My first London lodging was in an attic in the far suburb of Friern Barnet, an hour’s tube ride north of Charing Cross on the Northern Line. The attic was in a redbrick semidetached house rented by three young men from Scotland, of whom only one, some kind of economist or higher accountant, was willing to put me up, he being the only one I knew. The other two were hash-smoking pop musicians and ungenerous chaps of decidedly narrow disposition. I was, therefore, enjoined to secrecy, and urged to stay out of the house during daylight hours to avoid detection. There were two official lodgers who came and went irregularly, so the odd bronchial hack or creaking floorboard would be attributed to them. But not a tumble downstairs, nor an Oyrish aria offered up in the wee hours, nor the purling of puke down the outside of the house. Of none of these was I guilty. I was, after my fashion, the ideal house guest, leaving before breakfast and wandering the streets and alleys of London until lunchtime, then snatching a snooze on one of the benches in St. James’ or Hyde Park and whiling away the rest of the afternoon with a desultory look at the employment boards or a book or cup of tea until it was safe to crawl back into my attic, sometime after eleven p.m., for another night’s uneasy sleep and the whole bloody thing all over again the next day. But the others caught on somehow, and threatened to brain me if I stayed, so I moved out and on and haven’t seen or spoken to my erstwhile hosts since, and likely never will. After all, the past is a different country; they do things differently there.

        My next pad, via the good offices of an old school friend, was the laundry room of a town house on the Old Brompton Road, and although it doesn’t sound like much, and wasn’t, it was a step up from Friern Barnet, as pretty much anything outside of prison would have been. The town house was on the expanding, Earl’s Court edge of South Kensington. South Ken’s even trendier now than it was then, and it was trendy enough then, believe you me, boasting small Italian trattorie and wine bars and girls in miniskirts and girls in jeans. I extended the courtesy of the supplicant to mine host by seldom if ever raiding his fridge, avoiding the telly when the other flatmates—a trainee stockbroker, a Christian evangelist, and a teacher—were in; and I endeavored to ascertain that all the beer and curries I consumed were my own. Mostly, like a servant I ate in the kitchen or in the laundry room itself, a long and narrow space with a cot and a dingy window that looked out over the backs of buildings and the odd scrap of grimy garden. Indian cooking smells billowed up in great humid waves from the Star of India restaurant downstairs. In the summer radios played and old folks scratched at their tiny gardens. I could never have endured it if I hadn’t had the unquenchable hopefulness of youth.

          I spent much time exploring the neighborhood. Westward there was Earls’ Court, with its Aussie bars and scrappy vitality. There were pocket-sized parks in which old Jewish immigrants fed pigeons. There were car dealerships and low-rent clothes shops. But in the other direction there was all the chic of South Ken at its most chic: the lingerie boutiques, the Thai bistros, the vegetarian groceries. And across Old Brompton Road was the Onslow Arms, a pub popular with BBC types and actors. I went there in preference to the Old King Lud after a windfall from home or a cashed check from one of the students, whom I occasionally tutored in French when my host and his mates were out. The Onslow was precisely the über-Bohemian London watering hole to which I felt spiritually entitled. I could banter and make ironic observations with the best of them. I drank Pimm’s Cup and read The Times, and The Guardian, and even the Telegraph, so I knew what was going on at No. 10 (Harold Wilson was out, Sunny Jim Callaghan was in), and I was up on the latest gossip about John Osborne (divorced again) or Vanessa Redgrave (leading another demo) or any of the other demigods of stage and screen, a few of whom frequented the Onslow…Look! Isn’t that Derek (Jacobi)? And over there—Alan (Bates)? But there was no reciprocity: I had, and have, no acting skills, or thespian connections. Still, on the moral level I reckoned I was no worse than anyone else: a bit better, actually, being more sentimental than cynical, and falsely cynical mostly just to impress girls. Which of course made me a hypocrite, but no more than most.