The quarter is temporarily coloured by a variety of tribal groups, and it changes according to the season and the time of day, for many of its most visible and vociferous inhabitants are here only for a few hours, weeks or days. In the evenings it belongs to the ‘gays’; one of the few places in the city where men can fondle each other on the street. At weekends it is a meeting-point for West Indians; in summer, foreign students; Australians are always passing through – they come to Earl’s Court when they first arrive in England, and put up in one of the hundreds of rank boarding houses and hotels; by day it is full of Italian waiters who work in restaurants all over London; in the small hours, it drifts into the hands of pimps, sharks and drunks, unsavoury men who watch from doorways or cruise slowly by in squashy American cars, their eyes alight for punters.
Time in Earl’s Court is quite different from time in Islington. The north London square took its rhythms from the five-day week and the eight-to-six working day. Its shops opened at eight-thirty and closed at seven; and by day, women and children had the place to themselves. In Earl’s Court, somewhere is open all the time; supermarkets do not close until midnight, and after that there are cafés, clubs and hotdog stands. It does not feel strange to be an adult male on the street with nothing special to do except buy the papers at eleven in the morning – an activity that used to make me feel a bum in Islington. The only really dead time is the cold two-hour patch between 4 and 6 a.m.; an occasional London Transport worker in mittens on a bicycle, and the mechanical gurgle and squawk of a policeman’s pocket radio. For the rest of the day and night, there is a continual tidal sweep of comers and goers, and they make their own suns and seasons, as if this was a completely synthesised underground city.
The square is big and grand; more than a quarter of a mile, all round, of importunate Victorian castles of yellow brick and stucco, with conservatories, slate-roofed penthouses with circular portholes, marble pillars and cream pilasters. Whenever there was an opportunity, its architects added a crazy dentistry of black spiked railings – on the ground, on balconies, or just as an ornamental frieze, to remind the lesser breeds of the teeth of nineteenth-century capitalism. The pillars at each gate are square and solid enough to hold a drawbridge; and the designer of a medieval city transported into the square might conclude that it was admirably fortified against an unspeakably barbaric and cunning enemy. Only the flat roofs are open – attack from the air had not been thought of – and people sunbathe there in the summer, stuffing their ears with cotton wool to keep the noise of the jets out of their heads.
It is a place of radical extremes. A tiny minority of its inhabitants are very rich indeed, and live their fortified anachronistic lives in houses so big that they hardly ever need to leave them. Crates of wine and groceries go in to their basement doors, green Harrods vans deliver parcelled luxuries to flunkies, and the houses themselves seem to inhale these goods upwards to the double-glazed stratospheres of their penthouses, where the only sounds, perhaps, are the insipid rattle of the Financial Times and the tinkle of ice against glass. But nearly every house was subdivided into flats long ago, and each porch has an untidy rack of doorbells: ‘Clark’, ‘Kempinski’, ‘Durbridge’, ‘Mrs Andrewski’, ‘Plug & Rosie’. There are doorphones with buttons to press to release the latch of the communal front door, and their long buzz carries across to the pavements, along with the distorted voices of the button-pushers interrogating their callers like the furies of Gilbert Pinfold. Through some basement windows, one can see palliasses laid on the floor, side to side, end to end, as if this was a refugee camp in some devastated city; so, in a sense, it is. Space is expensive, most of the young transient population cannot afford more than a small share in a room, and property for them means clothes, beads, records, not paint and furniture and a private world.
Islington people live behind their housefronts, but many of the houses on this square are just over-occupied dormitories, places to doss down and brew coffee on the gas-ring. The young here use cafés, bars, wide pavements and public gardens as their living-room. They are improvising the piazza life of the poor in an Italian Renaissance city. The dramatic seasonal population shift in Earl’s Court runs with the weather: in late spring, as soon as it is warm enough to parade outdoors and sit on the pavements, the quarter swells with people. In midsummer, everywhere is a squash; there are long queues at the bank, especially around the foreign exchange desk, and you have to book in advance to get a table at a restaurant. In autumn, the streets empty and the squares are left to the pigeons and the tramps, the permanent and ubiquitous figures of urban survival in a cold climate.
The young migrants do not seek out privacy; they live on exhibition, a human counterpart to the boatshows and military tattoos which go on in the nearby concrete mausoleum of the Earl’s Court Stadium. Their clothes and voices and hairstyles are garishly communicative; for in this maelstrom of tastes and conflicting identities, like has to spot like as speedily as one recognises a slogan or a poster. A girl is going by my window now; she is wearing a long, loose crushed velvet coat and octagonal spectacles with wire-thin gold rims, she carries a Red Indian bag. It is enough to go on: not my type.
Even the minority who own flats and houses, for whom the quarter is not merely a temporary stage on which to perform their brief act, go to bizarre lengths of exotic indulgence and display. Waiting for a taxi on the pavement one night, I saw a bow-windowed room full of humming birds. Lit from low down, they howled brilliantly among the potted ferns and rubber plants, and I heard a Monteverdi record on the gramophone inside. In another house nearby, I saw a whole room converted into an aluminium cage for a monkey (and this in an area where human beings claw for a few square feet, enough to unroll a sleeping-bag in). The monkey’s only companion was a huge stuffed ape in a glass case outside its cage. There are no stray cats here.
And for the very temporary, the commercial travellers and small businessmen here for one night, there are correspondingly bizarre entertainments. In the Austrian Bier-Keller, bored English girls in fishnet tights and peasant tops serve drinks at 75 pence a time with stale frankfurters (to beat the licensing regulations), while an elderly accordionist squeezes out old Beatles tunes. ‘No touching, no dancing, no nothing,’ says the girl, automatic as a speak-your-weight machine. By 2 a.m. the place has sucked in the overflow of drunks and scrubbers . . . ‘On your own, dear? Mine’s a Scotch and soda—’ Men with paunches slouch about on the dance floor holding fluffy tarts in a bear-hug, and someone is noisily sick in the hallway. They have a brutish doorman to take care of that. A party of people who look suspiciously like schoolteachers sing ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ in Birmingham accents, and the accordionist puts on a face of ghastly jollity, exposing a jaw full of gold-capped teeth. Outside, there is a policeman, taking notes.
Earl’s Court is a place where people come in order to be free of the sanctions which operate where they live; it is fiercely and commercially amoral, and utterly indifferent to the curious tastes of the temporary citizens who are out on its streets. There is a constant sexual electricity in the air, but it is sex to be bought and bargained over – everything has its price. Corner newsagents display advertising boards full of postcards: ‘Exotic butterfly needs pinning’, ‘Intimate Swedish massage in your home or hotel’, ‘Gentleman with extensive wardrobe’, ‘Lady gives riding lessons in private . . .’, ‘Beautiful cage-bird, in need of training . . .’, ‘Stocks and Bonds for sale . . .’, ‘Diving equipment . . .’, ‘Interesting position . . .’. Visiting cards from ‘masseuses’ turn up in the mail and are slipped under the back door along with appeals for jumble from the local church.
But most consistently visible of all Earl’s Court people are the homosexuals. This is where the ‘gay scene’ is concentrated; and in the evenings, from all over London, by tube and car and motorbike, men come here dressed up in the varied uniforms of the gay ghetto: in their leathers, in peacock gear of wool and velvet, or, transformed for the night in drag, titupping on high h
eels in Jayne Mansfield shirtwaists, their faces looking like spoiled gouache paintings with rouged lips and powdered cheeks. They talk in the thieves’ slang of Gayspeak – and many of their coterie words like ecaf and riah, are formed on exactly the same backslang principle as Mayhew observed among East End costermongers in 1860. They chatter loudly about ‘duchesses’ and ‘cottaging’ (picking men up in public lavatories) and ‘chicken’ (under-age boys); it is a self-conscious code and is used more boldly in Earl’s Court than anywhere else in the city.
I sometimes go to a gay club in the quarter. It is a pleasant, civilised place with a restaurant and a dance floor, and lighting which flatters the often middle-aged faces of its clientele. After heterosexual discotheques, what strikes one first is the age range; the music is mainly acid rock, but many of the men are in their fifties and sixties, cultivatedly, rubicundly grey, like uncles. They have kept their figures, and dance trimly with young men in French pullovers, all snapping fingers and splayed calves. The uncles never look tired or puffed; it is the young who are worn by fun and end up puking in the discreetly cloistered lavatory. After midnight, there is a drag cabaret. A fat man with henna hair and rubber bosom obscenely mimes to a Doris Day record, an accurate, satirical travesty of female mannerisms. A young West Indian in the front row giggles hysterically at the performance, his head swinging from side to side, his teeth enormously large and white under the stage lights. The uncles smile indulgently, and pat the knees of their companions, twinkling as uncles will.
The clubs are cosy places, out of the public eye, where the homosexual coterie is the assured majority party and the handful of ‘straights’ are a tolerated and untroublesome minority. The pubs are different: sadder, more blatant, bizarre. There are two large pubs just off the square; one is a renowned meeting- and pickup-point for sado-masochists, and one has a discotheque in an upper room which is frequented by a number of transvestites as well as being a centre of the ‘teeny-bopper’ sector of the gay scene. Both are tainted with the hysterical edge of ghetto behaviour; in them, clothes, voice, mannerisms are exaggerated and extreme. For the pubs are both inside and outside ‘straight’ society, and this marginal position forces an obsessive concern with signals and symbols, with self-announcement and ritual boundary-drawing.
Outside the sado-maso pub, twin Honda and Suzuki motorcycles are parked, leaning at a maritally identical angle. (Although many of the most conspicuous ‘motorcyclists’ actually arrive by tube, goggled and helmeted against the onrush of foetid air in the tunnels.) Inside, there are men zipped invisibly into one-piece black leather suits as thin as contraceptive sheaths. They wear peaked jockey caps, and their smooth figures are broken only by the bulges of their codpieces. Smart greying men cruise among them, buying drinks.
‘I have some interesting colour slides of my body. I have been crucified three times, and the scars are very vivid . . .’ The voice at my elbow is genteel and businesslike, the voice of an efficient tax-accountant. He skims through a Kodak wallet of slides.
‘A view from the . . . rear—’
We peer together at the slide, holding it against the light over the dartboard.
‘Very interesting.’
‘That one came out particularly well.’
A pudgy yellow body, mottled by a sunray lamp; the scars and weals are exaggeratedly highlighted with cosmetics.
‘Would you like to see some more?’
I am told that here you can employ a young man who will dress up in the costume of a Victorian chambermaid and do petit-point on your testicles . . . Or the ‘chastity-belt’ – a contraption into which you are locked by your partner and which prevents its wearer from urinating. After two days people are said to howl with the pain. In this pub there are lounging Hell’s Angels, six and a half feet tall, with a frogging of silver chains on their leather jackets and the jaws of rapacious imbeciles. Beside them stand small wiry men with pointed noses, narrow mouths and tinted spectacles; they look like artists with a razor or a dentist’s drill.
These are, of course, only the outstandingly visible few; most of the people who come to the pub are shabby and unremarkable, but in the ghetto the tone is set by a florid minority of self-conscious symbolists. The rest of the inhabitants cluster round them, both protected and vicariously defined by a uniform which needs to be worn by only a few militant boundary-markers. Just as the leather men determine the character of one pub, so a few men in full drag dominate the other, whose upper room exudes a frumpish air of naughtiness. Besides the transvestites, it is full of boys with dyed blond bouffant hair, sleeveless knitted pullovers and adenoidal camp voices.
‘Ooh! Never been felt up that way before. Ooh, both sides!’
Men dance with each other cheek to cheek, between groups of trim, over-youthful-looking pickups, fresh from the gymnasium, who bay and squeal like goats. The transvestites go for a faded baby-doll look, all powder puffs and frilly petticoats; when they cross the floor, they travesty the bottom-wiggling, bust-balancing shuffle of 1950s starlets. Everyone goes to the ‘Ladies’ lavatory, from which real women emerge in a state of evident shock. Here are the same cruising grey bachelors, shyly affable, reaching deep for drinks all round. They have cars and flats – ‘my place, just round the corner’ – and are solicitously interested in everybody.
‘Been to sea again, Terry?’
‘How’s your mother, my dear?’
‘How nasty for you . . .’
‘Oh, dear.’
The bespectacled student who sells Gay News gets rapturously booed; there is a civil war in the homosexual world, and it is hard to tell who is on whose side. Gay News editorials adjure everyone to ‘pull together’, while the more sober Lunch presses for respectability and invisibility. While there is a certain amount of free flow between the two pubs, their hard-core customers are edgily hostile to each other. The Hell’s Angels stare balefully across the road at the transvestites, and there is a bristling quarrelsomeness about which shows up in brief, high-pitched arguments and quick scuffles. When the pubs close, their separate clienteles spill out on to the pavements, and police vans settle in the side-streets, their lights off, their occupants attentive for trouble. There are occasional arrests, and sometimes one hears screams, and goes on reading.
Beneath this surface of flaunting self-advertisement and baroque spectacle, there is a cowed indigenous life. Artfully styled and hidden between the tall Victorian houses there are blocks of council flats; and in the square itself many of the shabbier flats are rent-controlled. For poor families, this is a bad place to live; the local shops are expensive, the streets are dangerous, and thieving and thuggery are part of the essential pattern of life in the area. Elderly couples hurry nervously arm in arm, keeping close in on the pavements. They chain their doors and answer with a single suspicious eye. They have good reason. There is a rising statistic of pensioners who get battered in by strange young men; the motiveless murder of old people is one of the most damning facts of city life – especially in areas like this, where the young are in power and the old are frightened into making themselves pitifully inconspicuous. Their church and church hall are regularly vandalised. They seem to have resigned themselves to having been left behind, while the quarter changed from a dingily genteel place of lodging houses and solid cheap flats to the freak show it often seems now.
By the 1920s, this had become an unfashionable suburb. Middleton Murry had a flat just round the corner from where I live now, and was thought to be very much out of things, sequestered in a place where only thrifty maiden aunts were supposed to live, neither Kensington nor Chelsea, solely distinguished by the long, crumbling gothic strip of Brompton Cemetery. The quarter was characterless, combining the worst and shoddiest elements of the more fashionable districts which abut on it. Now it is this very lack of a fixed identity which has made Earl’s Court so aggressively metropolitan. It is changeable, corrupt, and florid. It belongs to no one. Like a colonial state with a daily history of coups and counter-coups, i
t goes through cycles of factional ascendancies.
Everybody here is marginal – and to be old, or poor, or have a regular job is to be both as odd and as ordinary as to be a drag queen or a leather freak. In this part of the city, no one is normal, and each person is forced, by this condition of splintered isolation from the larger community, into self-scrutiny and self-consciousness. There may be moments, in the pub or club, or with one’s neighbours, when one seems to be comfortably entrenched in a group – but the conviction easily dissolves during the course of a walk along the block, and a succession of wary eye-encounters with strangers who might as well be Eskimos or Hottentots for all they appear to have in common with oneself.
Earl’s Court people are distinguished by the way in which the details of their lives do not match up. They are chameleons, and it is hard to guess how they must look when they move outside this quarter. They are temporary; no one asks where they come from or go to; they leave no spaces behind them when they move, only unpaid bills and unopened circulars. For many of them, Earl’s Court has been a place to disappear into, and their brief showing here has left an unexplained gap somewhere else.
Soft City Page 22