In Rachmansland

By JOHN SPURLING

BETWEEN Westbourne Grove, where Christine Keeler met 'Lucky' Gordon in a cafe, and the Harrow Road, where Perec Rachman gained his first experience of putting in the schwarzes and de-scatting; a quarter of an hour's walk from Little Venice and twenty minutes from Kensington Palace; south of the Grand Union Canal, north of the Bayswater Road, west of Paddington and east of Portobello Road, is a street of early Victorian Bayswater façades, porticoed and four-storied, with deep basement areas railed off the pavement. There are 120 houses in the street, a population of 3,000 at a conservative estimate and a hazarded annual income for the landlords of at least £100,000.

During and after the war, St. Stephen's Gar- dens still housed decayed gentility. In the early Fifties, Rachman and his imitators began their process of moving in prostitutes and West In- dians, and except for • those few insanely obstinate statutory tenants who could not be cajoled, bullied, maddened or deroofed from their rooms, the gentility moved out to decay else- where. Behind the battered Corinthian porticoes a new shifting population found temporary and, for the landlords, lucrative shelter.

Sliced by north-south streets, St. Stephen's Gardens runs from west to east in four sections and culminates in the black church from one of whose tutelary saints its name derives. The Gardens, such as they ever were, are now a thin strip of children's playground in one of the centre sections. By day one is impressed chiefly by the unkempt state of the houses and the dirty pavements, Three or four houses have recently been repainted and notices have appeared on the lamp-posts headed, 'Spitting is dangerous,' but the dogs do not spit and are unabashed.

In addition to the prostitutes (at £15 a week per room, not to mention a cut on earnings) and West Indians (at sometimes £3 10s. per day for floor space), the landlords, many of whom, like the no.w legendary owner of the two-way mirror, themselves began as tenants of a single room, could not fail to see the profit inherent in a rootless population without permanent pros- pects, without a regularly assured income, which must somehow find shelter for itself and its children and is in no position to ,complain about living conditions or inflated rents.

The opening of basement clubs in St. Stephen's Gardens was a natural corollary of its new trends in population. Install a juke-box and lay on alcohol and you at once turn to profit a space which is either uninhabitable or at best brings in only a minimal rent. Tenants who can- not afford to complain about their own imme- diate surroundings will have to put up with all-night dance music, pavement scuffles and the continual slamming of car doors and revving of engines.

By the late Fifties, a new life was firmly established in the wake of the death of respect- ability. Evictions, midnight flits, copulation (paid for and unpaid for), child-bearing, fights, racial discrimination (at least during the Notting Hill riots) and all-night entertainment enlivened the preparation of five o'clock supper, the early rising in the dark, the spanking of already existing children and the bright self-satisfied television screens which, by virtue of their un- paid instalments, might at any time flicker home to the shop from which they came. An abor- tionist lent her essential support to the prostitute trade from the westernmost section of the Gar- dens; certain tenants of various nationalities emerged from the constriction of single rooms to become, like the original guiding spirit, owners of whole houses and to move in due course to quieter districts, retaining the source of their income to pay for select educations for their children or esoteric comforts for themselves and their friends; the police went in pairs; and the borough council sent dustmen and street- cleaners at regular intervals.

Changes began in 1959. By the time that Murphy (my wife) and I moved into our two- room top-floor flat in the easternmost section, the basement clubs had all closed, the prostitute on the ground floor of our house was under notice to quit and the heyday of the landlords was already a little overcast.

Within a week of our arrival we were visited by a film company and by the police. The film company—a tall man with suede shoes and a small stiff moustache—appeared, in company with the housekeeper who lived in the basement, on our top-floor landing. I found them trying ineffectively to operate the lire-escape—a ladder folded once on itself and kept flush with the ceiling by a pulley-and-string arrangement. The film man wanted to have a look at the roof. The fire-escape did, in fact, work, once you understood it, and he must have been satis- fied with what he found, because he returned a few days afterwards to call on me.

He thought the house and our room in par- ticular would provide part of the set his com- pany wanted for a nouvelle vague film. While they used our room, they would accom- modate us somewhere else, perhaps at the Dor- chester, and they would also pay us for our disturbance. He couldn't say that they definitely would use the room, because he was only factotum to the director of the film, a million- aire's son of twenty-five, who, despite his general incompetence, had the final decision.

The police came one Sunday at about mid- n/ight, working up the house floor by floor, door by door, interrogating the tenants without any old-fashioned illusions that Englishmen, live in castles. They were not old-fashioned policemen : they wore peaked caps and you would not have asked them the way anywhere. Nor did they give you the feeling that they were protecting you from anything, rather that they might be protecting other things from you. They had with them a drunken civilian, who seemed to be trying to identify a room and a girl. Failing to identify either our room or Murphy, but soften- ing their manner at the unexpected sound of my voice and calling me `Sir' as they apologised for disturbing me, they returned downstairs to their patrol car. We were not as surprised by the police as by the film company, because we already knew something of the girl on the ground floor. She spent the day wearing a tenuously secured dressing-gown open to her thighs, and attending to the telephone in the hall. She was known as Judy and. lived in the front room with another woman called Mrs. Brown, whose hair was cropped close and who always dressed like a man. Both were under notice to quit and towards the end of their stay their frequent quarrels became louder and more embittered than ever. The thing which finally turned the rest of the tenants against them was Judy's attempt to solicit the father of the family on the first floor.

This first-floor family was the backbone of the house. The father, mother and two small children inhabited the large front room, once presumably the august drawing-room, throne-room of a Victorian professional family, but now parti- tioned into different living areas; the mother's father, when he was not in the doorway of the kitchen at the back of the house, stropping his razor, was generally in his own room, separate from the rest of the family, on the same landing. Their authority stemmed from the fact that they had been there longer than any of the other tenants—two years—and that they had never ceased to confront the living conditions, even if only mentally, with their own standards. Their standards meant that they always noticed if the lavatory was dilapidated, if the stair carpet shed its moorings and became stretched like a conveyor belt from top stair to bottom, if the bathroom (there was only one in the house) smelt too strongly to use, if the wallpaper had become indistinguishable from the dirt which encased the whole house, if the prostitute on the ground floor quarrelled with her companion ob- scenely and so loudly that the children couldn't fail to hear.

Their noticing these affronts to their stan- dards set them apart, for instance, from the housekeeper in the basement, who, every Tues- day, when the landlord visited, dusted the carpet most of the way up, put a new roll of unmedicated paper in the lavatory and made some attempt to reduce the newspapers in there to a two-dimensional position—no mean feat, con- sidering that they had been blowing about there ever since last Tuesday's roll had expired on Friday morning and delegated its responsibilities to them. The housekeeper was a friendly young woman, but the windows of her own basement flat had • been broken ever since we moved in, in the late autumn, and more was needed than a broom and a pail of water.

It was unthinkable, in any case, to jerk the housekeeper through the landlord, since she was on our side and he was not. When the extra people were discovered in the other flat on our floor, it was she who persuaded him that they were only visiting, and when the young woman with the four-year-old on the ground floor next to the prostitute couldn't pay her rent for several weeks, it was the housekeeper who covered up for her as long as she could.

But although the first-floor family couldn't help noticing the defects in their living con- ditions and although they did occasionally wring minor concessions out of the landlord and per- suaded him to send the prostitute and her com- panion packing, they were in no position to force any major issue. Their source of income was too uncertain to admit of their playing fast and loose with any accommodation they managed to get, even at £8 a week and in slum conditions.

Our own two-room flat on the top floor cost five-guineas. When we first arrived it was already fully occupied by two large wardrobes and a side- board, but with the removal of one of the ward- robes to the basement, the re-disposition of the rest of the furniture and the whitewashing of the dingy walls, it came to seem more spacious. The changes we made to the rooms cost us our translation to the. Dorchester. The film man re- turned, a week or two after his second visit, with his young director, who arrived breathless at our - door, five flights above his white Alfa Romeo, parked obtrusively between the derelict Standard Vanguard and the derelict ice-cream van which belonged to the West Indians next door. The director looked at our books and said his hero wasn't the studious type; he floated fastidiously the length of the room to the window past the newly white walls, the reproductions of Cezanne and Botticelli, the gilt mirrors. 'Is this a gramophone?' he said. 'Yes.' `Hm. A gramophone, eh?' He floated back to the door and. out. The film man thanked us and followed him.

The other people on the top floor also had two rooms, but they were smaller than ours and there were four adults and a two-year-old using them. They all slept in the front room and lived in the kitchen at the back. They were joined just before we left by a new baby. The landing accommodated babies' nappies on towel horses, a high chair and the ginger-and-white cat, which slept on a shelf above the gas meters or on the top stair. It left the top floor only to visit the bathroom one floor down, our side of the self-closing fire-door, where it would relieve itself in the far corner behind the bath. Most of the smells in the house lodged finally under the scaled skylight on our landing, but,the cat's smell was always distinctive.

Soon after the departure of Mrs. Brown and Judy (ostensibly for Nottingham, though Mrs. Brown turned up again a month or two later to use the phone and borrow money), the young couple directly below us, beside the fire-door, did a midnight flit, taking the landlord's blankets with them. The room was then let to a middle- aged man and his wife. He was said to have been at one time a Shakespearian actor, though he now worked as a night-watchman and, since he slept during the day, he early developed a feud with the fire-door which was hinged to the wall of his room and which slammed automatically behind anyone who went up or down. He began by just lying in there and shout- ing, but he soon came out to slam the door himself five or six times by way of illustration. /The upstairs extension of the telephone was also beside his door and he. would punctuate over- long telephone conversations with jibes and en- couragement: 'Talk a bit louder,' Don't stop. You must have a lot more to say.' Go on. Go on, for Christ's sake!' He was the only person to trip on the loose stair carpet and fall to the bottom. He would buttonhole the father of the first-floor family and complain that the house was the noisiest in London, and indeed it was, since his advent, even noisier than it had been during Mrs. Brown's and Judy's final period, just before they left the house and after Judy had tried to commit suicide, because she was in love with a West Indian.

The rooms on the ground floor vacated by Judy and Mrs. Brown were taken by two men who owned a parrot and a stuffed alligator. They had a great many visitors, all male, and you would sometimes see them hanging out their washing in the back garden and playing games with underclothes.

The gardens behind our row of houses, which met the gardens behind other rows of houses and formed a huge rectangular arena, approach- able only through the houses, were unquestion- ably the most beautiful part of the surroundings. The stately façade at the front, diguified probably beyond its original sleek assertiveness by its very decay, had first decided us to live there, but the gardens would have made up for any frontage. Three huge trees, overtopping the houses, grew in the middle of the arena, their dropping leaves just beginning to reveal the backs of the houses beyond when we moved in, the new buds to obscure them again as we moved out. Under them,grew weeds, grass and odd bushes, criss-crossed by tumbledown walls, like the excavations of an ancient town.

Except for the young imen with their under- clothes, and occasional small groups of children, mixed black and white, who went no farther than their edge, the gardens were exploited only by the cats, and the birds when the cats were absent. The children preferred the street.

The street's particular character was per- haps better conveyed by the sound of the milk- bottles than by any single visual impression. Every portico concealed its own platoon of empty bottles, drawn up hopefully against an unlikely recall to active service, and with so many people going in and out of the house (casual visitors as well as Judy's professional ones), especially at night when the porticoes were not lit by either of the street lamps in our sec- tion, the bottles would be constantly rolling and clattering down the three steps into the gutter beyond the pavement, where the wheels of cars would grind them smaller. But you were never sure that they were being broken by accident; the noise was always equally sudden and angry : it could just as well be a fight. The late parties of drunks, sometimes black, sometimes white, but never mixed, on Friday and Saturday nights, created the same tightening of the stomach and compulsion to peer warily out of the window.

Not far away, in a basement, lived the originator of the changes which began in 1959. Basement clubs, prostitution and the exploita- tion of West Indians were then in their golden era and those who wanted to sleep at night found it hard to do so. Mr. Farr began with an attack on the basement clubs. He wrote to the superintendent of police asking for action against them and the superintendent agreed to visit him to discuss it. But when the superintendent arrived to find that Mr. Farr had gathered some seventy tenants to hear the discussion, and that the street, the steps down to Mr. Farr's flat and the flat itself were thick with people, he refused to speak and went away at once. The crowd turned itself on the spot into a tenants' association and set about cleaning up St. Stephen's Gardens.

Clean it they did. One by one the clubs, taken to court on injunctions, closed down. The Gar- dens has been free of them ever since. Tenants were circularised with advice: to approach the Rent Tribunal if they thought their rents were unfair; to check that their gas meters were set at forty-two; and to inform the sanitary depart- ment if they were leaving basement flats, so that if the premises were unfit a closure order could be enforced until the landlord made the neces- sary repairs. The prostitutes in the easternmost section of the street were thinned out and the membership of the association rose steadily.

Of course, it was difficult to persuade tenants, even if their rents were grossly unfair, to take the risk- of going to the Tribunal and incurring 'the wrath of their landlords. However, fourteen were piloted through the terrors of reprisal to success. The reductions ranged from one-third to two-thirds.

It wasn't an entirely bloodless victory: the tenants were threatened by agents of the landlords before they went to the Tribunal (one tenant was visited by two men and an Alsatian), and they were threatened again after the reductions had been made (one was attacked by four men with empty bottles and came away with a broken wrist and abrasions). One of the landlords admitted before the Rent Tribunal that conditions were so bad at the basement flat, a plumber had said he would never again clear the drains, no matter how much he was paid.

But beyond the individual gains against bad landlords and the occasional dents inflicted even on official complacency ('We all know what dreadful things are happening. It is up to the people to go to the police. We as the borough council can do nothing at all'), the mere coming into existence of a .group of people, white and coloured indiscriminately, for the express pur- pose of improving,their living conditions, forced landlords to tread more warily, authorities to uncover blind eyes, and the tenants themselves to realise that they were not quite as helpless as they had once supposed.