In all those large London houses divided up into ROOMS TO LET, you will be certain to have the following fellow tenants:
- Two gossipy old ladies on endless watch-out-and-report mode
- A young man on an upper floor who comes out and stares but never speaks
- Young couples, apparently very loving, but you wonder…
- An old man in the attic: can that really be Cupid he lets out of a cage at times?
- A dark cellar. Don’t ever go down—your earliest childhood horror is waiting for you
- A goldfish in its bowl, because that’s what you are
Dilys and I were sharing a flat again: a much less classy one in the seedy end of Bayswater. The area could be described as the “I-was-once-very-genteel-but-I’m-coming-down-in the-world-and-have-to-do-all-sorts-of-things-to pay-the-rent” part. The first time a car pulled up beside me, I thought the driver wanted directions to somewhere and, in my helpful Girl Guide way, went up and spoke to him. Be Prepared! The place he wanted to go to was not at all what I had in mind. We quickly learned to ignore the daily curb crawlers who swooped every time you left the house.
We moved in and found ourselves perched on the top floor of a terraced house. The railway ran just the other side of the road, to Royal Oak station. Whenever a train went past, the flat rocked like an Elvis tribute band (“Uhh Ohh, I’m all shook up!” for those not around at the time). Since it was the main line in and out of Paddington, this happened all the time. At first, we would practically leap in the air, but surprisingly quickly got so used to it we hardly noticed. We would look at our visitors in surprise as they shot in the air or fell off the sofa.
In the early hours, the main line trains stopped, but it was then time for the engines to come to life and spend the night going to and fro, crashing their buffers together in a manic game of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends. I still thought of mechanical objects as having a secret life of their own. You also learn to sleep through anything as a student. You learn to sleep for five minutes at a tube station, three minutes while buttering toast, all the way through most pathology lectures and while leaning on someone at a party pretending to snog him.
The landlady lived downstairs in the basement. I suppose there were other people in between. In the true tradition of landladies, she was a bit of a tartar and very easily ‘put out’. When ‘put out’, she would use her worst threat, the nuclear option of landlady threats. “Any more of this,” she’d say, “And I’ll send Billy up to talk to you!”. He never did come up. We often imagined Billy, her small, timid husband, sitting for a while on the bend of the stairs and then going back down again, to boast, “I told them off, my dear, I told them off proper. There’ll be no more trouble!”
Dilys had to leave again and I stayed on. After a while, I got thrown out, which is a rather dramatic way of saying that the landlady finally did worse than ‘send Billy up’, but gave me notice. Watch for the next blog if you want to know the disgraceful reason why!