drowned by the roar of the machine-shop/pit disaster. As a child, I stumbled wretchedly about in a pall of silicotic filth, unaware of the sun, occasionally catching a dim glimpse of my father, an emaciated creature in long underwear and a cloth cap, as he was dragged home, stewed to the gills on dole-money, from the local thieves’ kitchen. I never had much of an education, due to long absences from my hellish school after regular beatings by me mum’s fancy-man (tattersall waistcoat, moustache, Vauxhall), and weekend jaunts to drizzleswept boarding-houses with the nubile milk-monitor in 5A. However, the educational problem was easily solved by sending me: (a) to Borstal, where I was thrashed by the staff, humiliated by Etonians, and ostracised by my fellows, or (b) to a bicycle factory where I got my kicks from dropping dead rats (with which England is bubonically overrun) into the packed lunches, or (c) – if I was a girl – down to the waterfront to watch the boats. A short time later, sex reared the ugliest head outside a Hammer Film; due to the constant presence of drunks in underwear mashing tea all over the hovel, I pursued love’s young dream in bus-shelters, grimy cinemas, on canal-banks, behind bill-boards, and so on. My partners in the great awakening were diverse; every American schoolboy knows that I have: (a) Gone to bed with the foreman’s wife and got her pregnant, (b) Gone to bed with the blonde from the typists’ pool and got her pregnant, (c) Gone to bed with one of the sailors and got myself pregnant. This is the new Time Of Stress, and acting in the new True British Fashion, I faced the problem squarely by: (a) Nipping off to my auntie, the cheery abortionist, (b) Marrying the girl and promising her a life of loveless squalor, (c) Playing house with a young homosexual and waiting for the Day.
But suppose I managed to survive this jeunesse dorée; what then? Well, I might have gone into showbiz, and, living the glamorous life of a matinée idol in Bootle summer stock, entered my senior years without (from sheer luck) having got anyone pregnant, and with the comfy recognition that I was merely an alcoholic failure. Alternatively, had I gone into a respectable profession like teaching, I would have got all the plums the other fellows got (penury, frustration, domestic disaster, social rejection) simply by giving private lessons to a little girl to keep myself from the workhouse. Naturally, there was justice in all this – if I hadn’t been a dirty pacifist, and had gone off to Burma to whistle with the rest of the lads, I could have landed a job in a public school. Mind you, I mightn’t have got a look-in on the whistling routine; the Americans now know that I should have wound up in a grass hut with six typical British chaps, beating the living hell out of a senile Japanese until his mates turned up to square the odds and give us what we deserved.
Nevertheless, though I have been passing these last months with all the misery of an ad-man watching the Truth knock the stuffing out of a beloved Image, it wasn’t until last night that I actually broke and ran. The cinema that had been responsible for most of the punishment suddenly interrupted its run of English films to show an American low-budget movie, called ‘David And Lisa’, and since this took as its subject two young inmates of a mental hospital, I went along with glee at the prospect of having the ball in my court for a rare hour or so. The manager smiled at me in the lobby.
‘Hi there!’ he said. ‘Just in time for the short subject. You’ll like it. It’s an English documentary.’
‘Splendid!’ I said, with a touch of the old panache. After all, I was safe enough. It was probably a Pathé Pictorial, one of those delightfully exportable Technicolor furbelows full of Cotswold centenarians, and Chelsea Pensioners who’ve made the Brighton Pavilion out of matchsticks. I sat down. The lights dimmed. And onto the screen, in several shades of grey, came Waterloo Station, wrapped up by Edward Anstey and John Schlesinger in a package called ‘Terminus’. Leaden-faced people milled about in the gritty air; a small boy sat on a battered trunk, and howled; queues of people moaned about trains that had left ages before, and failed to arrive. I pulled up my coatcollar. I heard the familiar dark laughter breaking out around me. And when a party of convicts appeared and shuffled into a carriage labelled: ‘HOME OFFICE PARTY’, I stood up slowly, mumbled; ‘Excuse me’ in a deep southern accent, and left. The manager was still in the lobby.
‘Where’re you going?’ he said. ‘You’ll miss “Terminus”.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I’ve been there before. It’s where I get off.’
He looked at me. ‘You British and your sense of humour,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘Personally, I never went for it. But, by God, I guess you need it, huh?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess we do.’
The man who owned the papershop came out onto the pavement and watched me copying down addresses from his board. He didn’t say anything; he had been studying me from inside the shop for a long time; I’d seen his eyes in the slit between the halfdrawn blind and the Coca-Cola sign.
I took down half a dozen names and numbers and closed my notebook. He stepped forward.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, a little hesitantly. He was a short, tubby, midfortyish negro in a pinstripe blue suit, white shirt.
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Look buddy, maybe it ain’t none of my business, but you sure – I mean, like absolutely sure – you wanna look up them addresses? What I mean is, you wanna live there?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Y’ain’t looking up for somebody else, maybe?’
‘No. For me.’
He plucked a small cigar from his breast pocket, picked a hair off it carefully, struck a match on his window, and lit up, watching me through the smokeclouds.
‘We – ell –’ he said, soft southern, rolling the word,‘– guess you know y’own mind. Good luck.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and would have probed him, but he’d disappeared inside the shop again, and I was left on my blasted heath wondering whether, perhaps, he couldn’t have fitted me out with a quiet little country thaneship somewhere.
Nowhere, actually, could be less like a blasted heath than Harlem; it is perhaps the most undeserted area in the world, if you know what I mean. Sixlane avenues are whittled down to alleyways by the permanent overflow from the pavements, solid, sluggish streams of people, whose reasons for being there at all seem incomprehensible – they walk too slowly to be actually going from A to B; they are too far from the shops and bars to have any possible interest in them; and they never appear to cross from one side of the street to the other; instead, they roll on, as if on some enormous conveyor-belt, with no apparent purpose, and no pause. Naturally, this sort of jaywalking would be treated in downtown New York as an offence located somewhere on the books between child-rape and dope-addiction; but here, a crack regiment would be needed to enforce the laws; it’s left to the motorist to keep up a constant cacophonous alert to save himself from being devoured. It’s an odd sensation to stand in the centre of one sidewalk looking across the slowly passing heads towards the other; the mass of humanity makes the traffic invisible, so that one seems to be cut off from the opposite bank by an open chasm filled with a perpetual honking moan, on either side of which the silent souls trudge on. Once, I thought I saw, across the gorge, Beatrice waiting in the crowd; but I must have been mistaken.
I find Harlem extremely disturbing, this sort of set-aside Negro metropolis, a sophisticated
