Up West (2 page)

By the time the chocolatey remnants of my very first birthday cake had been wiped from my hands, face and eyebrows, I was already a veteran visitor to London's West End, and
particularly to Soho's bars, cafés, clubs, bookshops and the snooker halls. Having sent my mother out to work to keep the family, Father was in charge of my care, and as the West End drew him back to its narrow, sooty, fragrant streets like a drunkard to his stash of bottles, that's where we spent most of our days.

This was the case for the first five years of my life. After that, I was a semi-resident of Old Compton Street until I was thirteen. Then, once I had gained some independence, I haunted the place day and night until my mid-twenties. My visits became less regular after that, but whenever I had the time to wander aimlessly, I always chose to do it in Soho. I was happy to be back, soaking up the atmosphere and dropping in on some of the old ‘faces', shopping in Berwick Street market, eating and drinking in the area's restaurants, cafés and coffee bars. I developed a deep love and an abiding gratitude for the place and its people, and this love has sustained me for my whole life. For me, Soho is, very simply, my spiritual home.

There are many books about London's West End. Some are general histories of particular areas, while others concentrate on specific sections of the West End community – the Chinese, for example, the bohemians of fifties Soho, or the lesbian and gay scene. Then there is the ‘I drank with . . .' genre of memoirs, books that focus on a selection of the author's famous boozy chums. Here, anecdotes about the likes of Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas (my own father drank with him), Brendan and Dominic Behan (and them),
the Bernard brothers – Bruce, Jeffrey and Oliver – and John Deakin (and, indeed, all of those), tend to feature large.

What appears to be missing is a book that looks at the lives and times of so-called ‘ordinary' people who happened to live and work in this extraordinary area – the shopkeepers, the market traders and market porters, the playing children and the working girls, those who lived on the streets and those who entertained on them, and the very different populations of both Covent Garden and Soho by night and by day. It was these people that made the greatest impression on me when I was young, and it is their stories I wanted to tell.

I have chosen to focus on the years from 1945 to the early sixties, partly because I was there for most of them, but mostly because the two decades immediately following the Second World War, from VE Day to the emergence of ‘Swinging London' – a scene that was nurtured in the shops in and around Carnaby Street, in Soho's north-west corner – formed one of the most interesting periods in London's long history. What's more, it is all within living memory – just. That is why there's been such a rash of vox pop television, radio programmes and books about the Second World War and its aftermath: the rush is on to record the testimony of those of us who were there, before our memories fail or we kick the bucket eternal.

Nowhere else that I have visited in my life has had such a generous ‘live and let live' attitude. From the start, Soho has been a community of the dispossessed, a welcoming home for the marginalized and different, whether they were fleeing
persecution or poverty abroad or petty prejudices and hidebound attitudes at home. Since the eighteenth century, it has opened its generous arms and heart to virtually all comers, and in the immediate post-war years there was a new influx of the displaced peoples of war-battered Europe, and those who simply sought an alternative to the drabness of Civvy Street.

The Lyceum dance hall in Covent Garden, the theatres along Shaftesbury Avenue, the cinemas of Leicester Square and the dazzling, colourful, newly re-lit neon lights of Piccadilly Circus, as well as Soho's cafés, restaurants, pubs and nightclubs – not to mention its brothels and spielers – offered escape from the memory of the horrors of the war that they had somehow managed to survive, the gloom of rationing and restrictions, and the new post-war terrors symbolized by the spectre of the atom bomb. The West End, with its many delights, brought a splash of much-needed, vibrant colour and cheer to the grey drizzle of austerity-bound Britain.

My strange little broken bohemian family, shunned as weird and out of step in the mind-numbingly, narrow-minded housing estates of post-war Essex, was instantly accepted in Soho. Nobody cared tuppence what accent I had, where I had been born, who my parents were, or how they earned their living. In that exotic, fascinating, multicultural and tolerant place, I was seen simply as a child who deserved the protection and love of adults – and I found it. No wonder I loved the place. For me, Soho was, is and will remain, a place of refuge.

I am aware that this view is at odds with that of the majority of outsiders. Many feel that Soho is, and always has been, a very dangerous den of viciousness, violence and vice. However, you will see from the testimony of the people I have interviewed for this book that they never felt threatened, frightened or intimidated as they wandered its night-time streets as adults, or played in its sooty squares when they were children.

It isn't just outsiders, either. The parents of some children brought up in Covent Garden, just next door, warned their offspring – or their daughters, at least – against crossing the Charing Cross Road, especially after dark, as they would be exposed to sin and danger. Of course, that only added to the attraction for some. Those that risked their parents' anger say the same thing as Soho children: that they were in no danger. Personally, I felt – and indeed was – far safer wandering about Soho's streets and alleys than I was in any of the playgrounds of the many Essex schools I attended.

Later, when I was a young woman, if ever I was approached and hustled by an outsider looking for action on Soho's night-time streets, a local would magically appear from the gloom of a doorway and tell the man to ‘Piss off, she's Cliff's daughter': if anyone tried to argue the toss, it would be explained in no uncertain terms what would happen to them if they laid a single, unwanted finger on me.

Nevertheless, mention Soho in particular and the West End in general to anyone who has never lived there, and they immediately think of the four Ss – sin, sex, sleaze and
shysters. They are unaware of the place's many other, less disreputable qualities. I can, for instance, shock the unwary by mentioning that I have been invited to eat with the Soho Senior Citizens' Lunch Club. I love to see the look of bewilderment metamorphose into disbelief. ‘Senior citizens in Soho? Surely not!' It never seems to occur to anyone that people actually
live
in Soho, or if it has, they have assumed that the population is entirely made up of prostitutes, ponces, pimps, gangsters, gamblers, druggies and drunks. Other, more informed, types throw the odd bohemian, actor, musician, artist and writer into the mix, recognizing that alongside the sleaze, Soho has an equally long history of artiness.

What few people seem to suspect is that, within the half square mile or so of streets crammed between Oxford Street, Charing Cross Road, Trafalgar Square and Regent Street, families go about their daily lives in pretty much the same way as they do in the rest of the country. Children go to school to wrestle with the three Rs, while their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and older siblings get on with their jobs, trades and professions in order to pay their rent, bills and council tax.

Today, Covent Garden is a tourist trap, and a Mecca for lovers of opera, ballet, theatre, cinema and fashionable shops. In the period covered by this book it was a commercial and industrial centre, with the fruit, flower and vegetable market at its heart giving it a fragrant – and, at times, distinctly pungent – flavour. In Odhams in Long Acre, printing presses thundered out copies of a national newspaper, the
Daily Herald
, while small and large businesses – cigarette factories, bakeries, barrow-makers, printers and so on – thrived in Dickensian premises tucked away in courts and up alleys.

The well-heeled lived along both sides of the Strand, in the massive art deco block of the Adelphi, or in elegant eighteenth-century town houses, while Hollywood stars and other rich visitors stayed in the area's fashionable hotels. Just a couple of hundred yards away, in narrow terraces of cramped Georgian dwelling houses or blocks of purpose-built, cold-water flats – many without bathrooms or electricity until well into the fifties – lived those characterized by the Victorian philanthropists who built the blocks as ‘the industrious poor'. Many were members of families whose roots in the area were several generations deep.

Like me, the people who lived and grew up in the West End during the period covered in this book, who experienced its seamy joys and everyday kindnesses, its bustling, life-filled streets and bleakly glamorous nightlife, and above all its warm and unquestioning embrace, are growing older. My parents, and most of their friends, are long gone, but others survive, and it is their testimony, woven with my own memories and the contemporary writings of those who were equally captivated by this remarkable time and place, that I present in this book, which is at once a history, a memorial and a love letter.

It is hard to imagine now, but before Henry VIII got his hands on it, the West End of London was a rural place well outside the city walls. The Abbey of St Peter at Westminster owned land in Soho, as did Abingdon Abbey in Berkshire. The monks of Westminster Abbey also owned a slice of Covent Garden, and they leased land to the powerful Mercers' Company in both places, while some Carthusians had a stake in Bloomsbury. In the 1530s, Henry relieved all three religious foundations of their valuable real estate as part of his campaign to dissolve the monasteries and bring all church lands under the ownership of the Crown. He then parcelled out the same land as estates to his favourites in reward for their services and loyalty.

Although the area remained countrified under the new owners during Henry's reign, things were already changing rapidly enough to alarm his younger daughter by the time
she became Queen Elizabeth in 1558. She issued several edicts forbidding building on Soho Fields, and embargoes on unlicensed development throughout the area remained in place when the Stuarts came to power. Even in its gestation period, though, Sohoites showed a fine and customary disregard for the rules laid down by authority. Building carried on regardless, albeit relatively slowly. Soho continued to be used for hunting and for grazing livestock for a while, but was already coming under very serious pressure from a city that had long outgrown its walls, and whose population were keen to ‘go west' to find more elbow room and fresh air, and to escape the regular epidemics of plague, smallpox and the bloody flux.

In her book,
Soho
(1989), Judith Summers likened the area's name to ‘a short, wistful sigh' and it certainly has that about it, but the name actually has a bloody provenance: ‘Soho' was an old hunting cry. A jinking hare would hear the eerie cry ‘Soho, soho' as the baying pack and braying hunters tore across the fields, determined not to let lunch get away. Soho was prime hunting country for the well-to-do who, thanks to Henry, had estates there. It was handily placed within easy riding distance of both the court at Whitehall, and the city, and the King and his courtiers regularly enjoyed hunting trips and visits to one or another of their newly enriched lordships.

Elizabeth, in her turn, was a version of our latter-day couch surfers, forever foisting herself on her subjects' hospitality, except that she insisted on a four-poster bed and the best
of everything. She made an absolute point of descending on her nobles one after the other, expecting free room and board for herself and her court. Such royal progresses served several purposes. They allowed her to see her country and her subjects and them to see her, which helped to strengthen the bonds of loyalty in both directions, while closing up her court for months on end saved the royal purse thousands of gold sovereigns. Finally, they got her out of harm's way in the summer months, when the open sewers and crush of unwashed bodies set up a stomach-heaving stench, and London was usually in the grip of one life-threatening pestilence or another. The estates to the west were a good starting point for some of these trips, and they still provided sport in the form of hunting. Soho hare was certainly on the menu in 1562 when the Lord Mayor sallied forth on his annual inspection of the water conduits that brought the precious liquid across Soho Fields and in to the fetid and smelly city.

Funnily enough, Soho has remained synonymous with hunting of one sort or another ever since; only the nature of the quarry has changed. It has long been known as the place to go for a good time, whether you're looking for entertainment, an exciting nightlife or the thrill of illicit sex. It has a worldwide reputation for so many other things besides the ‘ladies and gentlemen of the night'. It has provided excellent restaurants, a great market and its own quirky brand of retail therapy for centuries. Even today, while nearby Oxford Street and Regent Street supply the usual opportunities of high street shopping, Soho offers an array of small, specialist shops that
will supply virtually anything you can think of, from first-rate produce to what one might (sometimes euphemistically) call niche requirements.

There are shops selling freshly roasted coffee, aromatic tea, rhinestone handcuffs, fabulous pastries, perfume, packets of Rizla, fine cheeses, tap dancing shoes, aged brandy, rubber catsuits, olives, titty tassels, cooking pots, excellent wine, violin strings, glittering theatrical fabrics, mouth-watering continental chocolates, bird's nest soup, sequins, oil paints, the
Times of India
, jugged hare, greasepaint, ravioli, real hair wigs, a brace of plump partridge, fake mink knickers, studio pottery, strings of garlic, kinky boots, salami, chefs' hats, chequered trousers and electric dildos. If you're hunting for something tasty, useful, glamorous, wacky, wonderful or weird, chances are you'll find it somewhere in Soho's narrow streets.