London Blues (9 page)

Veronica is now looking at me through her big doleful eyes. She’s kittenish and frolicsome all of a sudden.

‘If you were to buy me a box of Meltis Savoys tonight we could have a … little
romp
… now. Just a little one.’

She laughs and slides under the eiderdown. A long sustained note at the end of Monk’s
Ruby,
My
Dear
slowly spreads over the entire room engulfing me and Veronica, who is now in my arms.

COFFEE BARS AND MILK BARS
have sprung up all over the place in London in the last year or two and have, as they say, become very very much the
thing.
If the mums and dads have their pubs and stuffy corner-house
restaurants
, then the kids have got these places, places they can regard as their own where they can linger over espresso or milkshakes and listen to their own music. This is why Mr Calabrese tarted up his little family café and gave it the name it now has: Modern Snax Bar (it used to be called Emilio’s). Anyway, nearly all his regular customers had died or moved away, and Soho had changed too fast and too much in the 1950s for him. He says it used to be a village and now it isn’t. Mr C. will make what money he can before his lease finally runs out and then he will go and join the rest of his family down on the south coast.

Just around the corner from us in Old Compton Street is the 2i’s Coffee Bar. This is a pretty famous place and we’re always getting kids and journalists coming in and asking us where it is. I tell them I’ll have to ask somebody out back and would they like a coffee while they’re waiting? So at least we pick up some incidental trade from it.

Mr Calabrese took Charlie on to help out part-time. Charlie is about twenty and lives up Holloway Road. He’s a sharp
dresser who buys all his stuff on Shaftesbury Avenue, but if it’s cold he puts on a big old duffel coat that jars a bit with the sharp stuff underneath. Charlie tells me he is just ‘passing through’ here, he’s ‘developing interests’, and that he’s a ‘well-known face’ in certain quarters. He’s always on the make and I’m quite sure that over his bed he has a photograph of Sgt. Bilko. But he’s likeable and has a lot of Italian generosity.

His grandfather came over in the 1890s as a plasterer doing work on stately homes in Bedfordshire and I think there is some distant connection between his family and the Calabreses. Old Man Calabrese certainly always calls him Carlo, and this drives Charlie batty.

Charlie has an encyclopaedic command of slang and colloquialisms and I’ve often told him to write it all down and produce a handbook or little dictionary. It would make a good paperback if you could find a publisher brave enough to publish it, but being as most of the slang is sexual and pretty explicit no publisher over here is going to put his neck on the chopping block and get done for obscenity.

Charlie is growing bird-seed in a window box out in Holloway because he read somewhere that it contains marijuana seeds. He’s going to harvest a crop and sell it off and make a good few bob. It’ll complement his small-time drug dealing, or rather pill dealing. He carries black bombers and purple hearts around in those small circular tins that Gibbs Dentifrice comes in and sells them to kids in the amusement arcades where he spends a lot of his time.

Amongst the many angles Charlie occupies himself with is the odd bit of merchandise that has fallen off the back of a lorry, been lost in transit, gone for a walk, developed legs, become ownerless, lost its collar, appeared on his doorstep, was found adrift in the canal, or was given to him to mind by a geezer who never came back. All euphemisms for stolen or, as he prefers to call it, Little Red Ridings (rhyming slang: stolen goods = Little Red Riding Hoods,
and don’t ask me where the final ‘s’ came from). These are bent goods and it seems he’s friendly with some fence in Camden Town and works on a freelance commission basis.

Charlie has a different girl on his arm every time I see him. All good-lookers, all seemingly besotted with him. I think he regards women like his shirts. This one might be OK for tonight but it certainly wouldn’t do for tomorrow night. He regards me as semi-married because I’ve only got one girlfriend and see her regularly, so, in his eyes, I am old-fashioned and well past it (whatever ‘it’ is).

My other good friend is a black guy from Barbados called Sonny. We got talking one night at Mrs Bill’s stall by St Anne’s church. It must have been about two o’clock in the morning. Here’s how we met. I was standing there drinking some coffee and having a cigarette with a Sonny Rollins Esquire LP under my arm that I had bought earlier that day from Dobell’s in Charing Cross Road.

Sonny came over and said he’d renamed himself after Rollins. It turned out his name was originally Michael de Salle which came from some French plantation owner or something a hundred or so years ago. He said he didn’t want to be named after a French count so he called himself Sonny after Rollins instead. He told me that he played a bit of trumpet, and that Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro were his idols but adopting their names would have seemed too affected. So he settled for Sonny instead.

Sonny works most evenings in the Be Bop Club behind the bar. He also plays on some nights. The Be Bop is not much bop but plenty of dope and, inevitably I suppose, he does some dealing. Most of the West Indians when they were back home used to smoke some
ganja
so they do so over here too. Sonny deals in most things including some hard stuff which is mainly used by white society people (I believe him). He used to sell occasionally to Brenda Dean Paul who was found dead in her flat in Kensington back in July. She was society.

Sonny lives just off Ladbroke Grove in a basement flat that is dark and dank. The rest of the house seems to be full of ponces and prostitutes, all black. Sonny ‘runs’ girls from time to time for a few extra bucks. He has lived in this room since 1955. His parents, his mother and stepfather that is, brought him over from Barbados when he was fifteen. He lived with them for a couple of months in the East End somewhere, had a row, walked out and has never seen them since. He has been self-sufficient since then. He’s had to seize whatever opportunities he could. This is a life without an awful lot of choice.

He’s never been interested in black girls (except, that is, for business). It’s only white pussy that gets him going. It doesn’t matter about the size or quality, just as long as it’s white. Up until recently he had been living with a tarty Welsh girl called Mary but she ran off with some (white) bank robber to Greece. He still keeps a picture of her tacked to the wall above his bed and, perhaps, still loves her.

The 1950s finally came to an end and we are now three months into the 1960s. I haven’t noticed any changes yet but there’s a feeling in the air. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something: a feeling of expectancy about, things are going to happen but no one knows what yet. It’ll take a couple of years for this decade to discover its own identity. Everybody seems to feel that Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ isn’t going to be limited to whistling through South Africa, it’ll blow wider. I’m still living over in Bayswater (OK,
near
Bayswater) and still working at the Modern Snax Bar. I’m still seeing Veronica and she’s still telling me I’ll never be anything. This year so far I’ve bought myself an expensive suede jacket (via Charlie, it fell off the back of an airliner and only cost me £5 10s.) and discovered Claude Thornhill’s band.

Apart from that, what else?

The police are having a big crackdown on pep pills and Charlie and Sonny are being very cautious, and the
Queen’s sister says she’s going to marry some snapshot artiste … I was going to say, as
if
anyone cared, but the trouble is the whole fucking country cares. The whole fucking country thinks this is news and that the Queen’s sister is more important than what’s going on in Algeria and what’s going on with the black students down in Alabama! What hope for a country as parochial and insular as this?

It’s a quiet Wednesday at Modern Snax today and not much trade aside from the regulars. A warm day and I feel bored. Mr Calabrese is in for a couple of hours so we’ve got the radio instead of the jukebox. He turns on the radio and what starts blaring out? Yes,
Theme
from
A
Summer
Place.
You can’t escape the bloody tune. Everywhere you go they are playing it. I wouldn’t mind a shilling for every time I’ve heard it. And if it’s not that it’s bloody Adam Faith singing
Poor
Me.
What about
poor
us
having to put up with
him
? Christ!

We’ve had a couple of the real regulars in today, the ‘faces’ as Charlie calls them. Harold the Knife Grinder was in first thing this morning, telling me (yet again) that Queen Boadicea of the ancient Britons is buried underneath a platform at King’s Cross station and that there is some occult connection between this and the widespread reports of flying saucers in the neighbourhood – reports,
incidentally
, that are kept out of the newspapers, or so he says. And, further, this is all tied in with Merlin’s Cave nearby and St Chad’s Well too. They all fit in somewhere, but Harold hasn’t quite figured it out yet.

I used to be a bit condescending towards Harold when I started here. But as Mr Calabrese says, all this stuff is Harold’s truth,
mia
verita
in Italian (if that’s how you spell it). Even if Harold’s quest will always defeat him he is living in a world of magic and enchantment and hope. Anything is possible. Hope burns brightly in his universe.

Harold’s speech is often slurred and indistinct but if you listen carefully you’ll hear the vestiges of a fine, upper-class
accent. Nobody seems to know who he really is or where he came from, though it is rumoured that his family had a large house somewhere in the country. He’s always been around Soho. The story is that during the First World War he was sent back to a hospital here in England suffering from wounds and shell-shock. He never recovered. He drifted to Soho and has stayed here ever since. His left hand is badly shattered and his left temple displays a dreadful scar so there may be some truth in this. It’s no use asking Harold about his past. He has none. He has his knife-grinding and his quest. He lives in an all-consuming perpetual present.

Mr Calabrese gives him a free cup of tea every day and if we’re doing well Harold might also get a free sandwich or a cake.

His eyes are the bluest I’ve ever seen in my life and when I look into them I see a child’s innocence.

The other face we had in today is a character bereft of honesty, integrity, vision and truth. In other words, a human being at the opposite end of the spectrum to Harold. This is French Joe, though he isn’t French and Joe isn’t his real name. Nobody knows what his real name is, though there is a rumour that it is Cyril, but this seems unlikely. A real name is too honest for Joe; a nickname is enough. He lived in Soho for ages but his landlord finally threw him out because he hadn’t paid the rent on his room for years and years. He lives in Somers Town now,
somewher
e up behind Euston station, a neighbourhood on the wane. He must be around fifty but looks seventy-five. He is stained and decrepit and smells of drink, cabbage,
photographic
chemicals, old cigarettes, failure and opportunism in roughly that order.

Charlie said if you gave him some Omo washing powder he’d put a spoonful in his tea, he wouldn’t think to use it to wash anything. He lives in a polarised world where things are either ‘bleedin’ awful’ or ‘handsome’. He’s been on the run ever since he deserted from the Army in 1940 and he
now lives a hand-to-mouth existence ducking and diving and turning his hand to whatever comes along. He is bereft also of principles and is a well-known tea-leaf (rhyming slang for thief) who would steal from anyone, including his friends. We keep a close eye on him whenever he comes in.

French Joe has had regular jobs in the past but always got the sack for nicking stuff. At one time he worked in various capacities in different night-clubs, like Kate Meyrick’s 43 Club in Gerrard Street and the Shim Sham Club in Dean Street where Benny Carter once played, or so he says.

French Joe says he was born in Soho, in D’ Arblay Street, and this is apparently true. His mother was reputed to be a French whore (as, indeed, were most of the girls on the game fifty years ago – French, that is) and this might be how his moniker arose. He says he remembers Zeppelins dropping bombs on Soho when he was a small kid during the First World War and during the 1939–45 fisticuffs he was standing just down from St Anne’s church when it was bombed. The bombs during the last war drove him out to Tottenham for a while where he raised pigs in the back garden for sale on the black market.

Even if Joe was living out in north London during the war he was down in Soho every day. He says the war years in Soho were the best years ever in its history for making money. The place was full of servicemen out for a good time and you couldn’t help but coin it in.

When Joe was in today he asked me if I was free on Sunday evening to give him a hand doing a little job? The job was so bizarre and out of my ken that I said yes.

Sunday night came and so did 7.30 p.m. but Joe didn’t. I was stretched out on the bed reading
Moby
Dick
and listening to some string quintet playing
El
Relicario
on the radio when Joe finally turned up at about nine o’clock and honked his horn. I walked down and out and joined him in his little battered Austin A35 van. This is the unlicensed
vehicle with
DOBSONS OF PLAISTOW
–
HIGH CLASS
GROCERIES
signwritten down the side.

‘What kept you? I been giving this horn stick for ten minutes!’ spluttered Joe.

‘How do you close this door?’

‘You don’t. You hold it shut by that strap. See? Or, if you want, you can lock it shut and climb through the window. OK?’

‘I thought you said 7.30?’

‘I did. But I had to pick up something in Notting Hill.’

And with that we jumped and jerked forward and
spluttered
around the corner into Bishop’s Bridge Road, and then down the Harrow Road, and across the Edgware Road, stalling and starting all the way.