Up West (6 page)

Ray Constantine was another who experienced the horrors of war at first hand, even though he was a schoolboy at the time. His family had been bombed out. They were living in a rest centre: ‘I was walking down Lisson Grove to school one day, when a lorry about four hundred yards away erupted. For an instant I couldn't breathe, then a deafening explosion knocked me over. Some time later, I got up and continued. There was a full arm in battledress on the pavement. I picked it up and placed it in the gutter. I was late getting to school, and said to the teacher, “Please, Miss, a bomb fell on me.” There had been no air raid, but nothing more was said.

‘I later worked out that the lorry must have been transporting a defused bomb that had somehow gone off. Then, recently, I watched a programme on UXBs. An old man was saying how bomb disposal used to disable the fuse with a large magnet, but that the Germans realized this and added a second, trembler device. He related how they had placed the magnet on a bomb in Marylebone, then loaded it in to a lorry to take it to Regent's Park to be exploded. As his fiancée lived in Marylebone, he was excused the trip. The other five members of his team were all killed when the trembler blew it up in Lisson Grove.'

Ray also remembers that, ‘in autumn 1944, in broad daylight, I was riding a bus somewhere near Marble Arch/ Oxford Street, and a very little way ahead there was an explosion: a building covering almost a block shimmered, and just collapsed, leaving a cloud of dust, and blocking the road. There was no warning, as it was a V2.'

Of course, living through war scarred people physically as well. One thing I remember vividly from those early post-war years is just how many injured men there were selling things on the city's streets: matches, razor blades, bootlaces, glass animals, hot chestnuts. There were those whose minds had fractured, and there were also the ‘walking wounded'. Many ended up as sandwich-board men or pearl divers (washer-uppers) in restaurants, or simply spent their days moving from a doorway to a park bench, from the bench to a bomb site, from bomb site to an alley behind a café that gave its leftovers away. There never seemed to be enough hostels, and dry, warm places to doss down for a night were at a premium.

Barbara Jones and her sister, Pat, were evacuated at the beginning of the war, but her parents stayed behind in their home just south of the Strand. Mr Jones volunteered for the Auxiliary Fire Service. ‘My dad,' says Barbara, ‘prevented the Royal Society of Arts building from burning down by throwing incendiaries off the roof when the Little Theatre next door went up in flames – and received thanks, and a cheque, from the Society!'

Later in the war, Mr Jones was terribly injured in the bombing. ‘He was put with the dead at first,' Barbara remembers. ‘When they finally got around to dealing with him, they had to put his skull back on in nine pieces. He was written up in the American version of the
Lancet
as the Man Who Wouldn't Die. My mother was told he would never work again, that he might not see again, or grow hair again,
all sorts of things he would never do again. If he had a bang on his head, he'd be dead.'

Barbara's sister, Pat, takes up the story. ‘But he grew a shock of hair, he worked, he could see. When he was drunk, though, he would sometimes fall down and hit his head, and of course it would bleed like mad, and I'd be petrified.'

Another consequence of the war, and one that would make its presence felt, albeit in a different way, into the fifties, was how it liberated people sexually. As my mother – who had jostled to near the front of the queue when sexual liberality was being parcelled out – used to say that nothing loosened knicker elastic like the thought that you might die in the morning. For many, the last vestiges of Victorian repression decayed to dust in the face of all that transience. As Quentin Crisp wrote, in
The Naked Civil Servant
, ‘As soon as bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed. Voices whispered suggestively to you as you walked along; hands reached out if you stood still, and in dimly lit trains people carried on as they once had behaved only in taxis.'

London in general had filled up with young people – many, but not all, in uniform – looking for some kind of escape from the alternating periods of boredom and terrifying danger that made up military life. The influx of American troops from 1943 on brought a whole new culture and even more sexual openness in to the mix, a development that sent Quentin Crisp in to raptures. GIs ‘flowed through the streets of London like cream on strawberries, like melted butter over green
peas. Labelled “with love from Uncle Sam” and packaged in uniforms so tight that in them their owners could fight for nothing but their honour, these “bundles for Britain” leaned against the lamp-posts of Shaftesbury Avenue or lolled on the steps of thin-lipped statues of dead English statesmen . . . Above all, it was the liberality of their natures that was so marvellous. At the first gesture of acceptance from a stranger, words of love began to ooze from their lips, sexuality from their bodies and pound notes from their pockets like juice from a peeled peach.'

General licence and lawlessness followed this huge influx of people, all of whom were away from home and acutely aware that life could be brutally short and absolutely determined to have a good time while the going was good. After the war was over, the vice lords didn't quietly pack up their working girls and spielers and go home, and their punters didn't necessarily put their wallets away either. But there was a backlash. The fifties became particularly po-faced and judgmental, and would have killed all joy, had there not been strong resistance from those determined not to backslide in to what had been before.

For them, the thought of a cheerless copy of their parents' lives, scarred by class snobbery, relentless poverty or ‘quiet desperation' of one form or another, would not do. They wanted more, and they often found it by heading Up West. Soho was a magnet for the disaffected who having ‘seen Paris' were determined not to land back ‘on the farm', as the old song would have it.

The bohemian set that Dan Farson made famous in his book,
Soho in the Fifties
, were one such group. My father and his friends were another, while the birth of the teenager resulted from a new-found determination on the part of the young to reject the old values and certainties. A direct route may be traced from these post-war renegades through the West End of the fifties to the ‘anything goes' attitudes of the swinging sixties.

Trust is one of the first casualties of war, and Soho's multicultural nature, its great pride, was sorely tested by the conflict in Europe. All three members of Soho's Italian community – John Carnera, Leo Zanelli and Alberto Camisa – that I talked to for this book had fathers who held an Italian passport. This was not a good thing to have after Mussolini declared war on the Allies on 10 June 1940, and there was trouble on the streets of Soho as the windows of Italian restaurants were smashed in by groups of people from other parts of London.

Within hours of Mussolini's declaration, Churchill ordered a round-up of Italian nationals as so-called ‘enemy aliens', and within four days 1,600 London-based Italians had been taken in to custody.
*
No matter how long they had lived in England, all the adult Italian males in the West End were detained and interned in camps for the duration of the war with Italy. For some, this was a very bitter pill to swallow, as restaurateur Peppino Leoni wrote in his memoir,
I Shall Die
on the Carpet
: ‘I deeply resented the fact that after thirty-three years in England with no political or police blemish on my record, I'd be scooped up without proper consideration.'

Ennio Camisa, co-founder of the Fratelli Camisa delicatessen, recounted what happened in Judith Summers's book: ‘War was declared on Monday. The police came for me and my brother on Thursday, and said, “Just come with us, we want to ask you some questions at the station.” We shut up our shop in Old Compton Street and we didn't know what was going to happen to it.'

The Italian men were first taken to Lingfield racecourse, and then on to a disused cotton mill in Lancashire. From there, more than 1,200 detainees, mostly Italian but some German, and nearly 100 POWs, were shipped out to Canada on the
Arandora Star
, a luxury liner that had been commandeered by the navy. On 2 July 1940, less than a day out of Liverpool, the unescorted
Arandora Star
was torpedoed by U–47, and sank with the loss of more than 800 lives, 613 of whom were detainees.

The rest of the Italian detainees were interned on the Isle of Man until 1944, when the Italian Partisans toppled Mussolini and caused Italy to change sides, turning the ‘enemy aliens' back into the friends they felt they had always been. In a way, they were the fortunate ones, in being able to come back at all. The loss of fathers, grandfathers, sons and brothers to four years of imprisonment or death on the
Arandora Star
resonated through all the families who had come from Italy to make their lives in the West End.

* * *

Another legacy of the war was rationing, which, in the case of sweets at least, lasted to 1953. Peter Jenkins, whose family moved to the Peabody Estate in Wild Street in 1947, remembers sweet rationing very well. ‘We took the coupons to a shop on Drury Lane, where we were registered. It was right opposite Clement Danes school, a grocery shop. Mum did a lot of her shopping there. My sweet ration was spent there on penny sherbets and liquorice dips.' Peter also remembers ‘food parcels after the war – from your friend in Australia – tinned peaches, blackcurrant purée.'

I remember rationing, too, especially sweet things. In all the comics at the time – or at least the funny ones, such as the
Beano
– the most exciting thing that people could think of was unlimited grub, of golden piles of fish and chips, armfuls of sweets, huge pies with recognizable lumps of cow poking out, or bangers bristling from a massive mound of mash. That was what we kids wanted, more than anything: full bellies and sweet things with which to stop our gobs. The post-war restrictions only fuelled those feelings. So that was another effect of the war. It left post-war people hungry: for experience, family life, entertainment, normality, colour, beauty, all those good things; but also, importantly, for food.

Just as rationing was a hangover of the war, so was the black market that sought to subvert it. Whenever authority seeks to make something – anything – desirable difficult or illegal to get hold of, there are those prepared to supply it for a price. This was true of booze in America's Prohibition
days, it is true of pornography, illegal gambling, illicit sex and drugs, and, during the war, it was enshrined in the ‘black market' that arrived hot on the heels of rationing and shortages. Thieves raided warehouses, looted lorries and pilfered wholesale from the docks to meet the demand for iffy goods. The phrase ‘it fell off the back of a lorry' tripped off the tongue of the ‘spivs' who were the merchants in that market.

I suppose there must have been the odd black market trader who didn't favour loud clothing, a lounge-lizard moustache and leery behaviour, but I never saw him. No other individuals within society lived up, or down, to their stereotype the way spivs did. ‘They used to stand on street corners and sell all sorts of things, anything you could think of,' Peter Jenkins told me. ‘They had those big kipper ties, brightly coloured, and very often hats pulled down over one eye. The police used to move them on, but they were an essential part of West End life then. They could get you anything. Or so I believe. I don't know if my parents bought anything. I've got a feeling that my father was too morally upright.'

My father certainly wasn't. He took a pride in being able to lay his hands on little treats for us all when he was feeling flush, especially if, in doing so, he ‘got one over' on authority. I am certain that his spiv acquaintances helped a great deal in this cause.

When I think of the Old Compton Street of my childhood, I am struck by just how crowded the streets were. Every
doorway seemed to shelter a working girl, a ‘man of the road', or gossiping neighbours. Street corners had an endlessly shifting population of men and women, who came and went, returned and drifted in and out to talk, to exchange services and goods. Prince Monolulu would sail majestically to his pitch in Soho Square, Ironfoot Jack would strike sparks from the pavements, and busy spivs flogged anything and everything to anyone with cash and a heartbeat. In this, and in other, more legitimate ways, the war led some people to prosper.

The story of the Constantine family is a case in point. ‘In 1940,' Ray Constantine remembered, ‘my father was working in an indifferent café in Cambridge Circus for £2 10s., 10 a.m. to midnight six days a week. We were bombed out of our house, very near the BBC, and had to go to the rest centre, which was in the Florence Nightingale Hospital for Gentlewomen, Lisson Grove. The LCC had taken over the basement as a British Restaurant and rest centre for people whose homes had been destroyed. The manager of the rest centre hadn't been able to open the British Restaurant, as there was no staff, so he hired my father as chef and my mother as assistant. They felt like pools winners, with wages of £5 and £3 10s., and a large rent-free flat at the very top of the hospital in the matron's quarters.

‘Very early in 1942, they were assigned to the same job for the American Red Cross. An American millionairess, Mrs Margaret Biddle, funded the whole show. The ARC (American Red Cross) occupied 10 and 11 Charles Street. I
recall a lovely marble stairway leading up to the first floor, which was fully open and used as a ballroom. It was oak beamed, with suits of armour spaced along the walls, although the suits were removed and the oak beams were boarded up and wartime posters were stuck on the new walls. There was more affluence; a flat again, and £10 and £6, but both my parents worked more than twelve hours a day, seven days a week for that.'