Finding Feet in the Smoke| Finsbury Park
SOME QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Finsbury Park at the end of the Fifties seems a slightly unlikely area for you to go and live in, particularly after the relative refinements of the inner western suburbs. What took you there?
Simply that someone John Thompson had known was vacating a bedsitter there and we though it would suit us, getting us away from the Civil Service hostel. Otherwise, we’d have eventually done the job through a letting agent, in theory ending up anywhere. Mentioning Finsbury Park today, in the age of the so-named War Against Terrorism, reminds people of the ‘notorious’ Finsbury Park Mosque and ‘radical Muslim clerics’. Through repetition, these became instant media triggers during the early 21st century, though by 2009 the mosque claims to have distanced itself considerably from extremist activity. You can see the mosque from the train as you approach or leave King’s Cross.
Wilberforce Road, N4 runs south-easterly from Seven Sisters Road down towards the former Arsenal football ground at Highbury. At the top end on the corner stood the bleakly 1950s Tax Office building. It’s only a few minutes’ walk from Finsbury Park tube station, past the spot where the former Silver Bullet stood in Station Place, a pub we never went into around 1959, believing it might be trouble. Our road was a typical sequence of narrow mid-late Victorian terraced houses, built to the south of the Park itself in the 1880s for lower-middle and working class residential accommodation. The area had never remotely aspired to Holland Park in the days of its original glory, nor, since, to Holland Park following the great property boom of the 1980s.
Here in Wilberforce Road it was just plain brick rather than all-over stucco, cast-iron railings and front doors with modest pillars and a single step. At the end of the fifties, the road was just about respectable, not so much seedy as simply grubby, much multi-occupied and generally needing sympathetic renovation. This was true of the whole area, and, indeed, of any number of inner London suburbs so relatively soon after the end of the War. The atmosphere was on the grimy and gritty side, wanting the flowering trees along the pavements and the much more spacious feel of the impressively wide avenues and leafy squares and crescents of W11 we had just left.
So there is an actual Park there?
Oh, yes, quite a large one. It’s one of several created during the later 19th century by the Metropolitan Board of Works, created in 1855 to run London as its suburbs expanded like wildfire in most directions. Among its programmes for social improvement was the preservation of existing commons, like Clapham Common and Hampstead Heath, and the laying out of completely new parks, each of at least 100 acres in area. Finsbury Park was one of these, laid out in 1869. We only had to walk up to the end of the road and cross Seven Sisters Road and we were in the Park. In fact, we very rarely went there, I think because it probably shared something of the generally grimy nature of the whole area, needing some serious landscaping and planting work.
Number 83 Wilberforce Road was about halfway down on the left. Its frontage was not noticeably different from that of its neighbours: a couple of laurel bushes and some weedy soil behind a low wall in the narrow strip between pavement and front door. The house belonged to Frank and Ada Doust who let bedsitters of various sizes for appropriately different rents. There were evening and weekend meals for those who wanted them and were prepared to share that portion of their day with whatever other residents also wanted them. Our rent, for a shared room with meals, was not much over £2 a week each, tending to fluctuate with the changing price of potatoes, the dominant ingredient of our dinners.
John and I shared a room, which the now removed Bill Tate had enjoyed to himself, on the first floor front. Long and thin, it had just enough room for two narrow single beds, one against each of the longer walls, with six inches maximum between them. At the door end stood a small dresser with shelves and drawers, painted some time ago in white gloss. At the window end stood a single wardrobe. Net curtains at the sash window would probably have collapsed in shreds if introduced to cleaning agents and their challenging processes. That was it, and it had to be, because there wasn’t an inch of spare room for anything else. Space for movement was so limited that only one person at a time could move, often best achieved by walking on the bed. The disposition of the furniture meant that coming into the room required a manoeuvre that almost involved going out again halfway through before you could squeeze yourself in. A sliding door would have helped enormously. Leaving the room was much easier, and simply required you to turn slightly sideways in the doorway. Our fortunately few possessions were distributed between the dresser, the wardrobe and the space beneath our beds. The Dansette sat on top of the wardrobe. There was probably more room per head in an average space capsule, especially when you considered that the absence of gravity meant the space above your head was also available for use – and that one of us probably weighed fifteen stone, and had the bulk consistent with it. We managed to operate a kettle for cups of tea and coffee and to make a simple breakfast involving bread, butter, marmalade or jam. Any more adventurous catering would have been out of the question in that room.
How were your evening meals provided?
We went downstairs to Frank and Ada’s back room, which served as our dining room and, once we’d all finished and gone, as their living room. They slept with their small daughter in the ground floor front room, enabling all other rooms in the house to be let. They were not well off.
Ada was small and stocky, and, in her general appearance, could easily have been played by the actress Imelda Staunton. Her maternal approach towards us young men was instinctive and genuine, though she never intruded. She was one of those people whose age it’s almost impossible to guess. She looked ‘middle aged’ but looked also as though she’d always looked like that and always would, as if she’d aged too early and would stay that way forever. Her daughter could only have been about three but that information wasn’t much help. Ada lived in her pinny and, more or less all day long, in her kitchen, situated beyond the living room from which it was separated by a pair of glazed sliding wooden doors that were never closed. The kitchen gave onto the back garden, a wasteland of malnourished grass and random bits of wood, corrugated iron and old paint tins. The whole situation – the owners of the house, our room, the neglected garden and some of the other residents – contained all the vital ingredients of an early Harold Pinter play. All it needed to bring it to dramatic life was some source of mysterious menace. This would not have been in Ada’s power to supply.
Her husband Frank was a stringy cadaverous man, clearly older than her, who came home from work every evening, sat down in his armchair, took off his shoes, and rolled himself a very thin fag. From the moment of lighting until he’d finished it, Frank coughed, a rasping, gurgling, chewy cough that forced its way up from deep inside him, frequently robbing him of breath and completely stopping his conversation. He would break off in mid-sentence as his skeletal form bent double in the armchair, gasping for enough breath to continue talking - or to continue coughing. He was a kindly, tolerant, sociable man, a committed trade unionist, who’d been in the War and held strong humanitarian views on wealth, poverty and social justice. During our evening meals, coughing and gasping permitting, he and John would chew the fat at length, developing ways of redesigning the structures of society and the world at large to the benefit of us all.
What about pubs or other entertainments in the immediate area?
We weren’t too well served for pubs round here, so we did most of our drinking in town. On Sunday lunchtime we sometimes wandered down Blackstock Road to The Blackstock, which may have been a Courage house. This was a typical unreformed suburban corner boozer in a typical inner suburban street, rubbing shoulders with the usual dry cleaners, fish and chip shop, shoe repairers, tobacconists, greengrocers, bicycle shop and hardware store. Sunday lunchtime at The Blackstock, decades before karaoke arrived here, was amateur entertainment time. In a large, dingy back room, probably the Lounge Bar at other times, the resident duo played piano and snare drum badly on the makeshift stage area, and anyone who fancied their chances could get up and sing. It was all fairly excruciating. The regular star performer was an old biddy in a tatty fur coat who first filled herself with gin and then gave forth at about one thirty with a selection of sentimental songs from the 20s and 30s at the latest, many of them probably old London music hall songs.
Occasionally, on a warm evening, we’d walk up Seven Sisters Road to The Manor House, next door to the tube station. This was a huge, rather impersonal Watneys place with large bars. The Spurs football ground was nearby and the time to be in there was just after a home match when almost the entire football crowd tried to cram itself in. On these occasions, we stood well away from the bar and simply observed. Then you’d hear ‘Wanna buy a watch?’ and there beside you stood a shifty little bloke, who quickly whipped out of his pocket a glittering watch on an expanding bracelet in a nest of tissue paper. He moved fast. As soon as you said ‘No, thanks’, the watch was re-wrapped, back in his pocket, and he’d vanished. Moments later you could see him in quite another part of the crowd, engaging another potential punter. He wasn’t the only operator working that mass of people, and there were other things for sale besides watches. At closing time they didn’t go round shouting ‘Time, gentlemen, please’. They simply turned on a very loud, penetrating electric bell and left it on until the pub was empty. You couldn’t get out fast enough.
Was the famous Finsbury Park Empire still functioning then?
The Empire was still there, but on the point of closing down. It must have been a great place in its day, built for Moss Empires Ltd as second only on the circuit to the London Palladium. It was designed by the renowned theatre architect Frank Matcham in an Arts and Crafts style. It opened in 1910, cost £45,000, but eventually closed in 1960 and was demolished in 1965. It is said to have staged the very first ever performance of a magician, P T Selbit, sawing a woman in half in January 1921. There’s a block of flats there now.
The other big entertainment centre was the Astoria Theatre, our neighbourhood cinema. It opened as a theatre in 1930, the fourth of the famous London suburban Astoria theatre group. The interior was decorated sumptuously in a Spanish/Moorish style, with a vast spectacular ceiling in mid-blue studded with hundreds of electric lights as stars. Odeon Theatres took it over in 1939, it became a cinema and was renamed Odeon in 1970. It returned to use as a theatre in 1971, called the Rainbow Theatre, becoming a world famous venue for chart-topping solo performers and groups right through the Seventies. It closed in 1981 and remained out of use for 14 years. It’s now Listed Grade II* and was taken over following substantial renovation work during the late 1990s as the UK centre for the Brazil-based United Church of the Kingdom of God.
Did you see very much of the other people who were living in the house?
Many of the other residents were Irish. Some we saw frequently, some occasionally, and a few never. You couldn’t properly work out how many rooms there were in the house, or how many people lived in them and it seemed at times that there were more people than the house could reasonably accommodate. Perhaps a couple of the invisible ones worked shifts and shared a room. There was one room on the half landing before you reached the first floor, occupied by an obsessive radio ham. He didn’t eat Ada’s dinners and I think we saw him once. But we knew he was there and his sound effects told us what he was doing. From his tiny secluded cubicle in north London, all on his own, he talked every evening to the world. If you were coming up or down the stairs when he’d decided to leave his room, he would shut the door furtively, only emerging once you’d gone past. Further up the house, there was another man whom no one had ever seen, on the stairs, in the hall, or entering or leaving the house. We asked Ada about him but she told us nothing. Where her lodgers’ lives were concerned, she was discretion itself – unless, of course, you divulged information voluntarily, and then she would tactfully share it with chosen others. At this period of our country’s history, the height of the Cold War, both those blokes could have been perfectly respectable spies.
We had occasional sightings of a Mr Clancy, a short, quiet, respectable, self-effacing, nondescript middle-aged man in a decent raincoat who came and went at regular working times. He’d pass the time of day politely when you met him, never engaged in conversation, and seemed to spend most of his time in the evenings in his room, troubling nobody. He drew attention to himself on only one occasion while we were there, and Ada told us later that this was the annual event, his birthday, when he went out and did some serious drinking. That night, John and I had just returned from the cinema. We’d gone up to our room, and I was already in bed when we heard a peculiar scratching sound from downstairs. It persisted and, as no one appeared to be taking any notice of it, John went downstairs to investigate. The noise was coming from the outside of the front door. John opened the door to find Mr Clancy there, on his knees on the doorstep, holding his door-key which he’d been vainly trying to get into the lock. It was dark, he’d dropped his glasses, and he was thoroughly drunk. John lifted him to his feet, found his specs and helped him up the stairs to his room. The incident was never mentioned further and was not repeated in our time there. Mr Clancy resumed his normal unalarming routines, and by the time his next birthday came round we were living somewhere else.
So the people you got to know were the ones you had dinner with every evening?
That’s right, most evenings. Geoff was a bloke of about 20 who, according to Ada, was rebuilding himself after a damaging childhood. He’d been orphaned or abandoned at an early age and brought up in some kind of home where the general treatment of teenage children was less than civilised. Geoff had been badly traumatised over several years, but was now making his way independently with, it must be admitted and applauded, the fullest possible support of Ada and Frank. They weren’t his parents but they were certainly the nearest thing to parents he had possibly ever known in his life. He had a regular girl friend, a job that suited him and everyone was looking forward to a stable future for him. Ada had let us into a little of this background because she knew her young lodgers, and naturally wanted to protect Geoff from the sort of banter and backchat that can go on around the dinner table, which he might have found difficult to cope with. We all respected this completely. The anticipated backchat certainly took place, but was never directed at Geoff. While he didn’t take part, it usually provided him, as it provided us, with largely innocent amusement.
The daily dinner table was usually populated by Geoff, John Thompson and me, two Irish blokes Noel Bonham and Gabriel d’Arcy, who were sometimes joined by a third called Tommy who looked a bit like Frank Sinatra and knew it, and a grey middle-aged man called Mr Campbell. Except for the last-mentioned, we all got on extremely well together. This was partly because, except for John, we were all much of an age, in our early twenties, partly on account of sharing the required relentless wise-cracking style of humour, and because we were all so single-mindedly committed to jazz. Noel played the clarinet competently, Gabriel was teaching himself the trombone and they particularly loved the free, swinging style of Eddie Condon’s band. More locally, they had got themselves in with the Alex Welsh Band which played regularly at the Fishmongers Arms at Wood Green. Practically any evening when you returned home, the sounds of jazz, on record or being tentatively played live, were likely to be in the air. Ada tolerated all this, perhaps even enjoyed some of it, though she did once have to tell me that she thought a quarter to eight in the morning was a bit early to be playing jazz records. It was Jack Teagarden and I’d turned up the volume so that Gabriel could hear the trombone in his room upstairs.
You mentioned a Mr Campbell. How did he fit in here?
Not very well. He was the exception at the table. Another Irishman, he was a gloomy, very straight-laced character who worked in an office somewhere. He was at least a full generation older than us, in his late forties or early fifties – old enough to be our father. Even though the ‘Swinging Sixties’ would not begin for some years, the generation gap was fatal. His humourless, unbending style made him seem even older than he was. He’d spent a Catholic childhood in Ireland before the War, so the gulf between him and us was expressed not only in years, but also through beliefs, values and attitudes. As a result, he became the butt of many of the dinner table backchat routines, each slightly more daring than the previous one. Our code word for him was ‘Duff’ after a jazz number called ‘Duff Campbell’s Revenge’, which meant we could talk about him in his very presence without his realising it. He twigged it eventually, and wasn’t amused. In fact, very little of what we did or said amused him, and he complained to Ada several times about our puerile behaviour – with some justification. She wasn’t quite sure which way to turn. She found much of it amusing herself, but felt also that, on Mr Campbell’s behalf, she should try to moderate some of its wilder excesses. After all, if he became too discomforted by it, he might go and live somewhere else, and we would have driven away one of her income sources.
It came to a head when, having endured these painful dinners for long enough, he couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He told us very directly indeed, but in the politest terms, how offensive, annoying and childish we were. ‘I don’t expect very much from life on this earth, but the least I do expect is to come back after a day’s work and eat my dinners in peace!’ He was right, Ada supported him, we were truly ashamed and all apologised. After that, the strained atmosphere disappeared. We treated him with more respect and even he unbent a little towards us and became a bit more human. In the process, we’d each learned a bit more about living with other people.
One recurring problem didn’t go away. Ada’s small daughter Jill was given to sitting and playing underneath the dining table while we were eating. Most of the time you would hardly notice she was there, but now and again she would undo Mr Campbell’s shoe laces – and nobody else’s. Like us, she’d soon realised how to annoy him and so did it more often. Her worst offence was to piss on somebody’s shoes while under the table, an enormous embarrassment for Ada and a nasty experience for the wearer of the shoes. Naturally, we all took a very dim view of this and, for a few days, Ada would ban her from the dining room. But she always managed to sneak back in and increasingly targeted Mr Campbell’s shoes for this obnoxious act. In the end, she had to be permanently banned from the room while we were eating and relatively hygienic conditions were restored.
Was the entire house populated by single men?
Except for two more Irish people, Paddy and Marie. Quite recently married, in their mid-twenties, both very pale-skinned and very fat, they occupied a large room on our floor where they did their own cooking. Noel and Gabriel knocked around with them, especially on Sunday lunchtimes when, on coming out of church – for which Paddy always wore a vivid sky-blue suit in startling contrast to his bright red hair and white skin – they made straight for The Blackstock to get seriously involved with the Guinness there. Then it was back to their room for lunch and the remainder of the afternoon largely devoted to sleep. Marie was always popping in to talk to Ada while we were having dinner, often to borrow some ingredient or other, whining away in her almost incomprehensible loose-vowelled accent. When the Pope of the day died, she claimed that her grief over it had prevented her eating anything for the best part of a fortnight. When she’d gone back upstairs, those at the dinner table agreed it would have done her no harm at all.
Paddy worked for the London Underground. He was a guard on the short spur of the Northern Line that ran down to the City, then an exceptionally neglected line where most of the crumbling old stations reeked of urine. He did the football pools, drank loads of Guinness, obviously ate well and came and went all day on his short tube route. At the urging of the other two blokes, he’d bought himself a trumpet so that he could join in the amateur jazz. This was clearly one of those decisions made after a gutful of Guinness, and it soon became obvious that he had hardly a musical fibre in his body and little inclination to learn. He blew the thing raucously a few times and it was all over. The horn sat in its case in their room, discarded and waiting for an inspired soul to pick it up and take it over. I could hardly read music myself then, but I was captivated by jazz and wanted to play it. I took the very serious step of cashing £20-worth of Savings Certificates, virtually my entire savings at the time (equivalent to a month’s net salary), and bought Paddy’s trumpet. It came with a military band tutor book, which helped me to get going and, over many subsequent years, I achieved a passable competence.
We’d been in the house for a few months when a large room became vacant on the second floor which Paddy and Marie took over, releasing their former room, if we wanted it, to John and me. Compared to our original cell, this one seemed to have the dimensions of – and looked very much like - the stage set for Pinter’s The Caretaker, with an old gas cooker, a deep Belfast sink in the corner and an unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling. All it lacked was the grand accumulation of old bric-a-brac. There was space for all our things in a big wardrobe and an enormous built-in cupboard. As well as a bed each we had the luxury of a gas fire, two armchairs, and a wooden table with two upright chairs.
Paddy and Marie’s new room was directly above ours. There was no carpet on their floor and they slept on a folding bed that doubled as a sofa during the day. Whatever movements they made on this piece of furniture were readily transmitted down to us via the lino and floorboards. In this way we acquired our evidence that post-Sunday lunch afternoons were not entirely devoted to sleep upstairs. One Sunday we were in our room after lunch when we heard urgent rhythmic heavings from above. So urgent, in fact, that the feet of the folding bed were leaving the floor and crashing down again in time to the action. In our room beneath these athletics, the Dansette stood on the table against the wall. The reverberations came down through the wall and nudged the table, jumping the needle off the LP that was playing. In time, the bed went quiet and the whole house stopped shuddering. For the music’s sake, we moved the table away from the wall, amid our speculations that if Paddy and Marie pounded the sofa-bed to its limits, it might suddenly fold up on them completely, and trap them in a position uncomfortable both to be in and to visualise. Who among us would have rushed to the rescue, we wondered.
Presumably there were one or two bathrooms in the house?
There was just one bathroom for the entire house down in the front hall, opposite Ada and Frank’s bedroom. The bath itself was a big, old rolled edge model with individual curved feet like some animal’s claws, standing there on the lino. A copper geyser on the wall above it responded to the insertion of old-fashioned pennies in a meter, and, once the gas had got up to speed, delivered coughing spurts of brownish, blisteringly hot water. On the wall was a notice about leaving the bath as you’d wish to find it, and, on the back of the door, a list for residents to book the day and time of their intended ablutions. Despite the uncertainty about exactly how many people lived in the house, it was obvious that several of them either didn’t know the bathroom existed or, if they did, replicated its function in some other way.
Did television have any place in your lives at this time?
Hardly at all, except for early on Saturday evenings. Most of us weren’t often in for dinner on Saturdays but it was available if you booked it in advance - and it came with television. Ada put it on at six o’clock, during the brief news slot that preceded the pop music programme ‘Six Five Special’. This programme had been a major innovation in early 1957 when the BBC decided to launch a live music show with a live audience, aimed at young people. Kenny Baker’s jazz band played in the first edition, introduced by the DJ Pete Murray who used such studiedly hip expressions as ‘cats jumping here’, ‘real cool characters’, ‘give us the gas’ and ‘have a ball’. There was plenty of skiffle with Donegan and Chas McDevitt, jazz with Don Lang and the Frantic Five among others, and rock’n’rollers Tommy Steele, Vince Eager, Marty Wilde and Jim Dale. The King Brothers and the Mudlarks became regulars and the boxer Freddie Mills was brought in to present a sports-based feature. It’s said, and is probably true, that jazz musicians such as Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott and Johnny Hawksworth would drink in the pub opposite the studios, leave their unfinished pints to cross the road and play their number, return to the pub to continue drinking, go back to the studio for their next number and so on through the whole show. Today’s TV, obsessively choreographed, controlled and edited, with hardly a live programme in sight, would put that idiosyncratic working method completely out of the question.
We particularly enjoyed the awfulness of Lord Rockingham’s XI playing ‘There’s a Moose Loose aboot this Hoose’ among others, with a grotesque woman called Cherry Wainer on an electric organ and, of all people, the Observer jazz critic Benny Green, disguised in big dark glasses, playing tenor sax on the back row. Humphrey Lyttelton eventually unmasked him mischievously in the Melody Maker. In all, it was the kind of programme that sent old Frank fuming into the front room, out into the back garden with a fag, or for a long walk down the road, wondering what the hell it was that he’d been fighting for in the War.
What prompted you to leave Wilberforce Road?
I think John and I realised fairly soon that we wouldn’t be staying here too long. It was less than a year before we took the next step of ‘trading up’ to share a proper fully furnished flat. Finsbury Park had served its purpose in helping us away from the hostel but that was as far as it went. We really wanted to live in rather more wholesome, spacious and generally attractive surroundings. Beautiful young women at the London Accommodation Bureau steered us to a very well appointed flat with real rooms, real furniture, carpets, curtains, all the necessary modern fittings and even a rent book.
This new accommodation occupied the top floor of three, under the eaves, with sloping ceilings. The house stood in a pleasant tree-lined road, laid out and built between the wars, much of it the typical 1920-30s development you can find in almost every English town. In place of the dejected selection of assorted junk at the back of Frank and Ada’s house, our rear windows gave onto a long, carefully maintained garden with a wooded hill rising beyond. We were now in south-eastern commuter land in Honor Oak at the top of Forest Hill Road, rather to my surprise close to the heart of my parents’ former family territory. Although beyond the reach of the Underground, we were carried easily towards it, or right into central London, on the number 63 bus from the end of the road, or the number 12 from the King’s Arms, Peckham Rye down the hill.
With this move, and in only the first couple of years of my fledgling adulthood, I had now found my feet – and at times lost them - in three quite distinctly different parts of London. In the process I was becoming a more seasoned and confident member of the city’s constantly shifting population. As important as anything else, I could now impress visiting out-of-towners by navigating the Underground without needing the map. And, as the next few years were to show, the itinerant principle would continue to define my living arrangements.