NOTES
There are no notes for this chapter yet. Some of the notes on other pages are based on info YOU send me. |
The four of us - Bill, Angela, Felix and myself, sharing Bill's tiny room in Highgate was, as Bill himself described it, a nightmare. Bill, however, was not there much of the time. He worked at Morris Angel's, the theatrical costumiers in the West End by day and spent his evenings in pubs drinking many pints of cider. |
| After a few days, we parked Felix on Angela's mother in Fulham. However, she was ill at the time, recovering from pneumonia at the age of 72 and the strain of having to cope with a very lively four-year-old was obviously too much. We thought this might help us to register with Hammersmith & Fulham Council as a homeless family, but we were told straight away that we had no claim on them at all, as we had not ourselves been been living in the borough. The child didn't count. As it was impossible to return with Felix to Bill's, we decided to look into the possibility of squatting. Although the heyday of squatting was over, there was still quite a of it lot going on in London. We contacted a squatters' organization and they directed us to a big squat in Camberwell. We somehow managed to lug all our possessions over there by public transport. |
| The squat turned out to be a whole council estate which, for some reason, had been emptied of its occupants by the Greater London Council. We found that there were hundreds of people squatting there, and the squat leaders had even converted one of the flats into an extremely untidy office. With the minimum of ceremony, the man in the office sold us the keys to a large ground floor flat. The place was in an appalling state, but we did what we could to clean it up a bit and make it fairly habitable. We still had with us the last of the Postal Orders people had sent us for the junk we had been peddling from Orchard Cottage. We hadn't banked them, because we had no goods to send. We probably intended to return them. However, the ones that had not been crossed (foolish people) now proved very handy for buying food, as we had no other money left. |
| At six o'clock one morning, we were woken by the front door being smashed open. Council workers stormed in, one of them roaring "Don't resist or things will get very nasty!" The first thing they did was to smash the lavatory bowl with a sledge hammer to make the place uninhabitable, then they threw our possessions into their van and told us we would have to go to the local GLC depot to claim them. When Felix, who by the age of four could read fluently, saw their van he said "So bad men are called Greater London Council?" For years afterwards he thought the word 'council' meant an evil gang. He probably wasn't far wrong, in many cases. We went to the depot as instructed, for our things, but were told by a vilely rude woman to get lost. The worst of it was that the bulk of our possessions was made up of Felix's toys and books, which had been augmented just recently with expensive presents from Angela's mother. We realized it would be pointless to make a fuss - we had a much more productive plan, which we put into operation when the time was right. |
| In the meantime we went to Southwark Council's social services department (Camberwell being in the Borough of Southwark) where, after several hours, we were seen by a 'family social worker'. This creature turned out to be like something out of Hogarth, with the addition of a fag hanging out of its mouth. Being shouted and insulted by this grotesque specimen was almost, but thankfully not quite enough to send me into a rage, the results of which might have been catastrophic. Eventually she gave us a ticket for one night in the local hostel for homeless families and a railway warrant to go straight back to Devon the next day.
We knew it would be ridiculous to go back to Devon, but we were determined that the council should at least have to pay for the tickets, so we made a special trip to Waterloo station just in order to exchange the warrant for tickets, which we then tore up. It had not been easy to get those tickets. The ticket office clerk was abusive and refused to issue them (these were still pre-privatization days, when you had to be the very dregs of embittered humanity to get any job on the railways that involved dealing with the public). I have a vague memory of the tickets being issued only after Angela had barged into the private office of some official and threatened to cause big trouble. |
| The hostel for homeless families was actually quite reasonable. The families seemed well-behaved and the warden was very pleasant. In fact she said we were welcome to stay as long as we liked, in contradiction to some nonsense the social services wreck had told us about the police being called if we attempted to stay for more than one night. However, the snag was that we would have had to start paying rent, which was not going to be possible in the short term. We must have felt ourselves to be in a very desperate situation indeed, because we forced ourselves to make the extraordinary decision to park ourselves once more upon my mother! |
| Following the death of my grandmother nearly three years earlier, she had been obliged to move out of 4 Connaught Road by the council, as there was no justification for one person to be occupying a three-bedroom house. They had given her a fairly spacious two-bedroom flat about a mile away in Quinta Drive. We descended upon her, presumably with some forewarning, in the late Autumn of 1976. She was certainly not overjoyed by the event, but we somehow managed to persuade her that it would be a very short-term measure. Straight away, Angela set to work on the plan, alluded to above, to replace some of the possessions so blatantly stolen by the GLC. She embarked on a very short but most audacious campaign of shoplifting of expensive toys for Felix. It was not intended as retribution, just rightful restitution, and there was no question of ever repeating it. |
| That task out of the way, she quickly got a job as an X-ray technician in nearby Barnet General Hospital (the hospital where I was born). The radiography department was housed in one of the many 'temporary' huts built for wounded soldiers during the Second World War. Her job was to develop the X‑ray films (I gather it's usually done by machines these days). She found the radiographers, with their small talk about recipes and clothes and their opinions taken straight from the Daily Mail very difficult to bear. |
| As it became clear to my mother that our stay was going to last for rather longer than we had promised, her behaviour followed the expected pattern - doting on Felix and tolerating Angela and me at first, then gradually becoming more and more desperate to get all three of us out. We were all in for a bad time of it. |