London Belongs To Me
Norman Collins, London Belongs To Me, 1945
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| Eric Ravilious, 1930 Life in a Boarding House |
There's so much to be agreeably said for a book with an unprepossessing cover. Unlike my approach to a bottle of wine, for inst., where my sophisticated taste extends strictly as far as the fetching-ness of the label and so delight or disappointment are blamed upon my susceptibility to its graphic design, a book in plain wrapping is approached as if I've stumbled across a sealed package. Whatever can be within? Will I be thrilled by a mere box of tissues, or is it a case of jewels? Oh, so much anticipation as I settle in to read its opening passages ...
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| What a Plain Jane of a Book! Never let it be said I'm swayed by a cover |
As it was with the shabby and anonymous-looking copy of London Belongs To Me that sat on the informal book exchange in the Pipistrello condominio a little while back. All it gave away was that it was a 1946 edition and its author, Norman Collins, had penned a further half-dozen books by this time, and that "All the characters in this novel are imaginary. ... And so are the various Funlands, cafés, Spiritualist Societies [!] ... with which the story deals." I'm sold, Dear Reader!
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| Norman Collins, Author & Popular Radio & Early TV Bigwig |
Several pages in, I'm feeling uncertain. It's Xmas 1938 and the scene is initially festive. The dry and wry close observations of the small absurdities of working relationships and life in the metropolis ill prepares me for the shock of leaving such familiar ground behind as we follow the hapless and slightly pathetic Mr. Josser back from his awkward retirement farewell from his 42-years long invisible clerical career, to his modest family in their apartment in the boarding house in Dulcimer Street, SE11. And there we are left!
Oh dear, I think, as we are introduced to a cast of frankly pitiful characters that inhabit this boarding house, this is going to make for 600 pages of dismal reading. I was hoping for bubbly entertainment!
But then the story turns a corner and the characters have me hooked. I could go on for pages about their curious and intriguing lives, but there's a Phoney War to be shadow-run by Mr. Josser and his energetic and fanatical brother-in-law Henry in the South London Parliament and Debating Society (and a solemn German to painstakingly spy on them); and the ne'er-do well Percy has to Commit a Crime that even he cannot wriggle his way out of.
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| Percy Plotting Mischief In the 1948 Film Adaptation |
The widowed landlady Mrs Vizzard has to fall into the clutches of the charlatan Mr. Squales, who is presently billing himself as a Spiritualist, but whose true second-sight indeed troubles him as he unwittingly thinks it's some health condition; and the self-pitying "old as Methuselah" Connie has to ply her rat-cunning opportunism on her neighbours between scratching a nocturnal living working the counter of a nightclub's ladies cloakroom.
Not to mention young Doris Josser has to be disappointed by her move from Dulcimer Street into digs in Camden Town. Enthusiastic but impecunious Doreen had promised her Hampstead but, to Doris, it was "exactly the same as the Elephant and Castle on her side of the river. It didn't seem likely that this was the way freedom and the gay life would lie." Of course Doris is ultimately right, and even acquiescing to getting on the phone didn't help.
At the start there had been some friction about it. Doris said outright that they couldn't afford it and added that, so far as she knew, there wasn't anyone who would want to ring her up. Doreen, however, was set on the thing. It would drive her to the brink of suicide, or over it, she declared, if she had got to live forever, completely shut off from the whole world simply because Doris wouldn't ever agree to anything. And she went on to say that Doris had no conception, literally no conception, of what she was missing by not being on the phone. There were always dozens of people ringing up dozens of other people, she said, to fix up last minute arrangements that simply couldn't be arranged in any other way. She made it sound as though, simply by sending a couple of men along to connect the thing, the Postmaster-General could convert their life overnight from an affair of Lyonses and milk-bars into a whirl of Berkeleys and Savoy Grills.
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| It's the Living End if you can't Keep Up with Technology! |
Later, once the war was well under way, sensible Doris then had to share living arrangements with her sister-in-law Cynthia and Baby and put up with a different sort of technological addiction - the wireless.
But Larkspur Road was a racket. It was a kind of sub-station of the B.B.C. At seven-thirty when Doris got up, Cynthia would call out to her to turn the set on. And, once on, it played right through the day, even when Cynthia went out shopping with Baby and had forgotten to turn it off. Not that Cynthia listened very much. The set was kept low and talked away and read news and hummed and crooned and saxophoned all by itself in a corner, like a lunatic relation.
Here I shall leave off the daily dramas of the boarding house residents to weave together against the unfolding backdrop of the the first two years of WWII as, uncharacteristically, I really shouldn't spoil any of the comedy, tragedy nor wartime privations for anyone who may choose to seek out Norman Collins' novel for themselves, merely to add I've officially joined the ranks of the legion readers for whom this almost Dickensian epic and NC's rollicking and amusing style is much beloved.
But before I go, a word about the opening image: This is a copy of one of the lost murals Eric Ravilious painted on the walls of the Morley College for Working Men and Women in South London. As befits its accompaniment to London Belongs To Me, not only is the college in the same neighbourhood as our fictitious Dulcimer Street boarding house, the mural was lost in a bombing raid during the Blitz, and indeed Ravilious himself was lost in the war in 1942. For so much more about Ravilious do have a look at James Russell's marvellous blog.
Image credits: 1: James Russell; 2: Flying With Hands; 3, 4: via Google; 5: via Pinterest
[First Published on Flying With Hands, August 2020]