| NOTES |
Being 'assistant cook' at the Fulham Church Army hostel in Star Road turned out to be even easier than they had told me at the head office. In fact it didn't even involve opening any cans - that was the cook's job. In reality I was just one of two kitchen porters, concerned mainly with the washing-up and the pig-swill bins in the yard, which were in an apalling state and make me feel sick just to remember. |
| The cook was a survivor of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and had lost a leg due to ill-treatment there. He was deeply embittered and appeared to hate everybody and everything. His way of speaking to anyone was to bark raucously at them. He spent quite a lot of time thinking up extremely unpleasant ways of exterminating the Japanese. Although I feared him because I sensed there was a lot of violence in him that was always on the point of breaking out, he in fact took a somewhat softer attitude towards me than towards anyone else. In any case, he didn't give a damn whether we did our work properly or not. |
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My fellow kitchen porter was a manic Welshman who was not capable of washing up properly because of very poor eyesight, which he refused to admit to. As with all my jobs, even the lowliest, I wanted to do it to the best of my ability, so all the dirty plates and cutlery resulting from my colleague's poor work got on my nerves, and one day I showed him a dirty plate that he had supposedly washed. He smashed the plate and yelled "You're just like my MOTHER!" On the word 'mother' he gave the door to the canteen a vicious kick. "And my SISTER!" - a harder kick. "And my BROTHER!" The third kick pretty much demolished the door. The cook just grinned. The Welshman then disappeared without trace, so I had to do his job as well. |
| The cook was not supplied with enough cans, bread or potatoes (the latter were actually not canned) for the thirty or so residents, so they got small rations. No-one dared to complain or ask for more, except an enormous Russian who couldn't speak any English other than "More food !" This he roared with such menace that the cook favoured him and him alone with second helpings without argument. The food shortage didn't affect me because the cook honoured the ancient right of kitchen porters to help themselves to as much as they wanted. I certainly availed myself of this privilege. |
| I had to share a bedroom with two very smelly residents. One of them snored so badly that I was sometimes driven to beating him with my shoe in the night, but it neither woke him up nor stopped the snoring. The other one had a habit of playfully hitting or wrestling me, much to my great annoyance, and he gradually got more and more violent. I stole a vegetable knife from the kitchen, intending to threaten him with it, but never quite had the courage. |
| A lot of the residents had lice, but I got rid of mine (acquired in the previous chapter) quite early on in my stay there. I simply collected a complete change of clothes from among the stock donated by the public to the hostel, then had a bath and dumped all my old clothes. Dossers always said it was well-nigh impossible to get rid of body lice, but it was easy. |
| One day the Captain raided the kitchen and was horrified by something or other - probably the general state of the place. Anyway, the upshot was that the cook, having screamed abuse and threats at the Captain for a while, then followed in the Welshman's footsteps and vanished. I was now the cook as well as kitchen porter, not that it was very difficult to be both. My pay trebled from 50p to £1.50p a week! I soon managed to increase the amount of kitchen provisions - it turned out that you only had to ask. |
These were my last visits to Ken Colyer's 51 Club at 51 Little Newport Street. It closed in 1972. Does anyone know what that cellar of nostalgia for so many is used for now? Ken himself died in 1988.
There is now a housing estate on the site of the Star Road Church Army hostel. | However, the sleeping arrangements (not that any sleep was possible) were really getting on my nerves and the Captain wouldn't do anything about it. As cook, I now had to spend all day in the kitchen, from about six in the morning to ten at night, six days a week. But on Sunday mornings there was no need to start until about eight, so I took to doing an extraordinary thing in order to avoid the bedroom on Saturday nights, at least. Once I had locked the kitchen for the night I would leave the hostel and get the Tube to Leicester Square, in order to revert to my old habit of spending the night at Colyer's (see chapter 22). As it was permissible to lie on the floor at Colyer's, I got a bit of rest, but still no sleep. I would leave at about 6am, walk the six miles back to Fulham (public transport started at about eight on Sundays), and open the kitchen for the day on arrival at the hostel. This was quite fun until about the fourth week of doing this, when I tried to find a shorter way back and got a bit lost. As a result, I realised that I could not possibly have breakfast ready in time. This prospect was so frightening that when I eventually got to the hostel, I just carried on walking. This was the first of several occasions on which I was suddenly filled with an ecstatic feeling of freedom at the thought of vanishing without trace. There was nothing to stop me. Sod the lot of 'em! |