Knocking at the Gate

Think of a Saturday night. Think of a Saturday night in London. Think of a Saturday night in London in the nineteen-sixties. The most exciting, the most fashionable, the most ‘happening’ place on the planet at that time.

But you are not part of it. You are a kid too young to be out, and in any case living in a provincial town many miles from London, beguiling the Saturday night time by listening to the Police communications on FM on the radio. Or perhaps you live in London but are already too much of an old fogey to appreciate The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, pointy-toed shoes, and all the rest of it. Your Saturday night consists of a quick couple of pints in The Fox and Grapes half an hour before closing time, and an occasional exchange of pleasantries with others of your generation.

Strangely, I feel that I belong to both of those demographics. Silly of course, I can’t be both sixty-odd years old and a hundred-odd at the same time. In reality I belong to the first category, a child in the 1960’s, living in a small town hundreds of miles from London, but intrigued by what I had read about this vast and exciting city.

So why do I identify with those that were already too old to appreciate swinging London, or put another way, old enough to see its absurdities? Partly I think because of the rather low key comedy shows I used to see on the television, with storylines focussed on misfits rather than golden boys and girls in the thick of it. But it is mainly because at some time in my early teens I discovered the Sunday Times articles of Patrick Campbell.

Campbell actually moved in fairly exalted circles and had a full social life, as I understand it. He was a successful writer and broadcaster, and from what I hear, a talented golfer. However, his pieces for the Sunday Times, each around a thousand words, gave the impression of a domestically incompetent loner, forever in search of clothes which would fit a man of his very tall stature, driving frantically around London, crammed into his Mini, on rainy Saturday evenings, never finding the outsize wear shop before it shut. Or awake in the small hours of the morning, alone and looking for something which he hadn’t read a hundred times before. Or chewing the fat with the proprietor of his local, unfashionable pub or Chinese restaurant, where he was the only customer.

His column was also mercilessly funny in piercing the silliness of a lot of sixties fashion. There comes to mind his description of the dance known as the twist as grinding out two cigarette butts at once, while simultaneously drying one’s back with an imaginary towel.

The surprising thing on rereading these essays is that my impression that the various lonely episodes took place on a Saturday night is completely wrong. But I can’t shake it off. And I feel that there is something rather exciting about being on the fringe of the great swing of things, watching from the wings, as it were. A sort of knocking at the gate in Macbeth, where you stand back from the action and see it from outside.

So what is all this about? I don’t really know. What is true is that I am now a bit of an old fogey myself, sixty-four years old and regularly rolling my eyes at the stupidities of modern life and fashion. Again, watching from the wings. I have lived in Cambridge for the last thirty-five years. I lived and worked in London as a young man in the 1980’s and found it tremendously exciting and fun. I’ve had the good luck to live in Kensington as a student, and in more recent years to commute to work in the historic area around Bart’s Hospital. Although I wouldn’t want to live in London now, I still find it fascinating. I write short fiction in my spare time, mainly crime and supernatural stories. Most of them are set in London and draw so much on the atmosphere of this big, mysterious city.

Most of us have a period in our lives, as teenagers and young adults, when we are out on the town every Saturday night. I feel that this period in my life was rather short. By the time we had kids, we had already started ‘cocooning’. And once we had kids, there was a fifteen to twenty year period when we hardly seemed to go out at all. Now, in early 2021 when going out is off the agenda due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I don’t miss the parties and major events of my youth, and I don’t find the house arrest as frustrating as Madam does, but I would like at least to watch from the wings again, as the lead players strut about the stage, and as the great world goes round.

Stephen Duffy, January 14th, 2021