Elms - London made us: a memoir of a shape-shifting city

ALSO BY ROBERT ELMS

Non-fiction
The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads
Spain: A Portrait

Fiction
In Search of the Crack

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West
and Canada by Publishers Group Canada

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books

Copyright Robert Elms, 2019
All photographs Robert Elms

The moral right of the author has been asserted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 211 9
eISBN 978 1 78689 212 6

Typeset in Goudy Old Style by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire

To Alice, Alfie and Maude, Londoners all.

CONTENTS

Introduction

This is no longer my London.

These were the words of an old lady, born by the River Thames, almost eighty-five years before she was about to expire by the Euston Road. Propped up in a hospital bed, she was eager to reminisce, but increasingly short of the energy to do so. When she had a burst of will, however, and a lungful of bottled breath, she took to talking about the city where she had lived all her long and eventful life; she knew it wasnt there.

This is no longer my London, she said with a wave of her veiny hand and a resigned but somewhat slighted melancholy. She was mourning the passing of her home town as she awaited her own demise.

That lament for a lost metropolis wasnt exactly my mothers final utterance. Her last words were spoken so softly through an oxygen mask as to be inaudible, but they probably involved love. And while she hadnt fallen out of love with her city, which she once knew so well after years as a clippie on its crimson double-deckers, she no longer felt part of it, didnt understand it. The town she had so rarely left had left her; disappeared or transmogrified so as to be unrecognisable, and she was disorientated by the changes. Her mind was still sharp, but her mental map was way out of date.

This became obvious when I was trying to mine the last nuggets of her memory. I have always been fascinated by the old tales of the tumultuous corner of West London the Elmses had called home for generations. We were Westies, and there had been members of my fathers family bowling along Ladbroke Grove and Portobello Road, working its markets and angling its alleyways, from the very start of its story back in the mid-nineteenth century. But long before my mothers imminent departure, not one was left, not a single cousin or aunt flogging their wares or raising their kids, not a trace of our blood flowing amid those once crumbling stucco terraces.

Instead we had all been re-housed and resettled, scattered in a cleansing diaspora of gentrification. In our absence those once condemned houses had been tarted up and filled up with well-scrubbed, floppy-haired families in pastel cashmere sweaters to match their pretty pink and lilac abodes. The neighbourhood had been transformed more dramatically than any other in all London. But my mum hadnt seen that movie. Shaking her frail almost translucently silver head she said with all the vehemence she could muster, Notting Hill is a slum.

She no longer knew London because the London she knew no longer existed. It was well aware of her though.

On the morning of the day in 2011 that Eileen Elizabeth Elms, ne Biffen, breathed her last in University College Hospital, I went to take some air outside the hospital. I was seeking respite from the emotionally suffocating ward on the seventh floor, where my mother was slowly slipping over the eternal precipice. The screeching junction of Tottenham Court Road and the Euston Road, with the underpass sucking in traffic, is one of the most noisy and noisome in the entire metropolis. It is not exactly the best spot for a breather and a moment of quiet contemplation. So I moved a few yards south and found myself pacing philosophically between Spearmint Rhino and PC World.

I was wiping tears from my face and musing on the inevitability of passing and the raw sadness of imminent loss, outside a lap dancing emporia. I then remembered that this had previously been a dodgy Cockney Cabaret, where thespians in flat caps and braces with Dick Van Dyke accents did the Lambeth Walk for Japanese tourists scoffing soggy fish and chips, and even managed a half smile.

At this point a black cab rolled by, slowing to a halt at the lights. The driver shouted out of the window, Hows your mum? Surprised but not shocked, I didnt want to holler Shes dying over the throb of the traffic, so placed my hands together by my head in what I hoped was the internationally recognised symbol for sleeping. Forced by the lights to move on, the concerned cabbie left me to my solemn, sodden ruminations. Or so I thought.

For a couple of minutes later the same handsome old Hackney carriage was back. He must have whipped round the fiendish one-way system and then barged through the morass to pull over by the kerb in front of me.

Do you mean shes resting, Robert? he said. Now I didnt know this taxi driver from Adam, but guessed he must be a listener to my daily BBC London radio show. I had spoken on air so many times about my mum, shared her stories; and she would occasionally call up and take part in the show, so the listeners felt like they knew her.

They also knew she was ill and my absence from the airwaves had alerted them to her worsening condition. He looked really concerned about an old woman hed never met. I wiped my eyes and spoke to him.

To be honest mate shes dying, wont make it through the day.

At that point a large stubby hand reached out from the drivers window and held mine in a truly touching embrace, warm and kind.

London is thinking of her, he said before rolling gently away into the workaday madness. Blimey, that didnt half make me think about London.

The black cab and its knowledge-encrusted driver themselves an endangered urban species in this age of satnavs and Ubers are such a totemic symbol of my city, mobile golems arising from the rat runs: it was the most fitting and touching way for this metropolis of millions of souls to deliver succour to one of their own. My mum would have loved that.

She loved a black cab, always said riding in one made her feel posh. I returned to her impending deathbed and told her what had happened. I hope she heard. Later that day, surrounded by those who loved her, she left London. But as her presence faded with the procedures and bureaucracies of death, so the idea that her London had itself passed on, that in essence your city dies with you, really began to haunt me.

*

Eileen Elizabeth Elms, her middle name recognition that she was precisely two weeks younger than the Queen two baby girls born into entirely different worlds, just two miles apart was every inch of her five-foot, two-inch frame the Londoner. Yet she no longer knew this place, because the city she had grown up in, courted my father in, raised her sons, mourned her husbands, buried her friends, kept an eye on her neighbours, cradled her grandchildren and great-grandchildren in, was indeed no longer there. It had, by stages and increments, street by street, shrunk and vanished just as she did.