Essex Poison

‘I’ll send you a telegram,’ said Morley.

‘To where?’ said Miriam. ‘We’ll be in the Lagonda. And you’ll be on the train.’

‘Ah,’ said Morley. ‘Good point. You know, one day someone needs to invent some kind of mobile communication device. A sort of pocket telegram machine.’

‘I’m not sure it’d catch on, Father.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Morley.

‘It would just involve people telling each other they were on board trains.’

‘Ha!’ said Morley. With which he got up from the piano stool and dashed for the door. ‘Good luck then, you two. Until we meet again in Essex!’

‘Very good,’ said Miriam. ‘Goodbye, Father.’

‘No slacking,’ he called from the corridor.

‘No shilly-shallying,’ replied Miriam loudly.

‘No funking,’ I mumbled.

‘Although …’ said Miriam, turning towards me, and adopting her lounge position on the chair. ‘While the cat’s away the mice shall play, eh, Sefton?’

I needed a cup of coffee and a pick-me-up.

And a hundred pounds.

CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_76d38739-b850-54bf-9c79-d6c7d9f6d73c)

THE BOULEVARDS OF BECONTREE (#ulink_76d38739-b850-54bf-9c79-d6c7d9f6d73c)

DENMARK STREET is ideally situated in Soho, if for no other reason that it marks a kind of boundary and thus provides a perfect and speedy exit onto High Holborn and all roads east. I managed to persuade Miriam that I was in urgent need of a hearty breakfast, and this hearty breakfast once duly procured – in a neat little café opposite Foyle’s run by a family of natty Italians, with whom Miriam insisted on practising both her rudimentary Italian and her highly advanced arts of flirtation – we were soon heading off in the Lagonda across London.

London in 1937 was of course entirely different to the London of today, which has seen so many changes that have rendered many parts of it almost unrecognisable. If one aspect, one characteristic remains the same, however, it is this: for all its ugly wounds and gashes, and for all its hasty rebuilds and reconfigurations, east London remains the undisputed territory of the poor. Morley had a curious map on the wall of his study back in St George’s which showed an aerial view of the city marked prominently with all its churches, as though the Church Triumphant were massing and converging and sailing up the Thames towards Parliament, spires aloft like mainsails. To set out in the opposite direction, to move away from the centre, to go east, has always been to go against this flow of the great and the good and the godly, away from money and power, away from Christopher Wren, and out into unpredictable territory of Hawksmoor’s baroque, and crumbling Georgian terraces, and the squat fat brick and concrete mansion blocks that were then already replacing the old Victorian terraces. To go east was and is – and shall surely forever remain – to venture into the wild.

‘Dreadful,’ said Miriam as she gunned the Lagonda out along the Commercial Road and on into Poplar. ‘Can you imagine actually living here?’

‘I rather like it, actually,’ I said, as we proceeded at alarming speed onto the East India Dock Road and caught full sight of the great wharves of London’s docks, with their vast cranes towering above and behind like some giant backstage machinery for scene-shifting and which made the east London streets seem like a stage set where at any moment absolutely anything and everything might happen: tragedy, comedy, history, farce; the East London Palace Theatre of Varieties. It felt thrillingly alive, a place where things were being made rather than merely consumed, a place where lives were actually being lived and not simply performed, where a cat might look at a king, where a fool and his money might soon be parted, and where a little of what you fancy does you good. There were young children swinging high and wide around the lampposts, and mothers young and old were pushing prams, and people were going about their daily business, street sellers with barrels of herrings and bagels, and butchers and bakers and fishmongers, their goods spilling out onto the streets, a cornucopia of bread and fishes and strings of sausages, and men unloading vans, and newsstands, and cars and bikes and horses and carts: it was a kind of people’s paradise …

‘Oh come on, Sefton, don’t attempt your old communist nonsense with me. You’d rather live here, or in a nice flat in Kensington?’

‘To be honest I’d rather be living entirely elsewhere,’ I said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Miriam. ‘Everywhere is elsewhere, isn’t it? Otherwise nowhere is anywhere.’ She had certainly inherited her father’s eccentric logic. ‘But anyway’ – the subject had strayed away from Miriam’s favourite subject, Miriam, for long enough – ‘I have great news.’

‘Who’s the lucky man this time?’

‘Not that sort of news, silly.’

‘What then?’

‘I’ve been offered a column in a new magazine for women.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘What’s it called?’

‘The magazine? Woman, silly,’ said Miriam, ‘obviously,’ and, ‘Get out of the way, you little beast!’ she screamed, as we swerved in order to avoid a child no more than four or five years old, and dressed all in white, as though in an advert for Omo, who had run into the street chasing a ball, chased by a rather grubbier-looking older girl who fortunately swept up the young one in her arms before she made irreparable and very messy contact with the Lagonda. ‘Damned children! Aren’t they supposed to be in school?’

‘How much are they paying you?’

‘Paying me?’ said Miriam. ‘I have no idea, Sefton. I didn’t ask about payment.’

Which was really the great difference between us. Miriam was someone who never asked, or had to ask about payment: I was someone who was only ever really interested in payment. I wondered if she might be paid as much as a hundred pounds.

‘And what are you going to write about?’

‘My silly, empty way of life, what do you think?’ She flashed me a sarcastic smile.

‘Seriously though,’ I said.

‘Seriously though, Sefton, I am going to tell the truth about the lives of young women today.’

‘I’m sure people will be absolutely fascinated,’ I said.

‘I’m sure they will, actually,’ she replied. ‘I think it’s about time that women spoke out about their real lives, rather than pretending all the time to be second-rate men.’

‘I’d hardly describe you as someone pretending to be a second-rate man, Miriam,’ I said. ‘You’re more like a …’ I was going to say another species, but decided to hold my tongue.

‘Superior man?’ said Miriam.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Sui generis?’

‘Exactly,’ I agreed.

‘Good. Well, at least we’re agreed on one thing. Now do be a darling and light me a cigarette and remind me of the route, would you?’ (She was at this time, as far as I recall, happy to accept any cigarette from anyone: this was before she took up smoking exclusively De Reszke Minors, with their famous ‘Red Tips for Red Lips’, with whom she had some kind of advertising arrangement, connected to her column in Woman. Frankly, in the early years, if you’d offered her a pipe filled to the brim with good old-fashioned stinky Balkan Sobranie she’d have smoked it.)

We were now following the A13 out of London and into Essex: through Canning Town, with the views of Bow Creek and the Beckton Gas Works, and then on and up past Barking where finally you get to see the famous Becontree estate looming on the horizon. If you’ve ever been you’ll know that there is a kind of perpetual grey fog hanging over the place: all those houses and all those people, all that coal and wood being burned to keep them warm and alive, as though Becontree itself were an actual being, a slumbering beast, curled up and breathing out its slumbering beastly fumes into the unforgiving Essex sky.

From a distance the Becontree estate at first gives the appearance of a frontier town in Westerns – one half expects on arrival to find the old clapboard bordello ringing with the cries of good-time girls and grizzled crap-shooters, the saloon doors banging open as you stride in and order a whiskey and the conversation suddenly dies and you realise you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the sheriff’s office is under siege, and the gunslinger is in his buckskin shirt, squinting through the sun’s glare, riding onto Main Street to confront the bad guys in the big black hats – just as in the novels of Zane Grey, another of those writers beloved by Morley whose work seemed to me almost entirely without worth. (Morley’s great paean to the Western is of course Home on the Range: Life in the Wild West (1933), a book perhaps more wildly inaccurate even than any of his others, but which contains an intriguing account of his meeting with Buffalo Bill himself, when the old cowboy had been touring Europe during the early years of the century. Buffalo Bill, according to Morley, was much more than a showman. ‘Few men have done as much for our understanding of the lives of the American Indian,’ according to Morley. ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a circus with a purpose.’) But in reality Becontree was no Deadwood. It was no Dodge City, no Tombstone, Arizona. Borderland Essex in the late 1930s was like no other place at no other time. It was a place situated somewhere between the present and the future, stranded in a now that never was and could never be – a place entirely between the wars.

As we made our way down Becontree Avenue I was struck first of all not by the buildings but by the extraordinary sight of what seemed like never-ending rows of privet hedges leading off in every direction, all short and trimmed at regulation waist height and which made it look as though the actual buildings of Becontree were some kind of a weird garden planted in behind the hedges, almost as an afterthought, square, overgrown red brick flowers and shrubs. The Becontree hedges, perhaps more than anything else, sum up that dream of another England that Morley so admired and cherished, a perfect, planted petit-bourgeois green and pleasant land.

‘Ghastly,’ said Miriam.

A brightened, whitened East End

It was certainly strange – like a brightened, whitened East End, as though having been boil-washed and run through the mangle. There were tramways and cheap cars and uniform shopfronts all with identical awnings. There were long monotonous rows of houses, each with a handkerchief patch of garden out front, all equivalent in size and shape, except for those few homes set further back from the road around miniature greens, and odd corner sites that had young trees planted, and fresh, ugly churches. It all looked terribly clean and also rather Dutch; something to do with the pitch of the roofs, perhaps, and also the fact that everywhere one looked there were men and women on bicycles, furiously pedalling, as if the life of the nation itself depended on the men and women of Essex getting to work on time. And yet somehow, for all it looked longingly towards Europe for its architectural inspiration, it also seemed inevitably and undeniably American: the wide streets clearly built not for boulevardiers and bicycles but for cars and trucks and lorries, and the low-rise buildings not the stuff of the Low Countries but rather of the New World, the only ornament and interest the advertising hoardings that glued the streets together with Parkinson’s Biscuits, Eno’s Fruit Salts, Lavvo and Pumphrey’s Lemon Curd. We pulled over beneath a sign for Bile Beans, in a spot designated by another sign for ‘PARKING’, in front of a shop called Clifford’s, at the corner of Becontree Avenue and Valence Avenue. A convoy of lorries piled high with sand and gravel came thundering past, spraying fine dust and diesel fumes in their wake.