THOSE BOARDING HOUSE DAYS
Jeremy Lewis on the
touchingly comic atmosphere of respectable lodgings
AMONG the many agreeable features of English films made in the 1930s are those scenes set in cosy-looking boarding houses somewhere in the inner suburbs. The landlady's favourite lodger — and, it goes without saying, the heroine of this mild, domestic drama — works as a secretary in an office full of curious tubular furniture: her boss is invariably irascible and over- weight, and wears spats, a frock coat and pince-nez. Every evening her impulsive, clean-cut admirer — clad in an ankle- length overcoat, his large felt hat held to his breast as though he were about to burst into song — comes to collect her for a night on the town: this being an eminently. respectable house, he is prevented from bounding up the stairs after the object of his adoration by the firm but kindly pro- prietress, who ushers him into the `lounge', where the other inmates are resting their heads against the antimacassars, their pipes squealing and groaning as they strug- gle to digest Mrs B.'s evening meal of Irish stew followed by spotted dick and custard and a nice bit of Cheddar.
These fellow guests — most of whom are long-term residents — usually include a careworn clerk, bullied and underpaid at work but capable of unexpected heroism; a dubious major with a carbuncular nose and a taste for the hard stuff; a disapproving frump of the school matron variety, who glares at the major and browbeats the clerk; and a jolly commercial traveller, who joshes Mrs B., ignores the frump's withering glances, cracks jokes of the kind associated with commercial travellers, and spends a good deal of time rummaging in his case of samples for something to cheer up the heroine when she and the chap have had a lovers' tiff.
Ever since I can remember I have found boarding houses and small residential hotels — and particularly those that have come down in the world or have preten- sions to gentility — wonderfully touching and comic.
I lived for a year in digs of a near- theatrical kind in Ballsbridge, a prim and respectable suburb of Dublin, the inhabi- tants of which were much given to twitch- ing their lace curtains and exchanging disapproving gossip in low whispers, one hand raised to the mouth like conspirators of the old-fashioned variety. Unlike the traditional theatrical landlady, with her drooping cigarette, dressing-gown, curlers and rolling pin at the ready, Mrs Brady was a bustling, apple-cheeked, house-proud little woman who spent her spare time applying Brasso to the stair rods and the gong on the hall table, and re-arranging the plastic flowers that are so essential a feature of boarding house life. Mr Brady, on the other hand, was lethargy made flesh: after breakfast he would rouse him- self to the extent of changing a light bulb or mending a fuse, after which he would sink exhausted into an armchair in a small back room, unseal a bottle of Jamesons and watch the racing on television. Since Mr Brady was a part-time bookie, this was — I hope — charged up to the tax-man as some kind of professional expense.
The Bradys' house was a modest late- Victorian terraced house of the kind one might find in Clapham or Fulham. Into this small space they managed to jam eight students, four 'regulars', a half-witted maid, and their own four children: since every available room appeared to be cram- med with lodgers of some kind, I could only assume that the Bradys slept in the small room under the stairs where Mr Brady enjoyed the racing, while the chil- dren were laid out on racks in the kitchen, like apples in an attic. All the students of whom I was one — were undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin, which was well-known in those far-off days as the idlest university in Europe and a highly congenial rest-home for English public schoolboys with a weakness for drink, beagling and being sick out of windows.
I shared a room with two others and a mahogany wardrobe so enormous that the Bradys would have been well advised to leave it in the garden and fill it with additional guests: our fellow lodgers from Trinity included a Woosterish Catholic peer and the heir to a whisky empire, and since the more ambitious Dublin landladies fought hard to entice Old Etonians and sprigs of the minor nobility into their quarters, this lent Mrs Brady's establish- ment a certain cachet. In a room by himself was a lonely Wykhamist, who spoke to no one and was not spoken to in turn: when, one morning, the lavatory — the only lavatory, as I remember — was blocked in a particularly obstructive manner, and Mr Brady had come hurrying to the scene carrying, for some curious reason, an axe in one hand and a saw in the other, it was assumed that the Wykhamist was the Guil- ty Man, and a hush fell over the breakfast tables as he made his furtive entrance.
Like the characters in the English films I so admired, we were assiduous in exchang- ing polite pleasantries over the breakfast tables, paying particular attention to the `regulars'. Since Trinity terms were seldom more than about six weeks long, and some of the `regulars' had been lodging with the Bradys for the last 20 years or so, they were — quite rightly — treated with rather more decorum than the transitory and tiresome riff-raff from Trinity College. They included the inevitable commercial traveller, replete with nicotine-stained fin- gers and a light drizzle of dandruff about the shoulder blades; a sad-looking elderly man with a livid purple birthmark and a nervous facial tic; and a stout, blousy chain-smoker in her early 60s who looked as though she stubbed her cigarettes out in her inexpertly peroxided hair.
It goes without saying that we Trinity types thought ourselves wags of the highest order and several cuts above the `regulars', whom we unkindly derided behind their backs: no doubt they found us, as students almost always are, tiresome, arrogant and infantile to a wearisome degree. How boring it must have been to hear us stumbling about the flower beds and fumb- ling for the keyhole after a late-night session in the Dublin pubs! How aggravat- ing to have to listen to me laughing as I struggled to drink tea and post slices of buttered soda bread through the inade- quate aperture provided in the enormous red false beard I insisted on wearing, for obscure and entirely childish reasons, for an entire autumn term!
Some years ago I was invited to a rather grand reception somewhere off Eaton Square. Squadrons of Spanish waiters in absurdly short jackets and bow ties were handing round silver salvers of champagne and dainties covered with strips of smoked salmon and small heaps of glistening cav- iar; the heads of Famous Names could be spotted bobbing enticingly in the back- ground. Mine host, a smooth and charming Irishman, hurried forward to introduce himself. `Do you remember me?' he asked. I demurred in the way one does, my mind whirring like an ill-conditioned computer as I strove to remember where I had seen this entirely unfamiliar face before. `You used to be one of my mother's lodgers in Dublin,' he said: 'I remember you very well.' The years rolled away in an instant: this sophisticated, successful — and ex- tremely likeable — man in his mid-thirties was one of those Brady children who had (according to my version of events) slept in racks in the kitchen quarters and had helped the half-witted maid hand out the breakfast trays. Boarding house life had performed its wonders once again.
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