by Tim Moore
Over the road and behind the magnificent gates that are all that remain of the old Devonshire House, Green Park looked dark and haunted, and the grand buildings further along – most notably the famous headquarters of the club familiarly known after the directions on its driveway gateposts as the In and Out – were unaccountably abandoned and in a state of what you might call cultivated neglect. The next day I discovered that the mothballed In and Out and its broken-windowed neighbours were acquired in 2000 for £50 million by an obscure Syrian with even obscurer motives: facts that demand an outburst, if only I hadn’t just finished one.
The road splayed into a four-laner, then a sixer, with the two in the middle diving beneath Hyde Park Corner. Old man Clunn had got his way, and thus Piccadilly died away into gyratory desolation. It was no place for boulevardiers. No place for anyone, in fact, except perhaps traction-engine drivers looking for somewhere to do a U-turn. An owl hooted from over in Hyde Park; a rustle alerted me to a subway entrance where a homeless sleeper lay, perilously mummified in plastic sheeting like a pod in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. I turned and, I’m afraid, ran.
It was unfair to expect that pizza slice – which, let’s face it, had already done a lot of work – to cope with this level of enhanced activity, and slowing to a shuffle back up Piccadilly I started to feel as if my body might have started feeding off its own muscle tissue. But dawn was at last hesitantly poking up at the corners of Green Park, and there were more people about: orange-jacketed Tube workers trooping down the station stairs; a man with a 5-litre bucket of B&Q emulsion beside him propping up a bus stop. It was a rare and rewarding insight into the oddness of other people’s daily routines – rare because I now realised I’d never once been up in the centre of town at this time, and rewarding because I wouldn’t have to ever again. At least not for another four chapters.
Focusing laboriously on my watch I saw that I was still an hour and a half early; there was nothing to do but keep walking, back up the other side of the street to the Circus. Past Egyptian Hall, now that nation’s tourist office but in an earlier incarnation an extraordinarily eccentric palace of entertainment where mountaineers recreated the ascent of Mont Blanc and 800,000 Londoners filed in to see Napoleon’s state coach. More of those irksome, dull and obscure commercial amalgamations – SalomonSmithBarney; HDP International; the Bond-villainesque Corporate Executive Board – in Edwardian blocks that once accommodated the National Sulphuric Acid Association, ladies’ blouse maker Mrs Rosa Kennard, Titanine Aeroplane Dope and John Robertson & Son whisky merchants. What an office party they’d have thrown at Christmas (best go easy on the punch, though).
But the further I walked up Piccadilly, the more its commercial past and present converged. An ancient chemist’s shop the size of a washbag had its walls stacked floor to ceiling with Resolve and Timotei and anything else you’d find at Superdrug, along with plenty you wouldn’t: pomades, natural sponges, even an ‘engraving service on brushes’. The black, bow-fronted windows of Hatchard’s look as if they’d be happier stocked with pickadills, and the staff of my favourite London bookshop retain a similarly old-fashioned sense of customer service: they always know what they’re talking about, and more crucially what you’re talking about.
Hatchard’s has been in Piccadilly for two hundred years, and Fortunum and Mason for almost a hundred more. Both seemed winningly reluctant to embrace unappealing commercial developments that may have taken place in the interim: I’m delighted, for instance, that neither is willing to open beyond 6.30, which frankly is as late as anyone should be out shopping for anything except drugs, sex or diesel.
I’ve probably got a few Christmases left before glacé fruit starts creeping on to my present wish-list, but even so there’s something undeniably delightful about Fortnum’s, an establishment which has cultivated its Regency air so successfully that I was astonished to discover the present building dates only from the mid-twenties, and that the quaint little mechanical models of Mr Fortnum and Mr Mason who on the hour turn to each other above the entrance and bow or faint or drop their trousers or something were in fact slightly younger than me.
Nosing up to one of the store’s dramatically downlit displays I decided it was somehow reassuring that even in the twenty-first century someone was being employed to design and painstakingly assemble a tiny scale model of the Potala Palace in Lhasa, encrusting it with lychees and tinned wild asparagus tips in extra virgin olive oil before balancing the whole ensemble on a stuffed camel’s back in a shop window. In an only slightly ridiculous way it seemed a fitting memorial to all London’s absent craftspeople, the cobblers and seamstresses and portmanteau makers who only a generation ago, even along Piccadilly, had hammered and hummed and stitched a living.
Under more favourable circumstances I would have maintained my detailed vigil, dutifully checking each building against my 1933 directory. As it was, having passed my third Starbucks in apparently as many minutes I switched the camera in my brain from high-resolution video mode to grainy screen grabs. I forgot to check out Lord Peter Wimsey’s hypothetical residence at 110A; similarly overlooked was 145, the Duke of York’s home when in 1936 he was declared Britain’s third king in a year, and where Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were raised and educated. I snagged my hair in the wisteria recklessly tumbling down from the gardens around St James’s Church, Piccadilly’s oldest building (‘beautiful and convenient’ to its architect, the usually modest Christopher Wren; ‘rather ugly’ to Harold Clunn), and gawped blankly at the dawn workers trundling purposefully about the Circus and Leicester Square like after-hour functionaries at a theme park: men in overalls with spirit levels over their shoulders; bouncers sweeping up rustling mountains of club flyers; phone-box disinfectors sluicing away the tramp juice.
The taxis all had their orange lights on now, driven by men who had made the trade-off: less traffic on the back roads, more vomit on the back seat. Their targets were the knots of hardcore revellers, still getting cheeky with seen-it-all sergeants, still yabbering to commendably tolerant friends on their mobiles: this was Friday morning, for heaven’s sakes, and it wasn’t even 6 a.m.
‘Big Issue,’ sang a cheery young crusty as I headed back for the Ritz. ‘Only a quid with two free staples!’ I turned towards him; he scanned me up and down – trenchcoat, notebook and all – and his face went south. ‘You a . . . copper?’ he whispered in horror, answering the question himself by wheeling away up Regent Street. From Groovy Dad finalist at the school disco to hardfaced beggar-beater in two short years: how cruel one’s mid-thirties can be.
If only he’d seen me an hour later, unshaven and haggard and blinking under the Ritz chandeliers, street-soiled mac buttoned up to my neck. In 1938 a hundred unemployed protestors invaded the Ritz’s grill room and demanded tea; I hoped they were ready for a one-man reconstruction. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to check that in for you?’ asked Ian after he’d established it really was me, but aware that the coat’s subsequent retrieval from some lickspittle bellboy in a pillbox hat would set me back rather more than its value I dully shook my head.
One such jockey-sized sneerer strutted past our table, and as he did so I caught sight of us in one of the many mirrored panels arranged along the dining room’s towering marbled flanks. Ian was the immaculate but eccentric philanthropist; I the overawed God-bless-yer bench-dweller he’d taken pity upon during his morning constitutional through Green Park. ‘You’re a true gent, so you are, governor,’ I croaked as my £20.50 plate of eggs on toast was laid silently before me. And he was as well. I’ve just realised I never even offered to pay.
Around us early-bird businessmen loudly caught their worms as pinafored maids criss-crossed bearing salvers of melon balls and flowers so aggressively colourful they looked plastic. ‘Fourth quarter’s looking pretty fruity,’ bellowed the power-breakfasting pinstripe alongside us. ‘Yuh, well, I guess you could say we’ve got an allergy to tax,’ came the smugly drawled reply.
‘This
is a favourite place for head-hunters,’ said Ian, and he nodded towards a slightly less appalling pair conniving over their kedgeree. ‘They come here before work for shady little meetings.’
Where were all the hungover Hanovers, the puppy-pampering prima donnas, the wayward Waddington womanisers? Had the Ritz, too, capitulated so totally to the character-corroding blandnesses of the corporate dollar? But my higher functions were shutting down one by one, and conversational output was now available only via an intermittent read-only memory. ‘Opened in 1906, the Ritz is the oldest steel-framed building in Britain,’ I mumbled, wordlessly upending Ian’s leftover salmon into the plate-space recently vacated by my eggs, ‘and it was opened in 1906.’
As a man whose considerable business success can at least be partly attributed to never, ever going to sleep, Ian might at this point have felt justified in picking up the vase on our table and introducing its contents to my sallow, stubbled face. Instead he nodded kindly, and, accepting the time for talk was at an end, bent down to withdraw something of mine from his briefcase, something that due to the incompatibility of angular backpacks and nights on the town I had been unwilling to burden myself with.
As discreetly as was possible on a small table crowded with polished and starched dining accessories and any tiny particles of food I had omitted to cram into my filthy gullet, he laid the board flat, placed my motor on Piccadilly and proffered the dice. I shrugged and flicked a tired and bloated gesture of concession.
‘I’ll roll,’ he said with an understanding nod. It was a four. Toc-toc-toc-toc. Community Chest.
‘No cards,’ I muttered.
He held an index finger aloft, raised his eyebrows and bent back down towards his briefcase. ‘Cards,’ he said, holding a pink pack towards me. ‘I thought I’d bring everything along just in case.’ There was a pause while I dozily updated my mental checklist of secrets for business success: 1) Don’t sleep. (1.1) Bring everything along just in case. Oh, and (1.2) less egg and pizza on tie. In fact (1.3) new tie.
I took the top card, and seeing the bars didn’t need to read it. But Ian did anyway. ‘Go To Jail,’ he said, loudly enough to shut up our horrid neighbours in mid-bray. ‘Move directly to jail, do not p—’
‘Wait!’ I barked, shocked into action. ‘I wasn’t on Piccadilly. I was on Leicester Square.’
Ian’s thwarted glower did not last long. ‘Leicester Square, yeah?’ Toc-toc-toc-toc, all the way to the finger-raised cop.
CHAPTER 7
Go To Jail
‘TIMOTHY SEBASTIAN PERRIS Moore, sir!’
When a man whose uniform is accessorised by a medievally proportioned bunch of keys asks your name, you don’t fanny about. You give him your name, your whole name, and nothing but your name, and you don’t think about the consequences of its more curious components. At least not until two dozen of his surrounding colleagues are bent double, slapping hard surfaces, clutching stomachs and exhibiting other well-catalogued symptoms of advanced amusement.
‘Tim . . . Moore?’ I whimpered superfluously into the uproar. Four minutes into my stretch in Pentonville and the short, sharp shocks had started already.
I’d chosen Pentonville as my prison because it shared a name with a street on the board, because it was the oldest prison in London and because my neighbour Bernie’s dad had worked there as a probation officer in the seventies and told me it was like Porridge. It still is, in a way. ‘A local nick for local people,’ quipped the female officer who’d been nominated to show me around while her colleagues in Pentonville’s Audit Unit recovered their composure. ‘Eleven hundred-odd inmates, 90 per cent of them from north London. Fair number in their thirties and forties – one guy in his seventies, in here on a robbery charge. Mostly thieves and druggies.’ Placed in crime’s full spectrum, her indulgent tone suggested, such offenders had done no worse than roll three doubles on the trot.
We walked down some stairs and up a corridor; at the end she unlocked a huge barred gate and let it slam behind us with a great Norman Stanley Fletcher clunk. Into my nose filtered that sheltered-housing smell of reheated leftovers spiced up with a splash of TCP. Into my ears an unintelligible chorus of clinked trays and slammed gates and truncated building-site yells. Radiating around me were five passages, in which loitered dozens of men in grey sweatshirts and jogging pants. One was the spitting image of the sallow and thin-faced Monopoly-nick weasel; another had only one leg. And above me were four more floors of the same. I might be Just Visiting, but it had stopped feeling like it.
Pentonville hadn’t looked like a prison from the outside. For a start it wasn’t discreetly marooned amidst misty heathland as most of its institutional brethren are wont to be, even in London, but uncomfortably slotted slap between the busily bus-laned Caledonian Road and a tight grid of Victorian terraces. And there’d been graffiti on the almost decorative white wall out front, which along with a note in the car park disclaiming responsibility for loss from or damage to vehicles left there hardly suggested the slavish fixation with security that I’d idly imagined to be a prison’s defining characteristic. Gazing up at the main building’s stuccoed arches and pediments I was reminded of a Victorian seat of learning or provincial railway terminus. But then Pentonville was different: a Model Prison, the first in Britain whose intention was to reform its inmates.
Erected in 1842, Pentonville was a bold departure from the capital’s usual filthy, raucous dungeons. For the first time prisoners were to be kept in single cells, each with a hand basin and lavatory. The cells were arranged in wings that fanned out like spokes from a central hub, within which a handful of officers could effectively monitor hundreds of inmates. It was clean and light. Within years, Pentonville was the blueprint for new prisons from Germany to Australia and the USA.
But this was 1842, remember, and the rehabilitation regime was never going to involve the construction of matchstick cathedrals or correspondence courses in O-level Spanish. Prisoners were kept in their solitary cells for twenty-three hours a day, with meals pushed through hatches. Most cells were fitted with a crank that pushed paddles through sand, a hard-labour device invented at Pentonville that produced nothing more useful than fatigued agony. A large bell announced the start and end of labour – all speech was forbidden, and officers even wore special overshoes to maintain the tomb-like silence intended to force inmates to reflect upon the error of their ways. It was soul-destroying, and it was supposed to be. Let out for their hour of fresh air, prisoners were escorted individually around by officers, and had to wear slitted, visored hoods that prevented them from seeing the face of any official or fellow inmate. In chapel they were herded into solitary boxes like veal-calf stalls. All they’d have seen during a typical eighteen-month sentence were their feet; all they’d have heard was that bell and their own breathing.
Oddly, on their day of release many prisoners seemed rather overawed by the outside world. Some whimpered for cotton wool to stop up their ears. Others were struck dumb. But the Victorians thought of everything and in 1851 opened the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Asylum – Europe’s largest mental hospital – just up the road.
Britain still loves imprisoning its citizens. Almost 75,000 of us are inside – more, as a proportion of national population, than any EU country except Portugal (and you thought their only crime was Mateus Rosé). We’re 50 per cent up on France, and a third ahead of Italy. Even Turkey and China can’t match us. You can consider this a shocking blight, or as carrying on a proud tradition. At Pentonville they are of the latter school of thought.
‘Look there – you can still see where the food hatches were.’ We’d started our tour up on the semi-deserted ‘fives’ – the fifth floor – and my guide was keen to highlight any evidence of Pentonville’s heritage. She didn’t have to try too hard. That bell was still there by the chief warder’s office. Everything was cast iron and glazed brick. In 2001 a tuberculosis outbreak affected fourteen inmates and visiting relatives. And by the phones I’d seen a Samarita
ns poster.
‘Yeah,’ she said, clanking open another of the fifty-odd gates and doors we’d pass through in the hours ahead. ‘See that in there?’ We were back down on the twos, passing a door with a wired-glass inspection panel. ‘That’s what we call The Bubble. Eight suicidals, sort of keeping an eye on each other.’ Through the glass I could see the end of a bed, and on it a pair of restlessly twitching legs.
‘Watch out, mate – nonce alert.’ The voice came from behind, warning me of the heavily guarded group filing towards us: clad in distinctive burgundy tracksuits, a genuinely loathsome parade of every pervert cliché, from shiftily leering embodiment of human evil to slack-jawed gentle giant. What was I doing here? When I’d asked the Home Office for permission to visit Pentonville I’d expected nothing more than a ruminative stroll round the perimeter walls with a brogue-wearing architectural historian. And here I was clinging to the nylon shirt-tails of a strident Miss Mackay as she casually nodded at a confinement cell whose occupant’s behavioural excesses regularly warranted the close attention of anything up to six officers. ‘Sex case fruitcake,’ came her blithe assessment.
‘Is he board of visitors, Miss? Oi, mate, you board of visitors?’
This time I turned round, thereby breaking Bernie’s dad’s golden rule. ‘Never catch a prisoner’s eye,’ were his enigmatic parting words to me, and afterwards I’d eagerly run through the hideous consequences that might have spawned this adage: nose-splitting head butts, baptism by phlegm, Romany curses. Now I was about to find out.
‘No,’ I croaked feebly in the direction of a youthful inmate carrying a tray with bits of stew on it. But it was too late. ‘I haven’t had a visit for two months,’ he started as we walked up the iron stairs past another web of anti-jump netting. ‘And the food’s a joke, man. Look at this!’ I supposed he was waving his tray at me but my guide had already led us away. She sucked her teeth knowingly, raised a finger in mock admonishment and as I rather thought she might said, ‘Never let an inmate catch your eye.’