Hyde Park’s a paradise, with trees turning golden and squirrels ferreting around for nuts. One of the vege sellers down the Portobello Road, the one who sells those sweet fen carrots, reckons it’s a sign of a hard winter...
Snow came early in London that year, just before Harley moved in. A pilot, or so he claimed. With his brash smile and distressed leather bomber jacket, complete with lamb’s-wool trim, he certainly looked the part.
The house was in a leafy garden terrace between Notting Hill and Kensington High Street. A four-storey, white stucco wedding cake. On a wide and quiet street where lines of prunus marked the seasons. Footpaths generous enough to take the whole cast of My Fair Lady. I read somewhere that it sold recently for a cool 3.5 million pounds. Phillip always said one day it’d be worth squillions.
The dear old girl had been carved up into bedsits when Phillip and I lived there, in separate rooms. This was in the early eighties. The Prince and Princess of Wales were newlyweds, ensconced in Kensington Palace, just a stone’s throw away. My first-floor room measured two paces by six paces and cost twenty-five quid a week. A bargain. Dissection had not robbed that house of any of her dignity and I considered it a privilege to nestle in her bosom.
I was among a group of young overseas travelers squirreling up for winter. On honeymoon too, in a sense. We’d qualified in our chosen professions, spent a few years building careers, then taken off to spend a gap year around Europe. A few months of freedom sandwiched between the trammels of parental love and the burden of other kinds of love that had yet to claim us.
We were the quintessential innocents abroad. We’d come from all parts of the globe and met through that summer in cheap hotels and hostels, swapping our brief and brilliant histories over bitter coffees in rooms we dared not describe in calls home to Mother.
This place is an absolute bargain. 4.50 pounds per night includes a full English breakfast, so that saves on lunch. Brilliant value and it’s self-catering. Best of all, it’s walking distance for the girls working at Fenwick’s, a really classy department store, in Mayfair. Caris (the English teacher I told you about, from Jo’burg) was vacuuming in the lingerie section yesterday and accidentally sucked up a silk camisole!
We didn’t mention that the “absolute bargain” was 110 steps up from the ground floor. That we were jammed in four to a room and there was a patch of soggy carpet by the hand basin. Nor that the fire alarm went off whenever someone cooked toast, so we ignored it.
Friendships between total strangers forged fast in these environments. Survive a week in a four-bed room in any cheap hotel and you melded at the hip. Loyalties sprang up to buffer us against the end of summer when, inevitably, we’d go our separate ways.
We did things we’d never dream of doing back home. My ambitions in journalism were put on hold for the convenience and flexibility of temporary secretarial work. I worked as I wanted, where I was needed, filling gaps created by glandular fevers, appendectomies, personality clashes, company mergers, and relocations.
My shorthand and typing speeds were nippy enough to land jobs where I earned enough to satisfy my appetite for West End theatre, poking about in antiquarian bookshops, modest shopping trips to Harrods, that sort of thing. By watching the pence and walking virtually everywhere, I could afford to live the dream. For a bit.
With the optimism and confidence of youth, it didn’t worry me a jot that I was constantly the new girl doing battle with typewriters that had seen service when the Ark was a dinghy.
...private secretary to the Energy Conservation Executive. Spent the day typing “Please turn off after use” signs and sticking them next to the light switches in all the toilets. On an elderly, manual Remington — he says it saves power.
...now working in Customer Relations, another way of saying Complaints. Had a letter from a customer who found a spider’s leg in their fresh-cream apple tart. Have sent leg off to the laboratory for analysis...
I met Phillip there. We shared a laugh by the drinks vending machine over the spider’s leg. He was a winsome, pale New Zealander, working in Accounts. Gran always said you had to watch the quiet ones, but there was an innocence about Phillip that made me feel protective of him, even though I was a year younger. His girlfriend was flying over the next spring and they were planning to Eurail down to the Greek Islands. He was living in “a fab house” in Kensington and rode a yellow, ten-speed racer to work.
I saw Phillip, occasionally, after that. As I strode out in my one good pair of boots along Praed Street, he’d brrring his bell and whiz past.
“Hiya, Rosie,” he’d yell, the wind rippling his wheat-colored hair as he dodged the traffic.
“Red bikes go faster, Phillip,” I’d holler after him.
...lab results came back on that spider’s leg. Turns out it was a sliver of apple core. Have sent complainant a copy of results and a dozen fresh-cream apple tarts as goodwill. Hope they don’t choke.
When the leaves began to yellow in the royal parks I traipsed through regularly en route to any one of those temp jobs, I knew I had to find digs. And some longer-term employment to finance winter.
The pack I’d been traveling with was making plans to scatter. Bridget was going to work as a nanny in Devon, saving hard for a ski trip to Austria. Vonnie and Christina decided to flat-share in Oxford. Gym-junkie Mitch scored a live-in job as a bouncer somewhere in the Midlands. Ever-theatrical Caris won a position in Bristol after replying to an ad in The Lady: “Responsible person required to look after nine small dogs while owner in hospital.”
All that walking through summer had sharpened my appetite for London and its charms. Samuel Johnson’s words suddenly made sense: “...if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts...”
I had my one pair of walking boots resoled and reheeled — yet again — and registered my intentions with the secretarial agency. They gave me the address of a firm near Victoria Station. Industrial chemists, producing agrichemicals. The pay was 85 pounds per week, immediate start. If both parties were satisfied after a week, the job was mine until Christmas.
The office was compact, as befitted the London base of a company whose headquarters were tucked away in the Home Counties. It was adjacent to a small laboratory where new products were put through the final stages of testing before registration. One look at those chilling skull-and-crossbones symbols and my stomach churned.
“Killing juice.” The staff member introduced as the sales manager picked up on my mood. A dapper little man, he reminded me of a sharply dressed bookie. “Potent on weeds.”
I suppressed a shiver. “And people?”
“Just the stuff to knock off an obsolete boyfriend.” He nudged me and winked. “He’ll think he’s coming down with flu, then...” At this point he raised his right hand and pretended to strangle himself, gagging, eyes round as ping-pong balls.
The chief executive shot him a filthy look, then picked up a vial of liquid that looked as benign as water.
“Before this is released, it’s infused with a brightly coloured dye, a strong odour, and an emetic.” He smiled at me kindly. “Last thing we need is an unhappy accident.”
I shuddered. Then I glanced at the work station. Warmth suffused my soul. The typewriter was a brand spanking new IBM electric with cassette ribbon and auto-correction tape. My fingers caressed its keys. I was smitten.
Caris and Bridget are catching the train west tomorrow. We all had dinner at The Three Lanterns, a brilliant-value Greek restaurant near Haymarket. They do the best moussaka. Then we walked to The Waldorf for a gin squash before heading to The Strand Theatre. No Sex Please, We’re British. None of us felt like laughing.