London Blues Read Free Page B

mind. Who were the girls? Who was the guy?
    The director’s name I would later discover was TimothyPurdom. Well, that was the name he sailed under in the early sixties. He was christened George Eric Purdom. His friends called him Tim or Timmy. Why? I don’t know. And I never did find out.
    George Purdom. George Eric Purdom. He wasn’t an Eric. There was nothing about him that was Eric-ish, or George-ish. Given names that were misnomers, both of them. He was a Tim or a Timmy, the name suited him far better. A name he could live with. But where are you now, Timmy? Where indeed?
    Timmy’s a mystery all right. A real mystery. But, as I would discover, he was a mystery in an even bigger mystery. Forget about answers, we don’t even know the questions.
    This is a lost mystery of Lost London.
     
    I step off the underground train, walk along the platform and up the stairs. There is no ticket collector so I drop the ticket into a waste-bin and continue bouncing along in my new Reeboks and out on to the street. Queensway. Back in the 1960s it was a bohemian sort of place whereas now it seems mainly populated by Arabs, the less well-off Arabs, the ones that can’t afford Sloane Street and thereabouts.
    It’s a cold Sunday afternoon and big rain clouds are massing in the sky, yet the place is as bustling as Oxford Street on a Saturday morning.
    To the south is the Bayswater Road and that part of Hyde Park that dissolves into Kensington Gardens, while to the north is Westbourne Grove where I now head. Up past the old Whiteley’s department store on the left, now revamped as some co-operative boutique collective with flags flying at high mast above it, and then across the Grove.
    I continue, in an easterly direction, past the road that leads up to the Porchester Baths, past the old ABC Cinema.
    I turn left on to Porchester Road and stop. I’m standing outside the Royal Oak pub, a place that looks like it musthave been here for a hundred years or more. It’s a pub with more local than passing trade I would guess, an unprepossessing place that probably hasn’t changed since the war and one that won’t until the day a developer gets planning permission to demolish and redevelop, then it’ll become part of what it already seems – another part of Lost London.
    And there’s Timmy drinking at the bar, just in there, only a few yards away from me … but nearly thirty years ago. He’s part of Lost London too, the Valhalla of Memory. All the parameters are right except for that of Time. We could have met. Yes, indeed.
    I turn my head slowly. I know what to expect from sly peripheral vision glances. What was there is no longer there. I’m dealing in the vanished. The stuff of memories. The London that is gone.
    Here was Albert Terrace, built in the late 1850s or early 1860s. A tall terrace of mid-Victorian stock design – open basement, mezzanine, plus three storeys. Brick with stucco. Built originally for the middle levels of the middle classes who could not afford to live in the swankier area to the south along the Bayswater Road (which itself was for those who could not afford the airy elegance of Cubitt’s Belgravia on the other side of Hyde Park). One family (and servants) in each house with their horses and carriages kept around the back in the mews. But a special configuration of late nineteenth-century topography and demography resulted in the terrace descending into cheap multi-occupancy … and the plaster cracked and the wallpaper peeled and the carpets on the stairs got more and more threadbare while the rainwater pipes rusted and bracken and moss sprouted in the hopper-heads.
    I raise my head slightly and then slowly open my eyes and see what used to be there. I picture it as it was. Then I see what is there now and I see how the whole corner of Porchester Road and Bishop’s Bridge Road has been redeveloped in clean crisp brick. Gone is Albert Terrace and themews behind and the other buildings. The past has been