'Do you take dogs?' the next passenger
enquired.
'I prefer cash!' Streetgeezer joked.
'I can't seem to close this door properly.'
'Slam it hard and violently, it's a French car and has to be
shown who's boss.'
'Isn't it a bit warm to be wearing a black suit?'
'Madam.....it's never too hot to be cool.'
He was picking up in Hampstead Garden Suburb, an old lady going
to Edgware.
Streetgeezer always maintained a contentious opinion of area
known locally as "the Suburb". Built before the First
War and inspired by the Utopian dream of Henrietta Barnet, it has
failed in its objective: namely to be a place where rich and poor
alike co-exist and help each other. As it became increasingly
desirable, so the poor were replaced by those more inclined to
help themselves. Streetgeezer would often disparagingly describe
Hampstead Garden Suburb as a waiting room for Golders Green
Crematorium. Comparing its uniform red brick semi's to overgrown
council houses and accusing its dull streets, devoid of
advertising and unsightly additions, of being how one would
imagine the compound for senior party members in a communist
state.
In the centre of the Suburb is a village square that is home to
two adjacent churches (one non-denominational, the other C of E)
and the Hampstead Garden Institute where the locals take classes
in pottery, or Spanish, or flower arranging. The strict rules
laid down by the founders of the Suburb allow no advertising,
pubs, shops or commercial buildings within its boundaries. This
has led to an almost spooky absence of human presence. It is rare
to see anyone walking across or even near the square or the
churches. It is like a permanent Sunday afternoon; one of those
interminable suburban Sundays from twenty years ago where yellow
cellophane covered the non-perishables in the sweet shop, the
only thing open. The kind of Sunday you refer to when insulting a
Wednesday that is not going anywhere or a Saturday that had
failed to live up to expectation saying: 'It seems like a Sunday.
An everlasting placid Sunday (Spanish Opera Star 7 and 7) or a
scene from "The Prisoner", after the big white balloon
has frightened everyone away.
Off the main streets are hidden cul-de-sacs of quaint, charming
whitewashed cottages clothed in trellises, creepers and vines,
with window boxes and hanging baskets in flower. Here live little
old ladies who could be childrens' authors or the widows of Army
Colonels. Ex-memsahibs who returned from the Raj to find a part
of England they had believed would be forever white, but
ironically seems to be the only place on earth where Jews and
Arabs can live peacefully as neighbours.
They exited the suburb by the parade of mock Tudor shops on
Finchley Road while Streetgeezer pondered what it was that the
Tudors had ever done to deserve such mocking. As he drove, his
passenger spoke in the genteel tones of a forgotten era, a time
of smoking jackets, cravats, and cheerful though perhaps slightly
cheeky Hackney Carriage drivers who knew their place. They
discussed the sad state of television. The passenger felt
compelled to confess that whilst her husband would quietly spend
his evenings engrossed in a book or relaxing with Radio Four, she
would feel the urge to watch some TV. She would enquire of her
husband, 'Darling, would you despise me if I were to watch some
television?'
Like so many North Londoners Streetgeezer was born in Edgware
General Hospital. Whenever he drops there he is struck by the
realisation that this is where he started to exist, this is where
he threw a double six and moved his token from "Go"
onto the first square.
'It's a game innit?' the less imaginative passenger is inclined
to repeat, confirming the driver's suspicion that the bigger the
cliché the smaller the mind.
'In that case I want £200 everytime I drive past Edgware
General.' Streetgeezer would reply. He always assumed he would
cease to exist before the hospital did. That however was before
the prophecy of Jesus that 'The meek shall inherit the earth',
had started to be realised. Streetgeezer remembered the day well.
He was driving three stunned American business men down the Mall
and past the Palace when the LBC radio announced that Michael
Heseltine and Douglas Hurd would not be standing in the third
ballot, and so the new prime minister was John Major. With the
arrival of the meek came Mrs Bottomley and "reforms to the
health system". Her intended reforms being similar to the
way a crushing machine re-forms the shape of a car into a cube.