Read Online Up West by Pip Granger - Free Book Online Page A

and his pals the opportunity for mischief: ‘The doors used to face each other and we’d tie the knockers together, knock on one door, and of course the woman would open the door, and when she closed it, she’d knock on the door opposite, and so it went on.’
    The converted flats in Soho were no bigger, and often nobetter appointed, than those in the tenements. Toilets were rarely put inside houses, while bathrooms were very much a luxury fitting in new houses until well in to the twentieth century: they were rarely plumbed into old houses and flats until after the Second World War. The age of the housing stock in Soho and Covent Garden meant that Victorian conditions persisted well into the fifties, and those interviewed for this book often remembered not only their first bathroom, but also the replacement of gas lighting with electricity in the fifties.
    My father’s flat, at 61 Old Compton Street, was three floors above a delicatessen. The front door, set between the deli and what, in 1956, became the famous 2I’s coffee bar, gave on to a steep, dark staircase that wound up to a flat that had been intended as the servants’ quarters when the house was built a century and more earlier. There was a small living room and bedroom at the front, with sloping walls and ceilings following the roof line. At the back, a room had been converted into a tiny bathroom with an Ascot (a gas water heater that exploded into life at the turn of the hot tap), and there was a kitchen with a gas cooker. The kitchen also served as a dining room, although I remember the kitchen table more as Father’s desk, with his typewriter, untidy piles of paper and ashtrays overflowing with the oval stubs of the Passing Clouds he smoked when in funds. At the front, the windows looked out on the rooftops of Old Compton Street and Wardour Street beyond, and at the back they provided a view of St Anne’s churchyard.
    I have many memories of the stream of visitors passing through this small flat, including Father’s drinking and gambling buddies, fellow writers, criminals and celebrities, but one of my most treasured is of feeding a pigeon that came every day to the kitchen windowsill for his breadcrumbs and crusts. I christened him ‘Crooky’, because of his distinctive bent beak. Perhaps the spookiest experience I had while researching this book came during the interview with Chas McDevitt, who briefly lived in the top floor of number 59, next door. He volunteered that he used to feed what was obviously the very same bird, although he dubbed him Ikey.
    Jeff Sloneem spent the first eight years of his life just across the road from Father’s flat. ‘I lived in 62 Old Compton Street, above a greengrocery. We were on the second floor, and basically, you walked in, there was a living room with a kitchen, a little back room, then there was a bedroom, and that was it. It was part of a Georgian terrace that came to an end at my uncle’s tailor’s shop.’ The part of the terrace beyond Jeff’s uncle’s shop had been blitzed.
    Some of the tall, narrow houses above shops or cafés were split between flats and businesses, legitimate and otherwise, which meant that Soho families shared their space with the workrooms of jobbing tailors, tiny offices or perhaps a working girl or two. Janet Vance’s situation was typical: ‘I grew up at 11 Frith Street on the corner of Bateman Street, diagonally opposite the Dog and Duck. It was a café with flats above, and my dad had a gambling club in the basement. There were two flats on the first floor, two on our floor, and one at thetop. Girls, prostitutes, lived in the other flat on our floor, but they didn’t interfere with anybody, or work from there. Different girls worked from the two flats on the first floor.’
    Ronnie Brace never lived in Soho, but used to visit his mother’s sister in Windmill Street. ‘My aunt lived about 30