The Fields Beneath (25 page)

Very large numbers of people in the course of the nineteenth century managed to hoist themselves from humble, usually rural beginnings into the urban middle class, but it appears that still more were constantly hoping to make this grade by one means or another. The Kentish Town inhabitant who inserted the following advertisement possibly got a better response to her offer than the legion trying to sell the less fundamental drawing or music lessons: ‘Ladies of Neglected Education: Instructive Reading and Writing Lessons by an easy method, privately given by A Lady. Terms moderate.’ ‘You too can be a lady’, in fact. Just as much of Kentish Town was built on the over-optimistic assumption that there were large numbers of people of professional status and means just waiting to come and live there, so many of the lower-middle and working-class people who did in fact come to occupy the houses possibly had aspirations beyond their station which were similarly destined to be unfulfilled. The Board Schools may not have provided a clerical education, but they did provide near-universal literacy and implanted in the minds of both pupils and parents the idea of social betterment. Twenty years after their establishment, General Booth was writing: ‘… Another great evil is the extent to which our Education tends to overstock the labour market with material for quill-drivers and shopmen, and gives our youth a distaste for sturdy labour.’ Somewhat earlier, a correspondent to the
Camden and Kentish Towns Gazette
voiced the same opinion:

This is the paradox of the late nineteenth century – that whereas there was a superficial (and much advertised) increase in ‘refinement’, as cheap public transport replaced the walk to work, education replaced child-labour, gas-light replaced oil lamps, paving replaced mud, sewers replaced cess-pits and middens, bathrooms began to be a common feature even at lower middle-class level and the streets were beautified with drinking fountains and urinals – while all these embellishments were coming to the inner suburbs, their social status was steadily sinking to the low point at which it remained for the next half-century. Well might the St Pancras vestry – finally reformed from its bad old practices – pride itself on its street cleaning, its road widening, its public baths, its early introduction of electricity, its new progressive image. Such things had become the only possible saving graces in a district which, from about 1850, had gradually transformed itself from a place of beauty and charm into the physical embodiment of Matthew Arnold’s ‘dismal, illiberal life’. Today, we are already seeing the London of the turn-of-the-century through the distorting glass of nostalgia: when we look, for instance, at the photographs taken by London Transport in 1903 and 1904 of the entire route under which they were preparing to build the Northern Line, we are attracted by the vital appearance of the streets, the elaborate lettering of the shop-signs, in particular by the absence of motorised traffic. Now that the motor car and the grandiose follies of town planners have between them wiped out much of this old urban habitat, we mourn it and feel that it must have been a good one. But at the time it had its own horror, and struck a fear into the minds of sensitive or historically-minded people which, though rational up to a point, was nevertheless not entirely explicable in rational terms. Cobbett’s ‘Wen’, Morris’s ‘spreading sore’ – significantly both are metaphors of disease within a body: evidently there were felt to be dark forces at work within the huge body of the metropolis which were effectively beyond control. Nor was it just a question of spreading houses infecting the country, but also of chronic decay within the already-built quarters. Making use of the same metaphor, a modern commentator has written:

The middle classes responded to this threat by flight, building new homes further and further out (future areas for the plague to strike) and by developing an obsession with the likelihood of this or that district ‘going down’ which lasted all through the first half of the twentieth century and was frequently a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sensing whether or not a place was ‘going down’ was like picking up a bad smell: some people were better at it than others, but everyone sat round sniffing, alert for the first signs. The word ‘slum’ itself began to be used more and more casually and subjectively, so that a ‘slum’ came to be almost any street where lived people of a perceptibly lower class than oneself. Thus in the perception of the upper middle classes who had disappeared into the blue hills of Hampstead and Highgate and beyond – to Welwyn and Radlett and all that part of ex-rural England later publicised as ‘Metroland’ – virtually the whole of the old inner ring suburbs became indiscriminately ‘the slums’: a country as undiscovered as Darkest Africa, where coughing men in mufflers sold matches on ‘greasy’ street corners, and ‘slum children’ in torn pinafores ‘never saw a blade of grass’. Meanwhile there was, in reality, plenty of grass, and trees, in many parts of Kentish Town, Camden Town, Islington, Hackney, Clapham, Brixton, Lambeth and even in Bermondsey and Deptford. There were also large numbers of entirely self-respecting and comfortable people, who might well have declared, as Mr Pooter did in the end, that they loved their homes and their neighbourhood and did not want to move. But in their own eyes these people were living not of course
in
slums but rather uncomfortably near them. ‘Slums’ in people’s reminiscences are always two or three streets away, never quite on their own doorstep.

Thus Alfred Grosch, who was born in 1888 in west Kentish Town, wrote towards the end of his life:

Obviously there was some basis for this lurid picture: murders did occur, typically arising from fights in public houses; a gang called (by the local paper) the ‘Malden Road Roughs’ made a nuisance of themselves; there were some pockets of genuine slum property, mainly on the Holmes Estate adjoining both Malden Road and Queen’s Crescent, where were some of the oldest buildings in the district. But one also senses in Grosch’s account the almost paranoid fear of the respectable tradesman for the class beneath him, and the wish to regard this class as another form of life. His father owned a corn-and-seed business at 10, Malden Road, where ‘Trade was good, the premises in a fine position’: clearly he must have had other customers besides the brutal, the pugnacious and the hungry: ‘My father’s shop … stood at the bottom end of Malden Road, being fifth from the beginning in a row of shops that went to 18, even numbers. The corner shop, a tea-grocer’s, was kept by a bearded and most gentlemanly tradesman … He affected a black apron – my father always wore a white one – and an alpaca jacket. On Sundays, should it chance that we met him out, there would take place a very grave and dignified hat-raising ceremonial.’ Hardly a slum shopkeeper. The next shop was a coffee shop and dining rooms, then a bacon shop. Then came a watch-maker and jeweller’s ‘kept by very nice and neighbourly people with several sons, and able to afford a maid’. Then came the corn-and-seed-business, then an umbrella makers, then a toy-shop, then an oil-and-colour shop ‘whose chief assets were two pretty and vivacious daughters’. Round the corner in a mews was a blacksmith. Opposite, across the tramlines, was the Mother Shipton.

By chance, although a large part of Malden Road and its backstreets was redeveloped in the late 1960s and early 1970s, pub, mews and run of shops are all still in existence. It may be instructive to add here what the shops are at the time of writing. The corn-and-seed merchants now sells second-hand office equipment, as does its neighbour (same firm). The corner shop where the gentlemanly grocer lived is a Neighbourhood Aid Centre, its window decorated with cartoon posters about tenants’ rights. The coffee and dining rooms used to be a junk furniture dealer’s but has in recent years gradually elevated itself into a true antique shop. The bacon shop is the headquarters of Task Force, another of those benevolent enterprises which now cluster as thickly in west Kentish Town as the old ‘slum missions’ and soup kitchens ever did. Then come two shuttered shops – also a feature of Kentish Town today – and then a ‘Centre for Re-cycling’ which opened in the optimistic belief that patrons would bring to it and take from it objects of roughly equivalent value, but which soon degenerated into a dumping ground for rusting, broken pushchairs, dismantled water-heaters of an obsolete pattern and sodden sofas with the stuffing sprouting like fungus. The oil-and-colour shop where lived the ‘two pretty and vivacious daughters’ is now a cheap clothes-boutique called ‘Route 24’ – the number of the bus that has replaced the Malden Road trams.

What, one wonders, would Alfred Grosch make of this heterogeneous collection? How would he diagnose the relative social rise or fall of the area from it? His own admission of the subjective element in these matters is significant. When he returned to Malden Road as a young man after a few years away, ‘There was no disguising the fact that Number 10 and its surroundings were dirty and dreary. Indeed I am convinced that they were never otherwise, but had only seemed so when lit up by the early enthusiasm of my parents …’ Those who have moved away from an area long ago are more likely, even if their childhood was a happy one, to see it as a bad area from which they have ‘escaped’, and to exaggerate the slums of their childhood as a form of self-dramatisation. In contrast those who have remained in the same area, though they may admit on questioning that in their youth there were streets where they were not allowed to go, are more apt to harp on vanished elegances. Another survivor of Grosch’s era, today’s oldest inhabitant in trading terms, who has been selling stationery and books in the High Street since 1917 in the shop where his father sold cut-price three-volume novels before him, became eloquent as he recalled for me the lost world of small shopkeeping:

A similarly fond account of the High Street in the past was given to me by an old gentleman long resident in Suffolk, who had lived in Kentish Town as a small boy around the turn of the century. One can only mourn with him the disappearance of the specialised tobacconist, with a window full of lacquered and gilded jars, where the proprietor blended individual mixtures for ‘his’ customers; and also the Vicarage Farm Dairy, where glazed china milk pails covered with butter muslin stood on bare wood scrubbed ‘gleaming white’ and where ‘the only breakaway from the pure austerity of white was in a fair-sized coloured figure of a negro boy holding a heap of real eggs in a china basket, and looking very proud of them’. It is interesting, how often the words ‘scrubbed’ and ‘spotless’ and ‘snowy white’ occur in reminiscences such as these, when you consider that the one characteristic of London of the period on which everyone agrees is its formidable and all-pervasive griminess. Is this pristine brightness, like the ‘fields’ alleged to have been still existing in areas like Kentish Town at the same era, a figment of the elderly imagination, part of the mythic quality a long-gone childhood assumes in memory? Or was it genuine, the result of heaven-knows-what unceasing efforts on the part of individual housewives and shopkeepers, whose work was their life and who knew no other?