That I glanced through the poems but as usual couldn’t understand a word of them.
That I stared for some time at the title page of the second section.
That I heard the sounds of Alison padding about upstairs, getting ready for bed.
That I waited for the sounds to stop, and then drank some more whisky, and then waited another ten or fifteen minutes, and then went upstairs to use the bathroom, and then listened outside her open bedroom door, listened to her soft, regular, sleepy breathing which I could hear quite clearly in the almost-silence of the house, and then tiptoed back downstairs and picked up the ring binder again and stared at the title page again.
That the last thing I can remember is hearing a car drive by in the snow-dusted street outside, breaking the stillness of the night.
And that I then started to read.
June 1987
Last week I was obliged to visit the Strand, in central London, to complete the final paperwork for my departure to Australia; and now, in a few days’ time, I shall be leaving this country at last – perhaps never to return. In the meantime, my trip to London has stirred up some very potent memories, which I feel compelled to set down on paper before I leave.
It did not take as long as I’d expected to complete the formalities at Australia House. After which, finding myself with most of an afternoon to spare, I decided to take a walk into the City. For old times’ sake, if nothing else. I had brought my camera with me – my trusted Kodak Retina Reflex IV, bought in the 1960s, which has never taken a bad picture yet – and wanted to make a permanent record of those places which had once been so familiar to me – if any trace of them still remained.
As I made my way in blazing sunshine down Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill, through the long shadow cast by St Paul’s Cathedral and along Cheapside until I could glimpse the massive portico of the Bank of England itself, I realized that it was almost thirty years since I had last walked these streets. Twenty-seven years, to be precise. Everything had changed, in the meantime. Everything. The old City of London, which had been the centre of my universe for a few intense, troubling months towards the fag-end of the 1950s, had witnessed a revolution which even in those far-off days had been considered long overdue. A revolution in architecture, in fashion and now, finally – or so one read in the newspapers – in working practices. All the fine, arrogant old buildings were still there – the Guildhall and the Mansion House, the Royal Exchange and St Mary-le-Bow – but wedged in amongst them were dozens of new tower blocks, some dating from the benighted 1960s, others only a couple of years old, vaulting, sleek and glittery, like the decade we were now enjoying. The men (there were still not very many women) all wore suits, but these suits seemed sharper and more aggressive than I remembered, and there was not a single bowler hat to be seen. As for the working practices … Well, nearly all of the trading was done on screens now, if reports were to be believed. The face-to-face meetings, the chummy handshakes on the Stock Exchange floor, were consigned to the past. No more deals adumbrated over port and cigars at the Gresham Club; no more business gossip swapped in well-bred undertones at the George and Vulture. Traders apparently took lunch at their desks these days – cellophane-wrapped sandwiches brought in at silly prices by outside caterers – never lifting their glazed eyes from the screens where figures flickered their ceaseless announcements of profit and loss, from early morning to late at night. What role could I have possibly have played, as an ignorant twenty-one-year-old, in this frantic and impatient new world?
Yes, I had been only twenty-one when I first came to London. Some time in the last few weeks of 1958, it was. I had not been to university, and for two years had tucked myself away in the tedious anonymity of a filing clerk’s job in Lichfield, but some dormant mutinous impulse – my youthful horror, I suppose, at the thought of being stifled in this way for ever – had finally propelled me away from the safety of my home town and my parents’ house and sent me to London – to seek my fortune, as the cliche would have it. Or, if not my fortune, something even more elusive and intangible – my vocation, my destiny. For I had, without telling my family (nor would I have told my friends, if I had any), started writing. Writing! Such presumption would not have been tolerated, if my parents had known about it. My father would have mocked me mercilessly – especially when he discovered that my instincts inclined me towards poetry: and not just poetry, but, worse still, ‘modern’ poetry – that apparently formless, apparently meaningless cultural aberration that was hated above all other things by the middle-brow lower classes. Lichfield, the birthplace of Samuel Johnson, was certainly no place for an aspiring poet in the 1950s; whereas, if rumours were to be believed, London was awash with poets. I envisaged long, wine-fuelled conversations with fellow-poets in the bedsitting rooms of South London suburbs; heady evenings spent in Soho pubs listening to poetry readings in an atmosphere thick with Bohemianism and cigarette smoke. I imagined a life for myself in which I could make the momentous declaration ‘I am a poet’ without attracting incredulity or ridicule.
I have a long story to set down, so I must move it forward. Easily enough, I found a room in a shared house near Highgate Cemetery, and – through the classified advertisements in the
Dining alone is a problematic activity. I had no friends in the City, or indeed anywhere in London, and no one to talk to over lunch. Most days, therefore, I would take a book with me – usually a slim volume of contemporary verse, more than likely borrowed from the library in Highgate. The restaurant would be crowded, and at a table for six you might find yourself sharing with five strangers. One day, early in January 1959, I looked up from my book – it was Eliot’s
The other diners at our table looked across at both of us in some puzzlement. One of them may even have tutted. To speak to a stranger, in such a loud voice, in a public place, and to make use of such peculiar phraseology, was no doubt considered a grave breach of City protocol. For my own part, I was dumbstruck.
‘Tell me, do you consider Mr Eliot to be a genius,’ my new acquaintance continued, in an insolent tone, ‘or a fraud and a humbug of the first water?’
‘I … I don’t know,’ I stumbled. ‘Or at least … Well –’ (more boldly, now) ‘– that is to say, in my view – for what my view is worth – I consider him … the greatest living poet. In the English language, that is.’
