Diary
Some time ago, two or three years perhaps, I took up walking in the middle of the night. As a smoker and a `small hours' writer I thought it might give my lungs more of a sporting chance if I Popped out for a few minutes and perambulated round the block. After a week I went further and stayed out longer. I always take the carving knife with me, though when it's very cold, as it has been recently, I doubt very much whether any- one is out there aching to do a spot of mugging. The advantage to be gained from walking by night rather than day is obvious you can stand in the middle of the road and look at the buildings properly. The fortunate thing is that I live in Camden Town, which, as everyone knows, is Dick- ens country from Bayham Street to Gower Street and beyond, and more than usually rich in Victorian squares and terraces. Of late, owing to the frost, I've realised that, sentimental as I am about preserving the past above ground, I'm not half so keen on keeping the bits which remain beneath. I can't help worrying about all those sewage and gas and water pipes mouldering away under the earth, and all last week I flittered across Camden Town like an anxious canary, ready to fall over at the first whiff of gas. I can understand how heavy traffic might weaken the mains, but I can't grasp, scientifically speaking, the significance of low temperatures on the piping system, though I do remember being ticked off in Moscow for not wearing my fur hat, and being given a lecture on the differences between island and land masses. In Russia, so I was told, the weather can appear deceptively mild, and not until a stranger with a Good Samaritan complex rushes up and pulls your nose — because he can see it's become frostbitten — are you likely to be aware of danger. This being an island, I don't suppose it's the same thing for pipes. I start my walking in Mornington Crescent; I've been on my feet, as it were, for several minutes before that, but as during those first heady moments the air doubles me up coughing, I can't claim to manage more than a stum- ble. I recover when I've drawn level with Sickert's house. I read somewhere that he was suspected, for what reasons I've now forgotten, of being mixed up with the Duke of Clarence and Jack the Ripper, and I often think that were he to return and peer through his letter-box, as I have, and see what they've done to the interior of the house, he could be excused for getting out the old paintbrushes and daubing some- thing murderous on the front door. When I've passed the horse and trough on the corner, I'm on the Hampstead road. To the
right is a huge hoarding with one of those adverts saying Fly Me to Australia, behind which in better times stood Wellington House Academy, a school attended by Dickens when he was ten and run by a Welshman called Mr Jones. First the Birm- ingham railway line swallowed up the playground and sliced through the school- room, then the house fell down and now there's nothing save a garage and a lot of taxi-cabs. Still, it's the same pavement, more or less, that Dickens walked along, and it gives me pleasure in the deserted night street to imagine him bounding up those vanished steps with his Clavis Latin book tucked under his armpit and a white mouse wriggling in his pocket. Having savoured the moment I cross the road, walk down what is left of Oakley Square and eventually turn into Bayham Street. The house which he lived in has gone — a washerwoman lodged next door and a Bow Street runner rented the house opposite but there's a row of almshouses, and I don't see why they shouldn't be the same ones of which he spoke to Forster: `To go to this spot as a boy and look from the wall over the dust-heaps and dock-leaves and fields at the cupola of St Paul's looming through the smoke, was a treat that served me for hours of vague reflection after- wards.' What a marvel the man was; what an abundance of energy and industry he had, what genius and imagination! Along with everything else he obviously had very good eyesight. A new biography of him is long overdue. Someone, probably Peter Ackroyd, should write it at once.
The other day I heard the Bishop of Durham answering questions put to him by some very bright school-children in Northern Ireland. I was struck by two things — he didn't talk down to them for an instant, and not one child in the audience had a single pimple, never mind a boil or a carbuncle. That, and the fact that the Bishop has a touch of the Claude
`Years ago you had to put your head in the gas oven to kill yourself' Rains about him, though in the Phantom of the Opera Claude was less chubby. Most of the boys and girls appeared to dis- approve of the miners' strike and to be in favour of Thatcherism, and one or two obviously they'd never heard of the Red Dean — seemed to think that the Bishop was too controversial for his own good. A lot of the questions were about sex. Was it a good idea to have sex before marriage? The Bishop thought possibly not, if it could be avoided. Why not? 'Because,' he said endearingly, 'it's nicer to wait for one person and sort of keep oneself for one really big go that builds up.' Why can't homosexuals marry? He was a bit stumped by that one, but rallied by hinting that the equipment would be missing to receive the really big go which might produce offspring. I thought he was very nice and I don't know why people seem to think he's a bit of an ass. Equally nice, in fact something of a present-day saint, is Mon- signor Bruce Kent, who was waving his gladioli with the rest of us at Dame Edna's Christmas show last month. After she had told us how happy her mother was in an old people's maximum security home, we were encouraged to join in. Following a sugges- tion — made, I think, by Denis Healey that Dame Edna should pull out Norm's feeding drip and make a play for the Australian Ambassador — the good Mon- signor wanted to know if Edna was fol- lowed onto tube trains by men in plain clothes. He was, he said, and his telephone was bugged. It was a sombre moment in an otherwise hilarious evening.
T had more than four hours of sombre lmoments last week while waiting for my family to arrive at Heathrow. I was foolish enough to ask a bystander if it was safe for planes to land in bad weather. He said not always, which sent me straight to the bar. The two young men who were in charge began to laugh, and one said to the other, `Is it dead, do you think?' I know one can't always look one's best, but I was a bit hurt and told them as much. It turned out they were referring to my fur hat, or so they pretended, the one I wouldn't wear in Moscow, which was crouching like a dren- ched rat on the counter. An hour later, when I had already composed the obituary notices and chosen commemorative trees to be planned in the back yard, the plane landed safely. We travelled home cautious- ly; the wireless had warned us to go slow on the motorway because of the weather conditions, though the main danger seemed to lie in those plastic cones that blow all over the place. The sight of them reminded me of a night out some years back, when too much drink was taken and the man who was driving me home hit a line of them at a junction. He went into shock, under the impression that he'd knocked down five stout little men in top hats.
Beryl Bainbridge
Previous page
