Lizzy May – Chapter 12

The Bohemian Heath

‘Hampstead Leaves’ by Steve Fendt

Summer 1977

Well, Pauly, so there I was, in Hampstead.

The Lennoxes and I took to each other straight away. They were the sort of people you feel you’ve always known, after spending an hour together.

I lived with them for several years as their lodger and tutor to their daughter Charmian. They became like family to me. They were well-to-do, but unconventional, what was called Bohemian in those days.

Mrs Lennox, Esther, had once been Lady Something-or-Other. Married to a lord. She had an affair with Robert, you see, when the two of them were very young, in their early twenties. Robert was the youngest son of a wealthy confectioner. It had been a big scandal, before the Great War.

They owned a beautiful, big house in Hampstead, on Hampstead Way, just around the corner from The Wyldes, right on the edge of the Heath. It was the loveliest house I’d ever been in up to that point, let alone lived in.

The Lennoxes were strong supporters of the arts and they were friends with artists, writers and musicians. They held a lot of parties.

Percy, meanwhile, lived with his wife and two children in Hampstead Gardens. That was less than a mile away, across the Heath.

He would come over every week, to see his old RAF pal Robert, who’d been his commanding officer at Cranwell. They had so much in common, including their age, within a few months. Robert was a mechanical engineer and Percy loved machines, as I think I’ve said.

They’d talk for hours, smoking their pipes, walking around the garden or tinkering in the workshop. Then Percy would stay for dinner.

They were never ones to exclude women from their conversation, or talk down to women, and the four of us, Esther and me and Robert and Percy, would play cards, listen to music and have the most hilarious arguments into the small hours of the morning.

Charlie, Percy’s wife, never came with him. She didn’t want anything to do with that part of his life, he said: the War and all that. I think that was what drove them apart.

Of course, I didn’t help, as things turned out.

I like to think the rot had set in well before I was on the scene, though. I don’t flatter myself that I was the first of Percy’s girlfriends.

I just made sure I was the last.

I would sometimes see Percy and Charlie out on the Heath at the weekend, when I was walking with Charmian. If it was nice weather, I’d take her down to the Ladies’ Bathing Pond. That took me right back to my own childhood. She was a sweet little girl, eight years old when I first knew her, very bright and well spoken.

She died in World War Two, I’m afraid, when she was just twenty-two years old. I heard that a doodlebug, a V1 flying bomb, came out of the blue, destroyed the house she was living in.

There one minute, gone the next. It was terribly sad.

But I mustn’t get ahead of myself.

Charlie was a strange one, I thought. Very cold and aloof. Not just towards me, but towards everyone. Percy hinted there was some history of mental illness. But of course, I was biased, and probably she already suspected something was up between her husband and me.

The children, Daphne and George, were lovely. George was a handsome young man, eighteen years old and the image of his father, only taller. Daphne was a similar age to you now. She got on well with little Charmian.

Robert and Esther knew perfectly well what Percy and I were up to, of course, but turned a blind eye. They were hardly in a position to judge us for it.

Oh yes, we were definitely up to something by that point, although we hadn’t quite admitted it to each other, or even ourselves. Your grandfather was a very charming man, and obviously unhappy in his marriage.

We were careful to be discreet and keep it from Charmian and Daphne. Although, well, you know what little girls are like for noticing things, I’m sure.

---

I adored Hampstead. I’d live there now, if I could afford it.

Hampstead Heath was a lovely place for walking, or sketching, or swimming. It still is, though it’s busier now, of course. A lot of very clever people lived in that part of London in those interwar years. Many of them rich, and some of them famous.

There was a chap I’d often meet on my walks. Usually I’d find him sitting on the bench by the pond in the Vale of Health.

Eric was about the same age as me, a nice fellow with a long, rectangular face, luxuriant black hair and unforgettable, haunted eyes. When he talked to you, he’d gaze into the distance, and you’d wonder what he was seeing.

He certainly wasn’t rich. He was a sales assistant in a second-hand bookshop. Though talking to him, it was obvious he’d done many things before that.

He spoke of his experiences in the Burma police, and teaching in a boys’ school in Uxbridge. He’d been very ill, he said, and was convalescing. This would have been in the early Thirties, maybe around 1933.

We’d chat about politics, and literature, and life in general. He was very interesting, very knowledgeable, and a bit of a flirt.

He’d written a novel and was hoping to get it published, although it had been turned down by Gollancz – a bitter disappointment after years of work. He was working on a second one, he said. He was fascinated by the lives of the poor and destitute, believed it was a writer’s job to draw people’s attention to injustice and suffering.

We were several years into the Great Depression, you see. There were many people in desperate poverty, all across the Western world. People who’d once had steady jobs, and comfortable homes, and now had nothing. There were homeless people camping right there on the Heath.

I asked whether he’d had anything else published. He said yes, some essays and stories, and a memoir, which had come out just that year. He’d dig out a copy, and give it to me next time we met.

He was as good as his word.

I was confused, though, when he handed it over, after writing a dedication inside. The name on the cover was George Orwell. The book was Down and Out in Paris and London.

Yes, I know you’re reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. That’s quite a difficult book, and not one of my favourites of his, actually. A lot of people misunderstand it as a prediction of what life will be like in 1984.

It’s an understandable mistake, but that isn’t how literature works, not good literature, and Eric Blair was a very fine writer.

He wrote it in 1948. That should tell you something, but I’ll leave it to you to work out what.

I’ll give you another clue, though, to the meaning of the novel – or one way of looking at it, at any rate. A work of literature never has a single, simple meaning, and if you meet someone who says it does, you know you’re talking to a fool.

In some ways, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book about love. Not in a sentimental way, but about how terrifying love can be, how dangerous, yet how necessary. Eric wanted us to see that failing in the task of love can destroy us.

I think he might have been right.

---

Coming up:

This Friday in Tales from the Wood: Pauly allows himself to be provoked into a rash action, and reflects on the many facets of friendship. (Paid subscriptions.)

Next Tuesday in Lizzy May: A change of employment causes ructions.