When I was 16 I spent an idyllic week roaming the streets of Camden Town, in North London, with my disreputable pal Adam, who lived with his mum in a drab, shabby flat in the neighbouring wastes of Chalk Farm. Camden Town is now one of the fashionable hubs of London. Theme pubs with bands upstairs, little trattorias, tapas bars, Thai curry houses, a sprawling archipelago of market stalls selling jade Buddhas, raffish second-hand clothing & packets of skunk. And, of course, stratospheric property prices in reach only of the architects & designers who, over the past 25 yearsor so, have been transforming the long rows of Victorian terraces & villas back into houses again.
When Adam & I skulked in doorways with our fists buried deep in our duffle coat pockets, fags dangling from corners of mouths, pretending to be Sal Paradise & Dean Moriarty, Camden Town was another country. There was a hint of the exotica that sprung fully formed from between the paving stones during the mid-to-late ë60s. You could find the odd rebel bookshop selling communist & anarchist literature & a few beatniks would obligingly fall across your path from pub or club. But the region was still primarily the province of the London Irish & the second wave of West Indian immigrants. The battered glass-covered noticeboards outside tobacconists & sweet shops were full of scribbled small ads offering single rooms to tenants, but making it clear that ëno Irish or coloureds need applyí. I even remember reading one that stated with disarming frankness, ëSorry, no niggersí.
In the early ë60s Camden Town was still a district locked into the ë40s & ë50s & Adam & I loved its furtive, monochrome squalor. Our itinerary had us wandering through a network of back streets, projecting our feverish imaginings onto scenes glimpsed through curtainless sash windows or at the edges of the wartime bombed sites that still lay undeveloped at that time. Most of all we loved the caffs, the overheated, smoky dives wedged between a greengrocers & a junk shop. All of them were named after their proprietors & all had a small blackboard headed ëEatsí nailed to the outside wall or standing on the pavement announcing pie & mash, 2/-, full lunch for 2/6d, or simply tea & a bun for 1/-*.
Adam & I would sit at a corner table in our favourite caff, Ernieís, half way down Camden High Street, nursing two thick china pint mugs of orange tea, smoking Old Holborn tobacco in licorice paper rollups, watching the unvarying spectacle through half-closed poetsí eyes. Around the yellowing walls were pictures of long-forgotten boxers, some bearing faded autographs. The lighting was always dim ñ three or four 40-watt bulbs under green enamel shades. A Sporting Life calendar featuring a lissome greyhound for each month of the year hung above the doorway that led into Ernieís quarters. When hunger struck - & poets have to eat occasionally ñ we would order a bacon roll each. These were hard, spherical items with an explosive shell that would send shrapnel crumbs flying if bitten carelessly. They would only pass successfully from mouth to oesophagus if lubricated liberally with brown sauce, which was supplied to each table in encrusted, unlabelled bottles. Ernie always had a cigarette ñ a Capstan Full Strength - wedged into the corner of his mouth. Its serpentine trunk of ash would droop increasingly over the plates & mugs on the bar. But Ernie was a professional smoker & he knew the precise moment at which to turn his head to one side &, with a spasm of the bottom lip, let it fall into the sawdust on the floor. When our money ran out we would push our chairs back & head for the door, always murmuring ëGínight, Ernieí, as if we were fully accredited natives of that strange land.
A few weeks back I was driving up Camden High Street towards the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. As I passed the corner at which Ernieís had stood, probably for the greater part of the first half of the 20th century, I read the cheerily familiar but entirely impersonal name, Starbucks, & I caught a glimpse of Danish pastries, hoi sin duck wraps, girls in black sweatshirts & the glitterati of 21st century Camden Town sipping their lattes. Not a white pint mug full of orange tea to be seen. Not a single brown sauce bottle with its pumice-stone deposit around the top anywhere in evidence.
*2/- = two shillings, or 10 pence. 2/6d = two shillings & sixpence, or 12.5 pence, 1/- = one shilling, or 5 pence.
Pic from Hulton Deutsch collection.
