Vos hot ir gezogt? Well, this is my story. It is the only one I have. Mrs Cornelius was the best kind of mother. She did not believe in interfering. They never listened to me, anyway, even when they were young. She believed they took after her father, especially the one who is now an actor. He was given to ‘passin’ enfusiasms’, she said.
‘ ‘Is gran’dad wos barmy, reelly. Orlways wanted a teashop in Kent. ‘E joined the Masons and abart ev’ry bloody religion yer c’n imagine. As a matter o’ fact thass ‘ow I got me names - Honoria Catherine - ‘cause me dad converted ter Rome fer abart free weeks one September. It wos annuver of ‘is crazes. Well, ter be fair, everybody wos doin’ it in Notting ‘Ill that year, blankets and ther bully beef bein’ better at the Irish church. It wos orl Irish rahn’ ‘ere, then. That wos before we moved back ter Whitechapel. Then ‘e wos off on some ower wicket. Anarchism or somefink. We ‘ardly ever sor ‘im. Well, mum’d kicked ‘im art, anyway, an’ ‘e wos livin’ rahnd the corner, but I wos orlways ‘is favourite, even if ‘e wasn’t too sure I wos ‘is, yer know. Well, they wos orl anarchists in Whitechapel just then. Yer could say ‘e flowed a bit wiv ther tide, but I don’t blame ‘im, I’m ther same meself. You an’ me, Ivan. We got frough it an’ we’re not nuts. An’ thass ther main fing, innit?’
I was never fully able to concur with this. I remember how one day we had pursued a monstrous black fly which had flown into her basement flat. It was early springtime and I could not credit that the creature had grown so fat and sleek in a brief day or two. He seemed possessed of supernatural senses and to anticipate every move we made with swatters and rolled-up magazines. The fellow was the big game of the fly world. He was cunning and resourceful, scarcely sentient and therefore incapable of morality, neither good nor evil. He had no purpose beyond maintaining the existence of himself and his kind. His every instinct and physical component was designed for that single purpose - to survive; merely to survive. He was part of no natural cycle, he fulfilled no function in the Eternal Scheme. He did no good and only incidental harm. He was without value. And yet his eggs were surely laid so that if he were killed he could be replaced again, almost infinitely, and become a legion of fat, black flies whose only reason for existence was to survive. I could not accept this as a truism. The notion, I told her, was far too French for me. It was not an accurate symbol. I have the instincts of that fly but I am not that fly. There was far more to my decisions than a simple desire to survive. I wanted to do good for the whole of mankind. Now all I can offer mankind is experience.
I had a vocation. I survived in order to fulfil that vocation. But we need not speak of this tragish kharpe any further.
I leave her basement and walk past the new blocks of flats for whose erection the nuns of the Poor Clare Convent were evicted. Once there was tranquil mystery on the other side of a wall. Now the mysteries are altogether more prosaic. The police are frequent visitors. I reach the corner of Kensington Park Road and pass the Blenheim Arms, where the Bishop and Miss Brunner, from the school, still drink. In this area once everyone knew everybody else, but soon, because it was cheap and not far from Paddington, it began to attract the Jamaicans, then the bohemians started to arrive with Colin Wilson and his Black Monks, his pop groups, and soon the pubs and cafes were full of dwarfish writers seeking to revive some dream of reality by rubbing shoulders with degenerates whom they insist on addressing as ‘locals’ and who are as much interlopers as the intellectuals! I don’t know which attracts which! Do the writers follow the rabble or does the rabble look for the writers, knowing those middle-class misfits are the only people on earth willing to give it the time of day? This area was once a little rough, certainly, but one knew who one’s friends and enemies were. Now it is impossible to tell. Who writes these articles in the American press? I suppose I should not complain. Those few of us not squeezed out by hippies, perverts and Rotarians are at least able to make a living. You can sell almost anything to an American so long as you offer him a history, a provenance. An old coat becomes ‘Mick Jagger’s old coat’. They force you to tell them these things, otherwise they are disappointed. The entire antique trade seems devoted to inventing ludicrous covenants for the most unlikely and useless articles. I have Roy Wood’s motoring jacket, Lord Curzon’s dress uniform and Winston Churchill’s smoking-cap. Yesterday some pork-fed doughboy tells me he paid a mere £35 for Disraeli’s chamber-pot. ‘And what if it had had Disraeli’s turd still in it?’ I ask him. ‘Would you have paid £350?’
‘Only if it was definitely genuine,’ he said. The boy was serious. History for these people is a matter of commercial evaluation and romance, not of experience or learning. Or is it a matter of points and grades? Perhaps that is better than the English children who are nowadays only inducted into the mysteries of Bolshevik politics and can tell you any minor thing you might wish to know about Chairman Mao but have never heard of Primo de Rivera! And they say the system is not biased! It was to resist the takeover of the country by communists that many patriots went to jail. I met them on the Isle of Man. Mosley, I rarely spoke to. He tended to be avoided because of his breath. To this day, I believe, his followers have been unable to broach the subject. Even his wife says nothing. Perhaps she is used to it. He came into my shop one day, with his lieutenant, Hamm, and he said that he wanted to free Poland. He was standing for Parliament. It was 1958 or 9. I used to go down to Portland Road and have scones or crumpets with Mrs Leese. She was contemptuous of Mosley. He had failed, she said, to develop a firm line on the Jews. In those days she was still publishing her husband’s magazines, Black and White and Gothic Ripples, although the grand old fighter himself was long gone. She supported Mosley because he was better than nothing. We put copies of her magazines through every door in Notting Hill, advising people to vote for the Union Movement, which was what the British Union of Fascists had become. As it was, Mosley received 159 votes and went back to France with a clear message from the powers-that-be. Myself, I voted for the Conservative. Now, of course, it is illegal to air any but the most conventional views on the subject of Race. Mosley conspired in this censorship even before the infamous Race Relations Act gagged Mrs Leese and all those of her people continuing to fight, as best they could, under the banner of the Phoenix. When Mrs Leese died I stopped going to Portland Road. I still have some of their records. Of course it would be madness to try to play them now, especially the famous Nuremberg speeches. The people who took over laughed at me. I told them I was there from the beginning. I knew Mrs Leese’s protégés, I knew them well, those young men of fine words and noble motives. They created the National Front out of the ruins of the old movements but then through bitter in-fighting proceeded to destroy everything they valued. What if Hitler had thrown away his chances that way? I asked Mr Jordan one day, when he was speaking on the corner, as he used to, What would have happened to Germany, then? We would all now have pictures of Uncle Joe on our walls! Jordan agreed with me. He was trying to hold the party together. The trouble was, he said, that people were too contented. Eventually, when Socialism had brought the country to ruin, then perhaps we should see some progress. Well, the country is close to ruin but I do not see the emergence of a strong leader to save us, though the country cries out for one. Edward Heath is a petulant old queen. The ‘voters’, the public, slouch outside my shop wearing the banner of Anarchy on their chests while they pour cans of beer, purchased at state expense, into their loutish throats and wash down their ‘blue beauties’ and their ‘bombers’ and glare at me from permanently glazed eyes, the true inheritors of Makhno’s drugged rabble, who lost our Ukraine to Ulianof, Bronstein and Djugashvili, that First Triumvirate who ruined old, noble Russia much as their predecessors had ruined virtuous Rome.