London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  Indeed, any analysis of London Belongs to Me soon leads to screen comparisons, not just because of the all‐star cast that filled Sidney Gilliat’s 1948 film version (too much was needlessly changed and there wasn’t enough time to bring out the ambition of the novel despite the presence of Richard Attenborough and Alastair Sim), but because of the related Ealing comedies, particularly The Ladykillers, in which Alec Guinness’s ‘Professor’ Marcus is Mr Squales come to life, arriving at Mrs Wilberforce’s door with a menacing ‘You have rooms to let’ straight out of Mr Squales’ opening gambit to Mrs Vizzard in London Belongs To Me: ‘You have a room to let?’

  Just as film historians now explain that the five gang members in The Ladykillers were meant to represent different strains of the labour movement and different members of Clement Attlee’s 1940s government, so No. 10 Dulcimer Street is surely a populist No. 10 Downing Street, its Palace of Westminster the South London Parliament, a powerless people’s debating forum with its full panoply of elevated ministers as ineffectual in the face of the impending hostilities as the real life House of Commons a mile north‐west was initially, its residents embodying certain strains of the British psyche at its most vulnerable and threatened, and certain characteristics of those in positions of power and influence at the time. Mrs Vizzard, superficially in charge but hapless in the face of the imminent drama, is prime minister Neville Chamberlain; Mr Josser, bumbling, kindly but ineffectual, superannuated, but with a surprising spark, is Sir Samuel Hoare, 1930s foreign secretary, whom Churchill sent far from London in 1940 at around the same time that the Jossers leave Kennington for the countryside; Uncle Henry, treasurer of the South London Parliament, exudes a chilly manner reminiscent of the then Chancellor, Sir John Simon; and Mr Squales, the strange outsider who assumes control, often exhibits many Churchillian tendencies. (Churchill was the guest of honour at the film premiere at the Leicester Square Theatre in 1948.) And then there are the more philosophical comparisons. Mrs Vizzard is the embodiment of unbridled capitalism, replete with all its vices: lust, greed, conceit, paranoia; Uncle Henry is the standard bearer of socialism with all its vagaries and inconsistencies, and Percy Boon with his lack of moral boundaries and flippant, remorseless, murderous tendencies, fits in perfectly as a metaphor for fascism.

  Perhaps Norman Collins should have waited until the end of the war before starting work on London Belongs to Me. He could then have provided us with an even more sprawling work not only covering the entire period of hostilities, but covering more of London. Strangely this is a London in which the Tube barely registers – journeys are made mostly on bus and tram – in which the characters exhibit only the slightest interest in things that would have occupied most Londoners’ minds and time: football, cricket, the greyhounds, the music hall.

  Today London Belongs to Me is mostly forgotten, a cult classic, rather than a staple on the must‐read list of well‐thumbed London books, although it was introduced to a new generation by retro chic pop group St Etienne with their 1991 track of the same title. London Belongs to Me is a B‐novel, epic but undemanding. It cannot be ranked alongside Of Human Bondage or 1984 as a complex, sophisticated novel of the capital, but it does take its place near the top of a league of London lite: warm, rich, metropolitan mini‐masterpieces like Alexander Baron’s King Dido and Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City. London Belongs to Me offers no overriding philosophy or message. There is no slick ending gathering all the loose strands together. It exists simply as soap opera, allowing us to watch its many characters move through two years of their lives, from the dismal days leading to war through to the blacked‐out dark days of the Blitz. No one really learns how their place in life works. No one gains much wisdom or wealth. Except the reader.

  Ed Glinert, 2008

  PREFACE

  Getting to Know the Place

  There may be other cities that are older.1 But not many. And there may be one across the Atlantic that is larger. But not much.

  In fact, no matter how you look at it, London comes pretty high in the respectable upper order of things. It’s got a past as well as a present; and it knows it. And this is odd. Because considering its age it’s had a remarkably quiet history, London. Nothing very spectacular. Nothing exceptionally heroic. Not until 1940, that is. Except for the Great Fire and the Black Death and the execution of a King not very much has ever happened there. It has just gone on prosperously and independently through the centuries – wattle one century, timber the next, then brick, then stone, then brick again, then concrete. Building new foundations on old ruins. And sprawling out across the fields when there haven’t been enough ruins to go round.

  In the result it’s been growing‐up as well as growing. And it must be about mature by now. Even a bit past its prime, perhaps. Beginning to go back on itself, as it were. May be. But to see the people, you wouldn’t think so.

  Every city has its something. Rome has St Peter’s. Peking has its Summer Palace. Moscow has the Kremlin. In Madrid there’s the Prado. In New York there’s the Empire State. Constantinople has St Sophia. Cairo has Shepheard’s. Paris has got the Eiffel Tower. Sydney has a bridge. Naples is content with its bay. Cape Town has Table Mountain. Benares is famous for its burning ghats. Pisa has a Leaning Tower. Toledo has a bull‐ring. Stockholm has a Town Hall. Vancouver has a view. But London… London … What is it that London’s got?

  Well, there’s St Paul’s Cathedral. But St Peter’s could put it into its pocket. There’s Westminster Abbey. But there are Abbeys everywhere; they’re dotted all over Europe. There’s the Tower. Admittedly, the dungeons are convincing, but as a castle it’s nothing. Not beside Edinburgh or Caernarvon. Even Tower Hill isn’t really a hill: it’s only an incline. Then there are the Houses of Parliament and the Law Courts. But they’re merely so much Victorian Gothic – all turrets and arches and railings and things. There’s Buckingham Palace. But that’s too new; it hasn’t toned in yet. It’s just been planted there – a big flat‐fronted palace with a made road leading up to it. No, it’s the smaller, older palace of St James’s, just round the corner, with its grimy red brick and low windows and little open courtyards that is nearer the real thing. Is the real thing in fact. It’s a positively shabby little palace, St James’s. And it’s got London written all over it. And St James’s Palace – brick and soot and age – is written all over London.

  Yes, that’s London. Mile upon mile of little houses, most of them as shabby as St James’s. If you start walking westwards in the early morning from somewhere down in Wapping or the Isle of Dogs by evening you will still be on the march, still in the midst of shabby little houses – only somewhere over by Hammersmith by then.

  That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of fine big houses as well. Take Mayfair. But even Mayfair is distinctly Londonish too, when you come to look at it. The mansions are all squeezed up there side by side, and in consequence they are rather poky little mansions, most of them; though the sheer marvel of the address – Mayfair W. 1. – excuses any overcrowding. Not that Mayfair is all mansions or anything like it. It’s Shepherd’s Market, that hamlet of dark shops and crooked alleyways, rather than Bruton Street or Grosvenor Square, that makes Mayfair.

  And what’s more it’s Covent Garden Market and Smithfield Market and Billingsgate Fish Market and the Caledonian Market and Peckham Market rather than Shepherd’s Market – which isn’t a real market anyway – that makes London. They are a part of the people, these markets. And London is the people’s city. That is why Petticoat Lane is more London than Park Lane. And that is why London is the Mile End Road and the Walworth Road and the Lambeth Road and the Elephant and Castle. Strange, isn’t it, how much of the real London still lies south of the river, 2 just as it did in Shakespeare’s day, and in Chaucer’s day before him? It is as though across the Thames – in London’s Deep South – times and manners haven’t changed so much as in the Parliamentary North.

  But London is more than a collection of streets and markets. It’s Wre
n Churches and A.B.C. tea‐shops. It’s Burlington Arcade and the Temple. It’s the Athenæum and the Adelphi Arches. It’s Kennington gasometer and the Zoo. It’s the iron bridge at Charing Cross and the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus. It’s the Serpentine and Moss Bros. It’s Paddington Recreation Ground, and the Nelson Column. It’s Big Ben and the Horse Guards. It’s the National Gallery and Pimm’s. It’s the Victoria Palace and Ludgate Hill. It’s the second‐hand shops and the undertakers and the cinemas and the obscure back‐street chapels. It’s the Waif‐and‐Stray Societies and the fortune‐tellers and the pub on the corner and the trams. That’s London.

  And the people. They’re London, too. They’re the same Londoners that they have always been, except that from time to time the proportion of refugees has altered a little. At one moment the doubtful‐looking newcomers are the Huguenots. At another the Jews and it is the Huguenots who are the Londoners wondering whatever London is coming to. They’re all Londoners – the French and the Italians in Soho, the Chinese in Limehouse, the Scotsmen in Muswell Hill and the Irish round the Docks. And the only way in which modern Londoners differ from the Londoners who have lived there before them is that all the Londoners don’t live in London any more. They simply work there. By 8 p.m. the City is a desert. Round about six o’clock the trouble starts: the deserters leave. Everyone begins shoving and pushing to get out of the metropolis into the estates and suburbs and garden cities. There they sleep, these demi‐Londoners, in their little Tudor dolls’ houses until next morning when they emerge, refreshed ready to play at being real Londoners again.

  Perhaps it is simply the size of London that makes its inhabitants seem somehow smaller. Dolls’ houses appear to be the right dwelling places for these thousands, these tens of thousands, these hundreds of thousands, these half‐urban hordes. Stand on the bridge at Liverpool Street Station at a quarter‐to‐nine in the morning and you see the model trains drawing in beneath you one after another, and swarms of toy‐passengers emptying themselves on to the platform to go stumping up to the barrier – toy‐directors, toy‐clerks, toy‐typists, all jerking along to spend the day in toy‐town, earning paper‐money to keep their dolls’ houses going.

  Of course, there are still plenty of the other kind, too. 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 trying to get on in the world, some looking forward to a pension, some getting drunk, some losing their jobs, some dying, and some holding up the new baby.

  This book is about a few of them.

  BOOK ONE

  An Old‐Fashioned Christmas

  Chapter I

  1

  It was four‐thirty p.m. Four‐thirty on Friday, the 23rd of December, 1938.

  They hadn’t done very much work in the office that afternoon because in their various ways they had all been getting ready to celebrate. Bethlehem now brooded encouragingly over London. And Mr Battlebury in his enormous greatcoat which looked as though it were lined with bearskin at least, had gone off importantly in a taxi at ten minutes to one, and had not got back until after three. In the interval he had visited Fortnum’s in Piccadilly where he had bought a large box of crystallised fruit not because he, or anyone else in his family, particularly liked crystallised fruit but because it had been there on the counter and he was in the mood for buying things. After that he had visited the Goldsmiths’ and Silversmiths’ Company in Regent Street where he had bought Mrs Battlebury a pair of small diamond clips to go with the crystallised fruit. And making his way through the crowds towards Oxford Circus – it seemed, as it always did on Christmas Eve, that the whole idea of Christmas had taken most people entirely by surprise, and they were now shopping frantically in an effort to catch up with it, he had gone into Hamleys to buy a drawing‐room conjuring‐set that was to convert Robert Battlebury, Junior, into an astonishingly adept but rather boring amateur Maskelyne for a few weeks – after which the magic egg‐cups and disappearing handkerchiefs would be put away for ever, and forgotten.

  Finally, Mr Battlebury had dropped into Scott’s for a dozen six‐andsixpenny oysters and had ordered a bottle of Hock to go with them – which is why he arrived back in Creek Lane, E.C.2., carrying his gaily tied‐up parcels, a lot later and a good deal more genial than he generally arrived.

  Mr Battlebury’s staff had not gone so far afield. The typists had rushed off to the neighbouring Lyonses and Express Dairies and Kardomahs and Cosee Cafés (two flights up and mind the old oak beam), and had stuffed themselves with slices of rich dark pudding or hot flaky mince pies. The male staff, of course, had made for the pubs. There, under festoons of paper flowers and silver bells cut out of cardboard, they had eaten even larger slices of pudding, with a mince pie on the side as well, and had washed it all down with sixpenny beer and even, because it was Christmas, eightpenny whiskies‐and‐sodas and glasses of ninepenny sherry and sevenpenny port.

  By the time they got back to their desks they were most of them comfortably mellowed and a little sleepy as well. And even then, they didn’t honestly sit down to work off the effects as they would have done if Mr Battlebury hadn’t still been out of the office. Someone had been given a bottle of Happy Days, a ready‐mixed, emerald coloured cocktail in a fancy frosted bottle. The stuff was unstoppered with much giggling and they all – from young Harold, who stamped the letters, to the elderly Miss Unsett, who checked the pro‐formas – had a sip out of their office cups.

  The girls had most of them already exchanged Christmas cards. There was no obvious reason why they should have done so. They had spent the whole of the previous twelve months sharing the same office, and drinking tea together at eleven o’clock every morning and 3.30 every afternoon, and giving each other pieces of chocolate and aspirins. But for the past two or three days they had been behaving as though they had been parted for years. They had been distributing views of snow‐bound coaches and lighted taverns and children tobogganing, and robins and boys bearing holly and old bellmen crying ‘Oyez,’ as though Noel and the 18th century were the same thing, and life depended on celebrating both.

  The printed words inside the cards were as queer as the pictures. They all supposed a state of infatuation and a kind of agonised separation. There was a let‐us‐join‐hearts‐even‐if‐we‐can’t‐so‐much‐as‐touch‐hands note about the lot of them. And the less they cost, the more emphatic they became. For a penny you got a real heart‐cry, with a quite decent quality envelope thrown in. All these cards were now ranged along the tops of the filing‐cabinets and bookcases as tokens of popularity and good‐fellowship.

  Usually, everyone went off round about this time on Christmas Eve. But to‐night they were all stopping on for the presentation. It was due to take place in the Drawing Office at five o’clock. Mr Battlebury had said that he would be there; and that, of course, meant that everybody else had to be there as well.

  In any case, it was going to be quite a big do. The collection had been made during the previous week. They had got together four pounds fifteen shillings between the lot of them. And with it they had bought a handsome clock, a mammoth marble affair with an eight‐day movement. There was a pendulum that could be seen through a sunken glass peephole, and a striker that set up a low pulsating booong at the hours. It was an imposing substantial sort of clock, the kind of thing which looked as though it actually manufactured Time.

  Everything was ready, so at five to five all the girls – except for Miss Unsett who was still busy collating her pro‐formas like a scholar – trooped up to the Drawing Office. There was some pushing on the stairs and more giggling until they came to the frosted glass door marked Battlebury & Sons, Power Specialists, Private. Enquire Below and then they all sobered down a bit. The Drawing Office was a large bleak room with charts and diagrams on the walls, and it did not encourage conviviality. There were no Christmas cards there, not even a new calendar. The green‐shaded lights low down ov
er the tables cast a dim aqueous glow as though the meeting were taking place at the bottom of an aquarium. The only concession to the season was a spray of rather faded mistletoe hanging from one of the beams. The Drawing Office humorist had put it there. But it was not very festive.

  The draughtsmen were mostly standing about smoking. They were in their shirt‐sleeves as draughtsmen always are – as a race of men they do not appear to have a full suit of clothes among the lot of them – and the only sign of jollity was the cigar that the chief draughtsman, Mr Bewley, had just lit. It was one of a box of fifty that Mr Battlebury had given to him. Every year it was the same. Mr Bewley industriously smoked a cigar a day until the box was used up. And then, sometime in early March, he went back to his pipe and felt better.

  The girls had all managed to find themselves a chair – there was an empty place carefully being kept for Miss Unsett right under the mistletoe – when the door at the end opened and the Counting House staff filed in. They were a different breed of heroes from the draughtsmen. It was not only the devil‐may‐care shirt‐sleeves that segregated the draughtsmen; there was something of the artist – the untidy collar, the puckered eye, the wisp of hair – about them as well. The book‐keepers, on the other hand, were all smooth, precise little men wearing stiff collars and horn‐rimmed spectacles and hair that was smoothed down like sleek fur. Unlike the draughtsmen, they didn’t take off their coats when they were working and, in consequence, the most of them had very shiny elbows and slightly frayed cuffs. On the whole the draughtsmen looked as if they might provide the livelier company.