The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt Read Free Book Online

discovered unless one struck out well beyond the conventional objectives. The towns we lived in were becoming hostile to the very cars they had so myopically welcomed a few years before: in New York and Paris, as in London and many other cities, it makes little sense to keep a private vehicle. The car, at the height of its hegemony, stood for individualism, liberty, privacy, separation, and selfishness in their most socially dysfunctional forms. But like many dysfunctions, it was insidiously seductive. Ozymandias-like, it now invites us to look upon its works and despair. But it was quite fun at the time.

VI
     
    Putney
     
    H ome, they say, is where the heart is. I’m not so sure. I’ve had lots of homes and I don’t consider my heart to be attached very firmly to any of them. What is meant, of course, is that home is wherever you choose to place it—in which case I suppose I’ve always been homeless: many decades ago I left my heart somewhere on a Swiss mountainside, but the rest of me has foolishly failed to follow. Still, among my deracinated roots there is one that protrudes a little above the heap and may even constitute a grounding of sorts. From 1952 until 1958 my family lived in the southwest London district of Putney and I recall it with affection.
    I did not know it at the time, but Putney was a good address to grow up in. A hundred yards north of our flat stood St. Mary’s Church, a squat, elderly parish establishment notable for the debates held there in October 1647 at the height of the English Civil War. It was here that Colonel Thomas Rainsborough famously warned his interlocutors that: “ the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he . . . every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government. . . .” Exactly three centuries later the Labour Government of Clement Attlee would inaugurate the welfare state that was to guarantee to the poorest he (and she) a life worth living and a government that served them. Attlee was born in Putney and died only a few miles away; despite a long and successful political career he remained modest in demeanor as in wealth—in revealing contrast to his grasping, fee-gouging successors: an exemplary representative of the great age of middle-class Edwardian reformers—morally serious and a trifle austere.
    In its way, there was something austere about Putney itself. It is an ancient parish—mentioned in the Domesday Book along with a ferry which crossed the Thames there (the first bridge was built in 1642)—and derives its relative importance from both the adjacent river and the old Portsmouth road that would become Putney’s busy High Street. The confluence of road and river also explains why an early Underground line was routed through Putney, running north-south from Earl’s Court to Wimbledon, as well as a branch of the London and Southwestern Railway (later the Southern Railway) from Windsor to Waterloo, with a station strategically pitched at the upper end of the High Street. There was an unusual affluence of buses too: the 14, 30, and 74 which ran from Putney or thereabouts to northeast London; the 22 and the 96 which started at Putney Common and traversed the City before terminating respectively in Homerton and Red-bridge Station in deepest Essex (the longest bus route in London at the time); and the 85 and 93 buses which trundled south out of Putney Bridge tube station to Kingston and Morden respectively. And of course there was the 718 Green Line coach which passed through Putney on its long journey from Windsor to Harlow.
    Since all eight bus and coach routes, together with two trolleybuses (electric buses powered by overhead cables, foolishly withdrawn in 1959), the Underground line and the suburban railway converged in or near the High Street, the latter was an unusually busy thoroughfare for those days. I was well-placed to appreciate this: our flat, at no. 92 Putney