It did not take as long as I’d expected to complete the formalities at Australia House. After which, finding myself with most of an afternoon to spare, I decided to take a walk into the City. For old times’ sake, if nothing else. I had brought my camera with me – my trusted Kodak Retina Reflex IV, bought in the 1960s, which has never taken a bad picture yet – and wanted to make a permanent record of those places which had once been so familiar to me – if any trace of them still remained.
As I made my way in blazing sunshine down Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill, through the long shadow cast by St Paul’s Cathedral and along Cheapside until I could glimpse the massive portico of the Bank of England itself, I realized that it was almost thirty years since I had last walked these streets. Twenty-seven years, to be precise. Everything had changed, in the meantime. Everything. The old City of London, which had been the centre of my universe for a few intense, troubling months towards the fag-end of the 1950s, had witnessed a revolution which even in those far-off days had been considered long overdue. A revolution in architecture, in fashion and now, finally – or so one read in the newspapers – in working practices. All the fine, arrogant old buildings were still there – the Guildhall and the Mansion House, the Royal Exchange and St Mary-le-Bow – but wedged in amongst them were dozens of new tower blocks, some dating from the benighted 1960s, others only a couple of years old, vaulting, sleek and glittery, like the decade we were now enjoying. The men (there were still not very many women) all wore suits, but these suits seemed sharper and more aggressive than I remembered, and there was not a single bowler hat to be seen. As for the working practices … Well, nearly all of the trading was done on screens now, if reports were to be believed. The face-to-face meetings, the chummy handshakes on the Stock Exchange floor, were consigned to the past. No more deals adumbrated over port and cigars at the Gresham Club; no more business gossip swapped in well-bred undertones at the George and Vulture. Traders apparently took lunch at their desks these days – cellophane-wrapped sandwiches brought in at silly prices by outside caterers – never lifting their glazed eyes from the screens where figures flickered their ceaseless announcements of profit and loss, from early morning to late at night. What role could I have possibly have played, as an ignorant twenty-one-year-old, in this frantic and impatient new world?
Yes, I had been only twenty-one when I first came to London. Some time in the last few weeks of 1958, it was. I had not been to university, and for two years had tucked myself away in the tedious anonymity of a filing clerk’s job in Lichfield, but some dormant mutinous impulse – my youthful horror, I suppose, at the thought of being stifled in this way for ever – had finally propelled me away from the safety of my home town and my parents’ house and sent me to London – to seek my fortune, as the cliché would have it. Or, if not my fortune, something even more elusive and intangible – my vocation, my destiny. For I had, without telling my family (nor would I have told my friends, if I had any), started writing. Writing! Such presumption would not have been tolerated, if my parents had known about it. My father would have mocked me mercilessly – especially when he discovered that my instincts inclined me towards poetry: and not just poetry, but, worse still, ‘modern’ poetry – that apparently formless, apparently meaningless cultural aberration that was hated above all other things by the middle-brow lower classes. Lichfield, the birthplace of Samuel Johnson, was certainly no place for an aspiring poet in the 1950s; whereas, if rumours were to be believed, London was awash with poets. I envisaged long, wine-fuelled conversations with fellow-poets in the bedsitting rooms of South London suburbs; heady evenings spent in Soho pubs listening to poetry readings in an atmosphere thick with Bohemianism and cigarette smoke. I imagined a life for myself in which I could make the momentous declaration ‘I am a poet’ without attracting incredulity or ridicule.
I have a long story to set down, so I must move it forward. Easily enough, I found a room in a shared house near Highgate Cemetery, and – through the classified advertisements in the London Evening News – a temporary job as messenger boy for the stockbroking firm of Walter, Davis & Warren. Their offices were in Telegraph Street, and a large part of my job involved carrying mail by hand to and from the central clearing point for Stock Exchange Member firms in Blossoms Inn: a system which allowed for all settlement transfers and cheques to be delivered within the same day. (Such a thing would not be necessary now, of course, with faxes and electronic transfers.) I was allowed one hour for lunch, between 1 and 2 p.m., and most days I would take it at Hill’s, an old-fashioned City restaurant near Liverpool Street Station, where – if you didn’t mind the green-tiled walls that made it look somewhat like a public lavatory – you could dine on steak and kidney pudding, mashed potatoes and apple crumble for something in the region of half a crown.
Dining alone is a problematic activity. I had no friends in the City, or indeed anywhere in London, and no one to talk to over lunch. Most days, therefore, I would take a book with me – usually a slim volume of contemporary verse, more than likely borrowed from the library in Highgate. The restaurant would be crowded, and at a table for six you might find yourself sharing with five strangers. One day, early in January 1959, I looked up from my book – it was Eliot’s Four Quartets – and found a bearded man of about my own age staring at me intently. His fork was poised over a plate of liver and onions but instead of eating, he fixed his eyes on me and declaimed, in a loud and perfectly modulated voice:Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time future,And time future contained in time past.If all time is eternally presentAll time is unredeemable.
The other diners at our table looked across at both of us in some puzzlement. One of them may even have tutted. To speak to a stranger, in such a loud voice, in a public place, and to make use of such peculiar phraseology, was no doubt considered a grave breach of City protocol. For my own part, I was dumbstruck.
‘Tell me, do you consider Mr Eliot to be a genius,’ my new acquaintance continued, in an insolent tone, ‘or a fraud and a humbug of the first water?’
‘I … I don’t know,’ I stumbled. ‘Or at least … Well –’ (more boldly, now) ‘– that is to say, in my view – for what my view is worth – I consider him … the greatest living poet. In the English language, that is.’
‘Good. I’m pleased to find myself sitting opposite a man of taste and refinement.’
The man held out his hand, and I shook it. Then he introduced himself: his name was Roger Anstruther. We talked a little more about Eliot, then – touching also, I seem to remember, upon the work of Auden and Frost – but what I remember best about that first conversation was not its substance, but the strange sort of electric thrill which went through me in the presence of this singular and overbearing man. His hair had a slightly reddish tint, his beard was thick but closely trimmed, and although the sobriety of his suit marked him out unmistakeably as a working denizen of the Square Mile, a yellow handkerchief with pale-blue polka dots protruded from his top pocket in a manner that suggested some idiosyncratic sense of personal style – if not actual foppishness.
Abruptly at a quarter to two he rose to his feet and looked at his watch.
‘Well then,’ he said. ‘They are playing Fauré at the Wigmore Hall tonight. The E minor quartet among other works. I have booked two tickets for the front row, where I intend to lose myself in delicious mists of French introspection. Here is the other ticket. We shall meet at The Cock and Lion a few doors along the street, at seven o’clock. If you get there first, mine will be a large gin and tonic, with ice. Goodbye.’