London Blues (3 page)

This corner here is murmurous with time. Somewhere the past is still the present. Somewhere … there’s music …

How high the moon?

Tim is now loading a reel of 8mm black-and-white film into the movie camera. A Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk record might be playing on his portable record player. It’s the early 1960s and then when you were young your future, your life, had only one limitation and that was your imagination. If you could think of it you could do it. Anything was possible. It always is in the past.

‘Hi. Come in.’

‘Sit down … would you like a drink … or something?’

‘No.’

‘You got any Pepsi?’

‘No, I haven’t. I’ve got some lemonade … I think.’

‘No.’

‘You’re Elaine?’

‘Yes.’

‘You work with Brenda?’

‘No. We’re just friends.’

‘Elaine and me went to school together.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Yeah. Elaine works in a shoe shop.’

‘In the West End?’

‘Marble Arch.’

‘But I’m going after a better job.’

‘Good.’

‘It will be if I get it.’

‘I hope you do.’

‘I will.’

‘This your place?’

‘I live here. Yes.’

‘Not very modern, is it?’

‘Suits me.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Brenda says you’re going to pay us
£
10 each.’

‘A tenner each … that’s right.’

‘We get paid now?’

‘As soon as we’ve finished.’

‘Yeah. What’s this going to be called then?’

‘I haven’t decided.’

‘See, he doesn’t know. I asked before … said he didn’t know.’

‘Well, probably something like
Surprised
by
the
Boyfriend
.’

‘You’re the boyfriend?’

‘I’m the only fella here.’

‘What have I got to do?’

‘We can run through it … run through it in a minute when I’ve got the lights fixed … but it opens with you two alone here and you start getting fruity and playing with each other.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Yeah. And then I discover … I surprise you when I walk in and we have a threesome.’

‘So you appear in it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who looks after the camera when you are … doing it?’

‘Nobody. It’s on a tripod. It looks after itself.’

‘I don’t want to get pregnant.’

‘You won’t. I’m not going to come inside you.’

‘I’ve got to catch my bus at nine o’clock.’

‘I’ve never heard of any of these records … where do you get them from? I haven’t heard of … any … this lot.’

‘Jazz shops.’

‘Jazz … I don’t like
jazz
.’

‘Where are the records from these Cliff Richard sleeves?’

‘There aren’t any. I just have the sleeves
.’

‘You just collect sleeves … so it looks good?’

‘No. They’re props for this … the film
.’

‘Props?’

‘Just props … in the film.’

‘Don’t you have anything worth playing?’

‘There’s a Beatles EP there somewhere. Put that on.’

‘The who?’

‘The Beatles … you know … from Liverpool.’

‘I like Cliff.’

‘He’s all right.’

‘You know Roy?’

‘Who’s he?’

‘My boyfriend.’

‘
That
Roy.’

‘Yes. He’s my new boyfriend. He works in a record shop. The Melody Bar … in Charing Cross Road.’

‘That sounds exciting. Can he get records cheap?’

‘No. But Cliff Richard went in there last week and there were riots … and the police were called.
Summer
Holiday
got to number seven in the Hit Parade this week.’

‘Did he meet Cliff?’

‘Yes … and he got his autograph for me!’

‘Can he get me one?’

‘If Cliff comes back in the shop, he can.’

‘He’s the tops.’

‘Even my old gran likes him.’

‘Everyone does.’

‘Even the police.’

‘And Elvis does too.’

‘Does he?’

‘Yeah. I heard this geezer say it on the radio.’

‘When’s he going to be ready?’

‘Soon. He has to get all the lights and that right. They pay him a lot of money for this. That’s how he can pay us a lot.’

‘Only a tenner!’

‘That’s more than I earn a week at Maison Eve. And you don’t earn that selling shoes!’

‘I never said I did, did I?’

‘It’s good … for an hour’s work.’

‘You see those photos in the paper today of Elizabeth Taylor wearing all that jewellery? Over
£
100,000 worth!’

‘What I saw today was a really nice black dress in a boutique in Old Bond Street. It was six guineas and I’m going to get it.’

‘That’s nice. I’m going to save it. We’re getting married soon and we need every penny.’

‘To Roy?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Does he know you’re doing this?’

‘Course not, stupid!’

‘Let’s just run through it … are you sure you two don’t want a drink?’

‘A drink?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘This isn’t going to be shown over here, is it?’

‘No, it isn’t. I told you. It’s being exported to Thailand.’

‘Thailand?’

‘That’s miles away, Brenda.’

‘Thailand? Near India, The other side of India … so don’t take your holidays there!’

‘Where?’

‘Thailand. In Thailand.’

‘Shouldn’t think so. We only ever go to the coast
someplace
. Someplace … like Ilfracombe … or Cromer.’

‘I’ve been to Cromer.’

‘Lots of boys there.’

‘But more in Ilfracombe.’

‘We went in my dad’s Dormobile.’

‘Lucky thing!’

‘Yes. He saved really hard for it.’

‘I don’t want to miss my last bus.’

‘You won’t.’

‘I’ve got to get up early in the morning. I’m helping my sister-in-law.’

‘I mustn’t get my hair in a mess. I’ve only just had it done.’

‘You won’t.’

‘I don’t want what it cost me going down the drain. Seven- and-six it was.’

‘That’s steep. We don’t charge that.’

‘Let’s do a dress rehearsal.’

‘Can’t you just film it?’

‘We have to get it right.’

‘I’m cold.’

‘So am I.’

‘I’ve put the electric fire on … full.’

‘I’m all goose pimples now.’

‘It won’t show on the film.’

‘Can I put the gas fire on?’

‘If it worked you could.’

‘Belongs in a museum.’

‘Put that Beatles record on.’

‘It’s
Please,
Please
Me
.’

‘Yeah.’

‘This bedcover is filthy … don’t you ever wash it?’

‘Are we ready?’

‘Where did I put the spoon?’

‘It’s on the bed there … the other side.’

‘Here it is.’

‘Leave it there.’

‘Are you both ready?’

‘I am … yes.’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure you don’t want to run through it again?’

‘Ready? Ready … OK, then. I’m going to start the camera … and don’t get in the way. The camera has to see
everything
. Everything. But don’t look into the camera. I’ll tell you … as we go along. OK? Running. Now. Action!’

A dowdy run-down pre-war council estate in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. A house more run-down than the others. A battered, rusted Ford Capri jacked up in the front garden and adjacent a redundant washing machine with weeds growing up around it.

The woman standing by the front door looks like Elaine’s grandmother would have looked in 1963. But it’s Elaine herself. She’s wearing black slacks, a white blouse, a red bra. White high-heeled shoes. She’s been married twice and divorced twice. She looks lived-in, as they say. She was fifty last week.

‘It wasn’t me and anyway I can’t talk to you as I’ve got to pick my granddaughter up from the nursery.’

That evening when she was all alone she would look into the bathroom mirror, explore the intricate topography of her face, and say, ‘I was young and silly then … but very
attractive
…
very
attractive.’ She would stare into her eyes for some time and wonder: where have those thirty years gone?

A crematorium. Neat and ordered. Avenues of remembrance. Trained creepers and pruned roses. A tired fountain.

Here’s a plaque set in the wall:

She was crossing the road. Walking across the Edgware Road just south of Kilburn. Two black guys in a stolen car, stoned out of their minds. Hit and run.

I look at the plaque again … one of the two memorials to her existence.

NICK ESDAILLE
: Perhaps the sixties, the 1960s, started at midnight on 1 January 1960? Perhaps they started half an hour later? Perhaps they didn’t get going until 1966 when
Time
magazine had that cover story about ‘London – The Swinging City’? Was it 1966? I’m not sure. Yeah, it was 1966. Yeah, I always remember that because it was the same year as the Moors Murders trial. Perhaps … perhaps the sixties, the 1960s ….

This Yucatan is really
goooood
!

So … so … what I’m saying is … that you … is that you can ask a dozen different people and you’ll get a dozen different starting dates. The sixties, I always think, didn’t really get going until about 1964 and didn’t end until about 1972 or 1973. The early 1960s were, in every way, the fag end of the fifties – post-war austerity, drab, predictable … and not very imaginative or stylish.

You see the 1940s didn’t end until about 1956. Then it was the 1950s until 1963 or ‘64 or so.

So Tim, you know, was a child of the 1940s who came of age in the 1950s and when he was out and about in London in the early 1960s it was still very fifty-ish. But I think he was, in his own way, one of those formative guys who sort of … uh …
pointed
the way. He was heading in the direction
a lot of other people would go, but a good few years earlier. I suppose you could say he was one of the precursors of Swingin’ London, in his own way … even if his was a life on the margin.

Yeah … paranoia … paranoia … there was a lot of
paranoia
about then. In fact it was a child of the sixties. No, it wasn’t all dope related. Dope paranoia is local,
personalised
stuff. Pretty small beer: me and my friends and whether that guy in the bar is going to shop me to the local drug squad. That kind of thing. Part of the drug culture. What I’m really talking about is what you might call
polit
ical
paranoia. Political in the big sense of the term. Conspiracies that affect the way we live and the way we perceive things. Conspiracy theory, if you like, as opposed to the ‘accident’ theorists like … like, say Christopher Andrew and his ilk. These guys see all sorts of conspiracies with the left wing … communist and socialist conspiracies all over the place, the enemy within and all that, but as soon as someone thinks they see a right-wing conspiracy or plot these guys are on the platform shouting ‘Conspiracy
theorist
!’ You know, as a put-down.

I date it from 1963, the paranoia. There were two events then that got it rolling. First, the arrest and alleged suicide of Stephen Ward, the osteopath at the centre of the Profumo Affair. And then, a few months later, Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly shooting John F. Kennedy. But
this
was a double whammy: two days after Jack Kennedy got it Oswald got it too! Shot in the police basement in Dallas by a small-time Mafia hood, Jack Ruby!

Now, who really was Stephen Ward? Who was Oswald? Who was Ruby? Thirty years later now, are we any the wiser? Are we any the wiser in real terms? We know a bit more, sure, but we don’t have any definitive answers. Plenty of surmises. Plenty of hunches. But no smoking guns. No true confessions.

There was, I think, a mutually reinforcing feedback between the drug paranoia and the political paranoia. A
dope smoker who is pretty sure that the local drug squad is up to no good – you know, licensing dealers, selling off seized quantities, fitting up people – is more likely to look at Lee Harvey Oswald and think, hold on a minute! What’s really going on here? What’s the real score? What’s the
subtext
?

I can’t speak for other countries but for the generation that grew up here in the 1950s and 1960s dope got you looking at things in a different way. You found yourself questioning things your parents never did. That political sophistication may be the only valid legacy of the sixties. We’ll see.

Nobody has the Big Picture. Even people on the inside don’t have it, but, of course, their picture is a lot more comprehensive than the one you put together on the outside. I don’t think Timmy ever thought he had it or, if he did, he never confided it to me. Nothing much at all was known at the time. The odd strange occurrence, the odd half-digested rumour, the odd suspicion. Nobody was sitting down and trying to put it all together. You couldn’t catch it in a single focus. When you are working on a
newspaper
you hear things all the time. There’s a kind of
overload
. You prick your ears up when there is something that is of immediate use. But the rest? It goes to the back of your mind … then out of your mind. Unlike American papers we don’t have journalists working long-term on Big Stories. Your typical hack wants the big one placed on his desk – all trussed-up and oven-ready.