I Came, I Saw

by Norman Lewis

  I lived in a place, as it seemed to me, where nothing happened. Once Enfield had been a large and attractive village at the end of an escape route from London, travelling down which it took a coach and pair an hour and a half to reach unspoiled country in which a succession of monarchs had taken time off to go hunting. It had an interesting school built in the reign of Mary Tudor, a fine church, several outstanding pubs, and the grandest and oldest cedar tree in the land, planted in about 1670 by Dr Ridewood, headmaster of the Grammar School, who brought the seeds from the Lebanon. This spread its stupendous umbrella of the deepest green foliage over the heart of the town until it was finally demolished to make room for a departmental store.

  The magnification of an ancient village such as Enfield into a modern town is always a calamity. No sooner had the venerable cedar gone than a Mr Sidney Bernstein built his super-cinema, called the Rialto, in the old market place. The Rialto was modelled, as we were told, on the Roxy in New York, with an organ having 2,800 pipes and thirty-five miles of wires, and only lesser in the facilities it offered than the original in providing no built-in medical operating theatre. Few people in Enfield were sure of the origin of the word Rialto and some confusion arose when the first film, The Power of the Borgias, was shown, over unfamiliar names. Mr Bernstein, we learned, overwhelmed by the splendour of a bridge in Venice, had been ready with the supreme accolade. ‘Know something?’ he said to his retinue. ‘I’m going to put this on the map. I’m going to name my cinema after it.’ But the muddle in Enfield continued. Even the local newspaper got itself into a mix-up, or perhaps suffered a Freudian slip, speaking in its eulogistic review of Sidney Borgia, the cinema owner, and retitling the film The Power of the Bernsteins.

  The competition in the opening week of The Power of the Borgias — advertised in Enfield by a parade camel having a pronounced limp — was The Great San Francisco Fire (second time round) on offer at the town’s original, sad flea pit, the Queen’s, and a private showing of Mustapha’s Donkey in a windowless cell at the back of the Oddfellows’ Hall. This latter may have been the first pornographic movie ever made. A higher percentage of Enfield males had seen it several times, and it was so grainy and so ravaged by age and use that it was hardly possible to distinguish the donkey in the star role from the human actors it featured.

  I saw The Power of the Borgias with an old schoolmate, Alexander Hagen, who had been good at maths and had set his sights on becoming an airship designer, then jettisoning the idea owing to the state of the world, and philosophically accepting employment at the sewage farm in Ponders End. A ritual Saturday night meal followed at Mrs England’s Dining Rooms in the passage at the back of the station, where the tables were screened in such a way that patrons did not risk loss of face by being seen there, scuffling their feet in the sawdust. We began to ask ourselves if in fact we really existed or whether what we took to be life could not be a complex illusion, an endless, low-quality dream. These threadbare surroundings in which we sat hunched over a scrubbed table, our backs to the light, came very close to being nothing. Perhaps we too were nothing, had come from nothing, were journeying through nothing, towards a distant goal of nothingness. Enfield was nothing, the Rialto cinema nothing to the accompaniment of organ music, the Queen’s nothing with fleas. We had come here to confront a supper of nothing, boiled, fried or scrambled, with or without chips, to be followed by custard if desired at no extra charge. After this it was back home to nothing, or down the town to pick up a couple of girls at the bottom of Church Street, and engage them in a lively conversation about nothing plus sex, or just nothing.

  Christ stopped at Eboli, but he would have found people there who still had the spirit to sing and dance, and Mr Bowles mentioned once that on the Greek island where he went to dig up plants the impoverished peasantry got away with fifty days of what was supposed to be the working year and used them up on parties, pilgrimages and processions. What had happened to us? Why had the lives of Sir Henry’s serfs, and the workers at the Lock, been reduced to survival without distractions? Why had communal activities in the surroundings in which I was born come down to a couple of hours over a pint of sour ale in The Goat?

  No wonder we took refuge in make-belief, dealt in pretence and self-pretence, and half-believed the personal myths of our own creation. No wonder our pudgy-faced local beauties started life as Ethel, Gladys or Florence but ended as Esmée, Phoebe and Diane and inflicted upon themselves their soulless accents.

  Hagen had been assumed from his name to be a Jew, whose people had been carried in the stream of emigrants out of the East End, through Bethnal Green, Hackney, Clapton, Tottenham and Upper and Lower Edmonton, along the road taken by John Gilpin on his ride, until the great urban mess finally expired in the grim streets of Enfield Wash, Enfield Lock and Freezy Water where, discouraged from further advances by the disconsolate greenery of the countryside, the emigration had come to a halt. After a stretch at the sewage farm, he had walked out and set up as a wedding photographer. In this he did well, made money quickly and, while not going so far as to change his name, showed a preference for being addressed as Alexander rather than Alex, and asked his friends to pronounce the A in Hagen ‘ah’ not ‘ay’. Up to this point none of us had known much about him, nor visited his house. Now he let drop the information that he was half-German, and that his father had been German ambassador to Liberia where he had met Alex’s English mother, who was engaged in missionary work. They had separated after his mother’s return to this country.

  Hagen was a great watcher and imitator. He watched the men he hoped to mould himself upon, but of necessity from afar, so that his imitation never quite convinced. The tie was right but the voice was wrong. When he spoke, an echo of Central Europe lingered on which he said was Bavarian, but it only went down with girls who had never heard an Englishman of the ruling classes speak. Intelligent as he was, he would never raise himself to half the stature of Mr Bowles’ spirited nephew who had been born under the wings of victory. Hagen, like the rest of us, was too cautious, too premeditated, too afraid at bottom of his own shadow. He made money easily, but for all the calculated swagger that went with it, and the arrogant tilt of the homburg hat, he gave the impression of listening to the noises of the pogrom in the next street.

  For a while I was in partnership with him in the wedding photography, which called for little technical and less artistic skill. The wedding guests lined up like trained dogs, put on their boozy, foolish smiles, you clicked the shutter, and that was the end of it. They expected to look unnatural and they did. Seeing himself as the organizer, Alex abstained from involvement in physical labour of any kind, which he would have regarded as an inefficient use of his time, so I developed the films and made the prints, working under primitive conditions in the kitchen after my parents had gone to bed. My father never failed to inspect these pictures of the bride and bridegroom at the church door, and the family groups ranged with their inane grins in order of height, and occasionally he would draw attention to a small defect, usually caused by fogging, in the hope that this might be a blurred countenance from the spirit world, squeezed in forlornly among the all too solid flesh of Ponders End, or Palmer’s Green.

  Part Three

  The Corvajas

  Chapter Six

  WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY WAS SPORADIC and seasonal in its revenues, leaving time to be put to other commercial uses. Hagen bought lost property at trade auctions conducted by the railways at their various depots. Sometimes we carried out a combined operation, as we did in a lot comprising 360 umbrellas of various kinds, eventually trebling our money on their resale. My fortunes took a temporary upswing when I bought for £6 at one such auction a racing motor cycle which had been abandoned somewhere abroad, and brought back to England after its rider had been killed in an attack on a speed record. I rode this in the novice class in several dirt track races at Harringay and the White City, coming last in every race but one, when two of the four contestants crashed. In spite of this po
or record of achievement the organizers would always accept my entry and pay me the valuable sum of £5 in starting money, in the belief that it did no harm to the gate to feature a rider who could be relied upon to fall off in three races out of four. It was a great reverse when after a month or so the machine’s engine exploded and I was forced back for a short time into dependence upon the elixir.

  Slowly mercantile operations began to take over. It was to be seen that a living was to be had for such as us, debarred from creative endeavour, by keeping a close watch on auctions of the ordinary kind, in which an often bewildering miscellany of goods were put up for sale. At these, low prices were the general rule, and when from time to time an article of value came under the hammer it could usually be bought cheaply and rapidly resold at a profit in an auction of the better kind. This could be an exciting and even romantic business. Experts who spent a lifetime in manoeuvrings of this kind, having dedicated years to the science of market values, could expect once in a while to pick up spectacular treasures cleared from attics that found their way to the auction room. We knew our limitations and confined ourselves to goods requiring little or no expertise, gathered loosely under the heading ‘scientific articles’ which might include anything connected with photography, microscopes, barometers, sextants, surgical instruments, and when the occasional artificial limb turned up at a sale, or in one case a box of pickled anatomical specimens, we knew that Stevens of Covent Garden were the outlet for them, and they too were taken in our net.

  This trade was a nomadic one, involving endless journeyings into the remote suburbs, north, south, east and west. It became necessary to set up our headquarters near the centre of London, so we rented the first floor of a house in Woodberry Down, near Finsbury Park. This was a Victorian mansion built in prison style, probably under the influence of the nearby Holloway Gaol, with an attractive view of a reservoir from its back windows.

  Woodberry Down, we soon discovered, had been colonized by Russians escaping the severities of the Stalinist regime, particularly at the time of the liquidation of the kulaks, and this tree-lined, rather somnolent street harboured a number of the kulaks or their children who had managed to get away. They were tribal people, Ingushes, Chechens and Kazakhs, who made no concessions to their present environment, dressing and largely behaving, it was to be supposed, as they and their parents had done back in Kazan or Tashkent.

  Several families had joined forces to take a long lease on a house a few yards down the road, had installed English stoves and converted them so as to be able to sleep on top of them in Russian style in winter, and had pitched their black tents in the enormous Victorian rooms. The men, we were told, always slept fully dressed ready for an attack, but the women stripped naked and rolled themselves in bear skins. They drank pivo, a home-brewed Russian beer laced with methylated spirits, smoked yellow cigarettes with Cyrillic lettering on them, spent their money on fireworks, and kept the street awake with their all-night parties at which they let off rockets, beat tambourines, danced and wept.

  Hagen became fascinated by the Russians after an encounter we had with one of them called Aron. We were driving down the street within days of moving in when Aron, wearing a roughly-tied black turban, the tails of his long coat swinging, and amulets hanging from his wrists, stepped out into the roadway to stop our car, merely to ask the time. He invited himself into our flat, looked it over, and said, ‘you must give this place personality.’ He advised us as to how this was to be done, and he and his friends painted the floor red, covered the walls with tin foil and stuck blue stars and crescents over them. When the work was over we held a party, and the Russians brought their beer, their methylated spirits and their tambourines, ready to dance the night away. Two of them were princes, but Aron freely admitted that they were from Caucasus where every valley had its prince. What we failed to realize was that some of our friends were Muslims — although there were Christians and Jews as well — and the date suggested by them for our party happened to be the feast of Mouloud, celebrating the birth of the prophet — an occasion for rejoicing. Some time after midnight and a short halt for prayer, the fireworks were let off and, under the direction of one of the princes, the Russians made a raft from our furniture, poured petrol over it, carried it down to the water, and set it alight. It made an awe-inspiring spectacle in the demure setting of inner-suburban London, and the Russians cheered and wept at the beauty of it. The party ended with the pointless arrival of the fire brigade, who were followed by the police. Hagen and I were on a three months’ tenancy, and when this expired it was no surprise to us that it was not renewed.

  While looking round for fresh accommodation I returned to Forty Hill, where any changes that had taken place were for the worse.

  My father, who suffered from boredom, was going through a bad patch, sometimes causing him to groan aloud, and my mother was tired after a visit to Carmarthen where she had gone in response to my grandfather’s pleadings to do what she could to get Polly through a current crisis.

  Forty Hill, and with it much of North Enfield, was moreover on the verge of a great calamity, for the great and beautiful orchards among which I had spent most of my childhood were about to be cut down and replaced by housing estates.

  Against the long-term prospect of gloom, my mother had a single recent triumph to report. A woman called Mrs Edwardes from the superior residential area of Enfield known as The Ridgeway, who had been vacillating, undecided, on the fringe of my mother’s movement for at least a year, had been finally persuaded to join together with several of her friends, following a macabre experience to which she had been subjected. The tragedy of this poor woman — whom I had once met — was that over some fifteen years she had given birth to no less than ten still-born children. After the loss a short time previously of the last of these, and some final hesitation and misgivings, she had agreed to be present at a séance to be arranged purely with the object of attempting to communicate with the spirits of her unfortunate offspring. Some problems arose over differences of opinion among the circle members as to whether the still-born had souls or not. Right-wing extremists contended that a child who had never drawn breath did not, while the liberals held the view that even a foetus in an early stage of development did — although no one could draw a line as to whether the promise of eternity was present within hours, days or weeks after conception.

  The séance for Mrs Edwardes called for a major organizational effort, and was attended by invitation by persons known to possess exceptional psychic endowment from outside the area. I remembered that my mother had even tried to encourage me to attend to contribute to the formidable barrage of astral force that was being prepared. The occasion, she said, was a huge success. My father had been supported by a professional medium, and at least five of Mrs Edwardes’ still-born babies had given evidence of their presence, ranging from the infant mewing of the last of her children who had so nearly come into the world to the strong and confident greeting of her (now) teenage son.

  At this point I was ready with the questions that made my mother impatient with me. Until what age would the Edwardes family continue to grow on the other side? Until the ideal age — the best possible age — she thought, but she could not suggest what that age might be. And at that age they would remain throughout eternity? Yes, she thought, a little doubtfully, they would. Throughout eternity.

  The success of the séance for Mrs Edwardes had been due, my mother believed, in part to the astral power provided by several members of a group of local ‘seekers’ calling themselves the Sons (or Daughters) of Osiris. Their movement — very closely allied to Spiritualism — had taken its inception following the publication of a book called The Voice of Osiris, the Book of the Truth. The people of Enfield, few of whom bothered much with books, were buying it by the hundred in the belief that it had been written through a medium by the Egyptian god Osiris, personification of the power of good and the sunlight, and that the revelations it contained held the key to the trans
formation of unsatisfactory lives. It was printed on paper with a faintly perfumed smell, and illustrated with softly shaded pencil drawings of posturing dehumanized humans and a menagerie of sacred animals: cats, dogs, falcons, ibises, owls. Scattered through the pages were the symbols of ancient Egypt held in a web of cosmic rays, and great vacant eyes stared back at us from faces emptied of all expression by divine insight.

  It was my mother’s ambition eventually to absorb the children of Osiris into her church. A problem remained. Her following described themselves as Christian Spiritualists. Could the adorers of an ancient Egyptian deity be at the same time classified as Christians? The fact was that Spiritualism fostered open-mindedness in the matter of dogma, and I had no doubt that a way would be found of reconciling even such hugely dissimilar faiths.

  Another of my friends compelled by the times to pursue an unusual economic strategy was Arthur Baron, who, working at first from a small garage in Bookham, Surrey, trained himself to become a skilled mechanic and then an engineer. He specialized in buying up wrecked cars of the better kind — always cheap and, if there had been a fatality, very cheap. With patience, skill and devotion, and frequently a trivial outlay of money, these could sometimes be restored to near-pristine condition.

  My first car was from this stable, although this was one that had not been crashed. It was a ‘straight-eight’ Bugatti, the property of a rich Indian, who had altered its appearance in many ways. In doing so he had made it too fanciful and, needing garage space for new purchases, had cleaned it out for any price he could get, without argument, to the first buyer he could find.

  This car immediately disproved a theory of mine that the thirst for pretence was the hallmark of the English lower middle class, for this rich and probably powerful man, living in a palatial Wimbledon house, had ordered a special body built in Paris for his car — in the shape of a boat, or as nearly as this could be achieved. There had been little to be done about the front, but the rear end had been furnished with a polished wooden deck, enclosed by a low brass rail, and with fittings of the kind seen on yachts. There were also four small portholes. The Indian liked the poetic association of the word sunbeam, so he had removed Ettore Bugatti’s tiny elliptical trademark from the top of the radiator and replaced it — this was the process applied to all his cars — with that of the Sunbeam Motor Company, and an adaptation had been made to the radiator cap to accommodate an image of the Hindu’s elephant god, Ganesh. An ivory plaque covering most of the instruments on the dashboard showed a pair of lovers in lascivious oriental intertwinings.