Do Not Pass Go Page 5

  In 1935 the King’s Cross immigrants were Italian: Reggioni’s was one of half a dozen such catering establishments around the station. Today, you’d be wasting your time attempting to define the cultural make-up – almost half the UK’s ethnic-minority population lives in London, and King’s Cross has an almost randomly picked-and-mixed cross section. The impression I’d had around the station was of an aimless, rootless absence of community, an inhuman vacuum embodied in the revelation that fourteen years after the escalator fire in the Underground there, one of the thirty-one victims, a man in his forties, has yet to be identified. But the King’s Cross Gabby spoke of was different, a lively and all-welcoming community. Everyone comes and anything goes: as Gabby could no doubt assess from rich personal experience elsewhere, in London even the most colourful individualist was accepted on streets that had already seen it all. As a native I can say I felt a surge of civic pride. At least I hope that’s what it was.

  Gabby, I could sense, was beginning to enjoy the game, largely because of an incredible run of fortune that within two laps of the board had bagged him a pair each of light blues, purples and yellows and no fewer than three stations. For my part I’d landed on two of his properties, been sent to jail, copped a speeding fine and a hospital bill and been stung twice for income tax – down to three hundred odd quid and with only Marlborough Street, Water Works and Regent Street to show for it. Funded by a bank error in his favour, my rent and an advance to GO, Gabby hadn’t even broken into his five hundreds.

  Almost every turn was interrupted by a call on his mobile switchboard: one he answered with a strangely baritone ‘bom dia’, one with a rather suspicious ‘mmm?’ and the third – the work line, the one I’d rung – with that breathy ‘hellogabbyspeaking’. I’d hoped that in the apparent absence of further appointments I might be allowed a bonus hour or two, get a few houses up and make things more interesting than they already were, but it soon became obvious by the incoming calls on that last line that my time was running out.

  ‘We have maybe ten minutes,’ said Gabby as I handed him the Park Lane title deeds, his way of telling me to cut the crap and whip it out.

  ‘Just time for another couple of rounds,’ I said, too loudly and too heartily, and for the first time Gabby looked mildly surprised – this really was the easiest £40 he’d ever earned. And his luck didn’t change on the board, either. When I called a sudden halt, abruptly imagining Gabby’s next client leering out a salty, collaborative wink as we passed on the stairs, I’d already had to turn down Mayfair and even Bow Street on economic grounds.

  ‘So I win?’ said Gabby. Quickly I divvied up: eleven properties and £766 in cash for him, five and £174 for me. Not for anticipated reasons, it was the most dreadful Monopoly performance of my life.

  ‘You are busy today?’ he inquired mildly as I crammed and slammed bits into box and board into backpack.

  ‘No, not really,’ I said quickly, making for the door.

  ‘Oh,’ nodded Gabby, ‘I ask because you have many, many ah . . .’

  And following his gaze to the floor I saw the wodge of buckled cards displaced from my backpack during the over-eager preparations for departure. ‘Mistress Nina’s School of Correction: PUNISHMENT AT ITS BEST’ read the legend across the visible half of the one on top.

  I half-stooped to pick them up, then righted myself. ‘No need for her now,’ I jabbered, fingers already twisting the Yale. ‘You’ve just beaten me.’

  In my haste I’d forgotten to ask Gabby to do something for me, and jogging back past the station in light drizzle I set off to do it myself. Not at this stage confident enough to risk exposing my Water Works in public, I retraced my steps to the old coal depot and whipped the board out of the backpack.

  Despite that outlandish baptism, it was still a lovely thing to behold. Even in a light rain I could see what Oliver Sacks meant: the colours were indeed rich and costly, strident Technicolor blurts in a time of monochrome austerity, a beige age. Befitting its manufacturer’s heritage, the Waddington board is a triumph of the printer’s art.

  Surveying the bushes growing out of the coal depot’s upper walls, between windows missing like empty eye sockets, I accepted how little of London is a triumph of anything any more. The Channel Tunnel rail link scheme is already teenaged but at this end of the line was still years from taking recognisable shape. Why did it take us so long to get anything useful done these days? The enormous Piccadilly line extension to Cockfosters – opened in 1933 and incorporating eight new stations – was knocked up in less than two years. In that same year, the ribbon was cut on three new bridges across the Thames. Below I watched as an incoming express was swallowed up by the huge mouth of St Pancras station, in its time the largest enclosed space in the world; these days, we’re reduced to heralding that express line to Folkestone as the ‘first major railway to be built in Great Britain for one hundred years’. Intended as a proud boast, this comes out sounding more like a shaming indictment. Where once we excelled at building large things, these days it’s all we can do to knock them down: English Heritage had insisted that the mighty cylindrical skeletons of three gasholders lying in the rail link’s path must be dismantled and reassembled nearby, and even 100 yards off I could hear the ineffectively strangled obscenities of yellow-hats battling to loosen screws tightened in 1880.

  It should have all been rather melancholy, but in the light of my encounter with Gabby I instead found the surrounding shambles cheerfully inspiring. The tolerant individualism that drew Gabby to London was symbolised by its jerry-built anarchy: there has never been the civic will, let alone the way, to reshape the capital to some centralised and inhuman grand design. Most European capitals are dominated by great boulevards and sweeping vistas, created by wiping the map clean and starting again. But even after the Great Fire, even after the Blitz, there was no wholehearted attempt to grasp the opportunity for wholesale urban overhaul: there were discussions, and blueprints for a new future, and then in the end they just stuck up taller buildings along the original medieval street lines. Writing in 1938, a Sporting Times journalist reported how, while enmeshed in horrendous traffic up the Strand, his cabbie had turned round and muttered, ‘Damn fine city, London – or it will be when it’s finished.’

  And that’s it: London will never be finished. We make do, we mend. Of the eighteen Monopoly streets which are actually roads (as opposed to squares, districts or pubs), no fewer than six were originally built by the Romans. Although, in a feeble attempt at maintaining suspense, I’m not at this stage going to tell you which ones.

  Squatting down, balancing the board precariously on my lap and cursing King’s Cross for straddling the fold hinge, I placed my racing car in position. As I wiped away the worst of the drizzle, it occurred to me that I was taking this a lot more seriously than Vic and Marge. Blithely, blissfully unaware of the historic enormity of their looming task, that what they were about to do would impact upon millions of British lives, and millions more in the globe’s far-flung pink bits, their approach was, to be charitable, cavalier.

  ‘What’s this big road out front here, Marjorie?’

  ‘Euston Road, Mr Victor.’

  ‘Never heard of it. How about that one running up the hill to the left?’

  ‘I believe that’s Pentonville, Mr Victor.’

  ‘Never heard of that neither.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think they’re especially notable, Mr Victor. Now, if we were to walk just along there we’d get to Tottenham Court Road and Great Portland Street, some of the best kno . . .’

  ‘Don’t be daft, woman. It’s only a flaming game. Grand – that’s two streets and a station done already. I think tea is in order, Marjorie.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Victor. There’s a rather nice Lyons Corner House just up there in Islington. The Angel, if I recall.’

  I rolled. Both dice skidded smartly beyond Free Parking and into what I discovered, unwisely employing touch in favour of sight, to be a patch of nettles
. Having treated at least four postcodes to an ignoble and protracted oath, with as much precision as my poisoned digits would permit I rolled again. A five and a three: Whitehall.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Purples

  SOMBRE, STATELY AND regal, no street on the board is more aptly coloured than purple Whitehall. If you’re Country Life you call it ‘our noblest thoroughfare’; if you’re Michael Caine you call it ‘the most overrated place in London – just extraordinarily dull’. Once a 2,000-room behemoth, the palace that gave the street its name was the official residence of every monarch from Henry VIII to William III; originally York House, there is (as is often the case in a city that’s not even sure how it got its own name) some doubt as to how it became known as Whitehall Palace. Expert opinion links it to ‘the custom of naming any festival hall a “White-hall”’, but I prefer to side with the stubborn minority who entertainingly insist that the name is derived from some of the newer walls, these being, let me see, beige.

  Henry died at Whitehall, as did Oliver Cromwell. Many of Shakespeare’s plays were premiered there. Charles II once lost 4½ lb during a palace tennis match, slightly less than his dad did shortly after being escorted through a first-floor window on to a lofty scaffold. Then, in 1695, the 2,000 rooms were reduced to one after a Dutch laundry maid inadvertently started the fire that razed all but the Banqueting House.

  The royals had already moved out, and now their ever-expanding governments moved in. Emerging from Westminster Tube with Big Ben donging out midday, the yawning breadth of Whitehall tapered distantly to Trafalgar Square before me, both its flanks staidly overlooked by the museums of bureaucracy. Though I might easily be sharing its pavements with a disproportionate number of fellow Gabby clients, it was no little relief to welcome Whitehall as the clean, crisp chalk to the sleazy cheese of King’s Cross. Here was the vice versa of Oscar Wilde’s comment about old women having faces like public buildings – aside from Richmond House, a sort of Brutalist Hampton Court knocked up for the Department of Health in the eighties, every edifice looked stolid and humourless; Victoria’s we-are-not-amused catchphrase in bricks and mortar. The Treasury: Buckingham Place with net curtains and strip lighting. The old War Office: a Stalinist department store with two and a half miles of corridors. Dourly decorated with dusty ‘VR’s, the towering mahogany doors of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office seemed more like the long-sealed entrance to a mausoleum, and surveying what is now the Scottish Office it wasn’t easy to imagine the phrase ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ being coined behind its doors by Lady Caroline Lamb in the throes of her affair with Lord Byron.

  The Victorians and Edwardians deliberately fashioned Whitehall on an impersonal, imperial scale – befitting, after all, officials who held ultimate administrative power over a fifth of the world’s population. People could argue about where in London you might find the Empire’s heart and soul, but there was no doubt that here was its brain. A lot of Vic and Marge’s choices might generously be described as out of left field, but you couldn’t leave Whitehall out. It’d be one of the first names on any London street team sheet: if Whitechapel and Old Kent Road were the tough and sometimes dirty centrebacks, Leicester Square the temperamental playmaker and Mayfair the big-money signing up front, Whitehall would be the solid and dependable midfield general. When the Treasury took a direct hit from a huge Luftwaffe bomb in 1940, so effectively did its massive walls absorb the blast that surveying an unscathed exterior nonplussed emergency crews thought they’d been called out on a false alarm.

  The most serendipitous reward for endless weekends sneezing my way through the shelves of second-hand booksellers was a 1933 Post Office London Street Directory, which helpfully supplied an exhaustive list of the residents and proprietors of every address in the immediate pre-Monopoly era. The Whitehall entry told its own story of a colonial bureaucracy run riot. Strolling up its broad pavements Vic and Marge might have rubbed shoulders with an official of the Aliens Branch or the Inebriates Act Department, an inspector of the Schools of Anatomy or Explosives or – autograph books and Kodak Brownies at the ready – the actual chairman of the Bengal Military Orphan Society.

  Near the Cenotaph, a WPC rode past, her mount giving a fulsome reminder of this area’s continuing reign as London’s horse-poo capital; a chatter of remarkably enthusiastic German students strode by in a blur of backpacks and camcorders. We were into the statues now. A curiously stunted Sir Walter Raleigh sandwiched between two meaty field marshals I’d never heard of, then one I had: Haig, a controversial choice in the thirties because the artist made him almost as big as his horse, and today because we’ve found out that the Somme was all his fault. Monty’s come out worst – a graduate of the fight-with-a-lawnmower school of sculpture – but he’s got the best view, staring straight down Downing Street with the slowly revolving iris of the London Eye behind him should he fancy a quick peek over his melting, lacerated shoulder.

  At 12.30 the traffic at either end of the thoroughfare was embroiled in its usual pinball frenzy, but Whitehall itself retained an appropriately respectful calm: there aren’t many major roads in central London you can cross at a saunter, particularly one so extravagantly broad. Ambling over to the tourist gaggle at the Downing Street gates I understood that, as well as emphasising Whitehall’s role as Empire High Street, the sheer width was also a crowd-control measure.

  Back in Charles I’s time there were mob riots in Whitehall, and as executive power began to concentrate here so political malcontents periodically gathered to express their grievances. On this basis, it’s astonishing to think that until 1990 you could walk right up to the front door of No. 10. Not that you’d necessarily have wanted to in the mid-thirties, when according to contemporary tastes the modest Queen Anne terrace (constructed, incidentally, by Sir George Downing, the second person to graduate from Harvard) was considered so poky and rundown that there was a campaign to demolish it. Historian Harold Clunn, a strident advocate of such schemes, complained that ‘provided a place is old and rich in historical interest, the uglier it is the greater the reluctance to pull it down’.

  It’s certainly filthy. The exteriors of most of Whitehall’s buildings have been or are being buffed and blasted and steam cleaned, but peering through the tourists and the steel and the flak-jacketed police, the façades of Nos 10–12 presented a stubbornly stained and smutted reminder of the steam age.

  Despite recent claims that the capital’s air is now cleaner than at any time since 1585, no one would promote lungfuls of modern London as a cheek-reddening tonic: Mayor Ken Livingstone admitted recently that the air quality is inferior to any city in the UK and ranks among the worst in Europe. But how much worse it was in the thirties. Coal production didn’t peak until 1900, and even twelve years later 76,000 tons of soot were falling on London annually. Not for nothing was it called The Smoke.

  Monopoly was very much a coal-fired product: as well as the steam train at each station, until the sixties the centre of the board was decorated with a mural depicting two speeding expresses shuffling smokily past a brace of Metroland homes, themselves belching smuts through four chimneys. At the start of the fifties, 98 per cent of British homes still had an open fire, and the notorious pea-soupers of 1952 contributed to the deaths of 12,000 Londoners. And I still cannot quite believe that London Transport did not decommission its last steam engine until 1971: an absurd, nonsensical fact that, like asparagus making your pee smell funny, should not be true but somehow just stubbornly is.

  A souvenir stall selling Mind The Gap knickers heralded the start of Whitehall’s slightly more vibrant northern half. Following a guided tour group of Antipodeans through its gates I realised I’d never been into the Horse Guards before, and certainly not known that it remains the official entrance to Buckingham Palace. And only by virtue of further brazen eavesdropping did I discover that they still increase the number of guards when the Queen is in residence – a bold move if one considers the modern terrorist’s proven resi
stance to men in conical Rapunzel hats wearing even the very shiniest stirrups.

  Horses buffed to suede and boots to PVC, a troop of guardsmen rode into the courtyard through a battery of camera flashes. Beneath an arch, another two with lofted swords grimly resisted four bell-bottomed Italian girls approaching the tunic-tickling phase of the time-honoured tourist pastime of give-us-a-giggle, and I recalled how surprised I’d been to read that such saucy disrespect was at least as widespread around here in the thirties. Waiting at the top end of Whitehall for George V’s funeral cortege to pass, the crowd, adopting the catchline from a contemporary ad campaign for Lyons Corner Houses, began chanting, ‘Where’s George?’. And this at a time of staunch, almost feverish royalism: to mark George’s silver jubilee the year before, London’s schoolchildren were all given two days off school and a commemorative spoon, and tens of thousands had slept out in the rain to bag a front-row view of the regal procession (‘I can’t understand it,’ he said to his family as they stood before a wildly cheering mob on the Buck House balcony, ‘I’m really quite an ordinary sort of chap.’).

  Through a gateway etched with nineteenth-century I-woz-’ere’s I emerged into what in 1935 had been the largest clear space in London for over two centuries. Though a distant also-ran in the era of the B&Q car park, the Parade Ground still impresses. In an earlier age royal jousts had been held here, and looking through the fountains and flowers of St James’s Park towards Buckingham Palace it was impossible not to be stirred by a sense of history or pomp or something reasonably epic. And then I realised that standing here in 1935 you’d have seen swastikas flying from the German Embassy just in front of Pall Mall, and fascist bundles draped across the nearby Italian State Railway office, and I thought of the single lonely wreath I’d seen at the foot of the Cenotaph and felt my innards flutter.