An extract from Chapter One of A Far Cry From Kensington

So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to the silence. Eventually, I fell asleep contented, filled with soundlessness, but while I was awake I enjoyed the experience of darkness, thought, memory, sweet anticipations. I heard the silence. It was in those days of the early fifties of this century that I formed the habit of insomnia. Insomnia is not bad in itself. You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? – Yes, you can. You can put your mind to anything most of the time. You can sit peacefully in front of a blank television set, just watching nothing; and sooner or later you can make your own programme much better than the mass product. It’s fun, you should try it. You can put anyone you like on the screen, alone or in company, saying and doing what you want them to do, with yourself in the middle if you prefer it that way.

At night I lay awake looking at the darkness, listening to the silence, prefiguring the future, picking out of the past the scraps I had overlooked, those rejected events which now came to the foreground, large and important, so that the weight of destiny no longer bore on the current problems of my life, whatever they were at the time (for who lives without problems every day? Why waste the nights on them?).

Often, it is a far cry from Kensington and the early 1950s, this scene of my night-watch. But even now when I return to London, to Kensington, and have paid the taxi and been greeted by the people waiting there, and have telephoned the friends and opened the mail, that night I find again my hours of sweet insomnia and know that it is a far cry from that Kensington of the past, that Old Brompton Road, that Brompton Road, that Brompton Oratory, a far cry. My thoughts of the night dwell often on those past thoughts of the night in the same way that my daily life at the time has a certain bearing on what I do now.

It was 1954. I was living in furnished rooms in a tall house in South Kensington. I was startled, some years ago, by a friend’s referring to ‘that rooming-house near South Kensington Underground you used to stay in’. Milly, the owner, would have denied indignantly that it was a rooming-house, but I suppose that is what it was.

Milly was sixty years of age, a widow. She is now well over ninety, and still very much Milly.

The house was semi-detached, and on the detached side was separated from its neighbour by no more than three feet. There were eighteen houses on each side of the street, of identical pattern. The wrought-iron front gates led up a short path, with a patch of gravel and flower-beds on either side and lined with speckled laurel bushes, to a front door which bore two panes of patterned glass. All Milly Sanders’

It was in those days of the early fifties of this century that I formed the habit of insomnia. Insomnia is not bad in itself. You can lie awake at night and think

tenants had a key to the front door which led into a small entrance hall. Milly herself occupied the ground floor. On the right, as you came in, was a hall-stand with a mirror, some coatpegs, and a place for umbrellas; on one of its flat surfaces stood the telephone. On the left was Milly’s best room, with a bow window, used only for visitors. Ahead was the staircase leading to the tenants’ landings, and, to the left of the staircase, a short passage leading to Milly’s sitting-room, kitchen, bedroom and its adjoining conservatory and her back garden which was good and sizeable for a London house. These streets had been built for merchant families of the past century.

Upstairs on the first floor was a bathroom and furnished rooms let to two single tenants and a couple. In the front bed-sitting- room, which also had a bow window and a small kitchen adjacent, lived the couple, Basil Carlin and his wife, Eva, both approaching forty and without children. Eva was a part-time infant-school teacher. Basil, by his own definition, was an engineering accountant. The Carlins were unusually quiet. Once they were locked in their room no sound ever issued, even after midnight when the natural noises of the house had ended for the day.

Next door to the Carlins was a large bedroom looking out into the garden. It had a wash-basin and a gas-ring with the usual dark steel box beside it with slots for pennies and for shillings. Here lived and worked Wanda, the Polish dressmaker whose capacity for suffering verged on rapacity. But Wanda Podolak was generous of heart even though she could never admit to an instant of happiness. She had many visitors, some clients – her ladies, she called them – volubly having their dresses fitted, some compatriot friends, some of whom she described as enemies. Most of her visitors came from six o’clock in the evening onwards, after their hours of work, the clients being given preference over the friends and enemies, who had to wait on the landing till the fittings should be over. When Wanda entertained she didn’t put away her work; the buzz of her sewing-machine went on intermittently together with the sonorous Polish voices of the men, the clamour of the women and the clatter of cups and saucers as tea was prepared. The Polish conversations seemed all the louder for being unintelligible to anyone passing Wanda’s door.