19. In London, In Love

Photograph by Trevor Watson, Portfolio Gallery

Note:

The italicised text below is taken from a tape recording made by Mary on our trip to the USA and Europe in 1981-82.

The normal text records some of my memories of London triggered by listening recently to Mary's tape of our journey on a number six bus.

“It’s Monday December the seventh nineteen eighty one and we’re in London, riding on the top of a red double-decker bus, a number six, up at the front. Great view. John’s favourite route, he tells me, all the way to… Where was it?"

“West Kilburn, Queen’s Park.”

“We’re not going that far though. Only to the West End… We arrived last night. I was so tired. John’s sister Ruth and her husband Trevor met us at Heathrow. Driving through Piccadilly Circus and St. Paul’s was like riding through Universal Studios for me. It looked unreal, as though it was all a façade. We’re staying at Hackney Wick with John’s brother Stuart and his wife Jutka. It’s very coh-oh-old, and very grey, and everything is, first impression is, very very old.

We’ve stopped. The driver and conductor have just changed. I can see an inspector out here. Looks like a character from On The Buses. Trees are as bare as bare, very wintry.

Going past Petticoat Lane now. There’s a market thing going on, and the city’s changed, more lively, the shops are all working here. We’ve just come through an area where everything was closed and broken down. A lot of manufacture-and-sell-on-site places, tailors and shoe manufacturers and coat makers and cabinetmakers and things like that.

Going past St. Paul’s. Had to stop there on the way from the airport while I found the toilet, had my first English crap. Gosh, St. Paul’s looks great. There’s something on at St. Paul’s. Carol service. Not on a Monday surely?”

“Probably would be. Perhaps we can go to one. I once took Stuart to the Lord Mayor’s Show and stood just over there.”

In Paternoster Square. Stuart’s on my shoulders so he can see. Pat and I live at Finsbury Park. Stuart is three. I have a vague recollection of being taken to the Lord Mayor’s Show by Dad and Uncle Geoff when I’m tiny. Before they built the dreadful Paternoster House. At Churchill’s funeral Pat and I stand near the top of Ludgate Hill. See the gun carriage with Churchill’s coffin on it coming round St. Paul’s and setting off down to Ludgate Circus. Must be the January after we marry. Before Stuart is born. We rent in Wood Green at Mrs. Tanczos’ place. She’s Anglo-Indian. I can walk to White Hart Lane to watch Spurs. Still have the commemorative Churchill coin somewhere.

“Well, it’s certainly hotting up now. Lots of bustle around on the streets.”

“That’s Fleet Street straight ahead. Look, Reuters. Coming up on the left. I went there about a job after I left school. Thought I’d be a journalist. Met a friend of my Dad’s, there. Told me to go away and learn shorthand and typing.”

Marco. Helps Boris Pasternak smuggle the manuscript of Dr. Zhivago out of Russia. It’s published in Italy. Sounds wonderfully exotic to me. More than reason enough to want to be a journalist. How did Dad know Marco? I have no idea. Must have been a parishioner.

“I didn’t know you could do shorthand.”

“I can’t.”

“Piccadilly Railway, Strand – an underground station, all locked up. Why’s that?”

“Don’t know love. Can’t be used any more, I suppose.”

Spooky. Just last month I dreamt of the dead Mary in an abandoned underground station. Happily supervising a ghostly crew of make-up artists. Preparing souls for the after life.

"Now where are we?”

“Charing Cross.”

“Charing Cross. What’s that monument down there?”

“That’s the Charing Cross.”

“Oh, that is the Charing Cross.”

“Monument for Queen Eleanor of somewhere or other, Aquitaine I think, Henry the Second’s wife. When she died her body was brought down from up north and he had a cross erected at all the places where it rested overnight – they’re all known as Eleanor Crosses.”

“Oh, how sweet, would you do that for me, darling?”

“And the brass band too? You’ll be lucky!”

I sound so authoritative behind the casual façade of my speculation. I am wrong. Wrong Eleanor. Wrong King. I just checked the internet. Habits of a lifetime as a researcher and analyst are hard to break. The queen is Eleanor of Castile. Died 1290. The king is Edward I. She bore him sixteen children, poor thing. Twelve crosses erected at the stops along the route from Lincoln, where Eleanor died, to Westminster Abbey where she’s buried. A few survive. One at Waltham Cross. Just up the road from St. George’s on the Enfield Highway where Dad’s the vicar for many years. Charing Cross one’s a nineteenth century replica. Still, as Mary always said to her staff and apprentices: “When in doubt, Fake It”!

“Admiralty Arch. Where they came through for Princess Di’s Wedding, wasn’t it?”

“Right, only they opened the gates in the centre arch… Look! Back down there, down Whitehall.”

“Oh, there it is, Big Ben – have to go and get the chimes on the tape. Oh, and Nelson sitting on the top. And pigeons everywhere. It’s absolutely gorgeous, fountains going. Although it’s cold and grey outside it’s not raining. There’s a man with birds all over him. Look at that lion. It’s enormous isn’t it, Nelson’s column, I don’t know how big I thought it was going to be. 

Two Bank of New Zealands we’ve passed, making me feel happy, not so far from home. We’re coming up to Piccadilly Circus. What’s that? Crimea War Memorial.

Here we are, Piccadilly Circus, with Eros in the middle, a big Coca-Cola sign and the streets and the old lamps, looks like old gas lamps. We’re turning into Regent Street, oohhh and all the Christmas decorations are across the street, aren’t they beautiful? About seven big Christmas trees with big loops of tinsel, bunting linking them all up and they’re hanging across the street for, oh, a mile? Easily a mile right down the street.

We’re going past all the shops in Regent Street, it looks very exciting out there, lots of people around. Even a sale on before Christmas. There’s verandas on the shop fronts which seems strange - they haven’t got a sunshine problem.

A clown in the window of Hamley’s toy shop and across the top there’s fairies and animals. And Christmas pageanty sort of stuff, and a big By Appointment, and red lights on the front all the way up. The Christmas trees on the front of this shop called Jaeger – oh, and there’s Carnaby Street! – are all tiny little lights and they’re really effective. Liberty’s, all black and glitter. Ohh! Fur Coats! Coloured tinsely sort of dresses, bright colours, covered in lurex. Oh, Dickens and Jones. Clothing store. I think I wrote away for material once to Dickens and Jones.

Oxford Circus and we’re turning down

Oxford Street. Oh, there’s a lot of people here. Is that the underground they’re going down or just the way they’re crossing the street?”

“It’s both.”

“All the big stores are down here. John Lewis and Selfridges, full of lurexy clothes and those little tiny Christmas lights.”

“It’s buses and taxis only up and down here.”

“No cars. Buses and taxis only. D.H. Evans store, oh it’s covered in Christmas trees and lights and the trees on the pavement outside have got lights flickering on and off, isn’t that pretty!

Debenhams.

We’ve just stopped outside Denise’s fur shop. I can see a fur coat in there. Two hundred and eighty five pounds. What a lot of people. And it’s Monday morning. Oh, it’s actually after lunch on Monday, we slept in until half past ten after our long flight.

Matty’s, natty little trousers and gear. Lilley Skinner. No, Lilley and Skinner, shoes by the million.”

I can recount them all, all the big stores from one end of Oxford Street to the other. This is Kilburn work territory. Half my friends in St. John’s Youth Club work here as shop assistants and warehousemen. I gravitate to Knightsbridge when I leave school and work in Harrods for a spell. Brenda breaks the mould too by working in a bank in Pall Mall. Meets Jimmy there. But most of the girls don’t have the requisite accent for the Regent Street or Knightsbridge stores. Or can’t be bothered to fake one. Dark haired Jean is a shop assistant at John Lewis, all tight black hobble skirt and white blouse, neat and trim and just the trace of a Welsh accent. Even at sixteen she has a sadness, a brittleness about her. Her childhood sweetheart electrocutes himself showing off to her and her friends on a power pylon. I kiss her on a Sunday evening after church. Very sweet sixteen it is too. I board the weekly coach to the Billy Graham crusade at Haringey the following Thursday, thinking I will sit next to her. She ignores me completely. I’m totally perplexed.

Dad finds Freddy Mayes a job as a pageboy at The Cumberland, Marble Arch, after he catches him stealing lead off the church roof and signs him up for the youth club. You can see mischievous Freddy from the bus. So handsome standing there with the doorman in his green and gold-braided uniform, his peaked hat covering his golden hair. He has a terrible temper and kills his girlfriend. While I’m in Italy, I think. Around the time Khrushchev is banging his shoe up and down at the United Nations over the U2 spy plane incident and Princess Margaret is marrying Tony Armstrong Jones.

For years Dad visits Freddy in prisons around the country. Freddy does get released occasionally but never for long and he becomes progressively institutionalised. He's been in and out for over fifty years now. After Dad dies Elizabeth, bless her heart, takes over the visiting. You have to give it to these compassionate Christians who care for every little sparrow that falls in the wayside.

Dawn’s dad – Dawn lives next door to us at Queen’s Park - is a store walker at Peter Robinsons, Oxford Circus. Dawn works there in the school holidays. Her brother Cedric breeds tortoises in their back garden. He’s featured in the local paper. When Dawn reaches ten she becomes self-conscious, flat-chested though she is, about being in the garden in just her underpants. If she sees me through the wire fence, she covers her nipples with her index fingers and runs inside. Later, as a well-endowed bobbysoxer and newly branded ‘teenager’, she screams herself hoarse at Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock performance at the Gaumont State in Kilburn High Road. I think that’s totally crass, but I still ask her to go with me to see West Side Story. She says no. I go with Jill, one of the trainee teachers who lodges with us in Kingswood Avenue.

A lot of the older folk in the parish have never been to the West End. It’s only half a dozen stops or so down the Bakerloo Line or a twenty-minute bus ride. But then, after more than thirty years in New Zealand, I had never been to Dunedin until a few years ago. When Elizabeth and Ruth visited I finally came full circle and visited the city that, in name at least, is the antipodean image of my birthplace.

“Time to get off.”

“Bob wants to go to the toilet. That’s a nice change; it’s usually me that has to go. You should see Selfridges’ windows, full of Christmas scenes and ladies in bright pink gowns. I think window dressing must be an art form here.”

From the other direction, travelling to the West End from Kingswood Avenue, I often take a number six, usually one terminating at Aldwych. The underground would be quicker. I board the bus just south of the bridge at Queen’s Park Station, where N.W.6 changes to W.9 and clerical and artisan avenues give way to unskilled working roads. All my Kilburn teenage friends live within walking distance of that bus route. In a triangle between Carlton Vale, the High Road and the railway line. Brenda lives in Ashmore Road with her mum, her dad, her kid sister Norma. Her dad dies. Hardly a surprise really. He’s an ashen-faced chain smoker. Runs a newspaper and cigarette kiosk on a spot outside Victoria Station. I find excuses to go and see Brenda in the evenings. Her dad sits with his cup of tea in the corner of the living room, beneath the plastic ducks, hacking away as only Londoners can hack.

On the train from Bath, going home for the school holidays, I meet another girl who lives in Ashmore Road. I’m sitting at the window seat with my back to the engine. Opposite me is this stunning West Indian girl. About my age. I can stare at her reflection as I gaze casually out the window at the passing landscape. Somewhere along the way, perhaps as early as the Box Hill Tunnel, our stretched out legs touch. Neither of us pull away to break the contact. I must eventually have spoken with her, though I can’t believe it would have been me who broke the ice. She’s a student nurse. Lives in Ashmore Road, a predominately white neighbourhood then. We travel on the underground from Paddington to Queens Park. When we part at the top of the station bridge I’m too shy to ask for her address. I never see her again.

Mind, it might have been frowned upon if I had dated her, judging by Dad’s reaction when Ruth had a West Indian boyfriend, Winston I think his name was. Notwithstanding all his missionary work in Nigeria and the Sudan, or perhaps because of it, Dad takes the view - he says it’s Albert Schweitzer’s - that black men are our brothers, but younger brothers. Needing guidance and leadership. There’s the social divide too to consider. The divisions of railway lines and high street shops. North of us, on the other side of the North London line, is Brondesbury, rich Jewish territory. South of the old London, Midland, Scottish line at Queens Park is white unskilled working class. Further towards the southwest, beyond the tracks laid down by the Great Western Railway, is Westbourne Grove. Post-war immigrant black territory, noisy and poor. Dad takes me there with him to visit a parishioner. I’m shocked at the decay and poverty, the peeling paint, flaking plaster, numbers hanging precariously from apartment doors, the smell of urine and cats in the corridors. This gritty reality removes the gloss from my romantic images of working class life. And from my enjoyment of the representations of it then so fashionable in the West End theatre’s kitchen sink dramas.

My friends Matthew, Bob and John, who in memory of their state primary school like to refer to themselves mockingly as The Granville Road Old Boys, all live in side streets off Shirland Road. John plays the saxophone. Escapes by joining an Army Music Corps. Bob, who is a Teddy Boy before my Dad rounds him up for the youth club and sets him on the road towards righteousness, joins an army of a different kind, The Church Army. In his smart uniform, he wows all the girls, especially our teacher trainee lodgers from Tunbridge Wells. Matthew is the sombre intellectual of the group. Always in black. He and I share deep angst ridden discussions about Sartre, Camus and existentialism. We cultivate an image as radical outsiders. After years of evening study, financed by his struggling war widow mother, Matthew makes it to university. Ends up a professor of psychology in one of those new universities up north. We are both in love with Brenda. She looks so virginal in her choir uniform - frilly white blouse buttoned to the neck, black robes and cap, black court shoes. All the boys in the youth club are in love with Brenda.

"In Debenhams now, having afternoon tea. I’ve just seen a brilliant fur coat I adore and I’m deciding whether or not to go and buy it. It’s a steal in a furshop – reduced. All the mink coats in the store are reduced, the twelve hundred pound coats to six ninety five, that’s for a ranch mink jacket. But I’m not really considering one of those…

Well, we bought my coat and I look scruummy in my cream and tweed fur and I feel very much more London than I did before. It’s ten to five and getting dark already. We’re going down Oxford Street and all the Christmas lights are glittering away in front of the stores. We’re going to see the decorations in Regent Street.”

The rush hour is upon us. In the dark the Christmas decorations look even more spectacular than before, so, like children who, having enjoyed a ride at the fairground, immediately clamour for another, we climb back on a bus (I don’t remember the number), staying downstairs with our shopping bags this time, and retrace our journey back round Oxford Circus, down Regent Street, and into the Haymarket where we push our way off through the commuter crowd scrabbling to alight. A brief walk into Panton Street and we are in the warmth of The Stock Pot, a budget favourite of mine from student days, snugly ensconced arm-in-arm in an upstairs cubicle. We order the minestrone soup and share a carafe of the house red to take away the winter chill, and then I have the spaghetti carbonara and Mary the escalope of veal.

As we’re drinking hot chocolate and chattering away about our purchases and the Christmas presents we are yet to buy, a tall saturnine gentleman in a black vicuna overcoat approaches our cubicle with his coffee and sits down opposite us. He has silver hair, a lugubrious face and elegant, if skinny, hands. Beneath the open overcoat, he’s wearing a tailor-made pinstripe suit that has seen better days, a crumpled white business shirt and a black tie. He sits and looks piercingly at us. We are silent now.

After what seems a long time in this impasse, he fishes into a pocket of his overcoat and pulls out a small piece of paper. He smoothes it out on the table and considers it intently. Then he puts a bony manicured forefinger on top of the piece of paper, fixes his gaze on us again, and wordlessly pushes it across, slowly and deliberately. It has writing on it, which we both stare at, nonplussed. The words, handwritten in spidery capitals with pen and ink, make no sense. He looks at us for some response and when, after a further pause, this isn’t forthcoming, he digs into his pockets again and repeats the process. The message this time, if that is what it is, is in some runic, middle earth or hieroglyphic language. We look at him, not knowing what to say.

This ritual is repeated five or six times, none of the silent messages, no matter what the script, being intelligible to us. If he had burst into song I don’t think we could have been more surprised. He finishes his coffee without taking his eyes from us, stands up, buttons up his overcoat, bows his head slightly in our direction, crosses the room, walking with a slow measured gait, as though his shoes pinch or he has an artificial hip, collects his black trilby from the coat stand in the corner and, with a final backward glance at us, disappears silently down the stairs. Mary and I look at each other.

“Wouldn’t want him at your wedding, would you?” I say.

We collapse into laughter.

Having agreed that the poor man is off the planet, we finish our drinks, and set off for Cambridge Circus to catch our show. It’s raining now so, laden with shopping bags, we skitter along the back alleys and side streets between Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue, hugging close to the buildings in an effort to keep as dry as we can and avoid the perils of wet and icy pavements. With time to kill before the show, we find a cosy pub, buy some drinks and tell jokes.

“What do you get if you work your fingers to the bone?”

“Bony fingers!” we chorus together:

“The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on!”

“It’s the fickle finger of fate and it’s pointing at…?”

“You!”

And I put on my best nasal Brummie accent and mimic Jasper Carrot’s The Nutter on the Bus sketch.

“When the nutter gets on the bus, does the nutter sit next to you?”

“I’m in my first English pub. It’s called The Cambridge. We got drenched in the rain. Got my new fur coat all wet, my feet are killing me, we’ve been walking around all day and I’m absolutely stuffed. We had an Italian dinner and next we are off to the Phoenix Theatre to see a show called One Mo’ Time.”

It’s still raining when we come out of the theatre. Fortunately, it being a Monday night, taxis are plentiful and I don’t need to risk life and limb rushing out into Charing Cross Road to hail one to take us back to Hackney. We’re both tired so it’s nice to slump in the back of the cab and reflect on a good day, a magic day in many ways. I always loved London, especially at Christmas, but seeing it entrance Mary, and listening to her prattle on excitedly and happily, makes me mellow and content. I realise how deeply rooted London is in the New Zealand psyche, even for someone of German ancestry, and how important it is to Mary to have finally arrived in a place she has heard so much about back home and visited so often in the coffee table clutter of her fashion and hairdressing magazines. She has even made shopping an enjoyable experience for me, an avid anti-shopper.

“Well, that was excerpts from One Mo’ Time. It was this wonderful show. We had a lovely day yesterday and such a fun evening, I thought I’d die laughing! I’d let the show run on to the end of the tape and I was going to post this off today, but I’ve just woken up, it’s Tuesday, what, the seventh? …eighth of December, and it’s snowing! All the rooftops out of the window are covered with snow, and the cars outside in the street. It’s fluttering down just like the snow machine in Universal Studios. I couldn’t believe it, it’s the first time it has snowed before Christmas as long as Stuart and Jutka can remember, since they’ve been living in this house in, in Hackney. So I don’t know quite how we’re going to cope with snow, it’s almost, oh, it looks about three or four inches deep out on the pavement already. There’s some people have been trotting through it, but it’s so beautiful, absolutely wonderful...

It’s strange to be back in the East End after so many years. Pat and I meet in Bethnal Green in January of my final year at Cambridge. We are both at the Institute of Community Studies as part of our university programmes. Well, it’s a Cambridge University programme actually, run by Michael Young who teaches social survey methods and arranges for the class to stay at the Institute for a week to develop our interviewing skills and do some fieldwork on kinship ties in the East End. If I recall correctly, we survey the influence of mother-daughter relationships on brand preferences and purchases, particularly soap powders and washing machines. We visit old folk marooned on the thirteenth floor of tower blocks, who optimistically embraced their pristine new apartments, the demolition of the terraced streets of their childhoods and the relocation of their offspring to the new towns of Essex, but are now fearful of muggers in the stairwells and petrol-sniffing teenagers crapping in the lifts. Three or four students from other universities are along, including Pat and a friend of hers from Birmingham.

Pat lives in Southall, but her mum’s family are from the East End, from Hoxton. (I’m amazed to find, when I spend a year in London in 1998-1999, that Hoxton is now a trendy place for the arty set to live and that property values there are skyrocketing; back in the sixties you could hardly give the place away.) I don’t know where Pat’s dad’s family are from, or how they ended up in Southall for most of their married life, ultimately becoming the only non-Asian family in Endsleigh Road.

Pat and I go to a number of family celebrations in Hoxton, real knees-up occasions. Her mum drinks Advocaat snowballs, her aunts stoke up on the gin and her dad, a quiet cautious barely literate man who drives his own truck for a living, has a quiet beer or two. I love it. It’s such a change from crustless salmon and cucumber sandwiches and cups of tea delicately poised, little pinkies crooked in line with Grandma Deeks’ directives, desperately minding our Ps and Qs, and Grandma only a publican’s daughter for all that. It’s not as though we’re exactly classy on Grandad Deeks’ side either, he the son of a cashier in a mining company and grandson of a Mayfair hairdresser.

Pat's folk are initially a bit bemused by my Cambridge tag. When I meet her mum for the first time, she greets me with: “We’re just ordinary folk here, you’ll have to take us as you find us.” Which I’m more than happy to do. Later, when working in John Dale’s engineering factory at Southgate, I go with Mickey, our chief shop steward, to a number of social functions in Hackney Wick or join him and his Labour Party friends at an East End pub for a drink. Mickey is instrumental in Pat and I joining the Labour Party and campaigning in the Wood Green electorate in 1964. For Dorothy Butler I think her name was. (No, not Dorothy. Dorothy Butler published children’s books and had premises on the corner of Sunnybrae and Archers Roads. It was Joyce Butler.) Once, when out canvassing, I bang on a door, which is opened by an unshaven shirt-sleeved man of about forty in yellow braces. Seeing my red rosette, he spits “Harold Wilson, Shit!” and slams the door in my face - so much for the party intellectuals masquerading as the white hot heat of the technological revolution.

Those rosettes amuse me since I associate them, other than during election campaigns, with the prizewinners in agricultural or dog shows (1^st Prize, Rhubarb; or Best Old English Sheepdog), or with Thewell cartoons of little girls on shaggy ponies competing in local gymkhana. By the time I’m out campaigning with Mickey I’ve acquired a passable East End accent and can hang out as some sort of Cockney manqué, a fashionable affectation in those days. During the course at the Institute, in the evenings after dinner, we invariably take off in a posse to a local pub to enjoy the crush, the singing, the joking, the talent night entertainment, long before Eastenders popularised such middle class slumming. Mostly it’s The Rising Sun just down the road – I’m sure that’s the pub’s name but memories of Eric Burden and The Animals’ famous hit may be confusing me here. A couple of times we take the bus to The Duragon in Hackney Road where Ray Martine is resident comedian.

On the last evening at the Institute, there’s a social. Pat and I dance together most of the evening, kiss goodnight, and agree on a first date. After we’re married, renting at Wood Green or living in our first flat in Finsbury Park, if Spurs aren’t playing at home, and Arsenal not playing a visiting team that have a good chance of beating them, I go to Upton Park to watch West Ham and sing “We are forever blowing bubbles.”

Working in the furniture industry in the late sixties, I make frequent forays to the East End, visiting little businesses along the mean streets or tucked away in back alleys, most of them Jewish family firms, the descendants of immigrant entrepreneurs who fled the wave of pogroms in Russia after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Their foothold is still precarious, sustained by a mixture of commercial acumen, family commitment and community networks. The tales they tell me, only half in jest, of ‘Jewish lightning’ – small factories torched for the insurance – and owners running into the street to wave away the fire engines (“Not today! Tomorrow, you fools!”) – speak to the insecurities of a dying way of life. Most of these furniture businesses in Hoxton and Islington are set up as domestic workshops, often trading on the street. As they grow, if they grow, manufacturing invades the whole house, then the garden, then neighbouring houses, and then the owners start looking to migrate to larger purpose-made premises further afield. John Betjeman Esquire, who Mum and Dad are so thrilled to meet after he presents me with the Grant Memorial Prize for English at the 1957 School Speech Day, comes from such a family firm, established in Clerkenwell and later moving to Pentonville Road. Successful firms move away from their roots. The less so struggle for a generation or two and die. Contrary to entrepreneurial mythology, few of the acorns become oaks.

Uncharitably, I cannot for the life of me remember what Pat and I do on our first date – probably meet up in the West End and go for a meal and a movie. I do remember that’s exactly what we’re doing the night that Kennedy is assassinated because we’re on a Circle Line train around midnight and read the headlines on another passenger’s late night edition of the Evening Standard. And it’s not as though I can’t remember some of our other dates, very romantic ones too. Walking along the backs in Cambridge after a curry dinner at an Indian restaurant, the silently falling snow glistening in the riverside lights, Pat in her white fur hat and thigh length boots looking like Julie Christie’s Lara in Dr Zhivago. Dancing in the moonlight at the Selwyn College May Ball, Pat bright eyed and edible in a strapless turquoise ballgown. So I don’t think I am particularly shutting out memories of the good times that Pat and I share all those years ago.

I do vividly remember, in contrast, the first time that Mary and I, having made the critical transition from having an affair to being ‘an item’, go together to a function. Ironically it’s to Pureora Cemetery in Remuera for the funeral of a friend of hers – also the patient of an incompetent GP - who has died of cervical cancer, and, New Zealand being the small place it is, my old neighbours from the top of our drive at Sunnybrae Road are there. Sad in retrospect that our first ‘outing’ should be to the cemetery. One day, I thought, that will be our last outing too, bringing us full circle. But I wasn’t to know then that we were travelling all too rapidly towards that particular stop. And now here we are mercifully out from the underground for a spell, enjoying London life, I loving Mary and her company and the many pasts the city and I share. Mary’s wonder and excitement refresh London for me, let me see it with renewed pleasure, and still give me the happiest of memories to add to my recollection of the good times we spend together.

[For sequel to this blog see 93. 'A Wedding in Luxembourg', 19th February 2014.]