The London that was and will never be …

This week I am avoiding politics and plunging once again into nostalgia, to the old black and white English movies that I had downloaded in the prehistoric days before they banned YouTube in Pakistan, which brought back memories of the London of the 1950s and the London School of Economics (LSE) where I spent my most impressionable years. These days, you will be lucky if you get a room in a hotel for 150 pounds a day. But in those carefree, untroubled days, I survived on 50 pounds a month. This was enough for university fees, books, boarding and lodging, transport, monthly visits to Covent Garden or the Albert Hall, an occasional meal in a Pakistani restaurant and annual holidays in France, Spain or Ireland. As my friend Vishnu Sharma of Nairobi received only 30 quid a month from his old man, we used to cross the road and lunch every day in India House for a shilling. That is until they discovered that the passes that we used to flash when entering the canteen were actually London Transport season tickets. Roasted chestnuts in Soho cost six pence and you could take in a double feature at the Astoria cinema in Marble Arch for one-and-six.

Once, when I received a cheque for three pounds for an article I had written for Hier Spricht London, the magazine of the German service of the BBC, I invited a Venezuelan lady to dine with me at Schmidt’s Restaurant at 33-37 Charlotte Street, where each table was attended by a surly, elderly waiter wearing a white apron and they had a proper silver service. The photographs on the walls depicted scenes from some German town as it existed in the 1930s.That was the time, my mother used to tell me years later, when there were only three cities of lights and proper cabarets in Europe — Paris, Berlin and Warsaw. At the LSE, I edited the Clare Market Review, journal of the students’ union for a year. And on weekends, I would be on the Serpentine, rowing against the delicate current, feeling the slight tremor in the dark muscle of the lake, until I felt the rain drop on my cheek and a boiling sky discharged a wilderness of electricity. At times, I visited the National Gallery of Art in Trafalgar Square, where, on one occasion, I met the Hollywood actress Ava Gardner who asked me if I knew where “The Toilet of Venus” by Diego Velazquez was located.

Student life in London was an experience I would not have missed for anything. The images were absolutely riveting. Hikers rambling over pub lunches in Chelsea, discussing the quickest way to get to Cornwall where the land shelves off to furious rain mist and the Atlantic rushes in. Landladies in Bayswater bending over gulags of greasy water in kitchen sinks, toweling their heads, depressed at the sight of gray hairs mealing up the brown, while outside nettles guarded vacancies. Tourists eating salted beef sandwiches at the Nosh Bar in Picadilly near the Windmill Theatre and my soccer games with working class schoolchildren in Surrey Docks. Drinking hot chocolate in The Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, where Trotskyites, lemon-tea Bolsheviks and Existentialists flirted with freshly scrubbed au pair girls, student teachers and nurses who moved about with a rustle of bombazine and a stick of a smile. In summer, like butterflies, small circuses wandered through the lanes settling on village green and raising their tents like a hawk’s wings. And on Sunday afternoons at Hyde Park Corner, soap box orators demonstrated the power of British democracy.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 11^th, 2012.