The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt Read Free Book Online Page A

High Street, afforded me a privileged, if permanently noisy perch. And since I took the 14 bus to school (my Green Line adventures only began after we moved out to leafy Kingston Hill), I saw all these buses and trains up close every day. Cars were in shorter supply, but only relatively: London in those years had the greatest density of car ownership and use anywhere outside the continental United States and traffic jams were already part of Putney life.
    But off the busy High Street, there was another, quieter Putney: the established late-nineteenth-century suburb of mansion flats, subdivided Victorian terraces and Edwardian brick and stone villas, typically “semi-detached” but often quite sizeable. There were row after row, street after street, block after block of these often graceful buildings, strikingly homogenous in décor and facings. More attractive than the interminable interwar suburban sprawl of southeast London, less ostentatiously prosperous than the luxuriant, tree-lined avenues of northwest London, Putney was unmistakably and reassuringly middle class. To be sure, there were upper-middle-class enclaves, predictably located up by Putney’s ancient heath and on the slopes of the hill that led to it; and there were working streets like the river-fronting Lower Richmond Road where the aspiring poet Laurie Lee found cheap lodgings and his first job after arriving in London from deepest Gloucestershire. But for the most part Putney was comfortably and securely in the middle.
    Our own flat was chilly and uninspiring, rising three stories above the hairdressing shop where my parents worked. But it had the distinctive quality of backing onto Jones Mews: one of the last of the stable alleys where the residents and tradesmen of the town had kept their animals. In those years the Mews still served its traditional function: two of the six stables in the alley leading away from our back door were occupied by working animals. One of these—a bedraggled, skinny apology for a horse—slaved for a rag-and-bone man who would drag it out of its stall each morning, shove it carelessly between the shafts, and head out to collect what, by the end of the day, was often a substantial haul. The other horse fared better, working for a blowsy, chatty flower lady who had a stall on the common. The remaining stables had been converted into sheds for local artisans: electricians, mechanics, and general handymen. Like the milkman, the butcher, the flower lady, and the rag-and-bone man, these were all locals, children of locals, and beyond. From the perspective of Jones Mews, Putney was still a village.
    Even the High Street was still rooted in a self-contained past. There were already, of course, “chain stores”: Wool-worth, Marks & Spencer, The British Home Stores, etc. But these were small outlets and far outnumbered by locally owned shops selling haberdashery, tobacco, books, groceries, shoes, ladies’ wear, toiletries, and everything else. Even the “multiples” were somehow local: Sainsburys, a small store with just one double-window, still had sawdust on its floor. You were served by polite, slightly haughty assistants in starched blue-and-white aprons, resembling nothing so much as the proud employees in the photograph on the back wall showing the little shop on the day it opened many decades before. The “Home and Colonial” grocers further down the High Street carefully distinguished between its overseas and home-grown supplies: “New Zealand lamb,” “English beef,” and so on.
    But the High Street was my mother’s territory. I shopped on Lacy Road, which boasted an off-license whence I was dispatched for cider and wine; a small tailors’ establishment; and two “sweet shops.” One of these was generic and modern, at least by ’50s standards, offering fruit gums, packaged chocolate, and Wrigley’s chewing gum. But the other—darker, danker, dirtier, and otherwise depressing—was far more intriguing. It was