PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
London Belongs to Me
Norman Collins, born in 1907 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, was always a working writer. While producing early novels such as Penang Appointment (1934), The Three Friends (1935) and Trinity Town (1936) he was also deputy chairman of the publishers Gollancz, the left‐wing imprint best known for George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and the Left Book Club series. By 1941 Collins could no longer tolerate owner Victor Gollancz’s inability to delegate and he left for the BBC. He joined at the lower levels as talks assistant but was promoted and by the end of the war was director of Overseas Service. From 1945–47, soon after London Belongs to Me was published, Collins was in charge of BBC radio’s Light Programme, during which time he created the first daily radio serial, Dick Barton, a private investigator and sometime special agent who appeared in 711 episodes between 1946 and 1951.
In November 1947, Collins took over as controller of television. At that time the new medium was still in the shadow of radio and there were only 31,000 licences in the country. Yet at the end of his stint three years later there were 656,000. After Collins left in October 1950 he helped form a rival group, the Independent Television Authority, which later that decade broke the BBC’s monopoly. Collins became deputy chairman of the new independent authority, Associated Television (ATV), and in the 1960s was a director of the news network ITN.
In all, Norman Collins wrote sixteen novels and two plays. The Dictionary of National Biography described him as ‘sociable… on the political committee of the Carlton [rather than the South London Parliament].’
Ed Glinert read Classical Hebrew at Manchester University and in 1983 founded the city’s listings magazine, City Life, which he edited until 1989. The following decade he was local government correspondent for Private Eye magazine. He has since written a variety of books, including The London Compendium and East End Chronicles, both for Penguin, as well as editing the Sherlock Holmes stories and the Gilbert & Sullivan libretti for Penguin Classics.
NORMAN COLLINS
London Belongs to Me
With an Introduction by Ed Glinert
‘London, thou art the flower of cities all.’
WILLIAM DUNBAR
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 1945
Published with an Introduction in Penguin Classics 2008
Introduction copyright © Ed Glinert, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the introducer has been asserted
All the characters in this novel are imaginary. The London of the title is real enough – that’s LONDON all right. But Dulcimer Street and the lives of the people in it, like the other lives which cross with theirs, are all fictitious. And so are the various Funlands, cafés, Spiritualist Societies, agencies, hospitals and institutions, with which the story deals.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re‐sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-141-19124-9
Contents
INTRODUCTION
PREFACE
Getting to Know the Place
BOOK ONE
An Old‐Fashioned Christmas
BOOK TWO
The Crime on the Common
BOOK THREE
Love in a Basement
BOOK FOUR
Rex v. Percy Boon
BOOK FIVE
Dissolution in Dulcimer Street
BOOK SIX
The Cottage in the Country
BOOK SEVEN
London Lights the Clouds Up
POSTSCRIPT
Having a Last Look Round
NOTES
Introduction
New readers should be aware that the Introduction makes some details of the plot explicit.
London Belongs to Me is the capital’s great vernacular novel. Populist and proletarian, a generation before Sillitoe and Barstow, it is a work born from the living, beating heart of one of the world’s most‐used literary settings. Here is a novel packed with memorable period detail, a world of séances, bizarre political societies, smoky Mayfair nightclubs awaiting the next police raid, Nazi spies and stifling petty bourgeois gentility.
London Belongs to Me is not a complex novel. It features no struggle with fundamental human truths, no attempt to grapple with vital social or political questions. It is simply entertainment, a joyous romp through a slice of London life, unashamedly romantic and unforgettably humorous, written as if it had appeared in instalments like a Dickens epic. (Where Our Mutual Friend, written a hundred years earlier, begins with a body being fished out of the river, London Belongs to Me ends in similar fashion.)
Norman Collins does not rank as one of the great literary figures of the period. He is no rival to Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh. It would not be disrespectful to call him a popular novelist, a pulp novelist, concerned more with entertainment than enlightenment. Before London Belongs to Me Collins was enjoying growing popularity with titles like Penang Appointment (1934), The Three Friends (1935) and Trinity Town (1936) but London Belongs to Me (1945) was his tour de force and it sold 884,000 copies.
How Collins found time to write so lengthy a book remains a mystery, for while working on London Belongs to Me he was also the BBC’s Director of Overseas Service. He had previously been literary editor of the Daily News, the paper Charles Dickens edited, and deputy chairman of the left‐wing publishers Gollancz around the same time that George Orwell was providing the Covent Garden‐based outfit with Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.
Early in the war, Collins joined the BBC as talks assistant, a role about as lowly and unmemorable as that of Orwell (who spent that period broadcasting propaganda from a basement office near Oxford Circus to an audience in the Far East that may have reached single figures). Unlike Orwell, Collins soon began to show a flair for corporation life – the endless memos and mindless meetings, the stifling censorship, the canteen serving Victory Stew washed down with Victory Coffee; the farce, frustrations and fastidiousness that came from working in so formidable an institution. Collins rose through the hierarchy at Broadcasting House to take charge of the Light Programme and, from November 1947, television, at a time when radio was considerably more important. (Interestingly, there is hardly any mention of the new medium in the novel.)
Col
lins animates London Belongs to Me with deft deadpan wit, often through the briefest strokes, the action veering between the local and metropolitan, the intimate and the public, through a series of barely connected, enticing vignettes. ‘What le Carré did for spies,’ claimed Adrian Maddox in Classic Cafes, a glossy 2002 homage to the vanishing world of working‐class, twentieth‐century London, ‘Collins does for shopgirls and nightwatchmen, accountants and publicans: real Londoners who sleep the night in London as well as work the day there. Real Londoners – some in love – some in debt, some committing murders, some adultery, some looking forward to a pension, some getting drunk, some trying to get on in the world.’
That world is the cusp of the Phoney Peace and the Phoney War, for the action begins on 23 December 1938 at exactly 4.30 p.m., as Collins makes clear, although there is no obvious political or social significance to that moment or date. The capital will soon crumble in the onslaught of the Blitz, and evil things are happening across Germany where Hitler has annexed the Sudetenland, the Nazis have trashed Jewish property on Kristallnacht, and slave labourers are constructing the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. Collins’s depiction of the soon to be ravaged landscape is far removed from George Orwell’s brutal version of impending war in the contemporaneous Coming Up for Air. Here there is no stoical resignation to man’s inalterable, impending doom but simply an examination of how a group of mostly working‐class Londoners deal with their everyday existence, the ephemeral and the enlarged, the important and the inconsequential, amid the incoming gloom.
The setting for London Belongs to Me is No. 10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, a lodging house broken up into apartments in what was then a mildly respectable inner London suburb, situated on the southeast bank of the river a mile in distance but a universe away in status from the seat of British power. Within are a broad range of loveable characters. There is Mr Josser, a ‘small, elderly man with a wisp of white hair that stood straight up like egrets’ feathers’. He is a clerk, one of the many thousands of derided but ultimately vital tiny cogs that kept the City’s wheels turning in those bureaucracy‐heavy days, a member of that most unromantic and menial of white‐collar workers whose very insipidity so inspired the Grossmiths’ The Diary of a Nobody. Or rather he was a clerk, for the book begins with his retirement from the office of Battlebury & Sons, Power Specialists in the City of London, and he is now staggering home with his gift for forty‐two years’ service – a clock, inevitably. Free of the burdens of work, he is now at a loss. He will miss the mundane and monotonous, the waiting in the rain for a tram, the daily grind, but also the reassurance of a warm undemanding workplace. He knows that life will now be easier but, despite a kindly wife, purposeless.
Mr Josser is at the centre of the micro‐London that permeates the novel. Solid, stolid, unambitious, reliable, he is the embodiment of the self‐possession and sobriety that Churchill turned to in the lean years of the war. He is not central to the action, because he doesn’t appear enough, but he is central to the novel’s raison d’être, which runs from his retirement, or ultimate lack of it, through to his inevitable and long‐expected departure to the countryside, where London no longer belongs to him.
Mr Josser’s return home to Kennington from his City workplace provides our introduction to 10 Dulcimer Street, and soon we are taking in a panorama of the other residents. Mr Puddy is about to tackle the first of several dreadful meals that dominate his existence. Connie, the failed actress and ageing nightclub cloakroom attendant, is sinking into the first of several lakes of mawkish tears as she contemplates her miserable, friendless existence. Kind‐hearted but desperate, she lives a small life of ersatz glamour through a tedious job in a glamorous setting. Elsewhere in 10 Dulcimer Street the delinquent young Percy Boon is absentmindedly stubbing out his cigarette in the butter dish. A simple youth, as fixed on secondhand thrills as Connie, in his case the fast cars/fast women American template, Percy soon descends into serious crime, committed as casually and unemotionally as in a US gangster film, which contrasts with the pre‐war English gentility that drives so much of the novel. Percy Boon’s crime provides London Belongs to Me with its main axis: the build‐up to the deed committed in a godless world of decaying, disappearing morals – a micro version of the mass inhuman nihilism emanating from Germany; the aftermath of the crime during which time Boon, still driven by hopelessly romantic dreams, appears impregnable; the inevitable arrest and arraignment; all these give London Belongs to Me a focus which Collins can return to at any time to allow his characters more dimensions.
In charge of 10 Dulcimer Street is the snobbish, widowed landlady, Mrs Vizzard, caught between the humiliation of letting rooms out to her social inferiors and her love of the rent they bring in. An ice maiden with strains of Miss Havisham, she thaws when she falls in love with the mysterious, romantic new tenant, Mr Squales, aka Enrico Qualito, soi‐disant professor of spiritualism. Is he really a brooding Italianate hero who has stepped out of the pages of a Giovanni Verga risorgimento novel, as he would like everyone to believe, or a phoney who would be more at home in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta? Collins places Squales in a series of superb comic scenes, particularly at an all‐Red Indian evening at Finsbury Park where as ‘Mocking Bear’ he is asked a series of vital questions by a ‘pale clergyman’, to each of which he returns what turns out to be the wrong answer.
‘Is there going to be war?’…
‘Naw.’
‘Will Hitler invade Poland?’
‘Naw.’…
‘Will Hitler die a violent death?’…
‘Yuh’…
When ‘Mocking Bear’ is forced into a corner about the date of Hitler’s impending doom he commits himself to 3 October 1940, a prediction that also turns out to be wrong. Pressed by his guests, Squales then descends into hopeless hyperbole. ‘Mocking Bear says peace in Pale Face Country… War clouds vanish like summer snow. Papooses play and squaws happy. Braves put away scalping‐knives and repair wigwam. Much pipe‐smoking. Bad eagle fly away with arrow in his breast.’
The book’s greatest force, however, is the underused Mr Puddy, a comic creation as cleverly outlined as a P. G. Wodehouse creation in a Psmith caper. Mr Puddy has ‘known better days’. He still dresses respectably but is hopelessly drifting from one dead‐end job to another, inevitably with less responsibility and a smaller pay packet. He inhabits a one‐dimensional universe where his sole concern is the content of his next unappetising meal. No gourmet and with no wish to sup with sophistication, Puddy takes a barely believable delight in his junk diet; anything as long as it’s tinned and cheap, which reaches its climax when he comes to stocking up in expectation of war. On the back of a postcard he makes his list:
6 tins condensed milk.
8 lbs. sugar.
3 packets Quaker Oats.
2 marmalade.
2 jam.
2 Bovril.
6 tins Salmon.
2 pineapple.
2 peaches.
3 lbs. rice.
1 tongue (Lazenby).
It would probably last him a week.
Puddy’s comic worth comes from his appalling adenoidal difficulties. Nasal sounds – the ‘m’ and the ‘n’ – are beyond him and instantly converted into plosives, so that ‘cannon fodder’ becomes ‘caddod fodder’ and a more complicated construction like ‘Nothing coming in’ is rendered ‘Dothing cubbing id’. When a slapstick scene in his flat results in Squales slipping on one of his beloved tins, Puddy is full of incomprehensible remorse and apology that helps create a scene of slapstick genius:
‘What the hell happened to me?’ he asked.
Mr Josser glanced at Mr Puddy.
Mr Puddy coughed.
‘You drod on a sabbod,’ he said.
‘On a what?’ Mr Squales exclaimed.
‘On a sabbod. A Sailor Slice.’…
Indeed, food, or rather a debased mid‐twentieth‐century and very English version of it, is one of the novel’s
many themes. The cartoon diet that so many Londoners followed until they were saved by paninis (sic) and chicken tikka masala, a diet dominated by locust beans and cod‐liver oil (with a dollop of Scott’s Emulsion), reoccurs with welcome regularity. ‘A cup of tea sweetened with glucose… the worst she’d ever had brought to her’, a ‘“Home‐Made Farm House Pork Pie” that should have been labelled “poison”’, bridge rolls and cress for the train, and, before a séance, an admission that the medium has not yet arrived followed by the vital query to a hungry punter: ‘Fish‐paste or sandwich‐spread?’
Here one important London Belongs to Me theme slips into another: spiritualism. Fascination for the afterlife was one of the great middle‐class fads of the early twentieth century, the pre‐war equivalent of house prices and global warming. Even the most sophisticated and intellectually advanced members of society succumbed. For instance Arthur Conan Doyle, towards the end of his life, devoted more time to the ‘Other Side’ than he did to Sherlock Holmes. In July 1930, six days after his death, the great author supposedly appeared at his own memorial service in front of 6,000 people at the Royal Albert Hall. Many said they saw him – well, a version of him – sent from beyond and sat in the chair provided, but there was no earthly proof that the late writer made it.
The dead permeate London Belongs to Me, but not tragically so. The spectres of the late husbands of the rich widows Mr Squales seduces shadow over the smooth philanderer; there is the ‘Blonde’ whose unfortunate demise takes Percy Boon out of his trashy world of snide looks and stolen cars; there is the passing of Uncle Henry, to the ultimate benefit of the Jossers; there is even, very briefly, a Mrs Puddy who must be looking down aghast at her husband’s refuelling, and there are all the phantoms who steadfastly refuse to come to life at the many séances. But let us not forget those who are alive; the extraordinarily memorable minor characters with their expertly contrived names: Veesey Blaize, the inconsequential lawyer; Otto Hapfel, the hapless Nazi later reincarnated televisually in the form of Herr Flick in the occasionally funny TV sitcom ’Allo ’Allo; Uncle Henry, the manic socialist greengrocer; Doreen, the selfish flatmate; the tarty Blonde as doomed as any Hitchcock heroine.
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