It's 1940 and it's all kicking off!

Revisiting London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins

I do worry about my memory some times - a regular occupation for anyone in their sixties, I suppose. So last week I was very surprised to be notified that someone on GoodReads had liked my review of a book called London Belongs to Me, by an author called Norman Collins, as I could have sworn blind that not only had I never read the book, but never heard of the author either. A little bit of searching and I discovered that not only had I read it, and loved it, in 2012, but had followed it up with an even more enthusiastic review of another of Mr Collins’ works, The Children of the Archbishop. I was intrigued, to say the least, and as London Belongs To Me seemed to be set exactly in my current sweet spot, the lead up to the outbreak of the Second World War, and just beyond, I decided to give it another whirl, all 734 pages of it. And I’m so pleased I did, and now I’m going to share it with you…and weave into it, if I may, some of the research I’m doing into women’s lives at that time.

Norman Collins

Norman Collins, the author, is quite an extraordinary man of achievement, and it is surprising really that we don’t all know more about him. Born in 1907, he went into publishing straight from school, starting as a clerk at the Oxford University Press, and had a brief spell as a journalist, before joining Victor Gollancz’s publishing firm in 1930. During the war he joined the BBC, initially as an assistant in the ‘overseas talks’ department, eventually promoted to Controller of the ‘Light Programme’, where among other things he launched ‘Dick Barton, Special Agent’ (with 15 million listeners at its peak) and the Woman’s Hour that we know and (mostly) love today. These instant successes led to his appointment as Controller of the BBC Television Service in 1947. There one of his proudest moments was the live broadcasting of the 1948 London Olympic Games.

However, Collins was becoming increasingly concerned about the dangers of the BBC having a monopoly on television broadcasting, and in 1950 he resigned and began to campaign for a liberation of the system. When the Television Act was passed in 1954, creating the Independent Television Authority, Collins was already part of a syndicate to bid for one of the franchises on offer. He teamed up with the show business agent Lew Grade, and ATV was born, one of the ‘Big 4’ broadcasters, serving London at weekends and the Midlands on weekdays. His prestige and name may have been part of the reason they won the franchise, but sadly once the company got underway, Collins found himself sidelined. Nevertheless, his contribution to the creation of television entertainment in Britain should not be underestimated.

Throughout this busy career in publishing and broadcasting, Collins was also a commercially successful novelist, published by Gollancz and then Collins. London Belongs To Me was his ninth book, and came out in 1945. There would be seven more novels after that, the last, Little Nelson, coming out the year before he died in 1982. London is perhaps his most famous - it was made into a film starring Richard Attenborough, Alastair Sim and Joyce Carey. It was also turned into a television series in the 1970s.

Richard Attenborough stars as Percy Boon in London Belongs to Me, 1948

London Belongs To Me is a ‘joyous romp’, as it says on the cover, through the true heart of working-class London in the build-up to the Second World War. In a way that reminds me of John Lanchester’s excellent novel from 2012, Capital, the action is confined to one very small corner of London - to the inhabitants of just one house, 10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington. Here we find the widowed landlady, Mrs Vizzard, about to be swept off her feet by the ‘spiritualist’ Mr Squales; the Josser family, including their adult children Doris and Ted; Mrs Boon and her car mechanic son, Percy; Mr Puddy with his overwhelming passion for food; and my favourite, Connie, the washed-up actress now working as a late night cloakroom attendant in a seedy Soho club.

Standing at the corner of Dulcimer Street you can see down the length of the whole terrace…and they are certainly fine houses. Or have been. They date from 1839, when the neighbourhood was still select, exclusive and sought after. They now front the street - solid looking and graceful - receding in a gentle curve towards the river, like a monument erected to the good taste of our grandfathers; an inhabited historical monument with the history flaking off in great chunks of discoloured stucco that occasionally comes flopping down into the areas. They all had three storeys above ground and one below. And they all had porches supported on slender imitiation Grecian pillars and high, rather steep steps - like the ones Mr Josser had floundered up the night before - leading to the panelled and bevelled front doors with fanlights over them. They were large houses with eight to ten good rooms apiece.

The story opens at Christmas 1938 - Mr Josser is staggering home with his retirement present, the predictable but unwieldy clock, under his arm, and far too many Christmas presents. The Jossers stand for everything good about Londoners, they claim to value respectability above all things, until loyalty to friends and neighbours turns out to have an even stronger pull; they love their children, and they have saved hard to be able to afford to retire into a cottage in the country, if they can ever make up their minds to leave London. Two years later, the residents of 10 Dulcimer Street will have been through many shocks and disappointments, and some terrible scares. It is the Richard Attenborough character who drives the main action, as his dreams of bettering himself will end in death and disaster:

‘If I had a thousand a year, on the level,’ he was thinking, ‘I’d be OK. I’d know where I stood. I’d know what to do with it. I’d get a house out Purley way with a garage. I’d have a radiogram and a cocktail cabinet…I’d have a home cinema. I’d spend every weekend at Brighton. I’d learn French the easy way by correspondence. I’d buy a ukelele…I’d wear one of the new low-curved bowlers. I’d carry a gold cigarette case. I’d make my wife put on evening dress every evening. I’d have a Riley’s home billiard table and have friends in. I’d be OK.’

Mrs Vizzard will be wooed and won by the mysterious Mr Squales. Mr Puddy will be saved from annihiliation in the Blitz and emerge as a hero, all because he cannot bear to leave a couple of slices of ham uneaten in the burning warehouse he is employed to guard. And Connie…well I won’t spoil Connie’s story, but she is an absolute old diamond, washed-up, flat broke, made up like a dutch doll, with frizzy dyed hair and a handbag full of loot from the cloakroom she is meant to be attending. Connie has an unerring instinct for the moment when anyone else in Dulcimer Street might just be opening a bottle of something or dividing a cake.

In one great scene, Connie is up before the magistrate for obstructing the police in their duties: in other words, when they raided the club, Connie had turned off the lights.

The Magistrate regarded his fingernails. Then he turned to Connie again.

‘You have heard the evidence. Have you anything to say?’

‘Only that it’s all a lie, sir’

‘You mean that you didn’t turn off the electric light switch?’

‘Not deliberately’

Then how did you turn it off?

‘I slipped’…

‘And what did you do with your arms when you were falling?’

Connie thought for a moment. ‘I held them in front of me to break my fall’, she said.

‘Do you remember what you fell over?’

Connie thought again. She felt that there was a catch in it somewhere. ‘My feet’, she replied at last.

At the reply a titter started up in the body of the court. But the usher was up on his toes already and the laughter died away.

In that the switch is more than seven feet high, and Connie is only five feet tall, the magistrate sends her down for fourteen days, even though she explains that she has a dependent canary.

The next morning, Mrs Josser receives a letter from Holloway prison, in a ragged unreliable hand like a child’s. ‘Dear Mrs Josser, Owing to a slight misunderstanding, I shall be here for fourteen days. Please ask Mrs Vizzard on no account to let my room. Tell her the rent shall be attended to prompt on my return. Also please look after Duke. His water will need changing. The birdseed packet is in the top drawer…Give him enough to cover a penny. If it gets very cold please have Duke down with you. Again thanking you and apologising for bothering you, and hoping that you and Mr Josser are both well. PS please don’t on no account let Duke out of the cage even if he asks, he’s very uncertain. Tell him we will stretch our wings together when I get home,’

How can you not love Connie?

There is so much to love about this book, and I have been happily ensconced in Dulcimer Street all week, it’s the perfect book when you want to curl up with a cup of tea and let the hours go by. But I have also had my research hat on, for insights from a keen observer, of what London was like in the build-up to the Blitz, and how it slowly but surely affected plans and changed lives. Connie, who never wants to miss an experience, fights her way into Waterloo Station to watch the evacuation of the London children: ‘It wasn’t everyday that there was drama like that going on just round the corner’. But when she gets there

…What a scene it was. Not a bit what she’d imagined it, mind you. No screaming, no hysteria, no panic. Just rows and rows of children each with a gas mask, a parcel containing rations and sponge bag, and a label to prove that the child really was itself and not a totally different child from some other school. It was all orderly, efficient, disciplined as though the London County Council had been in the business of children’s crusades for years.

The war is the final catalyst for getting the Jossers out of London. Doris will give up her secretarial job at a firm of solicitors and join the ATS, and she and her fiance Bill will bring forward their wedding date, just as Harold and Mary Wilson decided to tie the knot earlier than planned in Mansfield College Chapel on 1 January 1940, as who knew what the future would bring. At least they went to chapel: Bill and Doris broke Mrs Josser’s heart by deciding on a Registry Office.

Harold and Mary Wilson marry 1 January 1940

The final chapters of the book take place during the Blitz, and Mr Josser’s train journey to rescue his daughter and daughter-in-law from London the night after one of the worst bombing raids allows Collins to paint a picture of the damage done to the East End of London, and what it revealed about the conditions in which people were living.

They were the suburbs of a previous generation. And overnight, they had suddenly been opened out. Disembowelled. A bomb - quite a big bomb, it seemed - had come down in the midst of them. Two of the little villas had disappeared completely. There was simply a large untidy crater filled with litter where they had been standing only eight hours before…The man next to Mr Josser leaned over. ‘Lucky it didn’t hit the line,’ he remarked consolingly. Mr Josser nodded politely. He was too shocked to do more. Shocked by the sheer flimsiness of the houses that people had been living in.

This week we have all been reminded of the extraordinary sacrifices of the D-Day troops, and quite rightly. But sometimes I wonder if there ought to be a day when we simply remember the sacrifices, and horrors, and bravery, of the people of the Blitz and of bombings everywhere.

Bomb damage in Kennington