Falling for London

by Sean Mallen

  Tara, as it turned out, was also from Toronto. Her husband was a banker who had been transferred to London just the previous summer. They had had only a matter of weeks to find a school for their two daughters, the younger of whom, Allison, would be in Julia’s class in the fall.

  Tara also spoke highly of the Royal and offered to arrange a play date when they were back in Toronto in August so that Julia could meet one of her classmates. She also set up a date for me to meet her husband, Malcolm, for a beer so that we could compare notes on expatriate fatherhood. Things were sounding better all the time.

  A few nights later I walked over to their place, a mews house in the centre of Belsize Park. A mews (the same word is used for both singular and plural) is considered fashionable in London, even though they are converted stables. Tara and Malcolm’s place was a small row house, but was gigantic in comparison to our flat on Buckland, and certainly much more expensive. As I was beginning to learn, expatriate employees in the financial industry get much more support in living expenses than us poor slobs in the media.

  Malcolm was a lean, soft-spoken guy who was likely at least fifteen years younger than me. He was in the habit of jogging every morning down to his office in The City, an impressive six kilometres one way.

  At the nearby Washington pub, he told me how Tara had had to get a leave from her teaching job in order to come. He was genuinely regretful at her sacrifice, calling her a terrific teacher. Another “trailing spouse.” He shared the story of how his daughters struggled in their first days at the Royal.

  Allison, the girl who would be in Julia’s year, had not dealt well with having to choose her own food in the cafeteria. It seemed, in fact, that she was terrified, not eating at all and would come home in tears.

  “Finally, she figured out what a jacket potato was, and that she liked it,” said Malcolm.

  For the Canadian girl, new to London, the potatoes were a godsend. Allison survived for weeks at a time on jacket potato lunches. But at least she was eating. Now, with the school year in its final weeks, both she and her sister were prospering. It was, I hoped, a reflection of how Julia would do.

  Malcolm helpfully advised me of the brand of scooter that all the kids were riding to school, with a strong recommendation that I order one online. Scooters were not nearly so prevalent in Toronto, where they do not do very well in the snow. But they were the preferred form of child transportation in London, given that snow is a rare event and cycling is a hair-raising pursuit, a result of the narrow streets and aggressive drivers. Scooters did have their downside, though. Already I had experienced being smacked on the shin by one carried by a harried parent who was trying to herd her brood onto a jammed bus.

  Chapter Five

  School and flat sorted, my bachelor life workdays were starting to develop a routine. Typically, they started in a leisurely fashion because everyone back home was asleep until the early afternoon my time and the newscast was not on the air until 10:30 p.m. in London. No need to rush into the office.

  I bought a membership at a gleaming new gym nearby, beside the Swiss Cottage Tube stop. I would stumble out of bed around 8:00 a.m., go for a workout, shower, shave, and eat — usually munching my cereal on the coffee table while I watched the BBC morning program. Then I’d catch the number 31 bus down to the market and the bureau. After a time, I realized that the bus ride was only about five minutes and the walk was about thirty. Here was a true luxury: being able to walk to work. It became my practice, often cutting through tony Primrose Hill and walking along the Regent’s Canal before entering the market and stopping at a hole-in-the-wall coffee joint called Terra Nera to pick up my perfectly crafted morning cappuccino from the two genial Italian brothers who owned it.

  Although we were filing almost every day, upward of 80 percent of the stories were invariably “melts” — sitting at my desk and writing scripts based on video from AP or Sky News or one of our other agencies. This is the fate of small bureaus in big media markets. The stories are almost always compelling, but you are not often an actual witness to the events you are covering, except via the TV. We would try whenever possible to add our own element by going out to shoot an interview with an analyst. There was always the bonus of a stand-up with the sign-off of “Global News, London,” which carried a certain cachet — in fact, more than anything, the network was paying all the money for the bureau in order to have that sign-off and “presence.”

  At lunchtime there was a cornucopia of choices just outside the doors of the Interchange. I hurried past the ladies who were doing the hard sell on the Chinese food that looked suspiciously like it had been shrink-wrapped in plastic. My destination was the West Yard, in the heart of the market.

  Dear reader, if visiting London you must go. The West Yard is a teeming mass of food stalls, directly beside Camden Lock on the Regent’s Canal. It offered a dizzying variety of street food from around the world: Turkish sausage wraps, Lebanese falafels, Pakistani wraps, Indian curries, Argentinian steak sandwiches, Vietnamese stir-fries, British meat pies, Jamaican jerk chicken, Chinese dim sum, Polish kielbasa, Australian kangaroo burgers (these I never sampled), Peruvian, Ethiopian. If I walked another few metres over to the high street, there were Iranian, Greek, Moroccan, Mexican, Egyptian, and various vegan choices.

  Here was lunch variety as I had never experienced before. At various times I sampled each and every one of the choices above and can only remember once having my intestines object. On warm days in peak tourist season the place is jammed with humanity feeding their faces. In contrast, during the bleak, grey days of winter there would sometimes be only one vendor braving the cold — typically the Jamaicans were the hardiest, despite their warm-weather heritage.

  It was the world’s greatest, coolest location for a workspace.

  By early or midafternoon, we had usually settled on a story. Sometimes it was obvious, sometimes it was something we suggested, sometimes our colleagues in Vancouver would express a preference. I would pore through all the various agency offerings of video and interviews, choose the best, and prepare a script for a two-minute story that I would transmit to the mother ship for a vet around suppertime.

  Once the script was approved, I would record my voice track and Dan would edit the story on his laptop. By 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. he would FTP the package to Vancouver and our day was done. While he would head home to his wife, I would generally linger for a while, in no great rush to get back to an empty apartment. I would deal with the myriad of logistical issues that still remained to set up our life in London, or scan European newspapers in search of a story to do. Every month I would get a notice from the accountants advising me of how much income taxes I owed Her Majesty and I would go online to remove a large chunk of poundage from my newly created bank account and hand it over.

  At the end of my workdays, I would usually walk back to the flat. This was the time of year when the London daylight lasted deep into the evening and so it was a lovely and placid stroll through the leafy streets of Belsize Park, wondering about the lives of the people inside those stately homes.

  We did not know when we moved into the neighbourhood that Belsize Park is London shorthand for posh. Celebrities such as Helena Bonham Carter were supposedly among its denizens, although we never saw her. It is replete with nineteenth-century mansions that were long since divided up into flats. Behind the stately exteriors are apartments that are lusciously decorated and impossibly expensive. Others are atrociously decrepit, but still impossibly expensive. That is London.

  Inside the front door of my building, mail for past tenants piled up atop a rickety old table. The ground-floor neighbour never seemed to pick up hers either. For a time, I kept the letters for the guy who previously occupied my flat, some of which appeared to be demands for payment from various utilities. He had apparently moved to Spain, and had no interest in having his mail forwarded, so I started dumping them in recycling, keeping the National Geographics.

  The dim entranceway was charmingl
y decorated with a bare light bulb, peeling paint, and dirt-brown carpet. Thanks to the absence of any kind of regular cleaning, dust bunnies the size of basketballs and a pile of disused luggage lined the hallway.

  The flat was quiet, sparse, and cheerless. Its most attractive feature, the spacious, even slightly grand reception room, which had a big south-facing window, was outweighed by its many failings. The room that would be Julia’s was tiny, with visible, drafty gaps in the crappy window. The Brits famously shun the benefits of central heating. They also seem to consider the idea of windows that actually seal against the cold to be quaintly colonial — far better, dear fellow, to expel the expensively heated air into the brisk London night.

  The main bathroom was both large and bleak, much like the communal cans you would expect to see in prison — the toilet permanently stained, the shower either freezing or scalding. The tiny kitchen had a door missing from one cupboard and it appeared that some kind of toxic waste had rotted away the finish on the cabinetry below the stove.

  All this for a rent that was roughly double the monthly mortgage payments for my four-bedroom, fully renovated, newly landscaped Toronto home.

  Not motivated to cook, I kept a supply of microwave dinners and cans of British beer in the fridge. My lonely supper was eaten sitting on the couch: a greasy tray of chicken tikka masala on the coffee table, washed down with a can or two of John Smith’s Bitter.

  Just before bed, I would call home, catching Julia and Isabella right around their suppertime.

  “Hi, Daddy, bye, Daddy,” was my daughter’s usual greeting before running away from the phone. She was not really that interested in long-distance conversations, preferring to watch inane comedies with loud laugh tracks on TV.

  Isabella would often sound tired and exasperated. I could scarcely blame her. We had agreed to share child rearing, with me overseeing more mundane tasks and her taking the lead in finding creative activities to give our only child a richer life. But now it was all on her. She would call Julia to the phone and gently insist she talk to her distant dad. Adding to her single mom experience was the renovation, now fully underway — our old kitchen had been ripped out in preparation for the installation of the new one, and she had had to jury-rig an alternative in the living room: a bar fridge, microwave, and hot plate.

  My rather mundane existence was suddenly enlivened when a major news story broke. The nation was gripped by the phone hacking scandal. It emerged that the top-selling tabloid, News of the World, had weaseled its way into the cellphone records of a missing fourteen-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, who was later found dead. The story went that some of her voice mails were deleted, which gave her distraught parents a brief hope that she might still be alive.

  British tabloids are infamous for their hardball tactics, and most of the time they get away with it because the targets are wealthy celebrities who might occasionally sue successfully but who generally enjoy marginal sympathy from the public. This was something different: it appeared that a grieving middle-class family was being victimized at the worst possible time. Revulsion was deep, broad, and devastating.

  In an extraordinary move, Rupert Murdoch, the last of the great press barons, shut down NOTW in a vain attempt to defuse the anger. News cameras, even from his own Sky News, chased him on the street as he entered a hotel for a meeting with the Dowler family. Afterward, he was forced to step out into a raucous scrum to offer a public apology to follow the one he had delivered in private to the family.

  The scandal exposed the cozy relationships among reporters, police, and politicians, and ended with daily arrests, revelations, and resignations. The head of Scotland Yard was forced to quit after it emerged that he had hired a former NOTW editor for media advice, a man who now had been taken into custody. It seems the cops had been feeding information to the tabloids for years, and that Murdoch, the king of the tabs (as well as the quality Times and Sunday Times), had been courted by fearful prime ministers of all political stripes and was a regular, unannounced visitor at 10 Downing Street.

  It was all the standard way of doing business among British elites for years, but now the sharks were in the water smelling blood after the Dowler affair.

  Murdoch himself was hauled before a Commons committee for a public thrashing at the hands of some of the MPs who had been regular targets of his hacks.

  Murdoch was seated next to his smooth and well-briefed son James, who was to do most of the talking, but the old man clearly sensed the public mood and interrupted James early on to offer a penitent, but awkward, “This is the most humble day of my life.” He had already shut down his bestselling newspaper, paid out millions in compensation, and suffered public denunciation on a broad scale. Murdoch was to remain rich and powerful, but he needed to do his penance — including suffering a glancing blow from a cream pie, delivered by a comedian later that morning. His young, third, and later divorced wife, Wendi Deng, achieved a moment of notoriety by whacking the erstwhile assailant.

  In the early days of the scandal, BBC workers went on a one-day strike to protest against ongoing cutbacks. It turned out to be a happy event because it freed Caroline, my friend from Toronto, from her duties at BBC’s Panorama so that she could host a barbecue at her home.

  Over a delightful supper of chicken, shrimp, and Tuscan salad, her British media friends unanimously agreed that we had only seen the tip of the iceberg — many more journos were most likely hacking or otherwise flouting the law in search of a scoop, but had been lucky to not get caught, yet. There was no small delight among them in watching Murdoch’s misery, given that his papers were harsh critics of the BBC.

  All in all, it was a great show, an education in the ways of the British media and power elites. By comparison, Canada is tame — there are no press barons who put the squeeze on prime ministers, no tabloids who stalk celebrities and publish rancorous fiction about them, and no hardball battles among papers and broadcasters joyously seeking to destroy their opponents.

  Back home, weekend mornings were usually spent dragging the little girl out of bed, getting her to swimming lessons, and catching up on house maintenance. Here, I would wake and stare at the ceiling for a bit before dragging myself out of bed. Although it was often painfully lonely, I was after all in London, so I determined to make the most of the chance to explore the city.

  The National Theatre had a sold-out show called London Road, the most offbeat concept for a musical ever. It was the story of the citizens of Ipswich, who were coping with the rampages of a serial killer, and was told through their actual words as recorded in police reports. Not exactly The Sound of Music. But the reviews were ecstatic, so I showed up early at the theatre in search of returns. This is a tactic that almost always works if you arrive early enough, and given that there was only one woman ahead of me in line for the matinee, my hopes were high — but misplaced. She got the only single return and I was shut out.

  Never mind, the Imperial War Museum was not far away so Plan B was to walk over and check it out. En route was the Old Vic Theatre, currently featuring Kevin Spacey as Richard III. The entire run had been sold out for weeks, but given I was walking past there was no harm in stopping to ask.

  The matinee had already started and there was no one in line at the box office.

  “Well, aren’t you in luck,” said the ticket guy. “A producer has just returned a ticket in the sixth row for tonight. Eighty-five pounds. Would you like it?”

  A steep price, but this fell into the category of things you should do while in London, no matter the cost. Out came the credit card.

  Spacey had been at the Old Vic since 2003, an American movie star coming to London to rejuvenate a venerable institution. Once the home of the National Theatre, the place had fallen on hard times in the earlier part of the century. A Telegraph article suggested that there had been talk for a while of turning it into a theme pub or a bingo hall.

  Spacey told the paper that some snippy locals (relatives of Sneezy BritFuck, no doubt)
had advised him in the early days that he should pack his bags and get the hell out of town. He gradually won them over with an honest respect for the theatre and a devotion to excellence. By the time I watched him limp out onto stage as Shakespeare’s most delicious villain, he had the city at his feet. (This was years before men starting coming forward with allegations of sexual harassment.)

  His Richard was both compelling and uncomfortable to watch. He twisted his body into what had to be a painful contortion that he maintained throughout. At the end, after having been killed by Henry Tudor, he was strung up by his heels, like Mussolini, and left hanging upside down for several minutes until the curtain call.

  It was one of those performances that made all of us unhesitatingly jump to our feet when Spacey, drenched in sweat, took his bows. All of us were amazed that he could even stand up after three hours of what had to be agony. And it was his second show of the day!

  The glow of a great night in the theatre faded into the dullness of an aimless Sunday morning. I thought about taking the train out to Hampton Court, or maybe trying the Tower of London. So many choices, such minimal decisiveness. After dawdling for several frustrating hours, I settled on an easier choice: the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  The Tube is routinely packed on a Sunday afternoon, particularly on the Piccadilly line from Green Park down to South Kensington. The tunnel that joins the Tube stop to the series of museums nearby was similarly teeming, especially with parents hauling the kids out for some culture. I would get to know the walk very well with my daughter.

  The V&A justifiably boasts that it is the world’s largest and greatest museum of the decorative arts and design. It grew out of the Great Exhibition of 1851, as British imperialism was approaching its period of greatest glory.

  Even now it holds that feeling of grandness. The entrance hall was dominated by a giant hanging sculpture in glass — a writhing mass of snakelike green and white tendrils created by American sculptor Dale Chihuly. You could not help but stand in awe. (It has since been transferred to a shopping centre in Singapore.)