BY THE TIME I left Enfield Grammar School the ice-age following the great American slump had set in. At best a grammar school education, however sound, offered few more exciting prospects at the end of the day than employment in a high street bank, and the world crisis and its dole queues had put even this beyond my reach. In common with most of my friends I had to turn my hand to whatever came my way. The experience of those years fostered resilience — possibly even, of necessity, a sense of adventure.
Some of my schoolfriends who had hoped to sit at office desks found themselves earning their bread in less conventional and often less sedentary ways. One, unable to continue his accountancy studies, was appointed assistant rat-catcher to the council, and later set up on his own and did well. A second who suffered from some sexual obsession became a professional partner at the Tottenham Palais de Dance, enabled in this way to kill both the financial and sexual birds with one stone. A third made journeys to Spain and returned laden with cheap Toledan crucifixes which he advertised in the Catholic press as blessed by the Bishop of Salamanca. For a while I did less well, continuing to bottle the elixir for which I earned about thirty shillings a week.
Questions of prestige were closely limited to those of economic necessity in the matter of finding employment. Enfield possessed some of the largest apple and cherry orchards in that part of England, and there was cash to be had when the season for their picking arrived. In the case of the apples it was easier to concentrate on the windfalls, but the prestige job — picking from the trees — entailed the manipulation of heavy ladders, and the very small risk of a fall, and although there was slightly less money in it, it was what everybody wanted to do.
The part-time employment to be found in the cherry orchards was not only in picking the fruit, but in scaring away the thousands of blackbirds and thrushes that would come winging in for the feast, particularly in the early morning hours. It conferred prestige to be engaged by the farm to shoot these with a twelve-bore — a bird’s corpse had to be produced for every cartridge expended — but social annihilation to enrol oneself among the group that patrolled the orchards in the early hours beating on drums. The most demeaning employment of all, taken by one of my ex-school friends, involved him in washing up for a Soho restaurant, and placing himself, dressed as a clown, at the entrance to display the menu provided for the lunch-time and evening meals.
With the expiry of childhood, Enfield had become a dull place. Almost from one year to another Mr Bowles had become old and blind, and I no longer took refuge at Myddelton House. The alluring Miss Tupperton was carried away by a dashing Major Pinkies, who had dropped in to the Hall one day to visit his old commanding officer and had not hesitated to plunder him in this way. Her place was now taken by a pretty and muscular young nurse, called in to help with Sir Henry’s gout. My parents had come to the realistic conclusion that whatever dormant psychic gifts I might have possessed, I had little to offer the Spiritualist movement, and there was no hope whatever of my following in my father’s footsteps. Nevertheless, membership of their church continually increased.
I lived in a place, as it seemed to me, where nothing happened. Once Enfield had been a large and attractive village at the end of an escape route from London, travelling down which it took a coach and pair an hour and a half to reach unspoiled country in which a succession of monarchs had taken time off to go hunting. It had an interesting school built in the reign of Mary Tudor, a fine church, several outstanding pubs, and the grandest and oldest cedar tree in the land, planted in about 1670 by Dr Ridewood, headmaster of the Grammar School, who brought the seeds from the Lebanon. This spread its stupendous umbrella of the deepest green foliage over the heart of the town until it was finally demolished to make room for a departmental store.
The magnification of an ancient village such as Enfield into a modern town is always a calamity. No sooner had the venerable cedar gone than a Mr Sidney Bernstein built his super-cinema, called the Rialto, in the old market place. The Rialto was modelled, as we were told, on the Roxy in New York, with an organ having 2,800 pipes and thirty-five miles of wires, and only lesser in the facilities it offered than the original in providing no built-in medical operating theatre. Few people in Enfield were sure of the origin of the word Rialto and some confusion arose when the first film, The Power of the Borgias, was shown, over unfamiliar names. Mr Bernstein, we learned, overwhelmed by the splendour of a bridge in Venice, had been ready with the supreme accolade. ‘Know something?’ he said to his retinue. ‘I’m going to put this on the map. I’m going to name my cinema after it.’ But the muddle in Enfield continued. Even the local newspaper got itself into a mix-up, or perhaps suffered a Freudian slip, speaking in its eulogistic review of Sidney Borgia, the cinema owner, and retitling the film The Power of the Bernsteins.
The competition in the opening week of The Power of the Borgias — advertised in Enfield by a parade camel having a pronounced limp — was The Great San Francisco Fire (second time round) on offer at the town’s original, sad flea pit, the Queen’s, and a private showing of Mustapha’s Donkey in a windowless cell at the back of the Oddfellows’ Hall. This latter may have been the first pornographic movie ever made. A higher percentage of Enfield males had seen it several times, and it was so grainy and so ravaged by age and use that it was hardly possible to distinguish the donkey in the star role from the human actors it featured.
I saw The Power of the Borgias with an old schoolmate, Alexander Hagen, who had been good at maths and had set his sights on becoming an airship designer, then jettisoning the idea owing to the state of the world, and philosophically accepting employment at the sewage farm in Ponders End. A ritual Saturday night meal followed at Mrs England’s Dining Rooms in the passage at the back of the station, where the tables were screened in such a way that patrons did not risk loss of face by being seen there, scuffling their feet in the sawdust. We began to ask ourselves if in fact we really existed or whether what we took to be life could not be a complex illusion, an endless, low-quality dream. These threadbare surroundings in which we sat hunched over a scrubbed table, our backs to the light, came very close to being nothing. Perhaps we too were nothing, had come from nothing, were journeying through nothing, towards a distant goal of nothingness. Enfield was nothing, the Rialto cinema nothing to the accompaniment of organ music, the Queen’s nothing with fleas. We had come here to confront a supper of nothing, boiled, fried or scrambled, with or without chips, to be followed by custard if desired at no extra charge. After this it was back home to nothing, or down the town to pick up a couple of girls at the bottom of Church Street, and engage them in a lively conversation about nothing plus sex, or just nothing.
Christ stopped at Eboli, but he would have found people there who still had the spirit to sing and dance, and Mr Bowles mentioned once that on the Greek island where he went to dig up plants the impoverished peasantry got away with fifty days of what was supposed to be the working year and used them up on parties, pilgrimages and processions. What had happened to us? Why had the lives of Sir Henry’s serfs, and the workers at the Lock, been reduced to survival without distractions? Why had communal activities in the surroundings in which I was born come down to a couple of hours over a pint of sour ale in The Goat?
No wonder we took refuge in make-belief, dealt in pretence and self-pretence, and half-believed the personal myths of our own creation. No wonder our pudgy-faced local beauties started life as Ethel, Gladys or Florence but ended as Esmée, Phoebe and Diane and inflicted upon themselves their soulless accents.
Hagen had been assumed from his name to be a Jew, whose people had been carried in the stream of emigrants out of the East End, through Bethnal Green, Hackney, Clapton, Tottenham and Upper and Lower Edmonton, along the road taken by John Gilpin on his ride, until the great urban mess finally expired in the grim streets of Enfield Wash, Enfield Lock and Freezy Water where, discouraged from further advances by the disconsolate greenery of the countryside, the emigration had come to a halt. After a stretch at the sewage farm, he had walked out and set up as a wedding photographer. In this he did well, made money quickly and, while not going so far as to change his name, showed a preference for being addressed as Alexander rather than Alex, and asked his friends to pronounce the A in Hagen ‘ah’ not ‘ay’. Up to this point none of us had known much about him, nor visited his house. Now he let drop the information that he was half-German, and that his father had been German ambassador to Liberia where he had met Alex’s English mother, who was engaged in missionary work. They had separated after his mother’s return to this country.
Hagen was a great watcher and imitator. He watched the men he hoped to mould himself upon, but of necessity from afar, so that his imitation never quite convinced. The tie was right but the voice was wrong. When he spoke, an echo of Central Europe lingered on which he said was Bavarian, but it only went down with girls who had never heard an Englishman of the ruling classes speak. Intelligent as he was, he would never raise himself to half the stature of Mr Bowles’ spirited nephew who had been born under the wings of victory. Hagen, like the rest of us, was too cautious, too premeditated, too afraid at bottom of his own shadow. He made money easily, but for all the calculated swagger that went with it, and the arrogant tilt of the homburg hat, he gave the impression of listening to the noises of the pogrom in the next street.
For a while I was in partnership with him in the wedding photography, which called for little technical and less artistic skill. The wedding guests lined up like trained dogs, put on their boozy, foolish smiles, you clicked the shutter, and that was the end of it. They expected to look unnatural and they did. Seeing himself as the organizer, Alex abstained from involvement in physical labour of any kind, which he would have regarded as an inefficient use of his time, so I developed the films and made the prints, working under primitive conditions in the kitchen after my parents had gone to bed. My father never failed to inspect these pictures of the bride and bridegroom at the church door, and the family groups ranged with their inane grins in order of height, and occasionally he would draw attention to a small defect, usually caused by fogging, in the hope that this might be a blurred countenance from the spirit world, squeezed in forlornly among the all too solid flesh of Ponders End, or Palmer’s Green.