by Tim Moore
‘At least no one’s pulled out the plug,’ he said, helping me reel the cable back through the sitting-room window (don’t even consider a TH!NKcity if you suspect any of your neighbours harbour either Luddite sympathies or a weakness for unimaginative practical jokes).
We set off circumspectly, starkly conscious both of the TH!NKcity’s head-turning silliness and its limited range. Anthony told me that a friend of his had taken one to Brighton, though under questioning confessed this had involved an overnight stop in Guildford. If you didn’t have the radio on, or the lights, or the wipers, if you accelerated like a tranquillised vicar and made optimum use of a ‘regenerative braking’ system which charged the battery under gradual and controlled deceleration, you could, possibly, make a fully juiced up TH!NKcity run for fifty miles.
Always at the back of your mind, though, was that if you left the hazards on or got drawn into a protracted – and certainly mismatched – exchange of horn sounds you’d coast to a halt on a flyover and realise your extension lead was, ooh, seven miles too short. Even if your batteries went flat outside a Magnox reactor you’d still need to sit there for eight hours getting a charge. It would be like driving into a petrol station and filling up with a turkey baster.
The charge meter was already down to 70 per cent as we droned to a Tube-train halt in an empty meter bay round the back of Oxford Street. ‘What now?’ said my father, who had spent most of the outward journey bellowing ‘Regenerate!’ whenever a distant green light changed to amber. ‘Wait for a warden,’ I replied, and out we got.
By the time we spotted one sauntering up to our TH!NKcity we’d saved £2.20 in parking, thereby very nearly offsetting the bill for coffee consumed while on surveillance in a Starbucks over the road. The warden circled the car, appraising it with a smirk identical to the many directed at us through neighbouring drivers’ windows on the journey up. ‘How will he know he’s not supposed to ticket it?’ asked my father in a stake-out whisper.
‘It says “electric” somewhere on the tax disc,’ I said, then speaking for both of us added, ‘so in other words, he won’t know.’
On cue, the warden looked at his watch, withdrew his little computery thing and began to enter our registration number into it. ‘Go, go, go, go!’ I should have screamed before rushing across and spreadeagling him over the bonnet, but it had belatedly occurred to us that as the ticket he was now beginning to issue would be invalid there was perhaps no need. I could, in fact, have done what my father was preparing to do and just sat and watched him do it. But here was the table-turning opportunity of a lifetime. Out I bolted. ‘Please, please!’ I yelped, breathing rather harder than my short burst across the street demanded. ‘I’m really sorry, but I think the meter must be running a bit fast.’ He eyed me evenly. ‘Also, I’ve broken down.’
‘Well, if that’s the case,’ he said, starting to sound slightly but rewardingly narked, ‘you really should put a note to that effect in the windscreen.’
I covered my forehead with one hand and nodded slowly. ‘It’s just . . . the lines,’ I said in a pained and pitiful rasp, ‘they’re so faded, so . . . so . . .’ Abruptly I lowered the hand and after theatrically scanning the street left and right looked straight into his eyes. ‘Listen,’ I hissed urgently, ‘I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but I’m here in the service of a visiting military force.’ He took a small step backwards. Cradling my chin as if in reconsideration, I addressed a prolonged and wondering hum to the pavement, then blurted, ‘No. No. No, that can’t be right. No. What I mean is’ – and here I arrowed my index finger to the relevant ballpoint scrawl on the tax disc – ‘this is an electric vehicle.’ It was cruel, really, and almost totally unwarranted. Traffic wardens have a miserable job, at least when it’s snowing, and I wholeheartedly endorse all efforts to discourage people driving into the middle of London. And so does my father, who confessed as we rounded Piccadilly Circus that in years of executive employment in central London he had never once commuted by public transport.
The current proposal to impose a daily charge of £5 for taking a car into the central area is promising, though one that will discriminate in favour of all those fat-cat gas-guzzlers who clog the relevant streets. A fiver? That’s not even half what a BMW-driving executive ponce shoves down a lap dancer’s G-string at lunch time. What they should really do is ban all private cars except the TH!NKcity and see how those City boys fancy wheezing into the company car park in what looks like the sort of machine Communism would have produced if it had worked better – a twenty-first century Trabant.
Though it might easily be a hangover from the Bentley Boys of inter-war London, or even the sorry legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s helpful comment that any bus passenger over the age of thirty was by definition a failure, for most people a car stubbornly remains not just a means of transport but a statement. It shouldn’t be so, given the depressing absurdity of motoring around the Monopoly zone – with parking tariffs rivalling the minimum wage and 50,000 cars an hour barging into the central area in the morning rush hour it’s no wonder that ‘the traffic’ regularly tops those ‘worst things about London’ Evening Standard celebrity surveys – but it simply is. And if a BMW says, ‘Out the way, poofhouse’, a TH!NKcity says, ‘Oh, OK. Sorry!’. Of course I drive a Volvo estate, which says, ‘Please pass – self-vasectomy in progress.’
Attempting to accommodate my wife and children in a TH!NKcity would be to recreate what seventies students did in Volkswagen Beetles when they couldn’t find their underwater Monopoly sets, but for my father and I it seemed a grand little runabout. We saw Anne Robinson waiting on a street corner and, throwing charge-conserving caution to the winds, gave her a cheeky, though sadly inaudible, parp. After cameo standoffs with two further wardens in Covent Garden (‘The meter isn’t broken? Right . . . oh, that’s it: I was misled by an ambiguous sign. Don’t go away – there’s a disposable photographic laboratory in my glovebox’), we blundered across an underground car park off Harley Street that not only advertised free parking for electric vehicles – and at £13 for four hours’ parking in a conventionally powered conveyance, this was the jackpot – but also free charging in two designated bays.
Slightly surprisingly, one of these was occupied by a Peugeot electric van; slightly less surprisingly, the plugs were completely incompatible with our socket. Honestly. It was clear from the wardens’ ignorance that this whole electric car/free parking stuff was a token gesture – rule out the ones with the crates of gold top on the back and there can’t be more than two dozen electric vehicles in the capital – but they could at least have made those tokens the right size.
With the charge meter dropping towards 50 per cent I began to focus more closely on regenerative braking. So effectively did this compromise the more traditional priorities of urban motoring that coasting around a corner near the British Museum I almost knocked over a woman on a bicycle. Oh, all right, I actually did knock over a woman on a bicycle. But somehow it didn’t seem to count: not having heard my stealthy approach, she looked so surprised as she bounced off the plastic wing that instead of the merited wildly abusive gesturing I was treated to a raised, open palm of apology.
It was an encounter that recaptured the spirit of ’35. Roundabouts arrived in London’s anarchic streets in 1926 and the capital’s first set of traffic lights went up at Piccadilly Circus the same year, but both innovations were inspired by a desire to increase traffic speeds rather than reduce accidents. In consequence, death rates were fearful: in the twenty years between the wars, 120,000 people died on Britain’s roads – equal, as one commentator noted, to the full strength of the British Expeditionary Force despatched to France in 1914.
In an interesting road-safety initiative, the government abolished all speed limits in 1930 and waited until the annual death toll hit, 7,000 – still a record and twice the total we manage today with twenty times as many cars on the road – before reinstating them five years later, reluctantly throwing in a compulsory
driving test. Even then there were complaints: opposing the 1935 Bill, Lieutenant-Colonel Moore-Brabazon made the ear-catching claim that is was essentially a motorist’s civic duty to mow down jaywalkers: ‘No doubt Members of the House will recollect the numbers of chickens we killed in the early days. We used to come back with the radiator stuffed with feathers. It was the same with dogs. Dogs get out of the way of motorcars nowadays. It is true that 7,000 people are killed in motor accidents . . . but there is education even in the lower animals. These things will right themselves.’
No pedestrians so richly deserved such education as the lower animals walking the capital’s streets. ‘Nobody who drives a motor vehicle in London can fail to be astounded at the folly of which pedestrians are capable,’ commented Motor in 1934. ‘It is no exaggeration to say the man at the wheel of the motorcar is constantly saving the lives of walkers.’ Victor Watson for one would have roundly endorsed such bold sentiments. Monopoly was released the year speed limits were introduced, and as detailed in its Chance card penalties the frustrations of driving are already more in evidence than its pleasures. Just months earlier, you wouldn’t have been fined £15 for speeding but given an indulgent wink of encouragement by the traffic cop as he respectfully flicked bits of pedestrian off your grille with his truncheon.
And what of ‘“DRUNK IN CHARGE” FINE £20’? Even as a child I thought it seemed a little distasteful to soil a wholesome family pastime with the image of some ginned-up landlord wrapping his Alvis round a West End lamppost. Bracketing a conviction for drink driving alongside mundane bills for education and healthcare, Monopoly made the practice seem not just acceptable but inevitable. In fact, by putting the phrase in inverted commas, Waddingtons were implying that it somehow shouldn’t be an offence at all. But remember that drink driving wasn’t really frowned upon socially until the eighties, and that speeding is only now coming to be considered unacceptable. Pondering which motoring practices indulgently termed ‘cavalier’ by today’s Londoners will appal their descendants in sixty years’ time, my father and I smugly came up with illegal parking and excess emissions.
Having carefully checked the pay-and-display signs to ensure we hadn’t strayed into a less enlightened neighbouring borough, we left the TH!NK city off Tottenham Court Road and lunched at a nearby curry house. When we leadenly emerged ninety minutes later, there was a ticket on the windscreen. And just an hour after that, having parked the TH!NKcity by Lincoln’s Inn Field to wander about the surprising and genuinely splendid Soane Museum, there was another, this time accompanied on the passenger window by a fluorescent ‘AUTHORISED FOR CLAMPING’ sticker of the type whose removal necessitates the vigorous and constant application of wire wool and lung-melting solvents for anything up to four years. It wouldn’t have been at all funny if the car actually had been clamped, of course, or if we’d felt any moral obligation to tackle that sticker, but it hadn’t, and we didn’t, and so it was.
My father did the maths as we whined home through the traffic. Using criteria that have no place in rational contemplation but made eminent sense to us, he calculated that after deductions for curries and coffees, our paper profit in terms of unfed meters and unpaid fines was a whopping £71.40.
We parked nose up outside my house with the charge meter down to 20 per cent; happy but oddly exhausted – please don’t say I can no longer handle a vehicle even as poxily stunted as this one without power steering – my batteries felt even flatter. This may explain why, when my father came out with a plastic bag and advised me to wrap the extension lead in it in case of rain, I chose to ignore him.
I was in bed when the first, gentle drops fell, a sound picked up by my ears but which my brain elected not to pass on to my legs. The extent of the downpour and its fearsome consequences only became apparent retrospectively, when in the morning I flicked on the bedside light and nothing happened.
CHAPTER 6
The Yellows
BIRNA’S ICELANDIC GRANDFATHER – a larger-than-life trawler captain whose life was an especially large one – regularly visited London in the thirties. Shortly before he died I talked to him about these trips, who he’d stayed with, what he’d done. When I asked him where he’d gone for a good night out as a young blade at large, his wet blue gaze drifted out of the window, and with a small but indisputably saucy smile of recollection he murmured, ‘Leicester Square’.
I’d been frankly astonished by this at the time, and was again after Anthony had repossesed my TH!NKcity with a good deal more grace than its minimal battery charge, garish adhesive decorations and accompanying sheath of penalty charge notices demanded. But after I’d sat down, opened the board for the first and only time under my own roof and rolled six, I rather belatedly made an obvious connection. The yellows – Leicester Square, Coventry Street and Piccadilly – were the good-time set, the night-on-the-tiles set, the party-till-you-drop set.
Relegated on the board below Coventry Street – familiar to all tourists and most Londoners as ‘Where?’ – Leicester Square’s reputation in the thirties was clearly as brassy as it is today: the Blackpool of London. ‘I would love Leicester Square to be like a Florence-style piazza, but at the moment it’s more like Ayia Napa,’ moaned the Metropolitan Police’s deputy assistant commissioner recently, addressing a Westminster Council meeting that planned to redeem the situation by licensing buskers, installing (sigh) thirty new CCTV cameras in the streets around the square and building six Parisian-model outdoor ‘pissoirs’. ‘That’s not the kind of entertainment we’re looking for,’ added council leader Simon Milton, probably referring to the happy hours rather than the pissoirs.
Simon and the deputy assistant commissioner might love the idea of a gracious promenade à deux about some trattoria-strewn Florence-style piazza, but in the absence of Florence-style weather I’m happy to bet they’d be staying in watching Top Gear. The only volunteers for a stroll about Leicester Square on a wet autumn evening are very likely to be both teenage and drunk, and hats off to them on both counts. Here at least was a part of London that knew its heritage, a place where young Londoners could draw on a many-generationed history of gathering to binge drink. When Euan Blair needed a gutter to keel over into, where else could he have gone?
Laid out as a handsome residential estate on fields owned by the Earl of Leicester in the 1670s, the square’s noble intentions were compromised almost immediately. The Earl’s son let in shops and stalls, and the rot set in with uncomfortable literality at the start of the eighteenth century, when someone stuck a telescope in the grass in the middle and aimed it at the decomposing heads of traitors impaled at Temple Bar down the hill, charging for each peek.
Artists brought in their questionable theatricalities – Joshua Reynolds had his staircase at No. 47 specially widened ‘to accommodate the ample skirts of female patrons’, and the engraver William Woolett was the square’s neighbour from hell, firing a cannon from his roof to mark the completion of a piece of work. At No. 30, William Hogarth drew much of the inspiration for his graphically tawdry caricatures from the streets around. And Bohemia, after all, isn’t a million miles from Transylvania – in 1761 a Swiss miniatures painter renting a room at No. 36 had a set-to with his landlady which culminated in his ferrying bits of her out of the door in parcels.
A defining moment in Leicester Square’s history took place in 1726. Partly because it took place in a brothel (at No. 27), but mainly because in involved a woman, Mary Tofts, who claimed to have given birth to a litter of fifteen rabbits. Clearly selecting the wrong sort of doctor for the job, the local hospital despatched a surgeon, who watched in utter astonishment as Mary spawned another couple of bunnies. Heaven alone knows what medical counselling he offered her – ‘No dear, we breed like rabbits, not with them’ – but the case was now the talk of London and King George I sent his own surgeon to investigate. The fact that this gentleman could claim only to have delivered Mary of ‘rabbit portions’ should possibly have raised suspicions, but it wasn’t until she w
as apprehended ‘trying secretly to buy a rabbit’ that the fraud was exposed. This incident sealed Leicester Square’s reputation as a cabaret of the bizarre; the sort of place where to make a name for yourself in the rabbit game, it wasn’t enough merely to pull one out of a hat.
It was all studiously lowbrow, and attempts to crowbar that brow upwards were invariably doomed. In 1851 an entrepreneur built a ‘Great Globe’ in the square’s muddy middle, at 60 feet high the largest ever built. Essentially a stylised model of our planet, visitors climbed up platforms in its gas-lit interior to examine from beneath ‘the physical features of the earth’. Or rather they didn’t – it was demolished after only ten years. Even more disastrous was the grandly titled ‘Royal Panopticon of Science and Art’, a series of lecture halls arrestingly decorated in the Moorish style. This ill-conceived marriage of the garish and the worthy also showcased a hydraulic ‘Ascending Carriage’ and the world’s loudest organ, features that helped bump the cost up to £80,000; a sum which, with reference to my now-traditional idiotic price index, could have bagged you Marble Arch, with enough change left for Big Ben’s clock.
If London’s squares, as many have said, are its jewels, then by the middle of the nineteenth century Leicester Square was the capital’s tarnished navel ring. The garden in the middle, by now a barren wilderness, was sold by a dentist to a ship’s purser, who sold it to an ivory turner, who sold it to a goldsmith. A grandly gilded statue of George I on horseback that had dominated the garden for a century was already looking a bit sorry when the builders turned up and found it right where they wanted to erect their Great Globe. Confounded by a law forbidding the statue’s removal from the square, they hit upon the cheeky solution of burying it 12 feet underground and sticking their big orb on top. When the globe’s bubble burst the statue was disinterred and, though George and his mount had in the interim shed all their gold leaf and five limbs between them, re-erected on its plinth. Now presiding over what had degenerated into ‘an open rubbish dump where kitchen refuse lay in heaps beside the rotting remains of dogs and cats’, George was left to the mercy of local children, who rode pillion behind him, pulled more bits off and one night in October 1866 endowed the decaying monarch with a dunce’s hat, pipe and moustache, having first painted his horse white with black polka dots. So notorious did this spectacle become that it even inspired what must surely have been a memorable show at a nearby strip joint.