Alone

by Pip Granger

  I loved my father’s stories, and his remarkable ability to enter into an imaginary world at the drop of a fag-end, and I gather that other people loved it, too. Father was one of those rare human beings who could inspire devotion in women, men and children alike when he chose, but his hair-trigger temper could also inspire real fear in almost equal measure. For some reason, most people were prepared to overlook the temper, or forgive him for it at least. I suppose he must have had more than his fair share of charm: as a child, I was unable to see just how it worked on people. I simply know that it did.

  I understand that Adolf Hitler and the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, had that same quality of animal magnetism. Hitler, despite his somewhat ludicrous appearance, had a sexual attraction that brought women (and some men) to him by the cartload, but, having gained their abject devotion, Adolf didn’t seem to know quite what to do with them: whereas my father, and Idi Amin, certainly did.

  Our favourite café, in Berwick Street market, was always our second stop after the newsagent’s. Our menu never varied. It was always ‘marts toast, Daddy’ (or tomatoes on toast to the uninitiated) for me, while Father made do with gallons of weak, milky tea, several Player’s Navy Cut, a good cough and a glance at the newspaper headlines.

  The café was a typical Mama and Papa enterprise. Betty was in charge of taking orders, schlepping teas and waiting tables, and her husband, whose name I never knew, did the cooking. He had been in the catering corps during the war, and there was little or nothing he didn’t know about supplying plentiful amounts of food to hordes of hungry punters at reasonable prices. It wasn’t a big place, just a dozen or so small tables and a counter with a large urn bubbling away on it. The urn ensured that the two large windows that flanked the door were permanently steamed up in winter, less so in summer when the street door could be left open.

  Betty must have had green fingers, because flourishing lemon-scented pelargoniums, spider plants and busy lizzies were crammed into every available inch of space on the windowsills, and the greenery acted as a living curtain. Watching the market traders and their punters through all those leaves made me think I was in a steamy old jungle somewhere, rather than in the very heart of London. Sometimes, if the sun was out, there was a brief period in the day when it was at exactly the right angle to shine through this tracery of leaves and make pretty patterns on the faces of the noshing punters.

  Behind the counter there were two glass shelves, one on each side of the door that led to the kitchen at the back. The shelves held bits and pieces of pretty, colourful china that had taken Betty’s fancy over the years and that had, by some miracle, managed to survive the Blitz, the nemesis of so many beautiful, but oh-so-breakable, things. There was also a long row of peachy, green and amber-yellow fluted sundae glasses in a variety of shapes: long and boat-shaped, tall and slender, or squat and round. These had not seen active service since the onset of rationing, but were patiently waiting the return of the sunny days of the knickerbocker glory, peach melba and banana split. I had never had any of these treats in my life, and had no idea what these weird-sounding desserts were, but I was more than willing to find out. Sadly, like the jewel-like sundae glasses, I simply had to wait in patience until sugar rationing was over. Given Betty’s mouth-watering descriptions of ‘dollops of vanilla ice cream, slices of peach’ (or ‘banana’, whatever that was), ‘lashings of syrup’ (ditto), ‘fruit jelly’, ‘sprinkles of hundreds and thousands’ (ditto again) and ‘a nice wafer or two’, the waiting in patience bit was not so easy.

  ‘Do you want to give me a hand wiping down the tables, lovey?’ Betty would ask me when the place was quiet after the morning rush. ‘It’ll give your dad a chance to focus and read his paper and it’ll help me no end. You’re a good little table wiper, you are.’ Sometimes, as a special treat, I was allowed to dry the teaspoons when Betty was washing up. The china was on the restricted list, though, in case I broke a plate or one of the thick, white cups that were not that easy to replace in the age of austerity. The kitchen was out of bounds as well, because of the many dangers of scalding liquids, hot steam and ferocious gas rings.

  My reward for services rendered would be a sugar cube from Betty’s carefully hoarded stock under the counter. The punters didn’t get sugar cubes, they got granulated from a hefty, glass sugar basin with a spoon in it. It sat on the counter next to Betty’s huge teapot. That way, Betty could keep an eye on the precious white stuff and pick out the brown lumps that formed when a customer stirred their tea with the sugar spoon by mistake. The brown lumps were not wasted; they were dropped on to a dry saucer, ready for use in Betty’s and her old man’s tea.

  If it was a busy day, then one of the locals would undertake to amuse me while Father lined up behind his eyes. This could often be something of a challenge if he’d been drinking the night before – which he usually had. If none of the customers was interested in keeping me amused, then I would press my nose to the damp window and watch the hustle and bustle of the market outside. I loved the way the traders weighed out their spuds and tipped them expertly from the big, silver scoop thing into waiting oilskin bags held out by the customer. I liked to watch as they picked over onions, carrots or beetroots looking for the best stuff for their regulars – and their worst for casual customers or ones they didn’t like. I caught on fast that the dodgy veg was always brought from the back of the stall, while the good stuff was on display at the front.

  On the rare occasions that Mother managed to persuade Father to do some shopping, I would never let any of the traders fob us off with the back-of-the-stall veg. I would become quite indignant if they tried. ‘Can we have our carrots from the front, please?’ I’d pipe in a voice that carried. ‘We can’t afford to throw anything away, you know, or to cut out the rotten bits.’

  Nine times out of ten, the trader would chuckle throatily and point out, with a grin and a roll of friendly eyes, that Father had ‘a right one there’. Sometimes they’d drop one or two extra onions or spuds into our bag, ‘for her cheek’. I’ve always loved markets, and I suspect it stems from the many happy hours I spent hanging around the stalls in Berwick Street or in ‘our’ café, watching the passing scene.

  Once breakfasted, we’d be ready to face whatever the day had in store for us. It was in Soho that I first encountered the scents of garlic, spices, freshly ground coffee, vanilla and French perfume wafting on the wind from the various establishments crammed, rouged cheek by unshaved jowl, in Soho’s narrow, bustling, soot-encrusted, but strangely fragrant streets.

  A leisurely stroll from Berwick Street into Rupert Street would soon bring the exotic smell of curry spices drifting to my eager nostrils from the kitchen of the Koh-i-Noor. Once we’d walked up Old Compton Street from Wardour Street, past the Algerian Coffee Shop that roasted and ground its own coffee, I could detect the delicious smell of garlic cooking in butter or olive oil as we turned into Greek Street, and got a whiff of the French restaurant, L’Escargot Bienvenu. I loved the wooden sign that hung above the restaurant’s green shutters, a charming painting of a round and cheeky-looking snail with its head nosing towards the soil. Above that, there was a plaster cast of a man joyfully riding another horned snail as if it was a horse. I decided that the man had to be very small indeed, even smaller than me, to ride a snail. Privately, I thought he must have been some kind of fairy, but with his wings hidden from view under his coat. I was so disappointed to discover, years later, that my fairy was, in fact, the restaurant’s founder, Monsieur Gaudin.

  Parmigiani’s and Lena’s Store, the former on the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street and the latter in Brewer Street, were Italian delicatessens, and rich sources of olfactory and visual bliss for me. Both stores had a wonderful amalgam of food smells, combining garlic, vanilla, coffee and chocolate with about a zillion other subtle herbs and spices. I’d drool at the first sniff. Anywhere else in England was more likely to be redolent of over-boiled cabbage, fried Spam, horribly sweet horse meat and snoek, wh
ich was a South African relative of the barracuda, I believe.

  The huge harlequin bolted to the first-floor wall above Parmigiani’s gave it the edge over Lena’s Store as far as I was concerned: I was fascinated by its sheer size and the colour it lent to the grey, sooty street. The harlequin’s costume was made up of diamond shapes in primary colours so bright that it glowed even on the dullest of days.

  I soon came to love Soho and its bustling streets, filled with men and women from all over Europe and beyond, living, working and playing together with an acceptance that few, if any, other places in 1950s England could offer. This period was the start of a lifelong love affair with Soho, its delicatessens, restaurants, cafés and eccentrics.

  It has been a wellspring of inspiration to me. Initially, it provided such a welcome change from the Rest Centre, where the hopeless misery of destitution and homelessness seemed to permeate the very walls. Later, after we had finally been rehoused, it provided a refuge from the sprawling Essex housing estate where I was shunned for coming from a family that was too different to be tolerated. Soho and its people specialized in tolerance: they’d been practising it since the eighteenth century, and they’re still at it today. Later still, as it turned out, it proved to be a rich vein that I could mine for my own novels about Soho in the Fifties, but we didn’t know that then.

  Wherever we went in Soho, I was greeted with wide smiles and sometimes sweets, and even hard cash. I often had a many-sided threepenny bit, a shiny sixpence or even a big half-crown pressed into my hand by shifty-looking lounge lizards, glamorous dancers from the Windmill, costermongers from the market and even an Italian opera singer wearing spats and carrying a gold-topped cane. Plump Italian ladies or smart French ones would clap their hands and exclaim, ‘She is a princess, a little English princess, so like little Anne.’

  Those days that I spent ‘up west’ with my father, just him and me, were to be the only times that I had him to myself. When it was just the two of us, he was rarely angry or frightening. In fact, he sometimes displayed a childlike sense of fun that I adored. I can still remember the warmth of his large, square hand holding mine and having to run to keep up with his uneven gait as we made our way through the labyrinth of streets and alleys on our way ‘to meet a man’ at the snooker hall or to Pitta’s in Old Compton Street for a plate of cheap nosh and a few laughs with its theatrical clientele.

  Father was supposed to be pursuing a career as a writer, but living in the Rest Centre and being in sole charge of a toddler made this difficult, so he contented himself with going to cafés, bars and dives to enlarge his acquaintance among Soho’s literati and artists, as well as its businessmen and spivs. The rationale for this, I’m sure, was that it was all material for when he finally got to sit at his typewriter once again.

  *

  Father had begun his writing career during the war. Having been a lad on the make during the Depression in the 1930s, he knew that it paid to keep an eye firmly fixed on the main chance. He became something of an expert at spotting an opportunity, golden or otherwise, and he’d seen one as World War II had loomed. He guessed that paper would be at a premium once hostilities got under way, as this had happened in World War I and he was pretty sure it would happen again. Our little island was unable to produce enough of it, and importing the raw materials became more and more difficult, with the seas surrounding it being patrolled by prowling German warships and U-boats. So, he scraped together some money and bought a warehouse full of the stuff.

  Sure enough, it wasn’t long before newspapers were a shadow of their former selves, with far fewer pages, packed tight with smaller print. The various ministries gobbled up stocks of paper by issuing written orders, coupons, instructional leaflets, travel passes and posters by the ton. The ministries were such voracious users of the precious material that there was little left over for such non-essentials as toilet paper and books. Newspapers only got a look-in because they were handy for propaganda, misinformation, morale-boosting, wrapping fish and chips and, of course, toilet paper.

  During the war, escapism became more and more necessary to servicemen posted far from home and civilians who spent their nights cowering in tube stations and air raid shelters. Cinemas did a roaring trade once the government caught on that keeping them closed for the duration was not an option. Even theatres made sure that, when possible, the show went on, although many remained boarded up for the whole six years.

  ‘Everyone had a radio though, and we all tuned in,’ Mother explained to me in later years. ‘Not only to hear the latest news, because we stopped trusting that. So much wasn’t reported, you see, so that the Germans couldn’t crow when they made a direct hit on something important, and of course, there was lots of deliberate misinformation too, to fool Jerry about our military plans. But we all liked a good laugh, and some dance music, and the radio was great for that.’

  For some, though, none of these things were available. Men on the front line couldn’t nip to the flicks, listen to ITMA or take in a show, and neither could the folks at home when the Blitz was raining high explosives and incendiary bombs down on them. Portable escapism in the form of books became highly desirable at such times, but sadly, they were in seriously short supply.

  ‘That’s when your father, with his warehouse full of paper, his gammy leg and his precious petrol allowance, came into his own. He became a writer, publisher, printer and distributor of cheap and cheerful books.’

  What he produced was pulp fiction. Some of his books, and the books written by his willing friends – and Mother – made it on to the convoys of ships that sailed the treacherous Atlantic Ocean, to entertain His Majesty’s Navy and the brave merchant seamen who did their best to keep Blighty supplied with essentials. Little or nothing of this material survived the war, because pulp fiction, by its nature, is pulped to be reused. But it meant that Father, and indeed Mother, had a track record as a writer, and, once the war was over, both had ambitions to return to it.

  So Father and I hung around the cafés, bars, restaurants, drinking clubs and the snooker halls, making friends, contacts and acquaintances as we soaked up the atmosphere of what’s called London’s ‘infamous square mile’, although it is actually much smaller than that.

  One of the most colourful of Father’s friends was Legionnaire Jim, a man who had, apparently, been thrown out of the Foreign Legion. ‘He joined the Legion because he was on the run after murdering someone, and it wasn’t safe for him to hang about in England,’ Father explained to Mother one night when we got back from the West End. Hanging was the punishment for murder until the mid-1960s, so I can understand Jim’s reluctance to linger on these shores. Family history does not relate who he killed. I suspect that it was a West End gangster or another crook, though, because that was the company that Jim habitually kept.

  ‘And you’re taking my baby into the company of cutthroats and murderers are you?’ asked Mother archly.

  ‘Give it a rest, Joan, and listen. As I was saying, he joined the Legion but got slung out again in double-quick time. The rumour is that he killed a sergeant and was thrown out for being too vicious, even for those murdering bastards. Now that’s saying something, that is.’

  ‘Yes, it’s saying that my little girl has no business being dragged into the company of a man like that,’ Mother spat, tired after a long week at school. ‘Have you got no common sense at all?’

  ‘It’s all right. He likes her, he tells her stories.’

  ‘What kind of stories?’

  ‘Cowboys and Indians, stuff like that.’

  ‘Well, keep her away from him, stories or no bloody stories,’ Mother told him. But Father ignored her and we carried on seeing Jim. In fact, I was determined to marry Jim when I grew up. He may have been very nasty indeed to other men, but he was very nice to me.

  It was while we were in Soho that Father came up with his next big money-making scheme. The pulp fiction had more or less seen the family through the war years, but it had dried up af
ter peace broke out. The money from it was long gone, and there was an urgent need to find something else. Mother’s salary only went so far, and having two prodigious thirsts to service, as well as two children to keep, it went almost as soon as it came. Our straits were dire indeed, and living in the Rest Centre was doing absolutely nothing for domestic harmony. Something had to be done!

  That’s when Father entered the smutty book trade. It’s a bit excessive to call the books that he bought and sold pornographic, certainly by today’s hardcore standards. They were more along the lines of erotica, erudite tomes on sexual matters – including a big, fat dictionary of fetishism – and foreign publications of such books as Tropic of Cancer, The Story of O, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Venus in Furs and various books by the Marquis de Sade, all of which were banned or restricted under the draconian obscenity laws of the time.

  At first he borrowed money to buy stock, at a little below premium rates. He then flogged it where he could, usually to unsuspecting servicemen or visitors who were looking for a little sin in Soho, but he had bigger ambitions. It was always a family joke that Father was so innumerate that he had to use his fingers to count, and that for anything over ten, he’d have to whip off his shoes and socks to count his toes as well. Although he was not quite that bad, it was certainly true that numbers were a bit of a mystery to him – until he decided that he needed a pilot’s licence to fly to the Continent and further his new-found career. It made economic sense to import his own books, thus cutting out at least one of the middle men. When it was in his interests, he found he could use a slide rule, read maps, plot courses and work out longitude and latitude like a pro. It was amazing.

  I have no idea how he could afford to pay for lessons, but learn to fly he did at a funny little aerodrome somewhere in the sticks, in Surrey or Sussex, or maybe Kent. It wasn’t much, just a Nissen hut for a club room where pilots could gather to drink, spin yarns about their derring-do and wait for the weather to lift. There was a pump with a long handle for pumping the aviation fuel through a length of hose into the waiting tanks of the planes, some concrete runways, a squat tower with windows all round, a tall radio mast, a few bright orange windsocks, another Nissen hut stuffed full of spare parts and some hangars to tuck up the aircraft when they weren’t in use.