Now it is dark and squalid and silent. Well-intentioned bureaucrats nowadays sent shop assistants home early, street traders were banished, almost empty pubs sold highly taxed watery lager and the factories were derelict: a textbook example of urban blight, with yuppies nibbling the leafy bits.
Back in the days before women's lib, designer jeans and deep-dish pizza, Big Henty's snooker hall with its 'ten full-size tables, fully licensed bar and hot food' was the Athenaeum of Southwark. The narrow doorway and its dimly lit staircase gave entry to a cavernous hall conveniently sited over a particularly good eel and pie shop.
Now, alas, the eel and pie shop was a video rental 'club' where posters in primary colours depicted half-naked film stars firing heavy machine guns from the hip. But in its essentials Big Henty's was largely unchanged. The lighting was exactly the same as I remembered it, and any snooker hall is judged on its lighting. Although it was very quiet every table was in use. The green baize table tops glowed like ten large aquariums, their water still, until suddenly across them brightly coloured fish darted, snapped and disappeared.
Big Henty wasn't there of course. Big Henty died in 1905. Now the hall was run by a thin white-faced fellow of about forty. He supervised the bar. There was not a wide choice: these snooker-playing men didn't appreciate the curious fizzy mixtures that keep barmen busy in cocktail bars. At Big Henty's you drank whisky or vodka; strong ale or Guinness with tonic and soda water for the abstemious. For the hungry there were 'toasted' sandwiches that came soft, warm and plastic-wrapped from the microwave oven.
'Evening, Bernard. Started to snow, has it?' What a memory the man had. It was years since I'd been here. He picked up his lighted cigarette from the Johnny Walker ashtray, and inhaled on it briefly before putting it back into position. I remembered his chain-smoking, the way he lit one cigarette from another but put them in his mouth only rarely. I'd brought Dicky Cruyer here one evening long ago to make contact with a loud-mouthed fellow who worked in the East German embassy. It had come to nothing, but I remember Dicky describing the barman as the keeper of the sacred flame.
I responded, 'Half of Guinness… Sydney.' His name came to me in that moment of desperation. 'Yes, the snow is starting to pile up.'
It was bottled Guinness of course. This was not the place that a connoisseur of stout and porter would come to savour beverages tapped from the wood. But he poured it down the side of the glass holding his thumb under the point of impact to show he knew the folklore, and he put exactly the right size head of light brown foam upon the black beer. 'In the back room.' Delicately he shook the last drops from the bottle and tossed it away without a glance. 'Your friend. In the back room. Behind Table Four.'
I picked up my glass of beer and sipped. Then I turned slowly to survey the room. Big Henty's back room had proved its worth to numerous fugitives over the years. It had always been tolerated by authority. The CID officers from Borough High Street police station found it a convenient place to meet their informants. I walked across the hall. Beyond the tasselled and fringed lights that hung over the snooker tables, the room was dark. The spectators – not many this evening – sat on wooden benches along the walls, their grey faces no more than smudges, their dark clothes invisible.
Walking unhurriedly, and pausing to watch a tricky shot, I took my beer across to table number four. One of the players, a man in the favoured costume of dark trousers, loose-collared white shin and unbuttoned waistcoat, moved the scoreboard pointer and watched me with expressionless eyes as I opened the door marked 'Staff and went inside.
There was a smell of soap and disinfectant. It was a small storeroom with a window through which the snooker hall could be seen if you pulled aside the dirty net curtain. On the other side of the room there was another window, a larger one that looked down upon Tower Bridge Road. From the street below there came the sound of cars slurping through the slush.
'Bernard.' It was a woman's voice. 'I thought you weren't going to come.'
I sat down on the bench before I recognized her in the dim light. 'Cindy!' I said. 'Good God, Cindy!'
'You'd forgotten I existed.'
'Of course I hadn't.' I'd only forgotten that Cindy Prettyman's full name was Lucinda, and that she might have reverted to her maiden name. 'Can I get you a drink?'
She held up her glass. 'It's tonic water. I'm not drinking these days.'
'I just didn't expect you here,' I said. I looked through the net curtain at the tables.
'Why not?'
'Yes, why not?' I said and laughed briefly. 'When I think how many times Jim made me swear I was giving up the game for ever.' In the old days, when Jim Prettyman was working alongside me, he taught me to play snooker. He played an exhibition class game, and his wife Cindy was something of an expert too.
Cindy was older than Jim by a year or two. Her father was a steel worker in Scunthorpe: a socialist of the old school. She'd got a scholarship to Reading University. She said she'd never had any ambition but for a career in the Civil Service since her schooldays. I don't know if it was true but it went down well at the Selection Board. She wanted Treasury but got Foreign Office, and eventually got Jim Prettyman who went there too. Then Jim came over to work in the Department and I saw a lot of him. We used to come here, me, Fiona, Jim and Cindy, after work on Fridays; We'd play snooker to decide who would buy dinner at Enzo's, a little Italian restaurant in Old Kent Road. Invariably it was me. It was a joke really; my way of repaying him for the lesson. And I was the eldest and making more money. Then the Prettymans moved out of town to Edgware. Jim got a rise and bought a full-size table of his own, and then we stopped coming to Big Henty's. And Jim invited us over to his place for Sunday lunch, and a game, sometimes. But it was never the same after that.
'Do you still play?' she asked.
'It's been years. And you?'
'Not since Jim went.'
'I'm sorry about what happened, Cindy.'
'Jim and me. Yes, I wanted to talk to you about that. You saw him on Friday.'
'Yes, how do you know?'
'Charlene. I've been talking to her a lot lately.'
'Charlene?'
'Charlene Birkett. The tall girl we used to let our upstairs flat to… in Edgware. Now she's Jim's secretary.'
'I saw her. I didn't recognize her. I thought she was American.' So that's why she'd smiled at me: I thought it was my animal magnetism.
'Yes,' said Cindy, 'she went to New York and couldn't get a job until Jim fixed up for her to work for him. There was never anything between them,' she added hurriedly. 'Charlene's a sweet girl. They say she's really blossomed since living there and wearing contact lenses.'
'I remember her,' I said. I did remember her; a stooped, mousy girl with glasses and frizzy hair, quite unlike the shapely Amazon I'd seen in Jim's office. 'Yes, she's changed a lot.'
'People do change when they live in America.'
'But you didn't want to go?'
' America? My dad would have died.' You could hear the northern accent now. 'I didn't want to change.' Then she said, solemnly, 'Oh, doesn't that sound awful? I didn't mean that exactly.'
'People go there and they get richer,' I said. That's what the real change is.'