Up West (15 page)

St Martin's got mixed reviews. Janet Vance, for example, turned down both St Martin's and a secondary school at Millbank because, although they were closer than the school she eventually attended, ‘they had bad names'. Graham Jackson remembers, ‘I went to St Martin-in-the-Fields, and this curate took a fancy to me. He used to come on and say “Hello Graham”, put his arm around me. It was a joke, a standing joke. Anyway, there was a club there called Five Farthings – from the rhyme, St Martin's five farthings. They used to do snooker, billiards, that sort of stuff, there was a coffee bar beneath – it was in the crypt. One day, the curate touched a guy who was bending over the table, and this kid's turned round and hit him with his cue. He was from St Martin's School, and of course there's a big hoo-hah, and when he's called in to see the headmaster, he's said, “If you want to know what [the curate's] like, ask Graham.”

‘So, I'm sitting in the class: “Graham Jackson out,” left-right,
left-right, down to see the headmaster, and I'm saying, “What am I doing, what's happening?”

‘And they ask, “Have you got a problem with this curate?”

‘And I've gone, “Well, yeah.”

‘They dismissed it. “You don't know what you're talking about. Rubbish. He's a friendly bloke. We've had a word with him, and you've got the wrong idea.” It was all sort of passed off. Years later, you start thinking, they're all the same. They cover things up by saying you don't know what you're talking about. 'Cause we're, what, fourteen years old, it's easy to get us to think we're the ones that are in the wrong.'

Ann Lee first chose Millbank over St Martin's, but ‘I was only there about a year and a half, and my mum took me out. A teacher there abused one of the children, who was my friend. We used to stay behind for music lessons, and this particular day I didn't want to, so I made the excuse that I had to go to the dentist, and I left her on her own with him. The next day, when I went to school, she wasn't there, and neither was he. When I got home that night, Mum had had a call from her mum saying that he'd abused her, and within weeks it was in all the newspapers. My mum decided to take us out, and we went to Starcross in Gray's Inn Road, just off the Euston Road, and that's where I stayed until I was fifteen.'

Ronnie Mann learned several things at St Martin's. One of them was that, just because you were getting older, they didn't stop hitting you. ‘At St Martin's,' he remembers,
‘discipline was strong. When the whistle went, you stopped; if you didn't, you got the cane. There was no arguing. If you talked in class, you got the cane. If you swore at a teacher, you got the cane; second time, you got expelled. Simple as that. There was no half-measures.'

Yet there was something about this regime that Ronnie found liberating. ‘At St Martin's, it was a totally different concept from St Clement's. I think that the headmaster, Mr Tomlinson, although at the time I didn't appreciate him, was really far-reaching. I don't think I started learning until I was about twelve and a half, thirteen. I fully deserved to fail my eleven-plus, because I had no concept of nouns, verbs, adjectives, no concept of anything. I was great at maths, but that was about it.'

As well as schoolwork, there were social lessons to be learned, and put in to practice. ‘It was a mixed school. You didn't sit next to the girls, because that would have been too effeminate, but certainly they sat in front of you, or behind you, and we had dance lessons together. When you got to thirteen, on a Friday evening there was an hour where they taught you the basics of ballroom dancing, if you wanted to. Bear in mind this was around the advent of rock 'n' roll, Bill Haley was just coming in, but you still learned the basics, and by the time I left we'd already advanced to jiving. It was great for me.'

Anyone educated in the fifties remembers harsh discipline, lots of learning by rote and endless hours spent copying work, with one's right hand, preferably, from
the blackboard. It seems, however, that most young West Enders didn't resent the system that much and one thing is for certain, a West End education prepared the young learners to live in harmony with cultural, religious and racial diversity – a very useful lesson that anticipated the world we live in today.

Few parts of the West End have changed their character quite as much as the Piazza in Covent Garden. Today, it's a tourist trap, full of shops, cafés, restaurants and street entertainers, while dominating the whole thing is the new Royal Opera House. When I was growing up in the fifties, the buildings that now house boutiques, antiques and flea markets, the London Transport Museum and the Theatre Museum were home to a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, the largest in the country.

The contrast between the old Covent Garden and the new is startling. I remember a noisy, incredibly crowded place with porters dashing about with stacks of boxes and baskets on their heads, roll-ups hanging from their lips and language riper than the fruit on sale. Incomprehensible (to me, anyway) shouts filled the air as wholesalers and punters haggled over prices in a variety of accents from nasal cockney, through
all the regional variations and on to Italian, French, Yiddish, Chinese or Greek, and everything between. It depended on who was selling, who was buying and who was delivering. It really was an extraordinary cacophony, but somehow, with much gesticulating, understanding was reached and business done. Some of the hand signals were reminiscent of the tick-tack men that bookies used on the racecourses, a private language that could only be read by those in the know.

The surrounding streets were just as confused. Locally crafted barrows
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teetered with boxes, baskets and sacks either coming or going. Horses still shackled to their carts waited patiently, snuffling in nosebags full of oats. Some had their heads down, foraging for stray apples, turnips and carrots, or slurped water from a battered old bucket as they were loaded up with the morning's haul. The gutters ran with water – horse, flower and rain – and the cobbles were strewn with dung, bruised fruit, battered spuds, broken blooms, straw and bits of cabbage, while horses and traders alike waded through it all.

When trading was done for the day, the mess would be cleaned up, to be replaced the following day with more of the same, but before the cleaning squad arrived, the pickers darted in to salvage anything worth eating, flogging or popping in a vase. I have often wondered what happened to the daily piles left by the horses at the market. Elsewhere
in the country, people nipped out with a bucket and spade to collect any offerings left by horses pulling wagons delivering bread, milk or coal – it was so good for their gardens. Due to the scarcity of petrol, horse power was much in demand in the forties and early fifties, and there was always a plentiful supply of fresh manure in those narrow Covent Garden streets. Perhaps it went to the London parks, for their roses.

The market was centred around the Piazza, which was laid out by Inigo Jones in the 1630s as a smart, public open space in the Italian style, with the back of the Duke of Bedford's mansion on the Strand marking out the south side and fine houses and St Paul's church on the other three. The Duke had ambitions to provide gracious homes for the elite, and an elegant square for the important business of promenading. It was vital to see who was in town, what they were wearing and so on: being seen was equally important, as was picking up news and scandal.

Given this, it's surprising that the Duke should allow a rather ramshackle market to set up shop on the south side of this handsome public amenity. A daily general market started there in a small way in 1649, selling, among other things, local produce and crockery, from temporary stalls and a few hardly more permanent buildings – sheds, basically – erected on the south, up against the wall of the Bedfords' gardens. A century later, the market had more or less taken over the Piazza, supplying much of West London with many of the necessities and one or two of the luxuries of life, including
caged birds, cooked food and ‘Geneva and Other Spirituous Liquors'.

From the start, the market was a chaotic, congested affair, almost entirely conducted in the open air. By the 1830s, the managers of the Bedford Estate, which still administered the market and collected tolls, had engaged a man named Fowler to design some permanent market buildings. Fowler had made his name designing an elegant basilica-style home for nearby Hungerford market (where Charing Cross station stands today). His buildings at Covent Garden, with a frontage to the west uniting three ranges of buildings running east to west, still stand today, although they have been smartened up quite a bit. The Clean Air Act of the fifties, the lack of horses and the absence of tons of discarded fruit and veg have all helped to keep them that way.

The managers of the Covent Garden Theatre built the Floral Hall as a private flower market in the 1860s. It was a commercial failure, and was bought by the Bedford Estate in 1887 to be a foreign fruit market. The Estate made further improvements, culminating in the opening of the Jubilee Hall in 1904, before selling out to the newly formed Covent Garden Estate Company in 1918. They remained in charge until 1961.

Although the very occasional visits I made with my father are imprinted on my memory, I cannot pretend that the market was ever central to my life. It was, after all, across the Great Divide of the Charing Cross Road. I was mainly aware of it from its customers: the little old ladies who sold bouquets
and buttonholes at street corners, or to theatre and cinema queues – London's flower market was also in the Garden, along the north side, where Great and Little Hart Street had been renamed Floral Street in its honour; and the men who trundled their barrows along Old Compton Street in the early morning on their way to set up their flash
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in Berwick Street, Rupert Street or the pitches in the side streets just off Oxford Street.

My main memories from my few youthful visits are of the great press of people and vehicles in the narrow streets, and the way the smells of the countryside – horse dung, cabbage, mould and earth – predominated in the centre of the city. I also remember how, in the hours up to lunchtime, the lorries that filled the streets around the market helped my stumbling efforts to read by having exotic addresses painted on their cab doors: Wigan, Bridgend, Daventry, Ammanford – they could have been Budapest or Timbuktu as far as I was concerned. Men – often young men in mufflers, with the inevitable ciggies stuck to their lower lips, or dogged and tucked behind their ear for later – swarmed over the backs of the trucks, building teetering loads of boxes, crates and cartons, all held together with faith, ropes and tarpaulin.

For the children who actually lived in Covent Garden, of course, the market was a vital presence at the very centre
of their daily lives, one that everyone I talked to looked back on with great affection. It was often part of their journey to or from school; a mysterious, echoing and empty space when the market was closed, and a fascinating, noisy and jam-packed one when it was open. It was a place of opportunities to be exploited, where they could fill their senses with rare and exotic sights and scents, and often the source of their family's livelihood.

For some, the market, empty or working, was part of an urban playground. Mike O'Rouke, who lived on the corner of Shelton Street and Mercer Street, remembers it clearly. ‘I was always up there,' he told me. ‘We used to go down where the main Piazza is, we used to get boxes and piles of sacks, you know, and you could climb up those, and play run-outs – you could hide for hours on end down there. We used to play run-outs round the streets, all up and down Long Acre, Langley Street, Neal Street.'

The back yards and alleys of the streets near the market also provided places for young Mike to play. ‘On Mercer Street, where my grandparents lived, there was – still is – a big opening behind them, and we used to have sacks and boxes there, and you could squeeze through the gate and you could make camps, climb about – just climbing in general, you know.'

‘Covent Garden market was a playground to us,' Ann Lee remembers. ‘It was only up the road. Mum knew a lot of the people that worked there, because they all sort of grew up together – I should imagine there were some who worked
there who weren't local, but I didn't meet any.' In fact, in the fifties, a lot of the market's workforce lived south of the river, but a fair few lived locally. Mike O'Rouke's family, for instance, had been involved in one way or another for generations.

The O'Roukes were mostly porters and traders, but there was plenty of work supporting the market, too. Ann Lee remembers that ‘Mum had a little cleaning job actually in Covent Garden market, and she used to take me in to the office with her – you know, the old-fashioned telephones, and the old-fashioned typewriters . . . I can see myself sitting at the desk – and as she walked through, it was “Morning, Kit”, “OK, Kit?” and “Goodnight, Kit”, and I thought, “My mum knows everybody”, but it was because a lot of local people worked there, in the market.'

It wasn't just the locals who saw the marketplace as entertainment. The everyday business of the market was a tourist attraction in itself, and I suspect that was why I was there with Father (well, that, and the out-of-hours drinking opportunities): we were tourists from across the Great Divide. Several guidebooks recommended a visit. Paul C, for example, on one of his trips to London to sample the delights of Soho, remembers that, one early summer morning after a very late night, ‘I went to Covent Garden, just to look round. It was a most extraordinary display of vegetables and flowers, and it was full of “characters”, doing business, all furiously smoking and with a pencil behind the ear. They were shouting at each other in a language I could hardly
understand, but obviously had something to do with money. And there were other guys in very expensive overcoats running around pointing that they wanted things, holding up fingers to show how many. I was absolutely fascinated just to watch it, and to see so much activity in a fairly small area.'