Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Half-aware of the story, I had imagined something along the lines of the Collyer Brothers, the reclusive hoarders from Brooklyn who died horribly amid tons of their own debris. (The room in which I am writing this is held by some to be un hommage to the Collyers.) But absolutely not. No. 7 is a shrine to order: a house unused to visitors that has been readied for important ones. Perhaps William Straw had been preparing for us all along.

  The Straws were not recluses either. Walter was said to go dancing. William was involved in church and civic groups. They went to the theatre and the Scarborough Cricket Festival. Much, though, remains mysterious. Evidently, William was a non-combatant in the battle of the sexes that so preoccupies most of humanity.

  But there is something in his life – quiet, self-contained, in touch with the past, purposeful to the point of bloody-mindedness – that seems to contain the very essence of Nottinghamshire.

  October 2012/February 2013

  25. That nice couple at no. 45

  MIDDLESEX

  One of the great joys of writing this book is setting off on a new adventure, armed with an old guidebook to see the delights that remain. Today’s text is Highwayman’s Heath by Gordon S. Maxwell (1935):

  Turn down from the Bath Road by the Three Magpies, and you will come upon a road as rural as anywhere in England. It is not, perhaps, scenically wonderful, but for detachment from London, or any urban interests, it would be hard to find its equal; there is a calmness and serenity about it that is soothing in a mad rushing world.

  He promises further rustic pleasures ahead: a hamlet with a pub, the Harrow; two ‘fine old farms’, one of them reminiscent of ‘one of those delightful old farmsteads met with in the Weald of Kent’; and some cottages ‘which might be in the heart of Devonshire for their antiquity, their picturesqueness and lonely situation’. Maxwell proves this with a picture showing the half-timbering and lovely, curving thatch.

  The Three Magpies is still there, and the road, Nene Road. You pass a little upturned-cannon memorial to William Roy, the pioneer of triangulation and forefather of the Ordnance Survey. And then the open space stretches in front of you. However, the walk is now necessarily a brief one: there have been one or two small changes. A high fence bars the way, topped by razor wire and adorned with signs uttering blood-curdling threats under the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990.

  The original hamlet was demolished in 1944, when public inquiries on planning matters were out of fashion. The place has since become rather famous. It was originally known as Heath Row, but it has lost the space. Which is a metaphor for the whole of Middlesex.

  Heath Row was a row of houses amid the crops of Hounslow Heath. Its fate was extreme but not untypical. I could have been following Our Lanes and Meadowpaths: Rambles in Rural Middlesex by H. J. Foley (1887): ‘How luxuriant is the wood on every hand! … And yet could pasture be richer, or could any meadows be more full of beauty than these?’ He was writing about Mill Hill.

  ‘Notice,’ he went on, ‘how the surface of the meadows reflects the varying moods of the sky.’ By now he was in Edgware. ‘Lovers of rural nooks and corners can hardly do better than pay a visit to Kingsbury,’ Foley advised.

  And then: ‘We come to the gates of Wembley Park, with an ivy-grown and thatch-covered lodge guarding the entrance … 250 acres, beautifully wooded.’ Towards the centre of London and ‘what can be more peaceful and secluded than … Neasden? … Little altered or disturbed, consisting chiefly of a few scattered cottages with a fair sprinkling of good old houses planted in large grounds’.

  As late as 1951 Norman Brett-James, in Middlesex, commended the ‘completely rural surroundings’ of Scratch Wood, some time before it became a motorway service station.

  So it goes round here. The land of the Middle Saxons was first mentioned in AD 703 and officially abolished in 1965. It is not uncommon in south-east England to have one’s life bedevilled by aggressive, noisy neighbours with no respect for your boundaries. Such problems only rarely end in murder. Middlesex happened to be next door to the most raucous, most expansionist place in Britain and was subject to an endless campaign of suffocation that lasted nearly a millennium, followed by a comparatively rapid process of dismemberment lasting less than a century.

  The thirteenth-century antiquarian Matthew Paris said the woods of Middlesex were almost impenetrable and ‘infested by outlaws and beasts’. But by 1709 the county was being described as ‘but the suburbs at large of London, replenished with the retiring houses of the gentry and citizens thereof’ (although Hounslow Heath remained very wild, because it was an infamous hunting ground of highwaymen, regarded as both outlaws and beasts). William Cobbett famously wrote in 1822 that ‘All Middlesex is ugly’. A decade later Lord Macaulay, just as famously, wrote that ‘an acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia’, which in terms of what happened to property prices was a much shrewder comment.

  Middlesex at that time was a far grander place than it subsequently became. The city of London was just that: the City of London. Everything in what we now consider London north of the Thames and west of the City was part of Middlesex: Charing Cross, Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the lot. Russell Grant, entertainer, astrologist and Middlesex partisan, still contends – from his thirteenth-floor flat in Soho – that he lives in Middlesex, with fine views of Surrey and Essex. The Boat Race crews still toss for the choice between ‘the Middlesex station’ and ‘the Surrey station’ before racing from Putney to Mortlake, and in the early days that was the undeniable truth. But even then Middlesex was the second-smallest county, more compact than Huntingdonshire, ahead only of Rutland.

  In 1889 London itself acquired its own county council. Its neighbour lost a chunk of its already paltry territory and much of its population; Middlesex County Cricket Club, based at Lord’s, no longer played in administrative Middlesex. And when a new Guildhall was built in 1913, the site chosen was not in the county town, Brentford, but in Parliament Square, opposite the Commons. Pevsner called the building ‘art nouveau Gothic’. It looks to me more like the parliament of Ruritania.

  The Guildhall was some way away from its own dominion, which was now a croissant-shaped thing stretching from Shepperton and Staines in the south-west to the distant north-eastern habitations of Tottenham, Edmonton and Enfield. Post-1889 Middlesex commanded the river from just west of Hammersmith, so the Boat Race stations remained half-right. Much of the redrawn county was still at least semi-rural, complete with the undulating pastureland of Mill Hill.

  By the 1960s it was not. Administrative logic was in fashion, and the patchwork of councils that governed the areas within the supposed green belt was deemed unfit for purpose: six county councils, seventy-three boroughs and county boroughs, twenty-eight urban districts, three rural districts, six parishes and the City of London were all considered ripe for abolition. To the Conservative government, the fact that Labour had controlled the London County Council undisturbed for twenty-six years was even more germane. The City escaped change; nothing else did.

  And so in 1965 Middlesex, aged at least 1,262, quietly expired. Its body parts were redistributed, mostly to the new Greater London Council, but with a small bone (Potters Bar) thrown to Hertfordshire and some larger ones to Surrey, which was allowed to extend north of the Thames as small compensation for the chunks it was itself obliged to disgorge to the new monster.

  In contrast to the changes that would occur outside London nine years later, postal Middlesex – which did not cover all the old county – was allowed to survive. The cricket club also lived on, but the county’s second most famous institution, the Middlesex Regiment, was amalgamated out of existence less than two years later. It had grown out of the old 57th Regiment of Foot, which, during the notably bloody Battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War, had been instructed by its severely wounded commander Colonel Inglis, ‘Die hard, 57th! Die hard!’ He obeyed his own command, living on for another twenty-four years, until 1835, and the regiment became known
as the Diehards. Middlesex, however, passed away with barely a murmur. The name is probably best known now as an American novel about a hermaphrodite.

  The Middlesex Guildhall had an afterlife as a Crown Court before, in 2009, becoming the site of Britain’s newly created Supreme Court. At the back of Court 3 there hangs one of the county’s old treasures, the ornately framed Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait dating from 1762 of the Earl (later 1st Duke) of Northumberland, Hugh Percy, who later became – in the geographically flexible manner of these characters – Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex.

  Scattered about this room, and elsewhere in the building, are various remnants of the deceased county, including the foundation stone, complete with county crest of a crown and three swords (‘three Seaxes fessewise’, to be more precise). Court 3’s main purpose is to be the centre of the Supreme Court’s export trade, in which the judges sit as a committee of the Privy Council and dispense justice to distant corners of the Commonwealth. In that capacity, it sometimes has to hear appeals from prisoners who have been sentenced to death. The collection of Middlesex memorabilia is not the room’s only source of grim nostalgia.

  In 1973 John Betjeman recorded the best-loved of all BBC documentaries: his prose-poem ‘Metro-land’, a journey on the Metropolitan Line’s route out of Baker Street through Middlesex towards Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. The brilliant wheeze of the then-independent Metropolitan Railway was that, like the American railroads, its owners understood that the way to make money was to build the lines and the communities together. Betjeman’s genius was to be completely non-judgemental. There is, to be sure, an elegiac undertone. But the programme was made without even the hint of an intellectual sneer about suburban pretensions.

  And thus, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, London trampled over Middlesex. Not mindlessly or brutishly: much of Metroland was built in the same agreeable style that lay behind Letchworth. And it was probably true that, as the ditty went,

  Hearts are light, eyes are brighter

  In Metroland, Metroland.

  I don’t suppose my Uncle Mendel promised Auntie Regina a rose garden in 1946 when they paid a few hundred quid to buy 48 Trevelyan Crescent, Kenton (alight at Preston Road – as I did, many times). He wasn’t that sort. But she got one, both at the front and, more substantially, at the back. By then Kenton was no longer what one old-time writer had called ‘a dream little hamlet’. But it was always their dream little home: leaded lights; herringbone-patterned brickwork; an arched porch.

  These were never, in John Major’s striking phrase, ‘invincible green suburbs’, except in terms of their Conservative majorities. It was the houses that were invincible. Metroland exacerbated the inclination of the English to be self-contained, a bit fearful, home-birdy and dull. The suburbs were never without neighbourliness: Auntie Regina became dependent on their kindness towards the end of her fifty-three years as wife, mother and widow at no. 48. But in Middlesex neighbours could never be taken for granted. No one in Metroland ever really knows what goes on behind the other houses’ leaded lights and net curtains. And not far from Trevelyan Crescent was the most startlingly secret home of them all, the epitome of suburban improbability. The address was 45 Cranley Drive, Ruislip.

  This was the home of a Canadian couple, Peter Kroger, an antiquarian bookseller, and his wife, Helen. In early 1961 police knocked on the door and were invited in; Detective Superintendent George Smith of Special Branch asked politely if the Krogers could tell them ‘the name and address of the gentleman who comes and stays with you each weekend’. ‘Well,’ said Mr K. after a pause to stare at his wife, ‘we have lots of friends.’

  Having failed to elicit any mention of the friend that interested him, the Superintendent decided to arrest the Krogers. Mrs K. asked if, before they went, she might stoke the boiler. Yes, said the Superintendent, if I can see what’s in your handbag. It turned out to contain a six-page handwritten letter in Russian and a piece of glass with three embedded microdots, advanced spying technology of the era. Very easy to hide in antiquarian books. Around the house were various items not normally found in Ruislip, even at that time of growing prosperity and modernity when the houses of Metroland were becoming full of gadgets.

  The cigarette lighter on the table had an unscrewable base containing secret codes; the radiogram had a special band for receiving high-frequency broadcasts; the talcum powder container in the bathroom had a secret compartment with a miniature telescope; and under a trapdoor in the kitchen, guarded by rubble and a concrete slab, was a shopping bag holding a metal box with a wireless transmitter.

  ‘That wireless transmitter,’ the Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, later revealed in court, ‘has no maker’s name on it, is not of commercial design, and is fitted with a non-British plug to fit into the house mains and fitted with an earpiece and no loudspeaker … it had an aerial and earth and was suitable for transmission … [and here I like to imagine a theatrical pause] TO MOSCOW.’

  It is hard to explain at this distance just how thrilling and chilling this was in 1961. About half the British population had lived through not one world war but two. A nuclear Third World War with the Soviet Union was considered a possibility, bordering on a probability. Less than two years later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it almost happened. And here was a link to the very heart of darkness. In Ruislip.

  Whenever mystery is unmasked in a suburban English home, it is customary for the neighbours to say, ‘Well, they kept themselves to themselves.’ But this was not true of the Krogers. Though he undoubtedly smuggled out messages in his antiquarian books, Peter Kroger was also a well-regarded and knowledgeable dealer. They gave famous parties, at which the lighter and the radiogram were doubtless well used for their obvious purpose. Helen, childless herself, was a kind of universal aunt, dishing out presents to the neighbourhood children. She was particularly nice to Winifred Spooner’s baby two doors away at no. 41. Mrs Spooner is now the last of the old neighbours left. ‘I always used to joke with my eldest that he was the only baby who had had his tummy tickled by a spy.’ The Krogers were hiding all right, but hiding in plain sight.

  It was their ordinariness and niceness that made such an impact, not least on a nine-year-old with an overheated imagination like me. Could I trust anyone?. What did my dad really do when he went off ‘fishing’? Why was my mum always so vague on details? (It must have made an even bigger impression on Manningham-Buller’s daughter, Eliza: she became head of MI5.)

  And Ruislip! The Krogers could have chosen – probably did choose – the suburb for its English blandness. They certainly chose the house carefully. It was not a typical semi, like 48 Trevelyan Crescent. It was not a house at all, but what the press called ‘a chalet-bungalow’ at the end of a cul-de-sac. The current owner, John Paulo, an engineer from Liverpool, kindly let me in for a snoop. He’s quite used to it: there was another writer lurking in the street on my first visit; the Paulos have had actors popping round before productions of plays on the subject, like Hugh Whitemore’s Pack of Lies; they once had half a dozen Chinese tourists outside taking photos – ‘They were very polite. They knocked on the door and asked if it was OK.’

  The Paulos have done the place up, very nicely actually, turning the loft into a genuine top floor. They have kept the trapdoor that led to the transmitter, but moved it. It’s a sort of conversation piece. And, as I was shown round, slowly I began to realise the thought processes behind the Krogers’ choice. There is no house directly opposite; the bungalow is set back so the garden is not overlooked; and there was a field – now a football pitch – behind. A Metroland gem for anyone wanting privacy. What’s more, the streets were built with a network of alleys, now blocked off to avoid annoyance by kids. But in the Krogers’ time, had they sensed danger, they could have nipped over the fence at the back unobserved and had dozens of possible escape routes.

  But they didn’t sense danger despite being very skilful operators. The only flaw in their pl
an was that their contact in the Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland – then a major concern for the Soviet Union – started spraying his cash around. The trail led by a devious route to Cranley Drive. The police wanted to watch the Krogers, but the only way to do that was from the house that was sort of over the road, though actually on Courtfield Gardens. There they lurked behind the little side window, after pleading with the Search family, who lived there, to put their patriotic duty ahead of loyalty to their charming neighbours.

  The Krogers were really Morris and Lona Cohen, two American old-style pre-war communists, idealists who had never recanted, and escaped the country after being implicated in the Los Alamos spy case. They had the second-last laugh. Sentenced to twenty-five and twenty years’ jail, they were swapped for a British agent after serving eight. They returned to the East in glory and were awarded the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of Friendship of Nations, and posthumously were depicted on post-communist Russian stamps. However, before they died in the 1990s, they had to live most of their days in Poland and Russia, in the turgid empire ruled by Leonid Brezhnev, and when interviewed for a TV documentary in 1991, they sounded somewhat wistful.