Across the pond

And it’s still changing. I was not wrong to assert  that Prompt Corner, which Orwell dearly loved, had become a hairdressing salon. I know for certain because one of my daughter’s friends learnt the trade there. But when I walked past today, after writing this morning’s blog, the furniture was all piled up. The present owners are a restaurant called Le Pain Quotiden, and since they had some old looking menu’s in the window, they must have  been  there a few years. Without me noticing because South End Green has so many restaurants these days (including a Starbucks) that I don’t like to acknowledge their existence.

The new owners are clearly aware of the commercial value of Orwell because there is a very new-looking plaque on the wall, announcing that George  Orwell not only visited there, but worked there, in 1934 and 1935. So that led me to speculate on what ‘Le Pain Quotiden’ means, when it is translated into English. Since my French is awful, and I did not even have my mobile phone with me, to check the facts, I had to speculate. It could not surely be ‘Bread and Dripping’. But it might be ‘Bread with Quotes’

Which is a slogan which reasonates with people who have read  Orwell. He first made his mark with The Road to Wigan Pier, when he voyaged to the north-west of England to report on the plight of the British Working Classes during the Great Depression. His perspective was  that of an Old Etonian with a conscience.  He discovered, amongst other things, that the working classes were spending what little money they had on food which was bad for them.

Like bread and dripping.

Fast forward to 2008, when we have another Old Etonian with a conscience, David Cameron, is Conservative leader and Prime Minister in Waiting. And when we have hundreds of journalists, Government ministers and Opposition leaders, seeking to save the working classes from themselves. Because they eating so many cheapish fast foods, that they are getting so obese that it is a grave threat to their health. Egged on by the advertising of the ’capitalists’, earning their bonuses  by promoting the fast food chains.

So what Orwell wrote, is still well worth reading. But it needs to be put into the context of the times.

Bread and dripping is not going to kill you. But it probably is not as good for your health at breakfast as fruit and salad and Alpen type cereal. Surely not as bad as bacon and eggs and sausages, which the British working classes of the 1930s could not afford every day. 

As it happens I was brought up on bread and dripping and I don’t think that it has done me much harm.

But I do find it difficult to get in the local restaurants. And even at home, where my wife wants me to relish in breakfast with croissants, her being a Francophile.

Which brings me back to ‘Le Pain Quotiden’, whose window is also full of notices of their planning application to Camden Council, for permission to put six tables and twelve chairs on the pavement outside what used to be Prompt Corner. Another phase in the Frenchification of Hampstead. But the Council will probably give them the go-ahead, because, unlike in Orwell’s time, most of the many cafes in South End Road, have tables on the pavement and have done for several  years.

So far, so good. But when I read the plaque about Orwell, I felt ashamed.

Yes, even trained journalists feel shame.

Because when Orwell worked there, Prompt Corner was a bookshop, and he was not employed as a waiter, but as an assistant in the bookshop, helping people to choose the books which would enlarge their vision of the world.

I knew this, of course. So how come that I had forgotten the ‘facts’ when I  wrote my blog this morning? My answer, which the shrinks in the white coats may not agree with, when they come to get me, is simply that my memory was focussing on facts salient to me.

Which is a real problem for journalists in the Northcliffe tradition. Even the honest journalists, concerned to report the ‘facts’ notice some facts more than others. Those that are ‘salient’ to them.

And for me Prompt Corner, was not a bookshop, it was a cafe serving Espresso coffee, when I first went there in the 1950s. I went there because it was a place I could go, spending as little money as possible, where I could chat up the women. I loved it, because the women I  chatted up there, had actually heard of Jean Paul Satres and Simone de Beauvoir. So  it made me feel that I was not entirely foolish in leaving the Wolverhamton of my youth.

So, when I walked back up the hill to my flat, I was appalled at my own mistake, and tried to look with eyes of George Orwell, who, like me, practised journalism, but he did it rather better than me.

What would he have thought, making this walk, 74 years after he lived here?

First, he would have passed the Railway Tavern, or that is what it used to be called because it was next to Hampstead Heath railway station, and had a working class clientele, who liked a sing song on a Saturday night. Now it is the Garden something or other, and is trying to attract the monied classes, who like to drink outside, as well as in, though the ‘garden’ of the former Railway Tavern, only warrants the name because it is out-doors.

Then I  passed on my left what used to be Barclays Bank, where Orwell may have gone to cash his meagre royalty cheques. He made big money after he was dead, like not a few writers.

Barclays, in my day as well as Orwell’s, was a seriously good banking firm, who advised people not to ruin themselves. They would not give mortgages  more than three times annual earnings. But in the world of the Thatcherite/Reagan boom bankers on both sides of the Atlantic, were encouraging people to borrow up to nine times annual earnings. Fine. If you don’t get made redundant. Or if  property prices do not continue to go ever upward.

When Barclays decided that its South End Green site was no longer economic, there was a revolt by  the locals, led by Pam Gilby, of the gin family, who was running the  neighbbourhood group, the South End Green Association. Barclays won. The closed the bank. But SEGA’s rear guard action won something. The hole in the wall of Barclays Bank is still there. So the middle classes can still get your cash there, even  though Barclays has sold the site.

To, who knows. But what used to be Barclays Bank is now, a Pizza place, fattening the working classes, and a newsagents/tobaconists.  The latter does not advertise his name. The shop sign is The Times. Although he sells a vast selection of international newspapers as well as all the Brit papers. So how come he gives The Times all this free publcity? Maybe Rupert Murdoch  owns the site!!!

Continuing on Orwell would have found that South End Road still has a half-way decent bookshop, where the assistants are doing what he did: encouraging people to read books which told them about worlds they have not experienced.

Whether George Orwell, if he were alive today, would have worked for the Murdoch Times, or for The Observer, which though it is owned by The Guardian, peddles lots of stuff encouraging young women to starve themselves. In order to be thin, which is how City bankers, apparently, like their women.

But I think he would still be quite happy to live in these parts. Because there are pubs  which have ‘gardens’ where you can smoke, without Big Brother clapping you into jail. And there are plenty of people around here, who have actually read his books and would be eager to talk about them with him.