‘They should’ve given yer the Nobel Prize, Ivan,’ she said one night in The Elgin. ‘If only fer tryin’.’It was just before closing time on a Saturday night. The pub was a favourite with gypsies from the Westway camp; it was full of rowdy fiddles and accordions. They were the same seedy kind who had infested Odessa and Budapest and Paris fifty years before. It was almost impossible to stand up without being pushed over. Mrs Cornelius was rarely given to betraying strong feelings, but five pints of mild-and-bitter had relaxed her tongue. She felt sorry for me: it was not long after my last trouble with the Courts. I had also been insulted by a cloth-capped junk man, reeking of urine and motor-oil, when I tried to get to the bar. She was trying to show she at least still recognised my gifts. From Mrs Cornelius it was worth more than a knighthood. I am glad she was able to speak before she died, confirming her faith in me. That memory alone sustains me. I have suffered injustice for too long. Now there is no hope.
I helped her through the sweating singers in their collarless shirts and greasy coats, into the dark rain of Ladbroke Grove where the buses and lorries splashed and grumbled. I took her in my arms. She felt sick, she said. She bent over the gutter outside her flat in Blenheim Crescent, but nothing came up. Even then it was apparent she was very ill. She was dying. There was no need for her to lie. We were always honest with each other. She had a nose for genius, even if it were sometimes corrupt. Trotski, Mussolini, Goering: she had known them all. She shook her head. ‘They never give ya yore due, Ivan.’ It was true. She alone could testify that, but for the Bolsheviks, every Russian honour would today be mine. I would be a world name.
The Poles called the Tsarist Empire ‘Byzantium’ and use the same word today for the Soviet Union. The Polish talent for piety is almost as great as their talent for laziness. I did not become an émigré merely to own a little house in Putney and work for a record company. They are not martyrs. They are self-pitying petit bourgeoisie. They would complain under any regime. I wish people would stop introducing them to me. It is the same with the Czechs. We have nothing in common beside basic Slavonic. During the War it was all Poles. Now it is all Czechs. Mrs Cornelius told the neighbours how great I had been and how I had suffered. But I did not want their pity. I gambled, I said to her, and I lost.
I go up to the canal near Harrow Road. It is so bleak there. Everything is rotting. Everything is grey. There is slime on the water. The tow-path is littered with filth. I look at the backs of derelict buildings where unhealthy children smash the remaining windows and piss on floorboards which are beds for tramps. They spray the bricks with their excrement and illiterate slogans. This is Sunday afternoon and this is my exercise! My day off, my stroll, my relaxation! I have seen the wonders of Constantinople, the glories of Rome, the masculine grandeur of Berlin before they bombed it, the elegance of Paris, the brutal magnificence of New York, the dreaming luxury of Los Angeles. I have worn silk from top to bottom. I have satisfied my lust with women of outstanding beauty and breeding. I have experienced at first hand all the world’s noblest engineering miracles: the great liners, the skyscrapers, the planes and the airships. I have known the exhilaration of rapid, luxurious travel. But now I totter along a disgusting tow-path, staring at flotsam and smeared walls, terrified in my frailty for my worthless old life, praying I do not slip on a dog turd or attract the ruthless curiosity of some prepubescent footpad. Their noises echo over the water; the mysterious croaks and grunts of primitive amphibians heralding a return to bloody ignorance and unsentient savagery.
I have been here nearly half my life! Since 1940, in one part of London. Dopoledne . . . The first half was spent exploring and instructing the entire civilised world. Major Sinclair, the great American aviator and my mentor, warned me I was not doing the fashionable things. He too was ruined for his unpopular views. His friend Lindbergh was another great man brought low by petty, vicious enemies. Lindbergh once told me his closest-kept secret. He had never meant to fly to England at all. He had originally set out for Bolivia, but his instruments had deceived him. We had much in common, Lindbergh and myself. He knew why the Jews destroyed the Hindenburg.
Under the arches of the motorway (with which ‘planners’ bisected Notting Dale and Ladbroke Grove without a thought for those who have to live below) gypsies build shacks of old doors and corrugated iron, parking battered caravans amongst heaps of rubble and scrap. Their thin dogs run everywhere; their children are dirty and neglected. The wonderful modern road speeds traffic to and from the West, from Bristol and Bath and Oxford where people live in eighteenth-century elegance. It is a white, efficient road and has done much, they say, to remove traffic from residential streets. But to build it they had to knock our houses down. Unstable, featureless towers were erected in their place. On both sides of Ladbroke Grove, in the shadows of the Westway. stagger alcoholics of both sexes, young and old, begging for coins to buy methylated spirits, swearing at you if you dare to refuse. Or at night lounging boys accost you, their black faces snarling threats. From within the concrete caves butane gas sputters, just as the naphtha flared above the market-stalls in winter in old Kiev. They built a great white road to the West and thus created a warren for thieves and skinheads who cling to the surface of civilisation like detritus around a boat. Yet without civilisation they could not survive.
I do not say Portobello Road and Notting Dale were perfect. Taxi-drivers refused to take you to Golborne Road at night. We were famous for our prostitutes and half the population was on the borderline of crime. Policemen went in threes through our alleys. But the social workers and politicians told us this would be changed. The road, they said, would abolish injustice and squalor. The filthy lorries would go. There would be paradise in the city. And what do we have?
Rock and roll bands give free concerts in the motorway bays and exhort their audience to Revolution and the smoking of hashish. Whores give their customers a cheap time against the pillars and negro homosexuals squabble and shriek while the traffic moans above their heads, taking the Lords and Ladies to Bath and Oxford and Heathrow. Those planners dreamed of Utopia but denied all reality. Then Utopia was no longer financially possible. Perhaps it never had been. Nonetheless, they continued to build as if nothing had changed. They built their wonderful road, much as the natives of New Guinea build bamboo aeroplanes to coax back the marvellous cargoes which came from the sky during World War II.
They told us they would plant flower-gardens in the mud they had created. It is bezhlavy. They said they would build theatres and shops and provide social services under the Westway: but they have even failed to deal with the gypsies who fight and drink beneath the arches from Shepherds Bush to Little Venice; murdering one another, beating their wives and children, refusing either education or work, while youth gangs menace old-age pensioners and wheezing mental-deficients display their diseased genitalia to little boys. And they had the temerity to laugh at me for my dreams! Is their Utopia any worse than mine? And where is the prosperity we were to see? The traders come from their suburbs to the Portobello Road on Fridays and Saturdays, wearing their bohemian finery, selling their high-priced junk. They make a tourist attraction of a slum. And they turn the tourist attraction even more into a slum when they leave. I see the bewildered Americans on a Thursday, wandering up and down the dirty streets looking for the glamour which, like a travelling fair, is only there at certain times, disguising the permanence of poverty and ignorance. Where are the Beatles and the bobbies on bicycles, two by two? Where are the great walls of Windsor and the bells of Old St Paul’s? They have no wish for anything but the romance. On a Thursday, we are not capable of providing it.