Nigel Fountain, in his Kentish Town kitchen, with coffee bubbling, foreground music, spice jars, cookery books, spare morning time, was wholly obsolete. And knew it. And gloried in it. And managed the emotional hurt of hanging on, in memory, to the sepia news‐reels of a highly selective past. He was slightly shocked, traumatized even, to be in a comfortable house with friends and food and library.
Lucifer‐like, he led me up through the house, to a flat roof, warmed by nights of love, to show off the vision of London. I imagined that he would be the final witness, the end of the Hackney story. Leftist utopianism, bohemian collectives, detective novels coding political critiques: he had experienced them all. What more could I expect to learn? This was the place I had already visited, to interview Sheila Rowbotham. They were in the same witness‐protection programme. Keep schtum, stay alive.
Fountain’s study, where we settled ourselves to make the recording, came out of a Stephen Poliakoff play. One of those high‐end dramas that splash budget on empty Belgravia mansions, lush soundtracks and Michael Gambon’s baggy integrity. Fountain gave good Gambon. The passionate irrelevance. The anecdotes that meandered around the risk of revelation, without ever quite getting there. Old loves, lost lives. Hotels by lakes. Children in forests. Without the horror behind glamorous drapes, the Holocaust surrealism. Just friends whose foibles Fountain was condemned to repeat to predatory interviewers, waiting on small mistakes.
I complimented Nigel on the bookshelves carved into the door and he threw back an immediate Gambon riff: the previous owner of the house was the actor Denholm Elliott. The carpentry was all his work. Remember him in Bad Timing? Nicolas Roeg’s Vienna, failing flesh: ‘a labyrinthine enquiry on memory and guilt’. Elliott did all that stuff with consummate ease: corruption, compromise, decay. He enjoyed himself too much, Fountain told me, in Thailand. On location for Bangkok Hilton. And he came home, here, to die. Quietly, without fuss. No serialized memoirs, no confessions. No scores to settle.
Nigel suffered with his back; he struggled to find a tolerable position in which to sit. He wore a pink shirt and my spectacles. He said that Marc Karlin had a fetishistic love for pre‐war English movie actresses. In his opinion, Denholm Elliott’s best performance was in The Cruel Sea. With Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden. I switched on the recorder and Fountain launched unprompted into an account of the gestation of his novel, Days Like These.
Writing became more and more of an obsessive activity. I was working in a Latin‐American news agency in Farringdon for half the week. My novel, apparently set in the 1980s, is really about the 1970s. My chronology is simple. 1970: move into 12 Montague Road. 1980: leave 12 Montague Road. That house, looking back, was a phenomenally creative place to live. It has to be said that 70 per cent of the creativity was being produced by Sheila Rowbotham. She was hammering away. She wrote in the middle of chaos, but she also made her own chaos.
She was a more glamorous figure than the rest of us. Although she is one of the most magnificently down‐to‐earth and unpretentious of people, she mixed in elevated circles. That Godard episode was in the late 1960s, just before I met her.
When I moved to Montague Road I was a dedicated member of the International Socialists. I worked for a paper called Idiot International, non‐sectarian with revolutionary leanings. It had a circulation of about eight. In fact it didn’t have a circulation at all. After it collapsed, we realized that the villainous Ratner, who was the guy distributing the paper, had simply stuck all the copies in a warehouse in Shoreditch.
After that I got a job with the Socialist Worker. I was the first person to resign from that paper. Everybody before me was pushed off a cliff. Then I worked for the Street Life, which also collapsed. After that I was motorcycling correspondent for the Sunday Times. Which was rather curious because I couldn’t ride a bike and didn’t own one.
Much of my political life was organized around pubs. Especially in Hackney. My friend David Widgery was very fond of a drink, but drink was not always fond of him. Some of my happiest memories of the International Socialists came from a pub called the Rose and Crown in Albion Road. We moved to the Stoke Newington International Socialists from the Islington IS – which was dominated by a core membership of myself, Widgery, David Phillips and a guy called Ross Pritchard. Marc Karlin was never a member of the organization. That’s Marc’s photo, up there on the wall. With the hair. He looked like Jesus back then.
I miss Marc tremendously, even to this day. I’m fed up with the bloody situation, people dying. The thing about Marc and Widgery is that they had an incredibly tempestuous relationship. Half the time they were not talking. I was the intermediary, saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, let it go.’ Marc’s demons stemmed from the fact that he’d had a very traumatic childhood. He would mutter about his father who was French‐Jewish‐Swiss‐Latvian. A mysterious background in the Russian Revolution. Marc and I lived in the double room, on the ground floor, in Montague Road. If you ever went into Marc’s room, when he was asleep, he looked incredibly tense.
We got on pretty well from the first time we met. Marc’s politics were anarcho‐Marxist. When I moved to Montague Road, Sheila saw me as a symbol of stability. When I arrived the place was pretty much drugged out, bombed out.
Sheila, who generally speaking is of a sweet disposition, could erupt. You see her cheeks go pink, it’s time to run away. She hurled a loaf at me on one occasion. I instituted a more and more Draconian and Stalinist eating regime. I would be chasing Marc down the road, demanding to know whether he would be in or out for dinner on the following Thursday. This would produce the situation where Marc would send home a side of beef in a taxi.
I bow to no one in my admiration of Sheila’s honesty, but it is a flagrant and utter untruth for her to claim that she did all the shopping. I was always in Ridley Road with a loaded trolley.
David Widgery was in and out. He kept one foot in Islington, at 2 Chapel Market. I arrived in Montague Road being pursued by a former landlord. There was a constantly shifting cast list. The core was Sheila. Widgery was around. I lived there. Marc lived there. Other interesting people passed through.
I was lurching from one failed publication to the next. I wanted to get into fiction and I kept trying to get back to my abortive novel. Days Like These was worrying at me. I was inspired by the milieu I was living in, by having rows with Sheila, interchanges at three in the morning. Sheila has very little concept of the difference between the living and the dead. Or those who are awake in a house and those who are asleep. You can have a conversation with Sheila and realize halfway through that you are talking about people who have been dead since 1880.
*
I was part of that famous Julie Christie walk across Hackney. I’ve got the photographs. There was a Turkish academic. There was Julie. There was a woman who was then very big in EastEnders. She played a Further Education teacher. I knew Julie. She lives in Columbia Road now. With the film‐director Sally Potter. I know Julie in the sense that every five years or so I would see her and she’d say, ‘Hello!’ And I’d say, ‘Hello.’ That was about it. She’s an extremely nice woman, but we don’t go out drinking together.
What was hilarious about that walk was that as we wandered haplessly about, Sheila would be announcing, ‘This is where Joseph Priestley lived,’ pointing to some wine bar around the back of Clapton. Then we’d be staggering along talking about some battle the Romans fought. It was pissing with rain. Nobody who saw us paid a blind bit of attention to Julie Christie. They were all gaping at the EastEnders woman.
When I was working, shortly after this, at City Limits, I got a call from some strange character in Limehouse, name of Folgate. About Days Like These. He said, ‘Nigel, you’ve got that community wrong.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘It’s not where you said it was.’ I said, ‘This is a work of sodding fiction. I made it up.’ He said, ‘It’s still in the wrong place.’
All the exchanges between Marc, myself, Sheila and David Widger
y went into the novel. I was reading a lot of John Buchan. He is a really great writer. I find his politics fascinating, that brand of mystical Toryism. I come from a Tory family myself, a petit bourgeois Tory family. In the 1960s, I wrote the first article on the National Front. I wrote articles on the National Front and the Monday Club. I’m a child of the British Empire, I grew up in that kind of Tory imperialist fantasy world. I could understand the Monday Club quite well.
This is before Thatcher. My novel should have been set during the period of the three‐day week, a time when the left seemed to be making some progress. The two groups who took politics seriously were the far left and the far right (including the far right within the Tory Party). There was an M15 agent within our group at IS. Looking back, she was rather nice. A lot better than all sorts of authentic members of the organization.
That was the atmosphere of Days Like These: Montague Road, my study of British fascism, coupled with a social life that involved long hours spent in the Norfolk Arms. Which at that time was a 1970s modern pub with fluorescent plastic.
Sheila had been a member of IS and had quit in fury at being bossed around by a bunch of deadbeats. SWP hated those characters with an Angry Brigade tendency. That awful blend of self‐dramatization and dangerous naivety. My last hurrah for IS was in 1976, the Walsall by‐election – after the postmaster general, John Stonehouse, that crook, staged his suicide by leaving his clothes on a beach. The IS candidate, a wonderful guy, was the inspiration for the Scottish character in my novel.
The other great excitement of the time was watching Barlow and Watt Investigate on television. TV detectives look into the Ripper murders, using documentary and forensic evidence: another marriage of fact and fiction. I became utterly fascinated with the series. I wrote an article for Socialist Worker about the programme and its conspiracy thesis. I went along at once to interview old Hobo Sickert. I became obsessed, for about a fortnight, with the royal surgeon, Sir William Gull. As I was poring over the photograph of the final victim, I began to have doubts: ‘Is this really a good idea?’
Sheila said to me, ‘My friend Bill Fishman is leading a tour of Whitechapel, why don’t you go along?’ I went on Bill’s walk. Within five minutes of Bill opening his mouth, my interest in Jack the Ripper began to fade. But my interest in East End radicals grew and grew. Bill got to Frying Pan Alley and said, ‘Everyone assumes that when such‐and‐such a character was sent to Siberia, he died. I know better. I know that man came here to this alley.’
Wow! It was the key point in the genesis of Days Like These. I became utterly gripped by the East End.
Hobo Sickert just repeated his story of the woman dying in the madhouse in Fulham in 1921. He didn’t show me his treasure box, the painting or the parchment with the Grail message. It was a very good yarn. It was seeing Hobo on television with Barlow and Watt that led me to Bill Fishman and the real East End.
I spent a lot of time hanging around tatty bookshops. The funny thing about the bookshop in my novel, the place where my character acquires that photograph, is that I made it up. And then I found it! Walden Books, Harmood Street, Chalk Farm. I found Walden Books after I’d written the bloody place into existence. After that, every time I went past, I thought: ‘That’s my shop.’
Chandler and John Buchan were my main influences. I was otherwise reading Marx and Marx‐related material. David Widgery went to the States in the mid 1960s. When I assembled my counter‐cultural memoir, Underground, I interviewed David. I have a very large collection of interviews. David absorbed all the American Beat stuff, directly.
The funny thing about David limping around was that I never realized how badly polio had affected him. It was one of the reasons why he was so staggeringly rude. It didn’t bother me. The only way to deal with him was to say ‘fuck off’. You had to be faster than he was. If you weren’t, he would destroy you. I’ve seen people whose jaws literally dropped. He would say, ‘Your acne doesn’t seem to be quite as bad as it was.’
He could charm the birds from the trees. He was wonderful company. Marc and David were intellectually stimulating in conversation. I miss that. Sheila and I both miss it. David’s death was dreadful, a horror story. I don’t want to go into it. He choked to death on his own vomit.
He had quite a hard time with his father. His mother, who loved him dearly, was a dedicated Christian. David went through an awful lot of pain in his childhood, from TB and polio. Two years of absolute agony. He was enraged by that. His mother’s Christianity amounted to nothing very much in the face of his suffering. When I first met him, 1965, he looked perfect for the decade. He looked like Mick Jagger. The beret came later. The mid 1960s was the blue suede jacket and those huge eyes.
By the 1980s, I moved across town. I was living in Endymion Road. There was a very nice woman there, an anthropologist, who was married to a man called Charlie Velasco. They’d been together for years. He was a total football freak. He was always arguing with Marc. Velasco was Tottenham and Karlin was Arsenal. The Calvinist rigour of George Graham and his New Model Army suited Marc perfectly. Velasco had front, the gift of the gab, but there was something wrong: he knew Tony Blair. They used to go around together. Not to football. Don’t know where really, rock concerts? Long discussions in that yellow kitchen. Blair didn’t do pubs.
The bloody Labour Party was a million miles from where we were. Checking the files, I found that I’d written an article in 1970 in which I referred to this guy from the Labour Party in a white suit and flares. I managed a tone of total contempt. His name was Ken Livingstone. Who was talking his usual reformist twaddle. The Labour Party, as far as we were concerned, didn’t exist.
Nobody wanted to infiltrate Hackney Council, that would have been heretical. IS had been expelled from the Labour Party in the mid 1960s. We were briefly involved in local grass‐roots activity with a tenants’ association. Two things came out of it. David Phillips said he’d met a woman who was Charlie Watts’s aunt. And then someone thanked him for stopping people putting dogs in the spin‐dryer. I said, ‘That’s our revolutionary triumph, mate.’
We lived next door to Tex and his wife. They were great. A West Indian couple. I loved that life, summer in Hackney. I loved the market. I loved the Norfolk Arms. It was a small world bounded by Dalston Lane, Colvestone Crescent and Ridley Road. I did not go to the eel and pie shop more than once. I didn’t like it. I used to eat at the Indian in Kingsland Road with Marc Karlin. I remember dragging him to see ABBA The Movie. Marc sat in the cinema shouting, ‘Sync! Sync!’ The audience were muttering, ‘What the fuck is he on about?’ After forty‐five minutes we had to leave.
Kingsland Road was like a game reserve, but it was better than the Holloway Road any day of the week. I didn’t get around a great deal. Victoria Park, I didn’t go there. We hardly moved at all. Montague Road had been a Jewish area, we had those little things above the door. I said to Sheila, ‘What is this?’ She said, ‘It’s a scroll.’ A girl who had once lived in the house committed suicide because she couldn’t marry the man she wanted, a Gentile.
When I look back on the move from Montague Road to Clapton, I feel guilty about it. Montague Road wasn’t big enough after the arrival of Sheila’s son, Will. I should have said, ‘I’m going to leave.’ If I’d left sooner, Sheila could have stayed on. We moved to Clapton and, after a year, I packed up. I’d known Will from the time of his birth to the age of five. I remember the day I left. I’ve never had any children. Will, aged five, said, ‘You’re not going?’ I was absolutely pole‐axed. I drove off with tears streaming down my face.
When I moved here, to Kentish Town, I said to Sheila, ‘Do you fancy having the basement?’ What goes around comes around. Sheila is the Charley Varrick of contemporary culture. She’s a lot prettier than Walter Matthau, but you know what I mean. The way she operates, whatever happens, to stay in the game. If she has to go to Manchester, to teach in the university, she does. If she sits down to write a note, it turns into a twelve‐page letter.
If she sits down to write a letter, it turns into a pamphlet. If she sits down to write a pamphlet, it turns into a book. She never bloody stops. She is one of the purest scholars I’ve ever met.
Now I work at the Guardian, three days a week. Death Row. Obits. I leave it to Sheila to trash my name. Have you read her memoir, Promise of a Dream? I get one mention. When I suggest that pornography be introduced into Black Dwarf. Great! And she got it wrong. I stole the idea from Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction.
An old friend of mine, a rock writer, was sitting on a train reading the Sunday Times, when he noticed a headline: POLICE RAID NORTH LONDON HOUSE. TERRORIST HELD. At this point he realized that the nice quiet German girl who had the room upstairs was in fact Astrid Proll, a member of the Baader‐Meinhof gang. Poor Gary, he had something hapless about him: he would never have made a connection with Astrid’s past. There were plenty of direct links between the German political underground and Hackney. Rudi Dutschke used to stay with Tony Cliff in Allerton Road. Proll was everywhere, in communes, with poets.
Sheila was fearless. She got into a fight on Victoria Station with a group of fascists. And you know about her lunatic dog? One night in Clapton they were woken by the dog barking. They rushed down to find a burglar standing there. Sheila pushed him out of the front door. She patted the dog and gave him an extra bowl of food. The following night they were woken again by this mad beast. The dog was standing, barking away, at the bottom of the stairs. Sheila realized it was only making a noise because it expected to be fed an extra meal.
So much of my time now is taken up with the dead. You have to be over seventy to get into the Guardian crypt. After that you might qualify for an entry in the obit files. Some people make a good living bounty hunting, chasing hearses, hanging around terminal wards. We have slots waiting for totally obscure B‐movie actors, bottom‐of‐the‐bill music‐hall turns, concrete poets who have sunk into the ocean depths. Footballers with centre partings and long shorts. I work on the theory that Brian Glanville takes Charlie Velasco out for a lunch he can’t afford and has to knock off an obit on Ron Clogg who played for Huddersfield Town in 1934. Brian still writes on a typewriter, faxes his copy in.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 47