Up West (20 page)

Not all buskers were musicians or dancers. I remember an
escapologist who often ‘did' the West End. He also turned up at the Tower of London, once trippers had re-established their well-worn sightseeing trails. He had a sidekick who would fasten his hefty chains with huge padlocks, tie the neck of his sack with rope, or shutter and bar a cage contraption and then start the dramatic countdown to the performer's marvellous escape.

On busy street corners in the shopping streets stood men who twisted long, sausage-shaped balloons into various animals. Although they flogged the results of their efforts, their schtick was really the making of their colourful menageries. Their hands were so deft and quick that they were almost a blur. They prided themselves on being able to make any animal that their audiences requested. Although I remember well the tortured squealing of the balloons as their hands twisted them into shape, I never remember one bursting, which was what their audiences were often waiting for. As I was afraid of sudden bangs, I watched them work with my fingers in my ears, just in case. When they had done, the results of their efforts were either sold on the spot or tied with string to float in the wind above their heads like a weird, weightless, airborne zoo.

Street vendors sold an amazing variety of things. I remember a lot of injured war veterans selling stuff from trays slung around their necks. It was not unusual to see a facially disfigured man, someone missing a limb, or a blind man, flogging boxes of matches or packets of razor blades or
ballpoint pens. These were the most popular lines, and may well have been supplied by a veterans' charity. They were always sold by men, presumably because women were not usually combatants in the Second World War and thus were not eligible to be licensed as street vendors or to be supplied with goods to sell.

Women did, however, sell flowers on the streets, and sometimes fruit. The flower ‘girls' of Covent Garden, some of whom were quite elderly women, would pick up what was left unsold at the market in the late morning, bunch it up and hawk it on the streets, especially to the theatre and cinema crowds in the evening.

The wonderful aroma of roasting chestnuts was a familiar one during winter months of the late forties, fifties and even in to the sixties. On bitter days, the hapless vendor would often find himself surrounded by a small mob warming their frozen hands and legs near his glowing brazier. Often, feelings of embarrassment for copping a swift, free warm-up led to the purchase of a newspaper cone of hot chestnuts, so the vendors only really minded if the crowd got so dense that fresh customers were kept away. Then a few choice, often witty words would send the heat-scroungers scurrying, only for them to be replaced by more frozen shoppers.

For years and years, chestnut sellers disappeared from London's streets and they were sorely missed by those who remembered the wonderful smell, the distinctive taste and, of course, the free heat. However, I've noticed that one or two have reappeared around Christmas, as a nod to nostalgia and
in response to popular demand. There's nothing quite like the smell of hot chestnuts wafting around shoppers as they schlep wearily from shop to shop, to bring a glow of festive feeling back in to the commercial Christmas chore.

In Leicester Square there was a stall that sold glass animals, run by a man known, appropriately enough, as ‘Harry the Glass', although he also answered to Harry Murphy. He made the animals as well, and was a fully paid up member of the Magic Circle. He was, apparently, a very good magician when he was sober, but sadly, he drank like a fish. His favoured form of transport was a black cab that he drove himself in those days before the breathalyser. There were several other glass-animal sellers in the West End. One, called Reg, had an oxygen cylinder by his pitch and would make the animals on the street – which brought in more customers, naturally.

For a long time after St Anne's Church fell victim to the Blitz, so all that was left was its tower and churchyard, the site of the missing church was a car park. There was also a bookstall there, run by a man who sold second-hand whodunnits, romances and the like from the top of his stall and kept dirty books for his more ‘discerning' customers underneath. I know this because I'm pretty sure that my father, among others, supplied him with them.

An army of fly-pitching spivs toted suitcases from pitch to pitch in the post-war decades. They would rest their suitcases on a couple of upended wooden beer crates and open them with a flourish to display packets of nylon stockings, or gloves and scarves, or knickers, or men's socks, or battery-
operated toys with flashing eyes and jerky movements, or tea towels, or bottles of perfume – the list went on and on. They'd usually have a lookout posted with his eyes skinned for a policeman's helmet approaching among the crowds. If a bobby hove in to view, a whistle so piercing that it could slice through the sound of the bustling crowds, bus gears grinding and lorries rattling, would alert the salesman, who would slam down the lid of his case and scarper, mid-spiel sometimes, and take a turn or two round the block, or nip in for a cuppa somewhere. When the coast was clear, it was back to the same pitch and the lookout on the same corner. They must have made a living for at least two.

Buying from a spiv with a suitcase was fraught with pitfalls. Sometimes a packet of nylons would consist of just one stocking, or a mismatched pair with one long enough to fit a giraffe and the other little more than a sock. The ‘French' perfume could turn out to smell like drains or lavatory cleaner, having been knocked up in somebody's bath out of God knows what. The spivs relied on the anonymity of the streets to get away with it.

Alongside the vendors, there were sharks. Many specialized in the three card trick, also known as ‘Find the Lady' or ‘Three Card Monte'. The trickster would set up shop on a crate and place three cards face up. One was a queen: often, but not always, the psychologically more attractive queen of hearts. Once the trickster had allowed prospective punters a good look he'd turn the cards face down. Then he would
move the cards around so rapidly that onlookers would be too confused to keep track.

One of his stooges would take a punt, while at least one other kept an eagle eye out for the police. The stooge who was betting would place a sum of money on the beer crate, apparently confident that he could ‘find the lady'. Naturally, he would have no problem because he and his partner had pre-arranged the ‘lady's' whereabouts. The stooge would carry on ‘winning' for a bit and once he had drawn in a crowd with his glad cries of triumph and joy, his performance would encourage the more naïve in the crowd to have a go. This time, however, the trickster would palm the queen, thus leaving the punter no chance of winning.

A variation on this trick was ‘Find the Pea' or ‘Find the Ball'. Instead of cards, the trickster would pull the same stunt using a dried pea and three walnut shells or, for the more organized, a small ball and three plastic cups. But no matter what the props, the schtick was exactly the same.

Another classic scam was ‘Take a Pick'. Eager punters would shell out a few bob to pull a straw from a cup. If the straw had a ‘winning' number on it they'd win a small prize, worth a tiny fraction of their original stake. The notorious Jack Spot used to boast of making £50 or more a day at this scam as early as the twenties, when he charged just sixpence a punt. The sum Spot made amounted to a small fortune in those days. I assume that the profits made in the forties and fifties were even greater.

There never seemed to be any shortage of mugs to take on
the sharks, even when the scam was obvious. ‘There was a guy outside Foyles,' remembers Graham Jackson. ‘He used to have a box and little envelopes. And he'd put them all in a box, and one of them contained – I think it must have been a pound note. And what he'd do, he'd shuffle them all up, and – the same old trick – he said, “Right, pick one.” And one of
his
blokes, of course, would go up, and take it – “Oh, you've won a pound, mate. Well done.” It was like half a crown a go, and these mugs would pay half a crown, and the bloke's got it in his hand, he's got the winning packet in his hand.'

Historically, the West End has always had a soft spot for misfits, characters and wild eccentrics, showing an easygoing acceptance, and sometimes a real affection, for the many weird and wonderful types who would not be tolerated elsewhere. Being partisan, I'd say that this is particularly true of Soho, but that could be because Soho welcomed my peculiar little family when the housing estates of suburbia had shunned us as pariahs, cursed with a virulent form of leprosy.

It is hard to understand now, in more enlightened times, just how judgmental, class-ridden and conventional post-war Britain was and just how difficult it was for people whose faces simply did not fit. Many of these West End characters would end up at the Nucleus, Gary Winkler's all night coffee bar, which stayed open until around six in the morning. A place that served hot food, cooked by someone who gloried in the name of ‘Denis the Menace' or, more sinisterly for a
cook, ‘Dirty Dennis', the Nucleus was a godsend to musicians and actors who needed somewhere to come down from an evening performance. Insomniacs and those poor souls who slept rough were also grateful to have somewhere warm and dry to sit over a coffee or a plate of spaghetti bolognese, especially on cold, wet nights.

Gipsy Larry – a very well known West End ‘face' who earned his crusts playing a tea chest wherever he went – used to hang out at the Nucleus. Tea chests were quite a common buskers' instrument in the post-war period when materials were scarce and the money to pay for them, scarcer still. The instrument was made from a tea chest with a sort of neck/ fingerboard arrangement, often made out of a broomstick, jutting up in the air and with a single string strung under tension from the broomstick to the chest. It was played a bit like a double bass: the different notes depended on where along the length of the string you plucked, twanged, thumped or, sometimes, bowed. The chest itself acted as a sounding box and, occasionally, seconded as a drum.

Sometimes, if you took a stroll down Monmouth Street, you'd see a full-sized wooden cross parked against a wall outside the Nucleus. That would be a sign that King David was in and holding court. King David thought he was the son of God, but why he didn't call himself Jesus, I'm not sure. Perhaps he thought that God had two sons, the famous one and His little brother, David.

The story of Ernest the Astrologer, another regular at the Nucleus, was a sad one. He was said to be red hot at drawing
up astrological charts and was always to be seen with a hefty tome on the subject. Despite being in his mid-thirties, he looked about seventy, partly because he had long, grey hair that straggled to way below his shoulder blades. This in itself was fairly unusual in the days when the short back and sides was still in favour with many men. Rumour had it that Ernest never slept and had taken a vow not to cut his hair until he found his girlfriend. He'd lost her one day in a cinema queue. She'd been there one minute, Ernest had looked away – his attention caught by buskers perhaps, possibly even Meg of the Gleaming Gums – and when he turned back, his girlfriend had vanished into thin air. Ernest haunted the West End ever after, peering at queues in vain, longing for his missing girl to reappear. The general opinion was that she'd taken the opportunity to leg it to the nearest tube, and had got away while the going was good. Ernest was found dead one day, in the graveyard of St Giles Church, sitting in a deck-chair (some say an armchair), with a large book of astrology open on his lap.

Another character who lived on the streets of Covent Garden was remembered by Olga Jackson. ‘Then there was old Niffy Whiskers, used to sell papers. We called him Niffy Whiskers because he had this long hair and long beard . . . he was obviously a very educated man. It was very sad, really. And he would go around selling papers. We used to feed these stray cats just off of Drury Lane, we would to buy these heads and things from the fish and chip shop, stew them up, then take them out to feed to the cats, and I remember one
day he really ripped me off a strip, because I was giving food to the cats, and he didn't think I should be doing that because people were hungry, etcetera. My mother said “I reckon he's been crossed in love.” But to her, anybody who went off the rails was always crossed in love.'

And then there were sandwich-board men. There were loads of them. They fell in to two main categories: eccentrics determined to air their views on a variety of subjects, and those who advertised on behalf of local businesses. Several of the former were convinced that the End was Nigh and were moved to tell us all so. They were not alone in their beliefs. The recent wars and the atom bomb had concentrated everyone's minds most powerfully on personal mortality, as well as on the terrifying possibility of general annihilation, so the doom-laden messages written in curly scripts, in chalk, on sandwich boards rang an uncomfortable bell with almost everyone.

There was also the flying saucer brigade. The fifties saw a positive rash of stories of abductions by aliens and sightings of flying saucers (they were nearly always saucers, rarely flying cigars or airborne spheres) and, of course, there were sandwich-board men determined to share their personal experiences of the phenomena. I remember two; one was utterly convinced he'd been abducted and the other was sure he was about to be.

The walking advertisements were almost always homeless men of one sort or another. Most were alcoholics who had lost everything and were nearing the end of that ghastly,
progressive disease. Some were mentally ill, and others were simply misfits who could not manage in a more conventional, structured life. All were eking out an existence by trudging the streets with their heavy boards advertising anything from a local gentlemen's outfitters through to restaurants or even stage shows that needed to drum up more custom.