When I was growing up in a small town on the south-east coast of Ireland in the 1950s, London seemed as far away as Samarkand. We had seen it in the movies, of course — The Lavender Hill Mob, The Blue Lamp, The Ladykillers — but we knew that was all made up. The real city had to be seen to be believed. Yet when I went there for the first time as an eager 18-year-old, I was disconcerted. London looked exactly like London. It was only when I lived there that it became a foreign place.
I met a girl in Berkeley, California, in 1968, during what we dubbed the Summer of Assassinations — Robert Kennedy was the most notable casualty — and decided she was the one for me, as I was, it seemed, amazingly, the one for her. We were cautious, though, and decided to give ourselves a year on neutral ground, just in case. An aunt died and left me a modest sum, enough for me to quit Dublin and rent a flat in Fulham. On a September midnight my girl arrived in Gatwick on a flight from San Francisco. Each of us, as we confessed later, was worried we would not remember what the other looked like.
Our flat was on the second floor of a corner house in Lillie Road, over what had been a doctor’s surgery. We had frequent telephone calls from patients looking to book an appointment. One day, tired of being politely evasive, I said, “Look, I’m sorry, but the doctor is dead.” The caller thought this so funny he had to hang up. Londoners do love a laugh.
Janet, my Berkeley beloved, got a job with an academic publisher, and I worked in the Post Office telegraph branch, from 6pm until 7am four nights a week. My task was to collect the sent telegrams every hour on the hour, tie them together, with string, in batches of a hundred, and take them to a storeroom. This used up five minutes or so, and for the rest of the hour I sat reading the Evening Standard from the front-page lead story to the small ads at the back; I got a lot of reading done, that year. There were worse ways to earn a bob.
I had finished my first book, Long Lankin, a collection of stories and a novella, and my agent, Gillon Aitken, was trying to place it with a publisher. Poor Gillon, I must have phoned him every other day for two or three months, until at last the manuscript was accepted by Secker & Warburg, who would pay an advance of £150. Bliss was it in that dawn.
My editor at Secker’s was David Farrer, an avuncular old boy who in his time had been tutor to the son of an Indian maharajah — “I rode to work each morning on an elephant” — and was private secretary to Lord Beaverbrook during the war. At my first meeting with him, in the Secker offices in Poland Street, he congratulated me on the book, assured me
I wouldn’t make any money from it, and suggested a drink. He poured two tumblers of gin, handed one to me, said “Cheers!” and supped deep. It was just coming up to noon, and the sun was nowhere near the yard-arm.
The summer of 1969 was exquisite, and for weeks and weeks London basked under cloudless skies
After more desultory talk and a few more generous splashes of gin, we took ourselves off to lunch at Au Jardin des Gourmets in Greek Street. First off we had a Pimm’s, for refreshment, and David related more of his adventures in and out of the publishing trade. He was cheerfully non-intellectual, but he had a sharp eye for a winner — he liked a flutter on the horses, too — and at the time he was betting on a novel due out in October, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, a writer I had never heard of. When we were done and the bill arrived I managed to get a look at it, bleared though I was from the gin, the Pimm’s and the subsequent bottle of Château Margaux; the total made my eyes water. “David,” I slurred, “next time could I just have the money?” He twinkled at me. “Ah but then, dear boy, I wouldn’t get my lunch, would I?”
The summer of 1969 was exquisite, and for weeks and weeks London basked under cloudless skies. We sat by the Serpentine, we strolled in Trafalgar Square, we visited Greenwich Observatory. That was when we saw London at last, really saw it, in all its sombre beauty.
In July, a week after the first moon landing, Janet and I were married, in a Catholic ceremony for the benefit of my devout parents. The officiating priest delivered a stern sermon citing St Paul on the duties of a wife and mother. My brand-new bride bridled — she was a Berkeley radical, after all — and made to leave. “Darling,” I whispered urgently, “you can’t walk out of your own wedding.”
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Afterwards we went for drinks to Finch’s pub on the Fulham Road, where John Gielgud, in a blue blazer and an exceedingly loud cravat, bought the bride and groom a drink and made a pass at their best man. One of Janet’s friends, a black opera singer named Bill, had flown over for the occasion, and my mother, who had never before met a black person, asked him if she could examine the pink palms of his hands and feel the crinkly texture of his hair.
We arrived back at Lillie Road in a golden twilight, to discover that our flat had been burgled. We didn’t have much, so we lost little.
Next day we packed up what remained of our belongings and left for Dublin. At the Aer Lingus bus terminal on the Cromwell Road we said our farewells to London. The city had given us a glorious year, and we would have been sad to leave, if all of life had not been before us.