Friends and enemies in the intellectual and aesthetic heart of London
PAUL JOHNSON
Last Friday afternoon produced a spectacular display of warm autumn sunshine, and I sat for a spell, enjoying its gentle caresses, at an outdoor café on Westbourne Grove, I marvelled, not for the first time, about the mutabilities of urban life, for this part of London, when I first knew it half a century ago, was a dangerous, Rachmanised, slummy place. Now it is the smartest part of London, and this particular café, which serves delicious cappuccinos, faddy cakes and fruit drinks with names like 'Monkey', is a cynosure of the young, beautiful and successful from all over Europe. Most of those who drop in are women under 30, in twos and threes, who come there not indeed to pick up men — there aren't many — but to discuss health, hairdressers, the new clothes shops which open at the rate of one a week in the neighbourhood, magic cosmetic dodges, miraculous diets and — yes! — books. They are the new elite, with high salaries, their own stockbrokers and 'financial advisers', buying on mortgage their dinky flats in London, Paris, Milan, Barcelona; models, fashion journalists, supersecretaries and executives in the City and West End, independent, paying their own way, for whom men are just another commodity to be indulged in or not, as fashion and fancy dictate. They don't go to church much, or visit their parents often, and they pride themselves on their courage, resourcefulness, street wisdom and being debroudlarde. But sometimes, in an unguarded moment, one of them looks as if she would like a strong shoulder to cry on.
I enjoy watching these ladies, as they go about their task, like priestesses, of squeezing the orange of youth thy, watched by handsome but problematical young men, who stand on the pavement awaiting their opportunities. Other smart young women, a little shopworn perhaps, pass by with their first infant in a pushchair, already entangled in the reproductive system. I notice, too, celebrated writers, eccentrics, film and television people, preoccupied with success and its problems — rows, divorces, lawyers, falling stock prices, greedy agents. The va-etview is constant, absorbing, scores of unfinished short stories. There are mystery men and women, whom I glimpse regularly but do not quite fathom: the Merry Widow, Old Dostoevsky, the Minor Royal, the Retired Femme Fatale, Lolita's Mum, Lowryman, the Last Stalinist and Wittgenstein's Ghost
— students of the quartier will know who I mean. I enjoy watching this moving picture gallery more than any such parade since I used to sit in the Café Mabillon in the early Fifties studying the worthies of the Boulevard Saint-Germain as they waddled through their crepuscular routines.
Window-gazing is one of the joys of our metropolitan village, for shops are always changing hands and bursting out with fresh glories. There is a place which specialises in bottles and filling them for you with wines, oils and other liquids. Another deals in plaster angels, and a third, called Scarlet, polishes your nails. There is a specialist Lenin icon store, and a shop which sells masterpieces of Socialist Realism at knock-down prices. The stonemason's where I bought my magnificent early 1800s Florentine copy of Donatello's David which took five strong men to lift into position in my garden, still flourishes. So does Mr Lacy, in my view the best picture-framer in Europe, where I take my oldmaster drawings to be cleaned and restored and remounted. A consultation with Mr Lacy on the precise date, provenance and merits of a particular antique frame is an art education in itself. Nearby is a learned gentleman who sells objets d'art of all kinds, but whose particular joy is handling fragments of sculpture from mediaeval England. His face lights up with saintly veneration as he runs his hands over a fine alabaster arm or neck and says, 'What man could produce that today?' Up the road is a charming picture shop where the girl in charge beckons me in and makes me a cup of tea. People recognise you here, and are always ready to chat and make friends. There are, to be sure, places I pass quickly by: one called 'Strictly, Men Only', for instance, and a pub where 'they' are said to congregate. I am ecumenical but not latitudinarian.
Westbourne Grove was developed in the 1850s and has always been a curious mixture of classes and races. There are pubs called the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Lons
dale (the 'Yellow Earl', I presume, patron of prizefighting and egregious exemplar of aristocratic cad), and another named after Prince Lucien Bonaparte, who lived for 40 years in a house pulled down to create the Odeon cinema, itself now transmogrified into an eaterie called Thank God It's Friday. Westbourne Grove's osmotics remind you it was once dubbed Bankruptcy Row. People moved in and out constantly. At Westbourne Farm (as it was still called) you could once glimpse Mrs Siddons taking her stately walks, exclaiming in her thrilling slow contralto, 'How — beautiful -it — all — is!' Nearby was the perky Charles Kemble, gesturing vaguely as he walked along memorising his 'study'. Later, you could attend the surgery. at Number 152, of A.J. Cronin, and not too far away were the diminutive figure of Thomas Hardy and, by contrast, the skeletal, half-sighted giant Aldous Huxley, in wide black hat and cloak, porn-poming a Bach fugue as he wandered, ankle-spotting. There are still mandarins at large. Is that Francis Wyndham scurrying along plotting an acute (but not unsympathetic) review? Can that be Hugh Massingberd composing a majestic obituary in his head? And there, clearly, is Alan Sillitoe wrestling with a minor character. Sometimes I glimpse Harold Pinter, head buzzing with Yankee iniquities and Turkish tortures, straying in from his mountain fastness in Holland Park. Then again, I see Brian Sewell heading purposefully for Sheila's Bookshop, the cerebral and aesthetic hub of the quartier. And that reminds me: where is Old Name-Dropper? I haven't seen him at Sheila's recently. Or read him in the columns of The Spectator, for that matter. Not ill, I hope. Come back, Ali, and let us drop a few agnomens together, or at least a toponym or two.
That's the thing about our village: you know its inhabitants and miss them when time or chance removes them from the scene for a spell. So, sitting at my table in the sun, enjoying the smartness of youth, I keep an eye open for old chums, like Freddy Forsyth, or the delectable lady who wrote that masterly book about old China. But alas, in an imperfect world, acquaintance is two-edged. I was reminded of this by the late Anthony Powell. Visiting him at the Chanty. I said what fun it was living in Notting Hill 'within walking distance of so many friends'. Uncle Tony raised a sardonic eyebrow. 'And enemies?' he asked.
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