The Memory Chalet Read online

  That my father should have been so besotted with the internal combustion engine was thoroughly in keeping with his generation. The “car culture” came to Western Europe in the 1950s, which is about the point at which my father was in a position to join it. Men born before World War I were well into middle age before cars were available to most Europeans: in the ’30s and ’40s they were confined to pokey little runabouts notorious for their discomfort and unreliability and could not afford anything better until well past their prime. My generation, by contrast, grew up with cars and saw nothing distinctively appealing or romantic about them. But for men—and, I suppose, a handful of women—born between the wars, the motor car symbolized a newfound freedom and prosperity. They could afford one and there were many available. Petrol was cheap and the roads still appealingly empty.

  I never fully understood why we had to drive a Citroën. My father’s ideological position on the matter was that Citroëns were the most technologically advanced cars on the road: in 1936, when the company first manufactured its Traction Avant, with front-wheel drive and independent suspension, this was certainly true—as it became once again in 1956 with the unveiling of the sexily aerodynamic DS19. The cars were unquestionably more comfortable than most comparable family saloons, and probably safer. Whether they were more reliable is another matter: in the days before the Japanese automobile revolution no road cars were particularly reliable and I spent many tedious evenings handing tools to my father as he tinkered with some dysfunctional engine part late into the night.

  In retrospect, I wonder whether my father’s insistence upon buying Citroëns—of which we must have owned at least eight in the course of my childhood—had something to do with his early life. He was, after all, an immigrant—born in Belgium, raised there and in Ireland—who only arrived in England in 1935. In time he learned to speak impeccable English, but underneath he remained a continental: his taste for salads, cheeses, coffee, and wine ran frequently afoul of my mother’s characteristically English unconcern for food and drink except as a fueling resource. And thus, just as my father resented Nescafé and preferred Camembert, so he disdained Morrises, Austins, Standard Vanguards, and other generic English products, looking instinctively to the Continent instead.

  As to why we should have become a “Citroën” family, when Volkswagens, Peugeots, Renaults, Fiats, and the rest were all readily available and cheaper, I like to think that there was some subliminal ethnic motive at work. German cars were of course out of the question. The reputation of Italian cars (at any rate those we could afford) was at its lowest point: Italians, it was widely felt, could design anything—they just couldn’t build it. Renault was disgraced by its founder’s active collaboration with the Nazis (as a result of which the firm had been nationalized). Peugeot was a respectable outfit but better known in those years for their bikes; their cars, in any case, were built like tanks and seemed to lack pizzazz (the same argument was made against Volvos). And, perhaps the decisive if undeclared consideration, the eponymous founder of the Citroën dynasty had been a Jew.

  There was something slightly embarrassing about our cars. They suggested, in an age of austerity and provincialism, an aggressively exotic and “foreign” quality to the family—causing my mother in particular to feel uneasy. And of course they were (relatively) expensive and thus ostentatious. I recall one occasion in the mid-fifties when we drove across London to visit my maternal grandparents, who lived in a run-down terraced house on a side street in Bow. Cars in that part of London were still thin on the ground and were most likely to be little black Ford Populars and Morris Minors, testaments to the limited means and conventional tastes of their owners. And here we were, clambering out of a shining white Citroën DS19, like aristocrats come to inspect their lowly tenants. I don’t know how my mother felt—I never asked. My father was enjoyably absorbed in the envious attention his new car was attracting. I wanted to disappear down the nearest manhole.

  For a few years around 1960, my father’s obsession with cars took him into amateur motor sport. Every Sunday the two of us would trawl north to Norfolk or the East Midlands, where fellow enthusiasts mounted scheduled programs of car racing. My father’s vehicle was a tuned-up Panhard DB, a pretty little car which made seductive noises and competed reasonably effectively against the Triumph Spitfires and MGBs of the age. Assorted family friends were inveigled (for remuneration? I never knew) into serving as “mechanics” while I was assigned the curiously responsible job of setting the tire pressures before the race. This was fun in its way, though the atmospherics could get tedious (grown men discussing carburetors for hours at a time) and the round-trip journeys took up to six hours.

  Far more entertaining were the continental holidays which we took in those years: largely, it sometimes felt, in order to give my father an excuse for a long drive. In those pre-autoroute years a continental road trip was an adventure: everything took a long time and something always broke down. Sitting on the “wrong” side of the front seat, I had a driver’s eye view of France’s glorious routes nationales. I was also the first to be accosted by policemen whenever we were stopped for speeding or, on one memorable occasion deep in the night somewhere outside Paris, caught in a military “sweep” during the OAS crisis.

  We mostly traveled as a family. My mother could not have cared less whether she spent her holidays in Brighton or Biarritz, and she found long road trips tedious and tiring. But in those days families did things together and part of the point of a car was to go on “outings.” For me, at least (and in this respect I probably resembled my father), the object of the exercise was the journey—the places we went to, especially on Sunday “jaunts,” were often conventional and of scant redeeming interest. Even across the Channel, the best part of our summer and winter holidays was always the adventure entailed in getting there: the punctures, the icy roads, the dangerous business of overtaking on narrow winding country lanes, the exotic little hotels reached late in the night after long hours of embittered domestic squabbling over when and where to halt. It was in the car that my father was most at home and my mother least so. Considering the amount of time we spent on the road in those years, it is remarkable that their marriage lasted even as long as it did.

  Looking back, I am perhaps more sympathetic to my father’s self-indulgence than I was at the time, for all the pleasure I took in our family travels. I see him now as a frustrated man: trapped in an unhappy marriage and doing work which bored and perhaps even humiliated him. Cars—cars to race, cars to discuss, cars to tinker with, and cars to take him home to Europe—were his community. Not caring much for pubs or drink, and with no workmates, he turned the Citroën car into an all-purpose companion and visiting card—culminating in his election to the presidency of the Citroën Car Club of Great Britain. What other men sought and found in alcohol and mistresses, my father sublimated into his love affair with a car company—which no doubt accounts for my mother’s instinctive hostility to the whole business.

  Upon turning seventeen I dutifully learned to drive and in due course acquired the first of many cars: inevitably, a Citroën, a cheap little 2CV. But although I enjoyed the experience and was eventually to transport assorted girlfriends and wives across much of Europe and the continental US, driving never meant to me what it meant to my father. Finding little charm in cold country garages and lacking the requisite technical skills myself, I soon abandoned Citroëns for more reliable if less exotic brands: Hondas, Peugeots, and, eventually, a Saab. To be sure, I too indulged testosterone-driven whims: a convertible red MG celebrated my first divorce and I retain fond memories of an open Ford Mustang cruising down California’s coastal Route 1. But these were always just cars, never a “culture.”

  This too seems to me a conventional generational response. We baby-boomers grew up with cars, as well as with fathers who adored and indulged in them. The roads onto which we graduated were more crowded, less “open” than those of the interwar and immediate postwar decades. There was l
ittle adventure to be had in driving them and not much to be discovered unless one struck out well beyond the conventional objectives. The towns we lived in were becoming hostile to the very cars they had so myopically welcomed a few years before: in New York and Paris, as in London and many other cities, it makes little sense to keep a private vehicle. The car, at the height of its hegemony, stood for individualism, liberty, privacy, separation, and selfishness in their most socially dysfunctional forms. But like many dysfunctions, it was insidiously seductive. Ozymandias-like, it now invites us to look upon its works and despair. But it was quite fun at the time.

  VI

  Putney

  Home, they say, is where the heart is. I’m not so sure. I’ve had lots of homes and I don’t consider my heart to be attached very firmly to any of them. What is meant, of course, is that home is wherever you choose to place it—in which case I suppose I’ve always been homeless: many decades ago I left my heart somewhere on a Swiss mountainside, but the rest of me has foolishly failed to follow. Still, among my deracinated roots there is one that protrudes a little above the heap and may even constitute a grounding of sorts. From 1952 until 1958 my family lived in the southwest London district of Putney and I recall it with affection.

  I did not know it at the time, but Putney was a good address to grow up in. A hundred yards north of our flat stood St. Mary’s Church, a squat, elderly parish establishment notable for the debates held there in October 1647 at the height of the English Civil War. It was here that Colonel Thomas Rainsborough famously warned his interlocutors that: “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he . . . every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government. . . .” Exactly three centuries later the Labour Government of Clement Attlee would inaugurate the welfare state that was to guarantee to the poorest he (and she) a life worth living and a government that served them. Attlee was born in Putney and died only a few miles away; despite a long and successful political career he remained modest in demeanor as in wealth—in revealing contrast to his grasping, fee-gouging successors: an exemplary representative of the great age of middle-class Edwardian reformers—morally serious and a trifle austere.

  In its way, there was something austere about Putney itself. It is an ancient parish—mentioned in the Domesday Book along with a ferry which crossed the Thames there (the first bridge was built in 1642)—and derives its relative importance from both the adjacent river and the old Portsmouth road that would become Putney’s busy High Street. The confluence of road and river also explains why an early Underground line was routed through Putney, running north-south from Earl’s Court to Wimbledon, as well as a branch of the London and Southwestern Railway (later the Southern Railway) from Windsor to Waterloo, with a station strategically pitched at the upper end of the High Street. There was an unusual affluence of buses too: the 14, 30, and 74 which ran from Putney or thereabouts to northeast London; the 22 and the 96 which started at Putney Common and traversed the City before terminating respectively in Homerton and Red-bridge Station in deepest Essex (the longest bus route in London at the time); and the 85 and 93 buses which trundled south out of Putney Bridge tube station to Kingston and Morden respectively. And of course there was the 718 Green Line coach which passed through Putney on its long journey from Windsor to Harlow.

  Since all eight bus and coach routes, together with two trolleybuses (electric buses powered by overhead cables, foolishly withdrawn in 1959), the Underground line and the suburban railway converged in or near the High Street, the latter was an unusually busy thoroughfare for those days. I was well-placed to appreciate this: our flat, at no. 92 Putney High Street, afforded me a privileged, if permanently noisy perch. And since I took the 14 bus to school (my Green Line adventures only began after we moved out to leafy Kingston Hill), I saw all these buses and trains up close every day. Cars were in shorter supply, but only relatively: London in those years had the greatest density of car ownership and use anywhere outside the continental United States and traffic jams were already part of Putney life.

  But off the busy High Street, there was another, quieter Putney: the established late-nineteenth-century suburb of mansion flats, subdivided Victorian terraces and Edwardian brick and stone villas, typically “semi-detached” but often quite sizeable. There were row after row, street after street, block after block of these often graceful buildings, strikingly homogenous in décor and facings. More attractive than the interminable interwar suburban sprawl of southeast London, less ostentatiously prosperous than the luxuriant, tree-lined avenues of northwest London, Putney was unmistakably and reassuringly middle class. To be sure, there were upper-middle-class enclaves, predictably located up by Putney’s ancient heath and on the slopes of the hill that led to it; and there were working streets like the river-fronting Lower Richmond Road where the aspiring poet Laurie Lee found cheap lodgings and his first job after arriving in London from deepest Gloucestershire. But for the most part Putney was comfortably and securely in the middle.

  Our own flat was chilly and uninspiring, rising three stories above the hairdressing shop where my parents worked. But it had the distinctive quality of backing onto Jones Mews: one of the last of the stable alleys where the residents and tradesmen of the town had kept their animals. In those years the Mews still served its traditional function: two of the six stables in the alley leading away from our back door were occupied by working animals. One of these—a bedraggled, skinny apology for a horse—slaved for a rag-and-bone man who would drag it out of its stall each morning, shove it carelessly between the shafts, and head out to collect what, by the end of the day, was often a substantial haul. The other horse fared better, working for a blowsy, chatty flower lady who had a stall on the common. The remaining stables had been converted into sheds for local artisans: electricians, mechanics, and general handymen. Like the milkman, the butcher, the flower lady, and the rag-and-bone man, these were all locals, children of locals, and beyond. From the perspective of Jones Mews, Putney was still a village.

  Even the High Street was still rooted in a self-contained past. There were already, of course, “chain stores”: Wool-worth, Marks & Spencer, The British Home Stores, etc. But these were small outlets and far outnumbered by locally owned shops selling haberdashery, tobacco, books, groceries, shoes, ladies’ wear, toiletries, and everything else. Even the “multiples” were somehow local: Sainsburys, a small store with just one double-window, still had sawdust on its floor. You were served by polite, slightly haughty assistants in starched blue-and-white aprons, resembling nothing so much as the proud employees in the photograph on the back wall showing the little shop on the day it opened many decades before. The “Home and Colonial” grocers further down the High Street carefully distinguished between its overseas and home-grown supplies: “New Zealand lamb,” “English beef,” and so on.

  But the High Street was my mother’s territory. I shopped on Lacy Road, which boasted an off-license whence I was dispatched for cider and wine; a small tailors’ establishment; and two “sweet shops.” One of these was generic and modern, at least by ’50s standards, offering fruit gums, packaged chocolate, and Wrigley’s chewing gum. But the other—darker, danker, dirtier, and otherwise depressing—was far more intriguing. It was run (and, I assume, owned) by a shriveled, mean-spirited old crone who would resentfully weigh out from an array of large glass bottles a quarter-pound of gobstoppers or liquorice while grumbling at the impatience and sartorial insufficiency of her customers: “I’ve been serving grubby little boys like you since the old Queen’s jubilee, so don’t try to fool me!” By the old Queen, of course, she meant Victoria, whose jubilee had been celebrated in Putney in June 1887. . . .

  There was still something Victorian, or perhaps Edwardian would be more precise, about the feel of the side streets. Up those solid stone steps, behind the heavy window treatments, one could imagine bespectacled spinsters offering piano lessons to supplement thei
r meager pensions—and one did not have to imagine it, since I at least was taught the instrument by two such ladies, both living in what I recognized, even then, as genteel poverty. I had school friends whose families occupied a floor or two of the imposing villas near Dover House Road or up Putney Hill, and was vaguely impressed by the sense of solidity and permanence given off by these buildings, even in their modern subdivided state.

  Putney had its loose ends too. The riverbank was still semi-rural and largely untouched—once you got past the ever-so-slightly commercialized strip near the bridge, where the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race began. There were boathouses, houseboats, the occasional tug, abandoned skiffs rotting gently into the mud: living evidence of the river’s ancient business. At Putney the Thames is still actively tidal: at times a narrow stream lazily bisecting great beaches of mud, at others close to overflowing its scruffy and rather under-secured banks when a ferry or pleasure boat, on its way from Westminster Bridge up to Teddington or even Oxford, sweeps under the bridge and into the great bend embracing Craven Cottage (Fulham’s Football Ground) on the opposite bank. Putney’s river was messy, inelegant, and functional; I spent a lot of time sitting by its edge and thinking, though I no longer remember about what.

  We left Putney when I was ten years old, drawn out to the verdant Surrey fringes by my parents’ brief flirtation with prosperity. The house on Kingston Hill, where we lived for nine years until my parents ran out of money, was larger than the old flat; it had a garden and a front gate. It also—oh joy!—had two toilets, a very considerable relief after the experience of no. 92 and its single water closet two icy stories down from my bedroom. And there were country lanes in Kingston for the aspirant cyclist to explore. But I never really got over Putney: its shops, its smells, its associations. There wasn’t much by way of greenery, except at the edges where commons and heaths had been left as nature planted them. It was urban through and through, though urban in that informal, generous way so characteristic of London: a city that—at least until the disastrous urban “planning” of the ’60s—had always grown out rather than up. I’m no longer at home there—the High Street today is no better than it ought to be, a featureless replica of every high street in England, from its fast food outlets to its mobile phone stores. But Putney was my London, and London—even though I really only lived there as a child and left forever when I went up to Cambridge in 1966—was my city. It isn’t anymore. But nostalgia makes a very satisfactory second home.