Fowlers End

by Gerald Kersh

  Even so, since morbid curiosity encourages you to go on, you reason: No. There is a catch in this somewhere. Here are rag-and-bone shops, junk shops, houses of penance for unmarried women. Something worth looking at. So you go back. The left-hand branch of the crossroads leads past Warren Street toward the Marylebone Road in which there are clinics, blind blocks of flats, a Poor Law institution, a town hall, and whatnot. To your left, off the Marylebone Road, the Borough of Marylebone, full of whispering mews and streets of houses that were jerry-built in the eighteenth century and won’t fall down—a place of mysterious back-doubles, redolent of drains and of human interest in general. That won’t do, either, you say to yourself. There is Hope here. The city is trying to nudge me away from my objective. Say you don’t go as far? You may turn into Albany Street, where the barracks are; and Albany Street leads to the monotonous Outer Circle of Regents Park, where a short walk will take you, again, to Camden Town.

  At this you feel a slight repellent urge in your elbow, and know that you are “getting hotter.” Why, then, since right-and-left and left-and-right both lead to Camden Town, so must the middle way, which is the Hampstead Road. Here the city becomes urgent in its discouragement. It says: Don’t waste your time—there’s nothing here for you, nothing at all, nothing for anybody. I don’t say it’s bad, mind you. Only I put it to you that you ignore it. It leads to a kind of nowhere, in the long run. Come and have a look at the disused graveyard near Aybrook Street? But now, having got the hang of this little game of reverse-compulsion, you go right on, straight ahead, past the hotels for men only, past the secondhand box-mattress shops, and the bituminous hole-in-the-wall where a man and his wife, black as demons, sell coal and coke by the pound, until you arrive at the tobacco factory at Mornington Crescent which used to be a Dream Factory because it was constructed in imitation of an ancient Egyptian temple. Here, two colossal plaster cats brood over the mouse-nibbled and rat-gnawed squares off Great College Street, which leads via the observation wards of the lunatic asylums back to Somers Town and Euston again. Between lies a hinterland of working men’s colleges, railway clearing houses, infirmaries, the Working Women’s Hospital, the Urino-Genital Hospital (better known as the Junior Sportsmen’s Club), a group of secondhand florists who make up cheap wreaths and crosses, and—between cafes—secondhand clothes shops where old women who mutter behind their hands sell for beer money the night dresses their neighbors have saved to be buried in.

  And this will never do, because it leads toward an awareness of life and death, may interest you in something. Even in the thrice-discarded detritus of the lowest of the low hereabout, the most discouraged imagination may find something to peck up and thrive on. On the other hand, behind the cigarette factory lurk those who wait in darkness—men who whistle after girls, and prowl Primrose Hill and Haverstock Hill in furtive groups. They believe that tobacco dust inflames the pudenda of the cigarette-makers, so that all they need do is shout,” ‘Ello, Betsy! Are yer bowels open?’to make an amorous overture. Here again the city tries to persuade you to stop. But if you know how to interpret a squeeze and translate the flicker of a muscle—having Fowlers End in mind—you will keep your eyes on the Cobden Statue and go ahead up Camden High Street toward the Camden Road, and so to Holloway, where the jail is; and past the allurements of this enclosed space through the perpetual twilight of the Seven Sisters Road, which takes you to Tottenham, where the only attraction is the Isolation Hospital for Infectious Diseases. Do not be led astray by this; go north to Edmonton and to Ponders End. Who Ponder was and how he ended, the merciful God knows. Once upon a time it was a quagmire; now it is a swamp, biding its time. Further yet, bearing northeast, lies a graveyard of broken boilers and rusty wheels called Slabsbridge, where creatures that once were men live in abandoned railway carriages. Between Slabsbridge and Uttermost there sprawls Fowlers Folly—someone of this name tried to build a tower there in 1790. He believed that the end of the world was at hand. Some vestige of the ruin remains. Only a mile farther on, where the ground, rising, is a little drier, is Fowlers End.

  Here the city gives up the game.

  This is it.

  Fowlers End is a special kind of tundra that supports nothing gracious in the way of flora and fauna. Plant a cabbage here in this soured, embittered, dyspeptic, ulcerated soil, and up comes a kind of bleached shillelagh with spikes on its knob. Plant a family, a respectable working-class family, and in two generations it will turn out wolves. Fowlers End is barren of everything but weeds. Even the dogs are throwbacks to their yellow-eyed predatory ancestors that slunk in the trail of the sub-men and ate filth. There is a High Street about a hundred yards long, and the most woebegone railway terminal on the face of the earth where, with a dismal and sinister smashing and groaning of shunting locomotives, all that is most unserviceable in the way of rolling stock comes in with coal and sulphur, scrap iron and splintery timber, and goes away with the stuff they make in the Fowlers End factories.

  As Sam Yudenow said, there is a steel-tube factory and a glass factory. There is a sulphuric-acid factory which looks like a Brobdingnagian assembly of alchemical apparatus out of a pulp writer’s nightmare as it sprawls under a cloud of yellow and black that shudders and stings like a dying wasp between great hills of green-black and gray-mauve slag. When it rains—which it doesn’t have to, because more water comes out of the ground than goes into it—some of the atmosphere comes down in a saturated solution, so that the hobnails in the soles and the iron crescents in the heels of the boots of the inhabitants are corroded in three days; and then, until they can raise the price of a re-studding job, they have nothing left to argue with but their hands and knees. The top of the War Memorial—the bronze sword of which was stolen and sold for scrap the night before it was unveiled—is already eroded, so that instead of looking like the ancient Roman gallows it resembles, rather, the old-fashioned English gibbet. Fowlers End got this monument by a bureaucratic error: only four Fowlers Enders died in the first World War, and one of these was shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy in 1916, so that, hard up for names to carve on its Roll of Honor, Fowlers End went over the Hertfordshire border three miles away and helped itself to fifty-six names out of the old graveyard at Ullage. Ever since then there has been bad blood between the people of these two places. Sometimes, generally on a Saturday night, the young men—women, too, and they are the worst of the lot—make up raiding parties and go out for mayhem and the breaking of windows. They always concentrate on the solar plexus, the seat of the soul, of each other’s community—which is, of course, the local cinema. The men of Fowlers End have bankrupted five successive proprietors of the Ullage Hippodrome and sent several managers to the Bloodford Cottage Hospital with broken bones. As I was to learn shortly after I went to work in Fowlers End, the Ullage men were in arrears. They owed us two roughhouses and were biding their time.

  Meanwhile the young bloods of Fowlers End were strutting, in their indescribably repulsive hangdog, drag-heeled way, in the High Street. And what a High Street it was, in my time! Except for a few clumps of rusty television antennae, I don’t imagine that the place will have changed much unless some German bomb, well placed for once, happened to fall nearby—in which case, good riddance to it! It wouldn’t have taken much more than a five-hundred-pounder to make rubble of the entire High Street, which, when I last measured it when I stepped out of the Pantheon to clear my lungs with a whiff of comparatively healthful carbon monoxide and sulphuric acid after a Children’s Matinee, measured exactly eighty-five long paces from God-bolts Corner to the end of the tram line where Fowlers End begins. And, bestially primitive as this cloaca of a street is, it must needs have two or three vermiform appendices, blind alleys! One of these was Godbolts, where the Pantheon stood. It was named after the real-estate magnate and general capitalist, a pious man who kept Godbolts Emporium on the other side of the street. He was a quick, hideously ugly little man, cold and viscous about the hands, with a gecko’s knack of sticking
to plane surfaces. Once, when I went into his shop to buy a handkerchief, Godbolt, telling me that he didn’t have much call for that kind of thing nowadays but thought he had a few in stock, went to get one from a high shelf. It may have been the effect of the fog but I will swear I saw him run up the wall. He had a black-cotton fly of a wife who was always buzzing at him from a distance; she never came within less than five feet of him—for fear, presumably, that he might thrust out a glutinous green tongue and catch her. He was always watching her out of the corners of his horny-lidded, protuberant eyes. They lived, according to local report, on stale bread and margarine and tea, but I always thought that he found a source of nutriment in his mustache; otherwise, why should he be perpetually sucking it with such relish?

  He owned the building in which the Pantheon was housed. It had been a church, once upon a time, built at considerable cost by the infatuated devotees of a demented tinker named John Nakedborn, who not only preached the Second Coming but more than hinted that he was It. It seems that he “married” the entire choir and then ran off to America; whereupon the sect broke up and the church stood empty until Sam Yudenow happened to pass that way. Always anxious, as he put it, “a good turn to do a feller,” he was employing at that time for a pound a week a crosseyed, clubfooted chauffeur who, sometimes, according to Sam Yudenow, “went two different diractions at once.” He took his employer to Fowlers End under the impression that he was going to Chingford. There was no cinema at Fowlers End then; the nearest one was the ill-fated Hippodrome at Ullage.

  Sam Yudenow, who was always intrigued by any vacant drill hall, barn or warehouse, however ratty, was fascinated by the naked, empty church: it had Gothic doors and windows and, instead of a spire, an onion-shaped dome. For the sake of that dome alone, if the building had been situated in the middle of Salisbury plain, Sam Yudenow would have been attracted to it. A dome like that who could resist? It was Class, it was Oriental, it was up-to-date. Besides, these were the days of the first cinema boom, when (if you believe the old-timers) all you had to do was find an old stable, paint it blue, call it the Majestic Picture Palace, paste up a forty-eight sheet saying Opening Shortly—and sell it for twenty thousand pounds.

  Sam Yudenow said to his wife, “Lily—look! May you drop down dead this minute if this ain’t the loveliest little site for a show you ever saw in your life! May you never live to see your children again!”

  “You should five so sure,” said she, looking at the place with horror.

  “It’s gudgeous!” cried Sam Yudenow. “Like ... like ... like an Indian tomb—artistic like an oil painting!” Then he sought out Mr. Godbolt and he said, “Uxcuse me, please. That place across the road, that ruin, it gives me the creeps. What is it? Why is it? What’s the name o’ this ‘ere place? Where is it? How do I get out from ‘ere? This ‘ere place— is there such a place? I never ‘eard of it!”

  “That’s a church,” said Mr. Godbolt.

  “Achurch? What for a church? How comes, church? Who goes there, black men? What do you mean, church? What place is this, anyway?”

  “This is Fowlers End, sir.”

  “What do you mean, Fowlers End? ... A church, yet!”

  “That’s my property, sir.”

  “No jokes? Then I’m sorry for you,” said Sam Yudenow.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” asked Mr. Godbolt from behind the counter.

  “A pair braces I want. I want a pair braces. Green braces. A pair green braces I want.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I have no braces in green,” said Mr. Godbolt. “But I’ve got a lovely brace in a nice shade of mauve.”

  “I meant mauve.... ‘Ow much you asking for these ‘ere braces?”

  “This superfine elastic brace is elevenpence ha’penny,” said Mr. Godbolt.

  “What, elevenpence ha’penny? What do you mean, elevenpence ha’ penny for such braces? Miv the church thrown in, for elevenpence ha’penny?”

  At this Mr. Godbolt looked hurt and said that this church, dome and all, was a very desirable property; to which Sam Yudenow replied, “So I dessay maybe God pays the rent praps?”

  “Don’t take His name in vain, if you don’t mind,” said Mr. Godbolt. “Fowlers End is expanding. The church would make a fine warehouse.”

  Sam Yudenow, who loved a play on words, said, “Warehouse for what wares where? What wares to house, and for why? Who for, warehouse? When, where? No jokes!”

  Later that day he left Fowlers End, having taken a lease on the old church for ninety-nine years at eighty pounds a year. He managed to convey to Mr. Godbolt and his solicitor that he wanted to use the old church to store surplus cinema supplies.

  But, loutish and obtuse as he may have been in almost every other respect, Sam Yudenow was a micrographer in contractual small print, and something of a master in the conveyancing of leases. He got away with a bargain, that day, but said to Mr. God-bolt on parting, “I’m temperamental—that’s the ruination of me. What for did I do this, what for? Mr. Cobalt, you hyptonized me.

  For a while Mr. Godbolt really believed that he had hypnotized Sam Yudenow and got the better of him. Accordingly, he conducted himself with all the condescension and magnanimity of a “good neighbor.” To be a good neighbor you must feel, fundamentally, that while you are independent of the man next door, he had better not try to get along without you. The good neighbor is a kind of emotional pawnbroker, a usurer in everyday kindnesses who manages to sell you his undesirable proximity on the installment plan, and exacts a consultant’s fee for every word of unsolicited advice. Good fences make good neighbors— nobody ever spoke a truer word. There never was a good neighbor who did not try to take some mean advantage of the newcomer to his neighborhood. It stands to reason: if your neighbor is socially your superior, you must live up to him and ruin yourself, or remain his inferior and abase yourself. Either way you must secretly hate him, belittle his success or magnify his failure. If he happens to be your equal, you will manage, if only by the weight of a snort, to tip the balance. He who has a neighbor has an enemy.

  I hold no brief for Sam Yudenow, but it seems to me that God-bolt got exactly what he deserved. He and his wife rejoiced, at first, at what they thought was their victim’s discomfiture. First of all, Sam Yudenow was bitten by a rat where the pulpit used to be. With ill-concealed glee, they commiserated and gave him a cup of tea. Then, when a green-and-orange truck came into the High Street and workmen started to put up ladders, they hugged themselves. Mrs. Godbolt winked at her husband with some of her several hundred eyes, while he treated himself to a double mouthful of mustache. Before long, however, Sam Yudenow was bellowing orders from the street while an army of lame, blind, and misanthropic scab laborers covered the dome with aluminum paint. Soon the whole front of the church was painted “Oriental Pink,” and the door and window frames were brushed with orange and green. At night workmen labored by the light of naphtha flares. Then, on the decaying hoarding that advertised an adjacent quagmire as A Desirable Factory Site, appeared, in orange letters on a green ground, this slogan:

  CHEER UP! THE SUPER CINEMA IS COMING!

  Mr. Godbolt went to Sam Yudenow and said, “I say. What’s the idea, if I may ask?”

  “What’s what idea, what?”

  “Super Cinema,” said Mr. Godbolt.

  “So? So what you want Sam Yudenow should open? A rab-bidge hutch? A pig stile? Of course a Super Cinema, of course. What then? What you want I should edvertise? A flea-pit? Nothing but the best is good enough for Sam Yudenow.”

  “Now look here, I can’t let these premises for a picture palace, sir.”

  “Read the lease.”

  “You said you wanted to store cinema accessories in these here premises.”

  “So? A few hundred seats? A couple projectors? A ticket machine? Not accessories? No? So if the County Council gives me a license to show a couple pictures Monday through Saturday, what’s the matter, what? Read the lease, read!”

  “I’ve been had,” sa
id Mr. Godbolt.

  “The lease, read,” said Sam Yudenow.

  “I’ll consult my solicitor, you swindler!”

  “Consult your solicitor, but you can’t consult me with your ‘swindlers.’ Read your lease; the lease, read.”

  So Mr. Godbolt went to see his solicitor in Edmonton, and they went over the lease clause by clause. It appeared that while the Said Samuel Yudenow had agreed not to conduct a Clay Pipe Burning Factory, a Brothel, a Tannery, a Soap Boiling Factory, a Public Slaughter House, or a Glue Boiling Factory on the Said Premises in the High Street—and much Fowlers End would have cared if he had conducted the whole lot singly or collectively—there was nothing in the lease about properly licensed places of public entertainment. The pebbled skin of Mr. Godbolt changed color, and his adhesive hands contracted, but he said nothing. Where a lion makes his kill and eats his fill, there must be pickings. A cinema must attract crowds. Where there are crowds there is a need for tobacco to smoke, sweets to suck, and tea to drink. Scuttling home, Mr. Godbolt conceived the idea of a cafe next door to Yudenow’s cinema, the only other place of this kind being a hut near the end of the tram line where stewed tea and mysterious pies were sold to tram drivers, punch-drunk with the jolting and deafened with the clangor of the run between there and Ponders End. Mr. Godbolt had in mind a place with tables and chairs for the patrons of Yudenow’s cinema. So he went to Jack Gutter, the Fowlers End butcher, and said, “Now those empty premises of yours, Mr. Gutter, just by the old church. Now what would you call a rental for them there little premises, Mr. Gutter, may I ask?”