LONDON LIFE

In 1959 I arrived at the small Muenchweiler Army Post in Germany, which comprised a Station Hospital (as opposed to a Field Hospital) and a Med Evac company --  about 300 troops total, and only about 30 patients in the 300-bed hospital). Having trained as a Medical Corpsman at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, I was lucky enough not just to be in a wonderful small town-setting in Germany, but also to be assigned as an Accounting Clerk in the Mess Hall of the hospital.  My boss was a Warrant Officer named Phil Alden.  He was a native of Texas who had married an English woman named Ella Renfield just after the war.  Ella possessed an astonishingly beautiful soprano voice, had had the beginnings of a career in opera; her aspirations dwindled to a halt as a result of the actions of a man named Hitler.

Ella became so precious to me in so many ways, and I hope to write about her at greater length in a future post I'm planning about my Army days -- but this post is about London.  Ella talked a lot about life in London, and it was certainly her influence that caused me to decide that I wanted to live in London someday.

I certainly didn't have a nest egg when I was discharged from the Army.  Back in the states, working for Western Union, it took me five years before I had built up a stash large enough that I thought I could get myself settled in London; I felt certain that I could get a job with Western Union Telegraph Company there; I was a whiz at a teletype machine.  (Upwards of a hundred words a minute!  Not to brag, but sometimes people standing at the counter, who'd come in to send a telegram or a money order, would stare in amazement, often making a comment, as they watched my fingers fly over the three rows -- not four like a typewriter -- of teletype machine keys.)

I'd always supposed I would go to London by myself.  About a year before I began making serious plans to go, I told my friend and apartment-mate Dennis in Lansing what I hoped to do.  He was sort of my boyfriend until we realized that we made much better friends than we did boyfriends.  He immediately -- this was in the boyfriend stage --wanted badly to go with me but when I told him I intended to go in a year or so, and he had no money to speak off, and I really couldn't see him making and saving enough by the time I intended to become, like Hemingway and Stein and T.S. Eliot and all those other cool people, an ex-pat, I said I thought it would be best for me to go alone as planned.  I'm sure I cited an old Chinese proverb Phil Alden had impressed me with: He who travels alone travels further. 

The time I planned to leave grew close, and then closer.  One morning as Dennis was ironing a shirt before going to his job as a clerk in a record store, he asked me again if he could go with me. "Where're you going to get the money?" I asked.  He pulled his copy of Gone with the Wind from his bookshelf; tucked within was a stash of cash, some $1000 dollars or so.  I said I still didn't think it was a good idea ... I was going to London to make a new life.  From overseas, I planned to write him and other friends and family beautiful letters.  Re-aligning my dreams to include a fellow traveler would be, at best, uncomfortable.

Tears came to his eyes.

There was only one way I could deal with the sight of tears.  Okay, he could go -- it was rash, but I would work it out somehow.  (As will be revealed by the end of this post, his going with me turned out to be for the best.)

When I asked him how he'd saved so much money in so short a time, he said he'd helped himself to up to twenty-thirty bucks a day from the record store's till.  The rich, in this case, got poorer, and the poor got richer.

                              ***

The Communication Workers of America, the union I was a member of, planned to call a strike on a certain day in July if certain conditions were not agreed to by Western Union.  Most people didn't think a strike would really be called.  There had been so many past threats, but never, my elder co-workers said, a strike.  Dennis and I made our reservation to fly to Luxembourg for the day after the strike was to be called

So when a strike really was called, it didn't matter much to me; I'd made other plans.  While my co-worers were picketing, Dennis and I were boarding the train in Lansing, bound for an overnight ride from Detroit to New York.

After a long day of walking around Manhattan, seeing the newly released movie of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" -- all the while full of really really deep regrets that we were leaving the USA one day before Dylan's Tarantula would be on sale in bookstores -- we boarded an Icelandic Airlines plane that was headed for a stop in Reykjavik and then, as I wrote in my Irish Diary above, Luxembourg.

Before we'd reached New York, the strike had been settled.  But for me there would be no turning back; not, at least, for now.

***

So, when Dennis and I passed through London on our way from Paris to Dublin, staying eleven or twelve days, lodging in inexpensive hotels, moving from one to another when we came across a cheaper one, and spending a lot of time visiting an extremely charming man who was already past seventy, named Leo Welch, who was Ella's best friend.  I had already met Leo, who lived on Red Lion Square, when I'd come to London in 1961, on one of my leaves from the Army, and when he'd come to Muenchweiler to visit Ella. I loved Leo.  I also loved Leo's flat in London; just a bed-sitter really, but in a modern building, and with a bathroom and a small kitchen with, as Leo put it, all the "mod cons."  Dreaming even then of living in London, I asked him if he would mind telling me how much per month his apartment cost.  "Fifteen pounds," he said; about $42.00.

The building that housed Leo's flat, which was perfectly
situated on the ground floor corner below these signs.

Dennis and I loved calling on Leo; his flat was in the West End near London's entertainment center.  Leoe was clever and witty and fun; curious as to our comings and goings, curious about our generation; by our love of the Beatles.  Leo was on a level,really, with my beloved Ella -- fascinating, fun, intelligent, friendly.  He nicknamed Dennis "Babycham" because that was the name of a bottled slightly alcoholic drink Dennis brought to the flat one night when we were changing hotels and were invited to sleep on Leo's carpeted living room floor.

When we got back to London from Ireland, we got a room at the YMCA, but it was just a few days before we found our own place.  The rent was shocking, nearly forty pounds a month, but, frankly, we'd checked out several places and this was the cheapest of them all.  It was just a large room, with a double bed, a bathroom, and a hot plate for cooking; a couch; and a nice table with two chairs at the windows.  It suited us alright; our diet consisted mainly of boiled potatoes with butter, and, for variety's sake, some version of eggs, as well as, when we were out and about, a lot of Wimpy burgers, and, when we really felt like splurging, an omelette at a sort of classy (for us) sit down restaurant.  (A Wimpy Burger, sort of like a White Castle but tastier and larger, came with chips and cost about 75-cents!)

An inconvenience, and a surprising expense, was that to get hot water or heat for the hotplate, one had to put a shilling into a meter installed in the flat (as was the case in most other rented flats); it would provide heat for a certain amount of time; if you wanted to boil some potatoes or take a shower, you needed to make sure you had adequate shillings to buy adequate time on the meter.  I could not imagine how many shillings you'd need for heat when winter came.

Our flat was far up in the Kilburn district, a good forty-five minute Tube ride from what we considered the West End, or central London. 

Our flat was on the 3rd floor; the one with the opened windows.

When I told Leo how much we were paying he thought we were being ripped off, but we were settled in and, frankly, having learned how much apartments were going for, I'd had to come to have second thoughts about my ability to live alone in London.  Dennis had, from the get-go, no intention of staying forever.  I asked Leo how it was that his great and centrally located apartment cost him only 15 pounds a month, a fact which I'd used when strategizing my future in London.  "Because I'm an old-age pensioner," he said.  

Before we set out for Ireland, I'd gone to the main Western Union office in London and asked if they would give me a job; the nice man there, seemingly both amused and charmed at the novelty of a Yank applying for a job, thought they could.  Right then and there he sent a telegram to the manager of the Western Union office in Lansing, asking for a character reference and so forth. Because it was late in the afternoon in London, and about eight a.m. in 
Michigan, a quick response came by wire:  I was said to have been a good employee except that I had not showed up for work after the settlement of the recent strike; he joked, however, that this must have happened because I was too far away for an easy commute.

I said to the Western Union man in London that I was going to Ireland for a couple weeks.  He said he would send me particulars about employment in a letter which he would post to me care of American Express in Dublin:

When we returned to London from Ireland I went to Western Union and gave them the necessary details. 

Then, on instructions from the man at Western Union, I went to some sort of immigration office and said I wanted to get a work permit.

There were about twenty people ahead of me in line, and then about twenty behind me.  I finally, at one of the desks up front, faced a fifty-ish woman with poorly dyed red hair and a presumably permanently soured countenance.  I said I wanted to apply for a work permit.  

Wow! I'd arrived at the worst possible desk!  This redhead went ballistic!  Screaming at me so loud that every one in the large room was turning to look and listening in.

I was initially startled.  One of my favorite poems to recite aloud was Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and it crossed my mind that I might be jailed -- or gaoled -- for having committed what must be, judging by my inquisitor's fierce disposition, a serious crime!  Would I soon be a guy similar to the one in Wilde's poem?

I never saw a man who looked,

with such a wistful eye,

upon that little tent of blue,

which prisoners call the sky. 

Who did I think I was, she shrilled?  I had broken Her Majesty's laws when I'd passed through immigration claiming to be a tourist; had I been truthful and told them that I was going to look for work, I would have assuredly (her exact word) been sent back to Calais on the return ferry.  "Why did you lie?" she shrieked!

I lied again, telling her that I'd had no intention of looking for work when I came ashore.  She screamed some more.  I said I'd just dropped in at the Western Union office to chat, and ended up thinking it would be fun to work in my field in a foreign country, and a man I spoke with there thought it could be arranged.

She screamed some more; it did seem I should perhaps feel embarrassed -- every one in the room had be staring at me, but I thought: what do I care?  I'm never going to ever see a single one of these people again.  It even occurred to me that if she wanted to turn red-faced with anger, it was her blood pressure, not mine.

I telephoned Western Union, explained my dilemma, and the head of personnel said he would do what he could to get me a work permit, and that I may have to leave the country to get it.  I said I'd visit Amsterdam,pick up my work permit there, and re-enter Great Britain legally, and gave him Leo's address as a contact point.

Meanwhile, Dennis and I were having fun exploring the city.  We walked and walked and walked, hanging out especially in book stores and record stores, visiting tourist sites, sitting in Russell Square, near Leo's, which had a concession stand, having what the Brits called a "cuppa," -- a cup of tea that was 4-cents, and reading from whatever paperback book each of us carried in our jacket pocket.  (Amazingly, even tea in such a humble place was excellent; years later at the airport in Dublin I was dismayed to see that tea was served from gigantic urns, and then delighted to find it tasted great, better than anything in the States!)  Occasionally we'd have a beer, which would be served warm, but the pubs -- open only at certain times of the day -- were cozy and comfortable places to have a rest and read a newspaper.

It would have been hard to be drunks in London, as we'd often been back in Michigan.  Pubs were closed in the evenings; if one wanted a full night of drinking you had to join a private club; we could not afford the annual dues.

Some days we lazily spent in our flat, boiling potatoes, reading, and listening to rock 'n roll on Radio Caroline, a "pirate" radio station that operated on a ship anchored just outside the reach of the law of Great Britain's BBC monopoly.  Radio Caroline was a blessing because stations licensed in England sucked.  Sometimes one or two hours a week of rock 'n roll might be broadcast.

Being rock 'n roll nuts, it was thrilling to see, at the famous Marquee Club on Waldour Street, the earliest (best) version of The Moody Blues, who'd recorded the gigantic 1965 hit "Go Now" which we were crazy about.

And then, on September 23, 1966, we had tickets to see The Rolling Stones at Royal Albert Hall; I think the tickets cost about five bucks each.    And, boy, Dennis and I could hardly get over how cool we were!  The Stones!  In London!

They were fronted by The Ike and Tina Turner Revue.  Tina, wearing an amazing electric blue-sequined mini-skirted dress and matching electric blue 5-inch heels, was simply mesmerizing as she sang and danced and shimmied back and forth across the stage.  As an encore they did their current great Phil Spector-produced hit "River Deep, Mountain High."  Ike and (mostly) Tina were awesome.  Every fiber of my being was filled with awe. 

As for The Stones, this was the era of young girls -- and probably some boys -- screaming throughout the performance, so you couldn't really enjoy the music; indeed, you could hardly hear it.  And Mick Jagger had not yet learned to "move like Jagger," -- I think he learned some moves from Tina, and have read that one of the managers of the Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham, who was gay, taught Mick how to swish.  But despite the screams and despite Mick's boring stand-in-place dancing, the entire show was still a spectacle.

A reporter named Norris Drummond, who was reviewing "the pop world's social event of the year" for The New Musical Express, wrote: "Keith Richard was knocked to the ground, Mick was almost strangled, while Brian Jones and Bill Wyman took to their heels, followed by dozens of determined fans.  Charlie Watts sat quietly behind his drums watching the scene."

Order was eventually restored over and over again.

Dennis and I returned to our cruising around, spending our money, being half-lazy, curious, fascinated by the city.

By the time I got the following letter from Western Union, our cash stash had dwindled.  

One day Dennis and I encountered a couple of our neighbor ladies on the 2nd floor landing, and they chatted us up.  Somehow it came to their asking if we would mind saying how much we were paying for our flat.  They were shocked, and both told us that their rents were considerably lower and their flats nicer than ours.  "He's just charging you more because he thinks Americans have lots of money."

So now we were pissed, but also by now we had picked a date to get back to Luxembourg to fly to New York.  We would take a ferry to Holland, see the sights in Amsterdam, pick up my work permit even if I'd never use it, and then entrain to Luxembourg.

On the last day that we would be paying our rent, we told the landlord that we were going to Amsterdam just for a long weekend.  Lo!  He played right into our hands!  His eyes behind the thick lenses of his glasses lit up, bulged with greed, and he asked if we could bring him back whatever the allowed limit was of duty-free fine chocolates and cigars.  We said we'd be glad to do him that favor.  Later that day he brought us a list of what he wanted and fronted us a considerable amount of cash to pay for it.

The crook thought we were such nice boys.

The night before we abandoned the flat, we broke into the electric meter box and took out all the shillings we had deposited.  Then, afraid that he might step into our apartment and discover our criminality, we were afraid he'd call the police and have us arrested at the ferry embarkation point, so we lay low at Leo's for four or five days before we actually took the train to Harwich where we caught the overnight ferry for Hook of Holland, and then a short train ride to Amsterdam.

I picked up my work permit at American Express.  Like I said, I'd never use it but, for the bawling out I'd endured, I for damn sure wanted to see what it looked like.

  

In those days you could buy a round-trip ticket, which we'd done because it cost barely more than a one-way, and you could just show up at the airport in Luxembourg on whatever day you wanted to use your return ticket.

We arrived at JFK Airport on Sunday, October 9th.  Dennis bought a ticket for San Francisco to visit a friend.  His flight was about noon and I went with him to the gate, as you were allowed to do in those days.  My flight for Fort Wayne, Indiana, was late in the afternoon.  Game 4 of the World Series was being broadcast all over the terminal on radios and television.  I loathed all sports except basketball. (It is against the law to not love basketball if you are Hoosier-born.)

I felt alienated and lonely and lost and out of place.  I was surrounded by idiots screaming and cheering and roaring.  I didn't care that the Orioles were sweeping the Dodgers.

I took a seat in a sort of remote area, leaned forward, put my hand over my eyes, and wept.

I got a good job at Magnavox in Fort Wayne.  Having no car, the only room I could find close to work was above a loud bar down the road from my job.  I could walk to work.

A young black man and I were charged with inventorying every piece of property in the truly gigantic factory.  The man who would oversee our work took us to look at a typing pool; I swear that in this gymnasium-sized room there were eight or nine rows of typists, all female, maybe 30 to a row.  Jesus!  One of my jobs would be to get the serial number, make, and model of each and every one of these typrwriters.

I could handle that.

My colleague was less easy to handle.  He had a degree and I didn't, but we were making the same wage.  He made a point a couple times a day of letting me know that he was seriously Christian.  I brought a book to work to read during my breaks and lunch periods.  It was a paperback of La Batarde, by Violette Leduc.  One day he picked it up, examined its front and back, asked me what "La Batarde" meant, and then said, "Why would you want to read a piece of trash like that?"

I didn't even want to respond.  Nothing he said interested me, and I supposed that nothing I cared about interested him.  Much of every day was spent in a relatively small room with him.  The situation hurt my brain.

I worked two weeks and now had enough money to put down towards a used VW Bug.  I packed up my books and clothes and headed for Lansing.  I crashed with two girls who had been my friends since they were Juniors in High School, and I was then 24.  They used to tell their parents that they were going to stay at one or the other's overnight, and then they'd come and party all night with Dennis and me and whoever else was around, crashing on the floor.  Hippie-dom was approaching!

I dropped in at the Western Union office.  They were glad to see me and put me to work the next day.

I had dreamed of living in London.  I'd tried, but I was now right back where I'd started.  I was teletyping.  Teletyping really really fast.