London Calling Read Free Page B

bath was 6d and second class 2d, cold baths were half-price. People arrived with brown-paper parcels containing their clean
     clothes, soap and towel. Most of them were the families of Italian waiters who lived in cramped rooms in Dean Street and Greek
     Street, saving every penny to retire back to Italy and buy a farm. With Mediterranean staples like olive oil and wine virtually
     impossible to get, these restaurateurs performed miracles daily to produce a semblance of Continental cuisine and provide
     the ambience necessary to keep the spirit of Soho alive.
    Soho was still very much a village despite wartime evacuation and the bombing. The same laissez-faire attitude that had always
     attracted artists and writers, students and journalists, also attracted strippers and brothel keepers, gamblers and pornographers.
     Throughout the war it was sustained by thousands of British and American troops who were there more for the brothels and gambling
     dens than the food but who kept Soho alive, giving it a reputation as a red-light district that still remains in the popular
     imagination. Hardly a street in Soho was without bomb damage; even St Anne’s was destroyed, leaving its tower standing alone
     in a mountain range of rubble.
    Despite the destruction, many people never left its streets; they would have felt like refugees anywhere else. There is a
     story about an artists’ model, a regular at the Highlander on Dean Street, who appeared one Saturday morning formally dressed
     complete with gloves and stockings. She even worea hat, a previously unseen occurrence. Asked if she was going to a wedding, she replied: ‘No. Going away for the weekend.
     To Swiss Cottage.’ 3 As Sammy Samuels, the owner of a series of spielers or gambling clubs, wrote about one of his clients: ‘he found his way into
     Soho and so far as I know, has not been able to find the way out. And Soho does get some types of people that way. Maybe it’s
     the air, or the feeling that you’ve gone “foreign” like in Africa or India, and it’s too good to change.’
    There were some artists and writers who were locals but mostly they arrived by taxi, tube or bus to eat and, most importantly,
     to take up their favourite positions at the bars. The bohemian community of London conducted its business in the pubs and
     cafés of the streets between Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia and Dean Street in Soho; a few minutes walk. It never took long
     to find someone you knew because no matter where people actually lived, they always travelled to Soho to meet their friends.
     The pubs were dingy and uncomfortable and everybody stood. They did not go there for comfort; they were there for the conversation,
     the ideas, the alcohol and the atmosphere of male bonhomie which few women were permitted to enjoy. Beer was from the barrel,
     people drank whisky and Guinness and the air was a thick fog of Craven ‘A’ and Senior Service. Soho and its environs were
     the stage, the various cafés, pubs and clubs were the stage sets, and in them, propping up the bar, were the characters, talking
     and talking. George Melly: ‘Soho was perhaps the only area in London where the rules didn’t apply. It was a Bohemian no-go
     area, tolerance its password, where bad behaviour was cherished.’ 4

1 A Very British Bohemia
    It was from the nests in Whitfield Street, Howland Street and Fitzroy Street, with the Fitzroy Tavern for home run, that the
     idea of Fitzrovianism in the verbal sense was first born… the idea of our group as vagabonds and sadhakas or seekers, as the
     Buddha was at the start… The fact that the name I gave, Fitzrovia, persists, does not surprise me, because of the unity of
     spirit and atmosphere which made it unique in London in those days.
    TAMBIMUTTU , ‘Fitzrovia’ 1
    The underground scene in London didn’t spring into being, ready-formed, at the end of the war. It grew slowly, the product
     of many factors, and in the early days there were