London Blues

by Anthony Frewin

  The Labour Party weren’t letting the grass grow under their feet. Harold Wilson was talking about the ‘white heat’ of the scientific revolution.

  In contrast, you looked at the Earl of Home and you wondered if anyone had ever uttered the word ‘science’ in his presence? No, he wouldn’t know what it meant. He used words like grouse, tradition, Our Great Party, the Monarchy. This guy was living in Victorian times. His one concession was to renounce his six (yes, six!) titles and henceforth he was to be known as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Not Mr Douglas-Home. Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

  Then the mists of November roll in and 1963 continues slowly to ebb away. Aldous Huxley’s death on 22 November is completely overshadowed by another death on the same day: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I was in the bar when the news came through on the radio. The place went silent. Some woman started crying. Nobody could believe it. This was some terrible mistake. A thing like that just couldn’t happen.

  I’d never been a big fan of the President yet the news knocked me for six. How could this lone nut, Lee Harvey Oswald, do something so awesome? Christ! And then two days later when this Dallas night-club owner and hoodlum shot Oswald in the basement of the police headquarters (and how many times did we watch and re-watch it on the TV?) all sorts of bells started ringing. Hold on a minute! Who was Oswald? Who was Ruby? What’s really going on? How the fuck can some guy just walk up to the man who assassinated the 35th President of the United States of America and shoot him dead? How does that happen?

  On the day that Ruby shot Oswald Veronica turned up in Porchester Road with her suitcases. I’ve moved back, she said. She stayed four weeks, until Christmas Eve. It was good while she was there. We just screwed and got stoned every night. That’s all.

  Later there was a note from her stuck to the mirror over the sink:

  TIMMY,

  I don’t think this is what

  either of us really want.

  Sorry.

  Luv

  R.

  Well, it may not have been what I really wanted but I was prepared to stay with it. She was not. I don’t know where she’s gone but if she needs anything she’ll be in touch. That I can be certain of.

  Charlie rescued me late on Christmas Eve and I spent the next couple of days with him and his enormous extended family over in Finsbury Park. There isn’t a street over there that doesn’t have some relative of his in it. The next two or three days were a fog of booze, dope and food: Charlie supplied the dope, his relatives the booze and food. It was one of the best Christmases I’d ever had … what I can remember of it, that is.

  It took me a couple of days back in Bayswater to sober up. I sat there hungover watching the last episode of That Was the Week That Was. It was supposed to go on for another thirteen weeks but the BBC chickened out and cancelled it. 1964 is going to be an election year and the politicians didn’t want some bunch of satirists taking the piss out of them. No, sir. So off it came.

  I opened and closed Modern Snax myself on the last two days of the year – the Monday and Tuesday.

  And I went home to welcome the New Year in by myself. There was just me, a joint or two … and Thelonious.

  January started slow and cold and then gradually got slower and colder still … but the Snax Bar takings were really up on last January. About 45 per cent up, believe it or not. There seem to be a lot more kids about with a lot more money. They buy their ‘mod’ clothes in Carnaby Street and don’t give a toss about all the shit that clutters up this country.

  I bought a hot 35mm Nikon off Charlie with half a dozen lenses in a fabulous carrying case (which I immediately dyed just in case the previous owner spotted me with it) and started getting out and about at weekends photographing anything that caught my fancy. People. Street scenes. The river. I wanted to do for London now what Brassai did for Paris all those years ago.

  I was taking some shots down Old Church Street in Chelsea early one Sunday morning when I got talking to a young girl wearing a black shiny mac with long black straight hair. Well, she started talking to me. Her name was Flavia Rowley. She was a first year student at the Royal College of Art. I took her out a couple of times for a meal and to Ronnie Scott’s and late in February she moved in with me. I felt a warmth and tenderness towards Flavia that I had never experienced with Veronica.

  There was an intellectual zest too. We were always going to art shows and galleries and seeing every foreign film at the Academy and Paris Pullman, and she introduced me to her sister, Julia, who was a commissioning editor at Hutchinson’s, the publishers. Julia commissioned me to do a book of photographs called Secret London. She and Flavia would write the linking text. The advance was small, only £50, but the important thing was that here was someone with confidence in my work, someone who gave me a focus for what I was doing.

  Flavia had enormous dark eyes. Her skin was olive-coloured. She was tall and slim and moved like a ballet dancer. I could watch her for hours, just look at her movements and into her eyes. She would often sit in the armchair working on a pen-and-ink sketch and I’d be spread on the bed just staring at her, mesmerised. Enthralled, I guess, is the word. She’d sometimes look up at me and laugh, throwing her head back and I’d watch her long hair cascade over those shoulders and I’d want her like I’ve never wanted another woman. But if a new chapter opens in one’s life an old one will close. And vice versa.

  In mid-March Mr Calabrese handed me a large brown manila envelope. I asked him what was in it? £250, he said. What do I do with it? Put it in a bank, he said. Why? Because, Timmy, I am shutting the bar. I am an old man and the lease runs out on 25 March, Lady Day. I cannot afford to renew it.

  I had worked there for nearly five years, ever since I came to London in 1959. Now it was over.

  Mr Calabrese gave me a card with his new address on it – somewhere in Folkestone. His son lived down there and had a coffee bar on Tontine Street (the strange name always stuck in my mind). He and his wife had bought a little house there and he was retiring. I’ve had enough of London, he said, I don’t recognise it any more. It has all changed. We will see you soon, I hope?

  Yes. I’ll come and see you soon, Mr Calabrese.

  With the few hundred pounds I had in the bank and the £250 I got as a golden handshake, finding another job wasn’t an immediate problem. Not an immediate problem, but a problem nonetheless.

  I had no idea what I would do. What, indeed, I could do. Or, for that matter, what I wanted to do. The thought of working in some other coffee/milk bar filled me with dread. That was certainly out of the question.

  As it was, I did a bit of this and a bit of that while continuing work on my book.

  This was working four days a week in the clippings library at the Press Association in Fleet Street, and that was doing commissioned photography for a picture agency on Farringdon Street, Albion Features, who specialised in supplying material to continental magazines and papers of which there seemed to be thousands, certainly enough to keep Albion in business.

  The bloke who ran the agency was an old Express pictures editor called Doug Maxwell.

  The first thing he said to me when I met him was: ‘Tim Purdom? What sort of name is that? That doesn’t sound like a press photographer! That sounds like a hairdresser or, worse, an actor. I’m not sending out pictures credited to Tim Purdom. You, son, are going to have to get yourself a new moniker.’

  ‘What you got in mind?’

  ‘Umh, Harry. Good press photographers are always called Harry. You can be Harry.’

  ‘Harry what?’

  ‘Harry Fleet … after Fleet Street. That’ll do a treat.’

  So, Harry Fleet it was, and my name graced many pictures in dozens of lesser known continental magazines that were so lesser known, in fact, you didn’t even see them in the newsagents in Old Compton Street.

  I later learnt that there was another reason for Doug changing my name. I wasn’t in the Union. With this Harry name, if anyone asked, Doug could always say it
was one of his pseudonyms. But nobody ever did. And, anyway, couldn’t he have said that if I’d used my own name?

  Youth and youth culture were what the editors wanted. So I was forever traipsing round to Carnaby Street, going to rock clubs, photographing the kids on Oxford Street, the fans chasing the Beatles, and so on. Flavia and I spent the Whit weekend down in Margate and I must have shot a thousand frames or more of the Mods and the Rockers and their ‘historic’ battle that got the middle classes wetting themselves. It was a good weekend and I made a fair few bob out of it.

  Flavia’s parents, who lived up near Barton Mills, the other side of Cambridge, finally tumbled that she wasn’t sharing the family flat in Old Church Street with Julia, but was living with me. An ultimatum was served early one Saturday morning (the Saturday immediately after my 27th birthday) in a sealed envelope borne by the family chauffeur: move out or get cut off.

  Flavia said, ‘Screw Mummy and Daddy.’ And I said, don’t be so hasty, you’ve got your studies and your future to think of, right? Moving back to Old Church Street won’t prevent us from seeing each other.

  She broke down and sobbed. And then I started sobbing too and we both felt very sorry for ourselves.

  At the back of my mind I thought the separation would see us slowly and inevitably drifting apart. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Our love (for that is what it was) intensified.

  We were watching Zazie dans le Métro one evening out at the Everyman when I looked out of the corner of my eye at Flavia and saw tears rolling down her cheeks.

  ‘You’re crying. Why?’ I whispered.

  She turned and put her arms round me. She pulled me to her. I could feel her tears on my neck.

  ‘I’m crying because I think I’m going to lose you.’

  ‘I’ll never leave you. Never … ever, I promise.’

  ‘Promise me that. Really promise me that.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I want to be your wife and I want to have your children.’

  No woman had ever said that to me before. It cut me to the bone. I could feel tears in my eyes. We shared a handkerchief and missed the rest of the film.

  We were going to get married.

  The joy of my autumn was pierced when Charlie handed me a letter one evening that had been entrusted to him by someone I would rather have never seen again. A bloke who had turned up again like the proverbial bad penny – Desmond the slimy journalist. Desmond soddin’ Raeburn. And after all this time! What the fuck did he want? Why did he want to see me now?

  I was going to ask Charlie if he had said anything when he gave him the envelope but Charlie was now snoring on the sofa. I looked at Flavia asleep. I’ve never ever lied to her, but then again there’s so much I’ve never told her ….

  Timmy,

  Of utmost importance we meet. Mutual advantage. Urgent. Come alone – Jasper’s Eating House, Bourne Street. This Saturday, 9-ish. We won’t be seen there.

  Desmond (Raeburn)

  P.S. Phone office if you can’t make it.

  I lay back and put my arm around Flavia. I stared out the window to the rooftops on the other side of Porchester Road silhouetted against the night sky. I now feel like there’s some kind of time bomb ticking away in my life. The seconds tick away and each one could be the last. An odd feeling I can’t seem to shake off. It’s just sprung up within me. Perhaps it’s just the unfocused anxiety that comes with age?

  Saturday, 10 October 1964. Flavia and I went to see A Hard Day’s Night at the London Pavilion. She thought it was funny, but I must admit it didn’t do much for me … though it was a change to see a British film that had some energy and humour and wasn’t full of middle-class creeps like John Mills and Kenneth More. I’d give it five out of ten, perhaps six even. It was anarchic and I liked that.

  Afterwards we wandered lazily about the West End and had a couple of drinks in the Pillars of Hercules and at the French (we split a bottle of pink champagne between us). Gaston was dressed in the most splendid double-breasted striped suit I’d ever seen. George Raft couldn’t have had anything finer in his wardrobe. In the buttonhole Gaston sported a large red carnation. Flavia told him he looked like the head of the Marseilles Mafia. Gaston took that as a compliment and kissed her on both cheeks. He said he’d just been to some French wedding. It was time to be going.

  We wandered down to Shaftesbury Avenue and I stopped a cab. I told the driver Old Church Street, Chelsea, via Sloane Square.

  Flavia snuggled up to me and the journey passed in silence, a good warm silence. Just the two of us together in the back, my arm tightly around her as though she’d slip away if I let go. Flavia and me.

  Now my mind was concentrating on the meeting with Desmond I began to feel a nervous sickness in my stomach. A semi-nauseous feeling that wouldn’t go away. I leant forward and opened the window and took some deep breaths.

  Flavia was asleep. Champagne always has that effect on her. A couple of glasses and she’s gone.

  The cab passed round Hyde Park Corner and then down Grosvenor Place, taking a right and going through some minor Belgrave streets that bring us out on to King’s Road as it passes through all that stuccoed magnificence of Eaton Square. Just before we got to Sloane Square I asked the cabby to pull over.

  Flavia sleepily opened her eyes.

  ‘I get out here,’ I whispered.

  ‘Hope it all goes well.’

  I had lied to her. I said I was meeting Doug Maxwell and some of his really boring clients. I’d said she would have found it crass and awful. OK, she had said. You go alone. I’ll wait for you down at the flat. I had lied to her. She trusted me without question.

  I held her head in my hands and gave her a long lingering kiss. I could taste the champagne on her lips.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  ‘And me you!’

  I shut the door and the cabby pulled off. Flavia appeared in the back window waving and blowing kisses in a funny exaggerated way. I stood there until she disappeared from sight towards the Royal Court.

  The turning was Bourne Street all right. There was the sign. One on each side of the road. I noticed on an old street map that I have that it used to be called Westbourne Street years ago after that lost river that runs underground now (you can see it in a culvert above the platforms of Sloane Street station). But, I suppose, as there were so many Westbourne this and Westbourne that, they shortened it. Now it’s just Bourne Street.

  And there’s the restaurant ahead of me. Jasper’s Eating House. Tiny and like a bistro. Real Chelsea-ish.

  I push the glass-panelled door open and enter. The place is small but packed with spindly tables and chairs. It’s crowded with young Chelsea-ites, talking loudly, laughing. I can smell a faint trace of dope in the air.

  This isn’t his sort of place at all.

  A young waiter dressed in something like a costermonger’s costume (you know, striped waistcoat, collarless shirt) thrusts a large menu in my hand.

  ‘I’m meeting someone here, actually.’

  I describe Desmond as I can’t readily see him.

  The waiter frown. ‘Oh, that gentleman,’ and his eyes look up: ‘we’ve put him in the far corner.’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ I say, distancing myself swiftly from my dining companion.

  The waiter waves me through to the back of the restaurant where, in a little alcove, sits Mr Grease. Desmond. Sitting there like a big self-satisfied spider. His fat sweaty nicotine-stained fingers waving a Player’s Navy Cut in the air.

  ‘Timmy, old man. Good to see you! Grab a pew.’

  He’s put on a lot of weight since I saw him last. His face is redder. His nose more bulbous. His hair is greasier than ever. Beads of sweat are regimented along his hairline.

  That photograph they use of him in the Sunday paper must have been taken twenty or more years ago.

  ‘Sit down. Sit down. Have a drink. Make that another large gin and tonic, waiter. No, make it another two large gin and tonics. I’m r
eady for another one. Make yourself comfortable, Tim, old man. Make yourself comfortable. The food here is supposed to be very good, or so that slut who edits our woman’s page says. What would you like? The oyster and mushroom pie is supposed to be worth a nibble. We’ll each have that. We’ll start with that. So what have you been doing lately? What new villainies have you been getting yourself into? You know you can tell Uncle Desmond. Mum’s the word if you say so. I’m the one chap on the Street of Adventure you know you can trust, aren’t I? I don’t have to tell you that, do I? Me, old Desmond!’

  I’m being reminded of a part of my life I’d sooner not remember. My stomach is churning.

  Desmond offers me a Player. I shake my head.

  ‘Suit yourself. They’re the only things that keep me going. Them and the gin!’

  The waiter returns with the drinks. Desmond reaches forward like a child who thinks someone’s going to steal his food. He takes the glass, pours the same again of tonic in it and downs it in one.

  I sip my drink slowly. It makes me feel a little better.

  ‘So,’ says Desmond, ‘the Olympic Games started in Tokyo today. I suppose you’ll be following that?’

  ‘What am I here for?’

  ‘No need to get shirty, old man. We can get to that all in good time. Let’s order first. Waiter! Two starving buggers over here. We want to order! And two more large gins – pronto! You only get decent service when you show them who’s boss. Always works.’

  ‘What am I here for?’

  ‘Let me order first.’

  I light one of my Benson & Hedges as Desmond orders the pie. I tell the waiter I’d just like a couple of bread rolls and some butter.