London Blues (2 page)

After what seems an eternity of reciprocating motion the camera pulls back to the medium shot. The director should have told the blonde this because she is caught unawares. Instead of abandoning herself to the plateaux of pleasure she’s scratching her nose and yawning. Somebody does say something to her because in a trice she’s back to rolling her head and staring at the ceiling. And still the banana hasn’t worn out. The brunette is diligently, if not mindlessly,
pumping away with it.

Looking at the part of the room now visible and linking it with what was seen of the right-hand side I could see it was pretty spacious. The ceiling is high too. This is in a Victorian town house carved up into bedsits. The wall on the right was probably put in to divide the room.

The film so far has been one take. The first cut now occurs: same camera set-up with the two girls on the bed. The brunette is kneeling down with her buttocks towards the camera. The blonde is listlessly masturbating her with the neck of a bottle. The camera zooms in to show the penetration in greater detail but the available light at this angle is limited.

Another cut and the girls are fondling each other’s breasts and kissing. The lens gently zooms in until lips and two extended touching tongues fill the screen. There’s a slow pull back to a medium shot of the girls sitting on the edge of the bed. The brunette opens her legs and pulls back her lips as far as they will go. The blonde touches her with a hesitant middle finger and then moves it down and into her until it is lost within. The zoom lens brings the subject forward until it fills the whole screen. It holds for several beats and then pulls back as the blonde removes her finger and the brunette closes her legs.

The girls are now startled by something off-screen. A noise, perhaps? They duck under the bed’s covers and wait. From camera right a figure walks into frame. He stands staring at the bed with his back to the camera. He’s wearing tight-fitting cord trousers, Chelsea boots and a dark shirt. His hair is blond and longish (for the time), coming to just over his ears. He steps forward and pulls back the eiderdown to reveal the two naked girls
underneath
doing their best to act sheepish and embarrassed. He undresses quickly and pulls the girls from the bed. They kneel down in front of him, one on either side. The guy looks like he’s in his early twenties. His features are sharp but not stern, almost like a young Paul Newman. He’s
smiling and enjoying himself.

The blonde takes his semi-flaccid circumcised member and begins rubbing it, deliberately and purposefully. She then sucks it with not much enthusiasm, barely taking more than its head in. The brunette comes over for a suck and does it with gusto, showing the blonde how it should be done.

The guy is now as hard as he’s ever likely to be. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls the blonde towards him. She climbs on him with her back to the camera and he’s soon inside her. He supports her buttocks with his hands, parts them for the camera and gently moves her up and down. Her co-operation seems zero. The brunette kneels down in front of them to get a better look. Now the girls change position for another few feet of 8mm footage.

The brunette climbs off and kneels down on the bed. The guy stands up, turns, parts her buttocks and starts to fuck her from behind. The blonde manoeuvres herself round on the far side so she can caress the other girl’s back. The detail isn’t too clear from this distance and I wonder why the zoom lens isn’t used for an anatomical close-up.

The guy withdraws and the blonde flops down with her legs open waiting for him. He seems to have some
difficulty
getting into her and then he’s in and she’s off staring at the ceiling again. The guy fucks her in what must be a difficult position, supporting himself on his right arm so that he’s well above her, with his left leg at an awkward angle, so that the punters won’t miss any of the action. Not that one can make out much from this distance. Again, why not a zoom? The brunette sits on the other side of the blonde caressing her breasts.

The guy withdraws quickly and the brunette reaches forward and rubs him as he ejaculates over the blonde’s breasts. The blonde turns her head away to stop any come ending up on her face and then slowly gazes down at her breasts as if to say: what on earth is
that
?

The brunette leans forward and pulls the now
detumescent
penis to her mouth for a final quick suck. She then turns and scoops some come in a teaspoon that has appeared as if by magic and offers it to the blonde who opens her mouth and takes it in. She probably didn’t swallow it, but whether she did or not we will never know as the film now cuts to a title card, again the black marker on white card:

Another card follows:

And then:

and

Whoever made this had a rare sense of humour, certainly for the genre. The allusive coming attractions would seem to validate the joky copyright line of MCMLXIII (1963): the originals for these punning titles were all feature films released here in London in 1961 or 1962, years I can remember pretty well, cinematically speaking, as I had just left school and went to the pictures regularly, usually twice a week.

This was the first sixties porno film I had seen in nearly twenty years. I had forgotten how amateurish they were. Not only amateurish but almost simple and innocent, like a saucy Victorian pin-up. Artless and unaffected. I
remembered
that everyone in them looked like someone you
could have gone to school with. They were the kids next door and the film could well have been made next door. Now the porno films from Germany, America and Scandinavia are shot professionally in good colour, with sync sound, incidental music and glam girls tarted up and expensively dressed like a page three bimbo opening a supermarket (well, in the opening scenes anyway – they soon strip off). But I guess it’s what you’re used to, what you grew up with. If I’m honest with myself I have to admit there’s a nostalgia factor in the appeal of these loops. They’re the first ones I saw, they are the ones I associate with my youth, with parties where I smoked my first dope, with the whole sixties whirligig.

The first blue movie I ever saw was at a party in a church in Chelsea, or rather a small chapel that had been converted into a house by a newspaper photographer who then lived there. I went with a girlfriend called Sarah Breakspear who I can still vividly recall after all these years. The only redhead I’ve ever gone out with. In the middle of the party someone switched on a little 8mm projector and we all enjoyed an hour’s worth of sleaze. It was fun, there was a lot of laughter. Try doing that at your average party now.

I’m thinking about the film and the sixties generally when I get an epiphanic answer to the question as to why the zooms lens was used in the first half of the film but not the second. The reason was simple. The guy who appeared in the film was the director/cameraman. Of course! When he was in front of the lens there was no one to operate the camera. He was the
auteur
(if stags are allowed such a thing) and, further, it was his room the movie was shot in. After all, didn’t he look the sort of guy who would have a picture of Bird on his wall?

The video had continued turning after the end of
The
Boyfriend’s
Surprise
Visit
… showing nothing but solid black. But now there was movement and sound – the end credits of
Get
Carter
were rolling, but I wasn’t taking any
real notice. I was still thinking about the blue movie. Who was the guy? What was his background? Did he make any other loops? Where is he now? What’s he doing? Who was the blonde? Who was the brunette? Where are they now? Did they travel by bus, underground, taxi or car to the shoot? What did they do immediately afterwards? What did they work at? Where
are
they now? If they’re married, do their husbands know about their work in the movies? Why did they appear? How much were they paid?

The
Boyfriend’s
Surprise
Visit.
Not a very original title but then the whole genre is formula stuff right down to and including the title. Boyfriend implies in this context a sexual relationship, and if he’s surprising his girlfriend she’s obviously doing something naughty. What you think you’re getting you usually get.

Years ago I had an inventory of British dirty films seized by the police from a wealthy collector and dealer who lived in St John’s Wood. I remember going through the list and thinking how dreary and unimaginative the titles were. There were some 500 of them. Nearly half were of
The
Boyfriend’s
Surprise
Visit
kind – titles like
Caught
in
the
Act,
The
Handy
Man,
The
Casting
Couch,
Geisha
Girl,
Night
Nurses,
and so on. The next largest group were the explicitly direct,
Get
Fucked,
Arse
Lovers,
Dildo
Delights,
and similar. Out of this long list only three were really memorable – two for their humour and the third for its sheer bizarreness. The humour award goes to
Los
Effectos
de
La
Marihuana
with
Incestral
[
sic
]
Home
in second place. This is what passes for urbane wit in this neck of the woods. The oddest title was stolen from a British theatrical musical of the 1940s written by Ivor Novello:
Perchance
to
Dream.
What a genteel title for a fuck film even if it does feature a dream sequence.

As I lay in the darkness edging into sleep the film kept running through my mind. Who were the girls? Who was the guy?

The director’s name I would later discover was Timothy
Purdom. 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 must
have 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 the
mews behind and the other buildings. The past has been jettisoned like the rubble of Albert Terrace. Spacious
expensive
apartments rising high and protected above Westbourne Grove and the Royal Oak. And here
incorporated
into the design at street level is a Pizza Express facing the south, and a Budgen’s supermarket fronting Porchester Road. There is where Timmy’s crowded and untidy room would have been, just there I would say, behind an
ornamental
balcony that also no longer exists. Now a sheer wall of brick.