London Made Us Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT ELMS

  Non-fiction

  The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads

  Spain: A Portrait

  Fiction

  In Search of the Crack

  First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019

  by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  and Canada by Publishers Group Canada

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Robert Elms, 2019

  All photographs © Robert Elms

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 211 9

  eISBN 978 1 78689 212 6

  Typeset in Goudy Old Style by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  To Alice, Alfie and Maude, Londoners all.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. Becoming Londoners

  The Avernus Returns

  2. The Knowledge

  On Fridays We Ride

  3. Up West

  Do You Fancy a Schvitz?

  Lord of Lord’s

  4. Dinner Time

  Every Day I Take Coffee with the Portuguesers

  5. Kicking Off

  There Are Dead People All Over the Place

  Down By the River

  6. At Night

  Jesus’s Blood

  Who’s the Best Dressed Man in London?

  7. Leaving Home

  The Brigadistas

  8. Finding Home

  Postscript

  List of Photographs

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  ‘This is no longer my London.’

  These were the words of an old lady, born by the River Thames, almost eighty-five years before she was about to expire by the Euston Road. Propped up in a hospital bed, she was eager to reminisce, but increasingly short of the energy to do so. When she had a burst of will, however, and a lungful of bottled breath, she took to talking about the city where she had lived all her long and eventful life; she knew it wasn’t there.

  ‘This is no longer my London,’ she said with a wave of her veiny hand and a resigned but somewhat slighted melancholy. She was mourning the passing of her home town as she awaited her own demise.

  That lament for a lost metropolis wasn’t exactly my mother’s final utterance. Her last words were spoken so softly through an oxygen mask as to be inaudible, but they probably involved love. And while she hadn’t fallen out of love with her city, which she once knew so well after years as a clippie on its crimson double-deckers, she no longer felt part of it, didn’t understand it. The town she had so rarely left had left her; disappeared or transmogrified so as to be unrecognisable, and she was disorientated by the changes. Her mind was still sharp, but her mental map was way out of date.

  This became obvious when I was trying to mine the last nuggets of her memory. I have always been fascinated by the old tales of the tumultuous corner of West London the Elmses had called home for generations. We were Westies, and there had been members of my father’s family bowling along Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road, working its markets and angling its alleyways, from the very start of its story back in the mid-nineteenth century. But long before my mother’s imminent departure, not one was left, not a single cousin or aunt flogging their wares or raising their kids, not a trace of our blood flowing amid those once crumbling stucco terraces.

  Instead we had all been re-housed and resettled, scattered in a cleansing diaspora of gentrification. In our absence those once condemned houses had been tarted up and filled up with well-scrubbed, floppy-haired families in pastel cashmere sweaters to match their pretty pink and lilac abodes. The neighbourhood had been transformed more dramatically than any other in all London. But my mum hadn’t seen that movie. Shaking her frail almost translucently silver head she said with all the vehemence she could muster, ‘Notting Hill is a slum.’

  She no longer knew London because the London she knew no longer existed. It was well aware of her though.

  On the morning of the day in 2011 that Eileen Elizabeth Elms, née Biffen, breathed her last in University College Hospital, I went to take some air outside the hospital. I was seeking respite from the emotionally suffocating ward on the seventh floor, where my mother was slowly slipping over the eternal precipice. The screeching junction of Tottenham Court Road and the Euston Road, with the underpass sucking in traffic, is one of the most noisy and noisome in the entire metropolis. It is not exactly the best spot for a breather and a moment of quiet contemplation. So I moved a few yards south and found myself pacing philosophically between Spearmint Rhino and PC World.

  I was wiping tears from my face and musing on the inevitability of passing and the raw sadness of imminent loss, outside a lap dancing emporia. I then remembered that this had previously been a dodgy ‘Cockney Cabaret’, where thespians in flat caps and braces with Dick Van Dyke accents did the Lambeth Walk for Japanese tourists scoffing soggy fish and chips, and even managed a half smile.

  At this point a black cab rolled by, slowing to a halt at the lights. The driver shouted out of the window, ‘How’s your mum?’ Surprised but not shocked, I didn’t want to holler ‘She’s dying’ over the throb of the traffic, so placed my hands together by my head in what I hoped was the internationally recognised symbol for sleeping. Forced by the lights to move on, the concerned cabbie left me to my solemn, sodden ruminations. Or so I thought.

  For a couple of minutes later the same handsome old Hackney carriage was back. He must have whipped round the fiendish one-way system and then barged through the morass to pull over by the kerb in front of me.

  ‘Do you mean she’s resting, Robert?’ he said. Now I didn’t know this taxi driver from Adam, but guessed he must be a listener to my daily BBC London radio show. I had spoken on air so many times about my mum, shared her stories; and she would occasionally call up and take part in the show, so the listeners felt like they knew her.

  They also knew she was ill and my absence from the airwaves had alerted them to her worsening condition. He looked really concerned about an old woman he’d never met. I wiped my eyes and spoke to him.

  ‘To be honest mate she’s dying, won’t make it through the day.’

  At that point a large stubby hand reached out from the drivers’ window and held mine in a truly touching embrace, warm and kind.

  ‘London is thinking of her,’ he said before rolling gently away into the workaday madness. Blimey, that didn’t half make me think about London.

  The black cab and its knowledge-encrusted driver – themselves an endangered urban species in this age of satnavs and Ubers – are such a totemic symbol of my city, mobile golems arising from the rat runs: it was the most fitting and touching way for this metropolis of millions of souls to deliver succour to one of their own. My mum would have loved that.

  She loved a black cab, always said riding in one made her feel posh. I returned to her impending deathbed and told her what had happened. I hope she heard. Later that day, surrounded by those who loved her, she left London. But as her presence faded with the procedures and bureaucracies of death, so the idea that her London had itself passed on, that in essence your city dies with you, really began to haunt me.

  *

  Eileen Elizabeth Elms, her middle name recognition that she was precisely two weeks younger than the Queen – two baby girls born into entirely different worlds, just two miles apart – wa
s every inch of her five-foot, two-inch frame the Londoner. Yet she no longer knew this place, because the city she had grown up in, courted my father in, raised her sons, mourned her husbands, buried her friends, kept an eye on her neighbours, cradled her grandchildren and great-grandchildren in, was indeed no longer there. It had, by stages and increments, street by street, shrunk and vanished just as she did.

  Some of her city had been knocked down, slum cleared, town planned or redeveloped away. But for a girl who had survived both the Blitz and the building of a motorway right above her house, who could cope with Jerry-bombed streets and jerry-built estates, that wasn’t really what threw her. It was more that the patterns she had spent a lifetime absorbing and memorising, the detailed sociospatial ‘knowledge’ all Londoners accrue after years in this place, had twisted, shifted, moved and mutated to such a degree that it was a totally different picture.

  This constantly restless city is happy to shed its skin of brick and stone for steel and glass, to unsentimentally jettison the unprofitable, to abandon the unfashionable, to discard the undesirable. London is a giant kaleidoscope, which is forever turning. Take your eye off it for more than a moment and you’re lost.

  And yet. Well, and yet the past is also remarkably resilient in this living palimpsest. A few months after my mum’s funeral, I had arranged to meet my wife at the Tate. Not the Modern one, which deep down I still think of as a distant, disused power station in a largely abandoned bit of town where rave parties are occasionally held, but the old, neoclassical, slightly stuffy British one on the north side of the river at Millbank.

  I jumped into a sherbet and for once was early, so got out intending to walk the last bit. I wasn’t too sure of my bearings, but was enjoying a meander in the vague direction of the Thames in an area I don’t really know. After a few minutes, hopefully heading towards my rendezvous, I thought I ought to check exactly where I was, so I looked for a sign. The nearest one said Tachbrook Street SW1, and I was standing outside number 64. That rang a bell.

  The most bittersweet task of the whole post-death rigmarole is going through personal papers. Old ladies can accrue a bizarre collection of cuttings and mementos, school reports and insurance documents, poems, recipes, drawings, Green Shield Stamps, swimming certificates, scrap books and rent books, and she had all of those. Her birth certificate was in there among the paper detritus of a life. A yellowing, folded form with the faded yet absolute authority of a pre-digital age. I remembered that the stated place of birth of this baby girl, born roughly equidistant in time between the world wars, was 64 Tachbrook Street SW1. I had, by absolute serendipity, stopped precisely at the point where my mum had started. A sign indeed.

  I had never knowingly been here before, and I don’t suppose she had been back since her family – which at that point consisted of her mum, dad and two older brothers – upped sticks in the early 1930s. They headed to a council house on a vast new estate near then-suburban Shepherd’s Bush, when she was but a small girl of four or five. I knew little about her short time in Pimlico (she actually always referred to it as Westminster), except that the five of them lived in two rooms, one of which had been the venue of her first breath and almost her last.

  A month premature, painfully underweight, suffering from chronic jaundice, little Eileen had been administered the last rites in that one room where her brothers also lay, as they expected her to add to the infant mortality statistics. But obviously she pulled through and lived to see two further girls and another brother join the brood.

  Her vague recollections of life in Westminster were of what she called a ‘tenement’. A crowded, crumbling block, stained black by smoke and soot, chock full of poor families spilling over on to rumbustious streets where her snotty-nosed, scabby-kneed siblings ran amok. Outside toilet, shared cooking facilities on the landing, insanitary, undesirable. But I was looking at an elegant late Georgian terrace, manicured to within an inch of perfection, swag curtains adorning its vast sash windows, luxury cars lining its otherwise tranquil kerbsides.

  I was obviously looking a little too intently, because a smartly attired man suddenly opened the Farrow and Ball-coated front door, with its proud brass knocker, and asked me nervously what I wanted. I explained that I wasn’t casing the joint, but that my mum was born here in this very house many Londons ago. This gentleman kindly asked if I wanted to come in and have a look round, but I declined, knowing that this place would bear no resemblance to her life. These elegant walls held no traces; the pieces were all still there but the kaleidoscope had turned so many times. Besides, I had to meet my wife at the old prison on Millbank.

  And it wasn’t just here in her first home that my mother’s home town had vanished. Hers was a resolutely working-class city; flat-capped and overalled in the week, suited and booted on Sundays, talking from the side of its mouth and smoking from the back of its hand. It was a hard-working city with factories, breweries, distilleries and power stations lining the river, sulphurous and stained, battered, bombed, scarred and dark, foggy and damp. But life in her smoggy, dank and dimly lit London was brightened by dance halls, tea rooms, picture palaces, hair salons, public baths, launderettes, football terraces, street markets and unruly pubs.

  The London she lived in and loved was a vast, grimy, largely Victorian sprawl. Made intimate by the proximity of family and friends, and the continuity of life in run-down streets and squares, where kids frolicked and women nattered, and people who spoke the same language, with largely the same accent, knew each other’s business and told them so. The old adage about London being a collection of villages was still largely true and many people stuck to their village for generations. Passport to Pimlico and all that.

  Of course, even in my mum’s prime time, just after the Second World War and before this city started to swing, there were other Londons. The parallel world of the privileged and the posh was only ever a few streets away, where stately prams were wheeled through Hyde Park by uniformed nannies and clipped voices commanded staff to complete their tasks. Her mother: my deferential, softly spoken grandma, had been in service. She was a parlour maid, a few hundred yards from Tachbrook Street in a grand house in Belgravia when she met the man who would become my grandad and fell awkwardly pregnant. They married quickly.

  Over in the City was another city still, where bowler hats and pinstripes were the order of the day and the middling sort took trains to suburbs in Surrey and suchlike. Soho was bohemia, Clerkenwell was Little Italy, Kilburn was a displaced Irish county, the East End was Yiddish and – by the time the Windrush had arrived – Notting Hill, where she met and eventually married my father, was home to a pioneer band of Caribbean families adding a tropical swagger to the crumbling streets.

  My mother herself was part Jewish, my father’s family partly Romany street trader stock; this was always a metropolis drawn from a wide gene pool. But its predominant culture was definitely white bread. Pie and mash, pale ale, pease pudding and a packet of Woodbines. Quick witted, good at getting a couple of bob, savvy as a saveloy, staunch, eager for laughter and dancing, tribal and territorial but also communal and convivial.

  She loved that London: the walks through Kensington Gardens arm in arm with my lefty father, talking politics. The jokes with her bus driver lost in a pea-souper somewhere down Clapham way. The market pitches and costers with their saucy patter, the charabanc rides to the coast paid for in instalments at the rumbustious local. The jive at the plush Palais de Dance in Hammersmith, the trips up West (actually east of where she lived, but some London conventions defy logic), pictures at Leicester Square with tea and cake in a Lyons’ Corner House complete with nippies.

  Hers was a town of sing songs, knees ups, even occasional punch-ups. But like all Londons, as she lived it, so it was dying out; its inevitable extinction a function of perpetual urban evolution.

  Which is why I decided to write this book. When the tears of my mother’s passing dried, and her ashes joined my dad’s long-gone cadaver in a pretty W
est London graveyard near the languorous river, I became a fifty-one-year-old orphan boy adrift in the city. If I manage to live as long as my mum, I am already roughly two-thirds of the way through my journey. That means that two-thirds of my London, the town I have made my life from and by and in, the city I have loved with an intensity that has occasionally baffled even me, has already been and gone.

  London changes: that is a given and a constant. As a Londoner, you know you are a tiny part of a perpetually morphing organism. You also know that the details of every life lived on these streets, including your own, passes. Yet we hope that the essence of this great city, our collective character, manages somehow to survive the maelstrom of innovation; that we are part of an eternity even as our era disappears.

  My mother’s London was already vanishing by the time mine was forming. I came of age in a broken 1970s city where factories, docks and workshops were evacuated and eviscerated, rotting hulks of a former economy. The blackened, exhausted terraces of once poor but stable neighbourhoods were condemned and demolished, replaced by soaring concrete towers, and entire social orders were dismantled. That resolutely blue-collar, grey-streaked, yellow-lit London of post-war certainties was crumbling away, and the ragged inner city of my youth was close to derelict and all but abandoned.

  Between 1945 and 1985, inner London lost almost half its population. The one-time teeming streets from Paddington to Hackney, Brixton to Bermondsey were dismantled and decanted of working-class families in a mass suburban displacement. This ‘slum clearance’ programme meant I grew up not in Notting Hill but half-a-dozen miles away on the Watling: a huge, distant, ‘overspill’ estate in Burnt Oak at the far end of the Northern line.

  Another remarkable fact is that almost half of all Londoners lived in what we then called council estates, which were genuinely affordable and even desirable. My family swapped an albeit tumbledown Georgian terrace with an outside toilet and a leaking roof in W10 for a two-up, two-down council house in Burnt Oak. And were pleased to do so. After all, their Notting Hill was a slum.