MAN? (Yes, of course I do, he looks exactly like a forensic pathologist’s reconstruction of a decomposed murder victim – I’d recognize him anywhere.) But there was no flyer reading: Charing Cross Hospital, last seen leaving Charing Cross in a westerly direction. In the corner a revolving strip of pinprick red lights made the slogan: IF YOU HAVE BEEN THE VICTIM OF A THEFT WHERE FORCE HAS BEEN USED TO STEAL YOUR PROPERTY PLEASE INFORM THE STATION OFFICER YOU HAVE PRIORITY OVER OTHER CALLERS.
The detective constable I’d come to see pitched up and ushered me in. I followed her down a distempered corridor, coated with a carpet so flat and dun that it looked spread rather than lain. Doors opened off to the right, affording glimpses of offices full of obsolete computer equipment and paunchy administrators. Water-cooler tanks, blue, ribbed, plastic, lay on the floor like the discarded shells of a liquid bombardment. To the left there were windows, in their metal frames I saw the metallic mangle of police vehicles jumbled up in the triangular yard. We went upstairs.
In a tiny cubicle of a room as featureless as a desert, we were joined by the snapper. She wore a brown woolly and brown corduroy trousers; was she, I wondered, deliberately camouflaged? She encouraged me to roll back my lip and show my chipped tooth. The flashbulb exploded. Into the charged atmosphere, I made the light-hearted remark ‘I was born here, y’know.’ The snapper, the DC – they took it well. ‘There’s been a lot of smoking done in this room,’ the cop said, and I wondered: ‘Before or since?’
I wasn’t sorry to leave the nick – I never am. When I was born, in 1961, I had a congenital inguinal hernia. My mother wasn’t able to feed me – they had to put me on a drip. I lay for six weeks – or so she assured me – in ‘a little cage’, until I was old enough for them to operate. As I strode along the Strand I wondered what had happened to the little cage; had it, like the hospital, transmogrified? Or was it perhaps still here, being used by the Met to contain tiny offenders?
[Will Self]
In the 1970s, a London Buses ticket inspector based at Charing Cross fascinated tourists with tales of how the (nineteenth-century) Eleanor Cross on the station fore-court was the spire of a great cathedral that had sunk into the marshy land close to the river.
[Sarah Wise]
THE STUCCO COLUMNS OF COUTTS & CO., WC2
The pillars of the Nash-designed bank headquarters, at 440 Strand, disappeared in 1973 during refurbishment. Charles Dickens used to lounge against them, as a hungry factory boy on his lunch break, in 1824. They were resurrected by architect Frederick Gibberd in his gardens at Harlow, where, now draped in ivy, they doze their days away.
[Sarah Wise]
SWALLOW STREET, WI
Swallowed up by the creation of Regent Street in 1821: 250 homes and 700 shops lost, thousands displaced. The ghost of Swallow Street runs along the centre of Regent Street. Regent Street divorced Mayfair from Soho once and for all. The minimal number of eastern entrances into Soho was a design ploy to keep the London mob away from Nash’s glorious shopping street.
[Sarah Wise]
THE FISHWIVES OF TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD, WI
In 1841, journalist Charles Knight wrote of them: ‘In Tottenham Court Road, which still retains the character of a market, they stand in long rows as the evening draws in, with paper lanthorns stuck in their baskets on dark nights, and there they vociferate as in the old times…“Mackerel alive!” “New Wall Fleet oysters!”’
[Sarah Wise]
NIGHTMORE STREET, WCI
Maisie Bishop’s Tic-Toc Club was in the basement of No. 21. Members included Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Patrick Hamilton, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Henry Williamson and other literary luminaries of the 1940s and 1950s. The Colvin brothers (Jimmy and ‘Wicksy’) based their radio play Nightmare Street on the murder of Nigel Fox-Patterson, advertising manager of the News Chronicle. Fox-Patterson’s body was found hanging from the area railings on 13 October 1946. At first thought to be suicide, it soon became clear that this death was the result of foul play. Johnny Nicholson, bookmaker cousin to the notorious Walworth Nicholsons, was arrested when it was discovered that the deceased owed him a substantial sum of money. Gordon Amis, cousin of the more eminent Kingsley, was also detained and later released. After months of evidence gathering, there was no prosecution. Nightmare Street remains a popular play on the repertory circuit, featuring, as it does, characters clearly based on contemporary originals. The BBC recorded a television version as a real-time experiment which was said to have influenced Hitchcock and inspired his film of Patrick Hamilton’s Rope. See also: Dan Farson’s Hanging on Their Words (1962) and J. Michael Harrison’s What Maisie Didn’t Know (1966).
[Michael Moorcock]
GOLDEN PLACE, WC2
Best known for the ‘Warrens’ on its north side, Golden Place was notorious as a thieves’ sanctuary, being technically Portuguese soil. A charter had been granted by Charles I to the Contessa d’Ecreta, an adventuress associated with L’école des Fleures, a secret society pursuing alchemical experiment and the search for the Emerald Stone – itself said to be a form taken by the Holy Grail (otherwise documented as the ‘Roone Staffe’). Originally the haunt of quacks and ‘hereticks’, Golden Place degenerated into a haven for criminals. It was returned to England by the Portuguese government in 1934. The Warrens endured as a slum of evil reputation while various government agencies debated jurisdiction and responsibility. Much of the area was flattened by German incendiary bombs in 1941. The offices of the Inland Security Services (IS4) now occupy the site.
[Michael Moorcock]
THE VENUE UNDERGROUND, LITTLE MONMOUTH STREET, WCI
Originally (1954) opened as the Jazz Cellar. In the early 1960s it changed its name to the Cellar and later to the Basement. It was where the Beatles first performed in London, but was better known for its association with the Rolling Stones and the Who. The Deep Fix were resident there until 1977, when the Venue decided to feature nothing but punk bands such as the Adverts, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Needle. It is now chiefly associated with rap and hip-hop.
[Michael Moorcock]
THE REGENT STREET COLONNADE, SWI
The destruction is complete. One of the most striking features of modern London has been cut off its face, and a great public injury committed, to gratify a score of persons who fancy they will be individually benefited by the removal of the colonnade. Now that the mischief is done, some of our contemporaries are raising their voices against it. The Daily News says, ‘The poor Quadrant! Has no one a kind word to say for it before it goes? Shall we part from it without a friendly word – a sad, or at least a respectful, farewell? There are many among us old enough to remember what the space now covered by the Quadrant was before the Prince Regent and the Prince of Architects invaded it. The narrow streets, the wretched hovels, the dens of infamy (we may almost say) that stood upon its site – who did not rejoice in their destruction? There sprang up in that place the finest street in Europe, and the largest colonnade. A diversity of opinion may exist as to the merits of the work in detail, but there can be none as to its effects as a whole. The Quadrant has been one of the features of London – not a foreigner but asked for it; not a print shop abroad but would display in its window an engraving of it, good, bad or indifferent. One of our national characteristics is to affect a depreciation of things in which we really feel a pride. On the whole, however, the feeling of Londoners has been by no means generally unfavourable to the Quadrant.’1
[Sarah Wise]
SCHMIDTS, WI
And then there was Schmidts on Charlotte Street, staffed entirely by lawyers from Vienna, who assured you that an empty room was full, advised against the duck as ‘terrible’, and then sat down to update you on the friend you’d brought in once, almost ten years ago, and who dropped in last summer on his way to Nigeria.
[Ruth Valentine]
THE RING
Ann Baer gave me my first job, at the Ganymed Press. I was nineteen. I was a pretty terrible employee, for all kinds of reasons; not least that my husband, after his release from prison, used to hang around outside, threatening to make trouble. The Ganymed Gallery was next to the New Statesman building and shared a common hallway. Every few months an elderly man would enter the gallery through our front door and then pass on, through a side door, into the Statesman office. He always carried a shabby shopping bag and his tie was held together with a ring. We were told never to speak to him or give any acknowledgement of his presence. He was to be treated like a familiar ghost. He came through the Ganymed entrance to avoid speaking to anyone at the Statesman front desk. He was Leonard Woolf. The ring had belonged to Virginia.
[Claire Walsh]