Few of us need the Panama Papers as a reminder that these are dark days for London, in which tycoons have turned the capital into a large branch of Foxtons. Against this backdrop it is easy to feel a certain wistfulness for earlier eras, when the city’s principal attraction wasn’t its investment profile but its shabby charm and affordability.
I have been thinking about this all week while reading Slipstream, a memoir by the late Elizabeth Jane Howard, published over 10 years ago, which contains a revealing portrait of London after the war. In 1945, Howard and her husband, Peter Scott, bought an entire house in Kensington for £8,000, roughly £200,000 in modern money, which would of course barely buy you a studio in the same spot today.
After she left her husband a few years later Howard was on her uppers, skipping meals to save money and living in a two-storey flat above a poultry shop off Baker Street, for which she paid £150 a year, equivalent to £500 a month now. A quick search reveals this figure will currently rent you a garage in Little Venice, or a room with a single bed in a shared house in Catford.
The bluff tone of the book makes it a terrific read and the picture of postwar London it paints can seem rackety and glamorous. On closer inspection, however, the book is full of quiet horrors. Howard is forever being pursued by random men and the book has a caper-like quality that at times beggars belief.On a trip to New York she meets the actor Walter Pidgeon, who turns up at her hotel the following day and calls up from reception asking to come to her room. “I can’t think what you mean,” she says. “Of course you can’t come up.” To which he replies, “You must forgive me. A terrible mistake.” The conductor Malcolm Sargent actually drops his trousers in the drawing room of her marital home and then puts them on again when he realises he has misread the signals.
The most extraordinary encounter, however, is with Jonathan Cape, Howard’s publisher, who after buying her debut novel, greets her for the first time with the words, “I’ve made rather a strong martini, very good for ladies who are menstruating.” As Howard remarks in the book, “this wasn’t a very cheering start,” however she smiles and pretends not to have heard him.
I mention all this as a corrective to nostalgia, and because, for all her naivety at the time, she comes across as such a heroine in the retelling. On the eve of her first marriage, her mother advised her “never refuse your husband – whatever you feel,” and as a result, she felt obliged to acquiesce, even in the early stages of labour. After the baby was born and she couldn’t stop crying, her husband admonished her thus: “you really must pull yourself together, darling”. Not everything was better back then.
NotsApp benefits
The tentacles of modern life have their limitations, and this week I found them while visiting a school in Manhattan. The students, in their final year and studying journalism, were engaged, well-informed, and almost shockingly well-mannered. They were also atypical, in that many of them had no access to social media; it was a Jewish faith school and, they told me, while they had cell phones for emergencies they were prohibited from accessing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest. All seemed sanguine and rather amused by this, in a way that made me wonder if a certain distance from the culture might not, at that age, represent a competitive edge.
Social disaster
In the communal car service on my way to the school, four people sat staring at their phones. I don’t miss the death of small talk in these circumstances, but the death of social awkwardness strikes me as sad. If, by being on one’s phone, it is now acceptable to avoid eye contact, conversation or interaction of any kind, what lies in store for the British temperament? Who are we if strained silences cease to exist? And does it mean we’ll finally start drinking less?
