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

run (and, I assume, owned) by a shriveled, mean-spirited old crone who would resentfully weigh out from an array of large glass bottles a quarter-pound of gobstoppers or liquorice while grumbling at the impatience and sartorial insufficiency of her customers: “I’ve been serving grubby little boys like you since the old Queen’s jubilee, so don’t try to fool me!” By the old Queen, of course, she meant Victoria, whose jubilee had been celebrated in Putney in June 1887. . . .
    There was still something Victorian, or perhaps Edwardian would be more precise, about the feel of the side streets. Up those solid stone steps, behind the heavy window treatments, one could imagine bespectacled spinsters offering piano lessons to supplement their meager pensions—and one did not have to imagine it, since I at least was taught the instrument by two such ladies, both living in what I recognized, even then, as genteel poverty. I had school friends whose families occupied a floor or two of the imposing villas near Dover House Road or up Putney Hill, and was vaguely impressed by the sense of solidity and permanence given off by these buildings, even in their modern subdivided state.
    Putney had its loose ends too. The riverbank was still semi-rural and largely untouched—once you got past the ever-so-slightly commercialized strip near the bridge, where the annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race began. There were boathouses, houseboats, the occasional tug, abandoned skiffs rotting gently into the mud: living evidence of the river’s ancient business. At Putney the Thames is still actively tidal: at times a narrow stream lazily bisecting great beaches of mud, at others close to overflowing its scruffy and rather under-secured banks when a ferry or pleasure boat, on its way from Westminster Bridge up to Teddington or even Oxford, sweeps under the bridge and into the great bend embracing Craven Cottage (Fulham’s Football Ground) on the opposite bank. Putney’s river was messy, inelegant, and functional; I spent a lot of time sitting by its edge and thinking, though I no longer remember about what.
    We left Putney when I was ten years old, drawn out to the verdant Surrey fringes by my parents’ brief flirtation with prosperity. The house on Kingston Hill, where we lived for nine years until my parents ran out of money, was larger than the old flat; it had a garden and a front gate. It also—oh joy!—had two toilets, a very considerable relief after the experience of no. 92 and its single water closet two icy stories down from my bedroom. And there were country lanes in Kingston for the aspirant cyclist to explore. But I never really got over Putney: its shops, its smells, its associations. There wasn’t much by way of greenery, except at the edges where commons and heaths had been left as nature planted them. It was urban through and through, though urban in that informal, generous way so characteristic of London: a city that—at least until the disastrous urban “planning” of the ’60s—had always grown out rather than up . I’m no longer at home there—the High Street today is no better than it ought to be, a featureless replica of every high street in England, from its fast food outlets to its mobile phone stores. But Putney was my London, and London—even though I really only lived there as a child and left forever when I went up to Cambridge in 1966—was my city. It isn’t anymore. But nostalgia makes a very satisfactory second home.

VII
     
    The Green Line Bus
     
    F or some years at the end of the Fifties, I went to school on the Green Line bus. The Green Line, publicly owned like all London buses in those days, was a division of London Transport providing long-distance bus connections across London, typically starting out in a country town twenty to thirty miles outside the city and terminating in a comparably distant town on the opposite side of London. The bus I used, the 718, was routed from Windsor in the