NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me. |
Following my eviction from the Buckingham Road bedsit, I discovered that all the beach characters I had associated with at the beginning of the year (described in Chapter 51) were still around. I was about to have a bit more to do with some of them than previously, particularly Tom and Janet, and Maurice and Dave. A number of memorable episodes were packed into the two or three months between leaving the bedsit and being able to move into 105 Islingword Road. The first was my stay with Tom and Janet. |
| You may recall that when we last heard of this dismal pair in Chapter 51 Janet was pregnant. She had by now had the baby and with the help of the social services the couple had managed to get a tiny room in Regency Square. Typically for Brighton in the sixties (and perhaps now, for all I know), this room was in a large Regency house of several storeys, the whole of which was in an appalling state of repair and crammed with tenants who only intermittently managed to keep a roof over their heads. The rents all came from Social Security. Tom and Janet happily invited me to stay in their room with them and the baby. I accepted the offer, but the electricity had been cut off, the room stank and Janet had septic scabies. Added to the crying of the baby and the lack of sparkling conversation (to put it very mildly), these were not the sort of conditions I could put up with for more than a about a week. |
| I think Robin Sidgwick's flat was next. This was very different. It was half of a smart house somewhere in the outer suburbs, and Sidge let me have the spare bedroom. Sidge had been discussing with Carolyn Holland the need to be getting on with some charitable work for the dossers of the town, while waiting to take over the Islingword Road premises. They felt that the troops - the student helpers - might start to get restless if they continued to see no results of their labours apart from me drunk. It was therefore agreed that I should ask the minister of the Nonconformist church near to Sidge's place if we could set up a soup kitchen once a week in his church hall. He readily agreed. |
| Sidge and Carolyn then decided that I should trawl the butchers' shops for bones and scraps and scavenge in the vegetable market for discarded produce. I had no intention of demeaning myself in this way, but I thought the idea was sound, so I ordered them to do it instead. I limited my part to acquiring two enormous bains-marie from a second-hand catering supplies shop. Oh, and I also wrote an indignant letter to the Argus under a false name, saying that I had actually seen people connected with the Brighton Hostel Project scavenging in the vegetable market, and that it was therefore a damned good thing that the Corporation had had the sense to turn down the planning application. Of course, the purpose of writing this letter vehemently attacking ourselves was to give me an opportunity of composing a powerful reply. I made sure that the original letter was sloppily written and ludicrously angry, but that the reply was intelligent, elegantly constructed and reasonable in tone. Well, it brought in a few donations. It's a good trick and I don't suppose I was the first or last to employ it. |
| Anyway, the bones, scraps and vegetables were brought back to Sidge's kitchen and boiled up for several hours, and the result resembled that awful slop produced at the Simon shelter (see Chapter 47). In the evening we carried it over to the nearby church and waited for the beneficiaries of our largesse to arrive (I had detailed a student to tour the town telling dossers about it). About a dozen turned up, which we found rather disappointing, but we assumed the numbers would pick with the approach of winter. The church hall was dark and excessively gloomy. We gave each client a plate of the noxious stew and were surpised when no-one wanted a second helping. We had to take lots of it back to the flat and use it as the basis for the following week's offering. We boiled it now and again in the meantime to stop it going off. The following week there were only three or four diners and the week after that, none came at all and we had to carry back two full bains-marie. Well, at least it was a good excuse to cuddle Carolyn in a dark corner for mutual consolation. Oddly, she didn't seem consoled by this therapy so much as alarmed. |
| Before the next banquet was due, two or three of the participants stopped me in the street and said things along the lines of "Do you call that charity? It was bloody disgusting!" I told them that they were in no position to become food critics, but I could see they had a point, on reflection. However, my reaction was not to try to improve the service, but to knock it on the head after just the three attempts We weren't sure how to dispose of the ten gallons of stew, nor did we bother to keep boiling it up. After a week, it was stinking the place out, so we took it out to the nearest drain in the early hours and tried to pour it down. It wasn't easy and we spent a long time trying to force all the bits between the grating with our feet. The reason I've gone into such detail about this trivial incident of the disposal of the rotten stew, is that it has unaccountably remained vivid in my memory. I still feel a bit nauseous when I recall it. |
| My stay at Sidge's place came to an end in a most disagreeable fashion. You may recall Del Radstock, who featured greatly in Chapters 48-50 and of whom we last heard when he let Arnrid and me me down rather badly in Chapter 50. Now, over a year later, he suddenly reappeared. He had found out from Arnrid where I was staying. It so happened that Sidge had now gone home, as most students did, for the Christmas vacation. I foolishly allowed Del to stay at the flat. One day, I came back and found the place ransacked, with a lot of gratuitous damage - doors senselessly smashed, etc. Everything small but potentially valuable was missing. So was Del. I told the police, who had already picked up Del for stealing a car. Sidge and Arnrid between them managed to persuade the Police not to charge Del with theft from the flat as well. The magistrate, Recorder Doughty, lectured Del for some time on what a vile and useless specimen he was (this greatly angered Arnrid) before sending him down for a year. The following year, Sidge and I visited him in prison (Wandsworth) a couple of times. |
| As a result of the damage to the flat, Sidge's landlord forbade him to have any more people staying there, so I had to find somewhere else. Unusually, I have no memory of how I spent that Christmas. For the next chapter I'm going to backtrack a bit to the Autumn just to relate one big event. |