Do Not Pass Go Page 6

To put all this in context, my visit to Whitehall came less than two weeks after the World Trade Center awfulness, which as well as casting a general pall over most personal ruminations had whipped up an atmosphere in compatible with dawdling aimlessly about in front of important government buildings holding a notebook. In every reception area stood a stark placard reading ‘ALERT LEVEL – BLACK SPECIAL’; when I inquired of a chap in a blazer outside the Royal United Services Institute what this meant his response was the sort of look that greeted Oliver Twist’s request for seconds. The same query at the threshold of the Parliamentary Counsel at least elicited a verbal reaction: ‘It wouldn’t mean much to you if I told you, which I won’t.’ Asked more cordially to explain myself by a plump security officer patrolling outside the old War Office, I struck up what was threatening to become a conversation until I made the mistake of referring to its tenants as the Ministry of Defence. ‘I think we’ll just call it a government office, shall we?’

  Then both road and buildings narrowed, and Whitehall shrank to a mercifully more human scale. Turning around to look back down towards Westminster, I was presented with a view that uncannily replicated the photocopy of a 1936 panorama I now retrieved from my backpack. Every building, every statue was unchanged. Double-deckers with the same route numbers (77 and 12, as you don’t ask); the same lampposts in the same places. All you needed to do to the old photo was dangle security passes round the necks of that little knot of lunch-hour Civil Service strollers, Tipp-Ex out the Keystone Cop taxis, homburgs and bowlers and give the plane trees a healthy slug of Miracle Gro. I was almost relieved when I turned back round and saw my view framed by Tostig Souvenirs and a J.D. Wetherspoon.

  Lured into the latter by an absurd offer – a pint and a burger for £2.49 – I took up a seat by the window. In accordance with the current urban trend this had until recently been a venerable old bank, but I wasn’t going to cry into my beer – certainly not at 99p a pint. How can a pub not be better than a bank? If it had stayed the latter I wouldn’t be in here now, I reasoned, working back to my seat under mahogany and old portraits with a refill in my hand. In any case, peering across and along the street and cross-referencing from my 1933 directory I noted that not much else had changed here either. The Silver Cross restaurant was still trading under the same name, as was the Clarence Tavern and home of farce, the Whitehall Theatre. So too the Old Shades, established for comfortably over a century and still supplying its patrons with honest ale and hearty fayre. On the other hand, the British Union of Vivisectionists had evolved into a McDonald’s.

  Suffused with the rosy, ill-focused glow of a man who has enjoyed a quantity of bargain ale inappropriate to the hour, I set out into the street. This end of Whitehall was distinctly more stimulating, I now found, winking at a slightly mad-eyed old man in a yellow bib emblazoned with ‘COMPASSION IN WORLD FARMING’ and wondering if I should tell him about McDonald’s. There were anarchist stickers on the lampposts and a witness appeal for an assault that could never have happened further down the road.

  I don’t suppose for a minute that without that second pint inside me I’d ever have gone into Tostig Souvenirs, and not even for a second that after a lifetime of weary scorn I’d suddenly have been so richly entertained by the stalwart tourist T-shirt slogan, ‘I like the Pope – the Pope smokes dope’. Laugh? I almost bought a bouncing clockwork penis.

  There wouldn’t have been any foreign tourists in London in the thirties, at least not as we know them today. The Depression had broken middle-class piggy banks across the world, and the belle époque of the old European aristocracy was finished. Blue-collar provincials couldn’t afford a week in London even if they’d been allowed to: I’d been mildly horrified to discover that paid holidays were almost unheard of at the time of Monopoly’s birth. When the Amalgamated Engineering Union secured two weeks’ annual paid leave in 1937, it was seen as a landmark.

  How different it had all been half a century earlier. In the 1860s and ’70s a new breed of vast luxury hotel colonised this part of London, along wide thoroughfares that helped demarcate what became known for the first time as the West End. Piloting my way slightly unsteadily across the Italianesque free-for-all encircling Trafalgar Square – the only place in London where I’m still scared to drive – I turned into one such street, a street that didn’t exist until 1876 and is therefore comfortably the newest on the Monopoly board.

  Created on the site of Northumberland House, the eponymous aristocratic family’s London base and a well-loved seventeenth-century mansion demolished only after much protest (and a helpful half-million for the Duke), Northumberland Avenue was expressly designed to accommodate hotels. The five-hundred-room Metropole, the Victoria, the seven-floor Grand – all were built in the Continental style for Continental travellers arriving at the new Charing Cross station. And all showcased the latest new technology: contemporary photographs emphasised not starched linen and chandeliers but en suite plumbing and telegraph facilities. The Victoria was one of London’s first electrified buildings, with a prodigious generator in its basement, and two-piece telephones were soon installed in most of the Grand’s three hundred rooms.

  Until 1954 it was almost impossible to obtain planning permission for a new building taller than the width of the street before it – a regulation supposedly imposed as a result of Queen Victoria’s fury at her view from Buckingham Palace being interrupted by a fourteen-storey mansion block – so in order to build high hotels they first had to lay a wide carriageway. A turn-of-the-century snap taken from a Northumberland Avenue rooftop showed its considerable girth crisscrossed by top-hatted promenaders and straddled by horse-drawn hansoms lined up in the middle of the road around a pitch-roofed cabbies’ shelter. If Monopoly had come out then, Northumberland Avenue would have been a shoo-in.

  As it was, by the time of Vic’s tour all the hotels had gone. The dwindling number of fur-collared foreigners decamped to the newer establishments around Park Lane and Piccadilly, and, as the Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras, had discovered to its cost in the thirties, the typical domestic rail user was no longer a well-heeled visitor from the shires but a breathless commuter. On the day he sold the Grand to a whisky firm for use as their London headquarters, Sir Francis Towle commented regretfully that ‘a great hotel resembles a battleship, inasmuch as it becomes obsolete after twenty years’.

  Today Northumberland Avenue is a tree-lined Whitehall annexe, equally under-trafficked and so broad about the beam that the central reservation is used as a bus park. That width, those trees and the Parisian look of the old hotels rising monotonously upwards impart an atmosphere redolent of some obscure boulevard round the back of the Arc de Triomphe; and in fact the building that had in 1935 housed the London HQ of the ill-starred League of Nations was now reincarnated as a French-run ‘apart hotel’, offering ‘aparts’ at £170 a night (without breakfast, for pity’s sake).

  The generous conclusion is that in selecting Northumberland Avenue, particularly as the purple set’s top-rent daddy, Vic and Marge had briefly let their fingers slip off the zeitgeist button. Yes, Monopoly was all about hotels and so was Northumberland Avenue, or anyway had once been – maybe Vic had stayed at the Grand in its Edwardian prime; maybe he’d spent the Great War ferrying military memos up and down the Metropole’s marbled corridors. Or maybe, in accordance with the Pentonville/Euston model, he’d reached the top of Whitehall, stared bleakly about the pedestrian-hostile no-man’s-land girdling Trafalgar Square, turned to Marge and after a meaningful exchange of looks muttered, ‘Oh, just stick that one down.’

  Succumbing to a horribly premature hangover, I shuffled unenthusiastically along. On my left, generally identified with great reluctance by tiny bell-plates outside thick and glassless doors, the offices of Enterprise Oil, Investment Manager Selection Ltd and PBR Financial Services. On my right, the grubby-windowed, pigeon-netted Northumberland House and Metropole Buildings, once respectively the Victoria and Metropole hotels and now clumsily welded into a
n anonymous governmental labyrinth on Black Special Alert. Security guards in sweat-circled blue shirts paced about the dulled brass and eroded woodwork of a once grandly bustling reception; just beyond, pausing outside a net-curtained window, I beheld the silhouettes of half a dozen motionless heads arranged around an overhead projector screen on which was felt-tipped ‘Any Answered Questions? Action on JBJ/SC’.

  Referring to my 1933 directory as I stood in the porch of a long-closed branch of Barclays strewn with last year’s newspapers, I understood how much less tedious London’s commercial existence had once been. Then, Northumberland Avenue had accommodated offices of the Mechanical Pulp Consortium Ltd, Velva Silent Flooring, Simon Brothers champagne merchants and the Peruvian Construction Company. That dead Barclays had once been Nevill’s Turkish Baths; a Ladbrokes bookies currently stood in for the Welsh Plate & Steel Manufacturers Association. Aside from Virgin Bride and, in happy proximity, the International Sacred Literature Fund, every current concern was faceless and globalised and somehow shadily offshore. The rich foreign tourists were now rich foreign businesses.

  But Northumberland Avenue isn’t very long, and things picked up at the end. Inside the Nigerian High Commission, half a dozen visa applicants lounged in plush armchairs amidst an endearing disorder of deflated balloons and upside-down beds: the cheering antithesis of Whitehall’s dour administrations. Two sun-yellowed sheets of A4 taped to the door detailed the price of Nigerian tourist visas by country of origin, and I scanned it in wonder – Austrians were charged £23.20; Germans £10.50; Tunisians £2.32; Libyans £33.33. No two countries shared a price in a list whose pathological inconsistency could only be explained by a refreshingly human brand of bureaucratic capriciousness. While enjoying a city break in Lagos, Bjök leads away a plague of rats with her beguiling ululations: Icelanders find their visa fee slashed to £6. The Filipino ambassador beats his Nigerian counterpart to the last Ferrero Rocher at a diplomatic do: next morning the Tipp-Ex is bitterly cracked open on Northumberland Avenue and the relevant figure bumped up to a monstrous £125.

  Back over the road I came up to the Playhouse Theatre, known to some as the venue of Alec Guinness’s stage debut and to me as the location of no fewer than thirteen early BBC Beatles sessions. You can’t beat a good theatre, though you can beat a good play. I hate plays. I’ve never seen the point of paying money to watch people shout a lot and pretend to die, and now that I’m the father of three young children I don’t have to. But then the Playhouse doesn’t seem to have concerned itself with good plays. In 1912 you could have come here to see Bunty Pulls the Strings, a production which it’s difficult to imagine being much better than it sounds, yet which somehow endured for 620 performances. Currently on stage, though, was J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls: an apposite examination of pre-war middle-class morality which I was nonetheless obliged to shun due to the lingering shame of how during a youthful – and very brief – journalistic engagement I entered it in the Evening Standard’s listings as Anne in Spectacles. And in any case beyond, to my great delight, was the cabbies’ shelter, clearly the self-same structure in my photo but now replanted 50 yards down the road.

  Perhaps because I would rather crawl home on bare and bleeding knees than ever consider flagging down what are Europe’s most expensive licensed taxis, London’s cabs retain a certain fascination for me. In 1904 there were 11,400 horse-drawn cabs in the capital, a staggering total not surpassed by their mechanical successors until the late 1970s. (The fearful congestion thus engendered forced the authorities to establish ranks on which cabs were obliged to wait for a fare.) Vic and Marge could quite feasibly have hopped into a horse-drawn hansom – the last was still galloping around London in 1947 – but given the choice he’d probably have preferred not to. It was the hansom drivers’ reputation for drunken abuse that inspired London’s do-gooders to finance prefab cabmen’s shelters – essentially Victorian Portakabins – where they might enjoy a cheap and hearty meal and a strictly teetotal beverage. Sixty-four went up; the Northumberland Avenue shelter is one of less than ten survivors.

  The century-old green door was open and in I peered. At one end an undertoothed Joan Sims who certainly rounded off all sentences with the word ‘love’ was boiling carrot slices on a gas stove at least as old as her; at the other a cadaverous, cardiganed cabbie sat drinking tea beneath a Sun calendar. Miss September would have walked away with the Community Chest beauty competition, with the gas stove a good bet for that ten-quid second prize. I coughed.

  ‘Yes, love?’

  By way of reply, suddenly concerned at breathing second-hand lunchtime ale about a teetotal establishment, I withdrew my Victorian street scene, along with a later close-up of the shelter. ‘Where d’you get them foaters?’ she asked, poring over the photocopies with quiet amazement. A pleasing ten minutes ensued. After a brief revelation that the shelter was leased to her by the Transport & General Workers Union, we sat down around the Formica, and with a complimentary cuppa forced towards me I explained what I was doing. In scenes that were to be repeated at almost every stop around the board, the word ‘Monopoly’ unlocked a trove of eagerly recalled adolescentries, mostly centred around sibling conflict and cousin-conning gamesmanship.

  ‘My brother used to hide a few cards under his side of the board before we started,’ said the cook. ‘I always saw him sliding them out later but I never said nothing. He was six foot before he was twelve.’

  The cabbie leaned back against Miss September until her breasts picturesquely crowned his head like Mickey Mouse ears, and then, as a cabbie should, slowly reeled off the streets around the board in precise order. When he’d finished he looked into his tea for a while, then muttered, ‘Used to be a trough for horses next to this shelter.’

  I stepped out into the long autumn afternoon shadows feeling oddly inspired. A shyly grinning Japanese youth carrying an upside-down map came up and whispered ‘Tems reever?’; directing him towards the Embankment set me on my way through the striding commuters with a maybe-it’s-because-I’m-a-Londoner spring in my step. It was a Monday, and it was late September. But I was not having to take any action on JBJ/SC, nor carrying a Filipino passport into the Nigerian High Commission. Even here, on what surely had to be the least exciting street on the board, I had met good people who had told me good stories.

  With a name handsomely more foolish than any other on the board, I always suspected the story of Pall Mall would kick off with a memorable opening chapter. And so it proved to be. In the early seventeenth century, Irish travellers returned from Brittany stopped off in London to introduce a pastime they had acquired there, one perfectly adapted to the wide flat bits around St James’s Park. Requiring players to propel a large boxwood ball through iron hoops by means of a big hammer, ‘paille-maille’ is variously suspected to derive from the Italian for ‘ball-mallet’ or the Breton phrase, ‘Are you sure this isn’t croquet?’.

  At any rate, the game proved so popular with Charles II that he lopped off a few vowels and built a special alley in a field round the back of Whitehall to play it, and indeed played it with such uncroquet-like ferocity that after additional vowel surgery it spawned the phrase ‘pell-mell’.

  Even the bloke in the Rothmans of Pall Mall shop didn’t know all that, and after I’d told him he thoughtfully raised a large, red hand to a large, red cheek and in obscure reciprocation said, ‘This is the best place in London to get a cab. An unhired one passes every thirteen seconds.’

  As we watched, half a dozen sped past in a one-way, slot-car frenzy, joyously liberated from the gridlocked torpor of Trafalgar Square. The Rothmans right-hander is no place for daydreaming jaywalkers, offering enthusiastic drivers a rare opportunity to outbrake rivals going into a sweeping corner. Clip the apex and get the power on hard and fast up towards Piccadilly: it always brings out the Michael Schumacher in me, and the Michael Tyson in my rear-seat passengers.

  The pace of life without his establishment was not, however, matched by that withi
n. We talked about restrictions on tobacco advertising and sports sponsorship. The phone rang; a wrong number. He told me that the funny thing was, he’d never smoked. The phone rang again; another wrong number. ‘We get a lot of those,’ he said. ‘Dunno why.’ Beginning to understand that the taxi survey had not been culled from a local news report but painstakingly compiled over many years from behind this very till, I felt obliged to comment that his daily routine seemed cruelly at odds with the ‘Rothmans World of Excitement’ emblazoned on the merchandise that surrounded him. Nodding wistfully, he said he often had only one customer a day – a cabbie, of course, who came in at lunchtime for a pack of Royale 120s.

  The phone rang again and this time, mercifully, a brief conversation ensued. ‘A Japanese lady wanting advice on posting books home,’ he said after downing the receiver. ‘We get all sorts of calls. That’s the trouble with being a famous address. Post comes in from all over the world just labelled “Rothmans of Pall Mall, London”.’ He showed me one such recent arrival, a rumpled envelope with an exotic stamp.

  ‘What do they write about?’ I asked, suddenly recalling a conversation with an aged Mancunian taxidermist who told me how he’d rushed over to the chairman of British American Tobacco at an inter-war race meeting and blurted, ‘Hey up, Sir Hugh – I really like your fags.’

  ‘Just trying it on, mainly. They smoke nineteen and send the last one in saying the packet was duff and could you send them a replacement.’ He ran his fingers across the manila wrinkles and, detecting a small, soft cylinder, nodded indulgently. ‘That’s this one’s game, anyway.’

  The Monopoly addresses beyond jail have always reflected precisely the sort of raffish, world-of-excitement urbanity that cigarette manufacturers have been traditionally so desperate to imbue their products with. Taking their lead from Sir Walter Raleigh, who at his house by The Angel, Islington, became the first European to light up, no fewer than six fag brands have borrowed from the board: Pall Malls are smoked around the world, Germans still pop down the corner shop for zwanzig Bond Street, and though seventies lad-fags Piccadilly and the ill-fated Strand have long since coughed it, Mayfair remains a stalwart among Britain’s pennywise smokers. Most notably of all, in 1902 Philip Morris adapted the address of its London factory in Marlborough Street when launching the brand that is now the world’s most famous (originally featuring a red tip to disguise lipstick marks, Marlboros were the first cigarettes aimed specifically at women). It’s probably unhelpful to speak of a golden age of smoking, but in the thirties the pastime certainly reached its browny-yellow London zenith. George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a contemporary study of gas-lit boardinghouse tawdriness in the capital, is dominated by Gordon Comstock’s quest for fags, bought with rent money and consumed in place of food. Almost every Monopoly street accommodated a cigar dealer or small-scale fag firm: five of the former up Bond Street; no fewer than twelve of the latter down Piccadilly. In the thirties Britain had the world’s highest incidence of lung cancer, and by the war seven out of ten men and a third of all women smoked.