Spitalfields Life

Islington Council is unveiling a plaque for my friend & mentor, the novelist Nina Bawden, at midday on Friday 11th September, at her former home, 22 Noel Rd, N1, and you are very welcome to attend

Nina Bawden, 2011

In recent years, a recurring highlight in my existence had been the opportunity to walk from Spitalfields through Hoxton and along the canal path up to Islington to enjoy a light lunch with novelist Nina Bawden, who lived in an old terrace backing onto the canal and whom I considered it a great honour to count as my friend.

I first met Nina when I took my copy of “Carrie’s War” along to a bookshop and queued up with all the hundreds of other children to have it signed by the famous author. She appeared to my child’s eyes as the incarnation of adult grace and authoritative literary intellect, and it is an opinion that I have had no reason to qualify, except to say that my estimation of Nina grew as I came to know her.

Years after that book signing, Kaye Webb, Nina’s editor who had encouraged my own nascent efforts at writing, rang me up at six-thirty one evening to say she had just remembered Nina and her husband Austen Kark were coming to dinner that very night and she had nothing to give them. At this time Kaye was over eighty and housebound, so I sprinted through the supermarket to arrive breathless at Kaye’s flat beside the canal in Little Venice by seven-thirty – and when Nina and Austen arrived at eight, dinner was in the oven.

They were an impressive couple, Austen (who was Head of the BBC World Service) handsome in a well-tailored suit and Nina, a classically beautiful woman, stylish in a Jean Muir dress. I regret that I cannot recall more of the evening, but I was working so hard to conceal my anxiety over the hasty cuisine that I was completely overawed. Naturally, in such sympathetic company, it all passed off smoothly and I only revealed the whole truth to Nina more than twenty years later after Kaye and Austen had both died. Given this unlikely background to our friendship, it was my great pleasure to get to know Nina a little better once we became “neighbours” on this side of London.

Born in East London in 1925, Nina was evacuated during the blitz and then became amongst the first of her post-war generation to go up to Oxford. At Somerville College, she had the temerity to attempt to persuade fellow undergraduate Margaret Thatcher (Margaret Roberts as she was then) to join the Labour Party, that enshrined the spirit of egalitarianism which defined those years. Even then, young Margaret displayed the hard-nosed pragmatism which became her trademark, declaring that she joined the Conservatives because they were less fashionable and consequently, with less competition, she would have a better chance of making it into parliament.

The catalogue of Nina’s literary achievement, which stretches from the early fifties into the new century, consists of over forty novels, twenty-three for adults and nineteen for children. A canon that is almost unparalleled among her contemporaries and that, in its phenomenal social range and variety, can be read as an account of the transformation brought about by the idealistic post-war culture of the Welfare State, and of its short-comings too.

Nina met Austen, the love of her life, by chance on the top of a bus in 1953 when they were both in their twenties and married to other people. They each divorced to remarry, finding happiness together in a marriage that lasted until Austen’s death in 2002. At first,they created a family home in Chertsey, moving in 1979 to Islington, when it was still an unfashionable place to live. Although the terrace where she lived is now considered rather grand, Nina told me she understood they were originally built for the servants and mistresses of those on the better side of Islington.

Nina was someone who instinctively knew how to live, and through her persistent application to the art of writing novels and in her family life with Austen and their children, she won great happiness and fulfillment. I know this because I sensed it in her bright spirit and powerfully magnanimity, but equally I knew that her life was touched with grief and tragedy in ways that gave her innate warmth and generosity an exceptional poignancy. When Nina’s 1972 novel “The Birds on the Trees,” was shortlisted for the lost Booker prize in 2010, she re-read it and recalled it had been inspired by the suicide of her son Nicky, “When bad things happen, you absorb them into yourself and make use of them in novels.” she said soberly, “In the case of Austen, I had a fight with the railways.”

On 10th May 2002, Nina and Austen boarded a train at Kings Cross to got to Cambridge for a friend’s birthday party. They never arrived. The train derailed at over one hundred miles an hour and Nina’s carriage detached itself, rolling perpendicular to the direction of travel and entering Potters Bar station to straddle the platforms horizontally. Austen was killed instantly and Nina was cut from the wreckage at the point of death, with every bone in her body broken. In total, seven people died and more than seventy were injured that day.

After multiple surgeries and, defying the predictions of her doctors, Nina stood up again through sheer willpower, walked again and returned to live in the home that she had shared with Austen. In grief at the loss of Austen and no longer with his emotional support, Nina found herself exposed in a brutally politicised new world, “I suppose I am lucky to have lived so long believing that most men are for the most part honourable. And lucky to have taken a profession in which owning up and telling the truth is rarely a financial disadvantage” she wrote. Nothing in her experience prepared her for the corporate executives of the privatised rail companies who refused to admit liability or even apologise in case their share price went down. It was apparent at once that the crash was caused by poorly maintained points as the maintenance company had cut corners to increase profitability at the expense of safety, but they denied it to the end.

Refused legal aid by a government who for their own reasons deemed the case of the survivors seeking to establish liability as “not in the public interest,” it was only when Nina stepped forward to lead the fight herself, setting out to take the rail companies to the High Court personally, that they finally admitted liability. If Nina had lost her case, she risked forfeiting her home to pay legal costs. But after losing so much, inspired by her love for Austen, Nina was determined to see it through and, in doing so, she won compensation for all the survivors.

You can read Nina’s own account of this experience in “Dear Austen,” a series of letters that she wrote to her dead husband to explain what happened. “When we bought tickets for this railway journey we had expected a safe arrival, not an earthquake smashing lives into pieces,” wrote Nina to Austen,“I dislike the word ‘victim’. I dislike being told that I ‘lost’ my husband – as if I had idly abandoned you by the side of the railway track like a pair of unwanted old shoes. You were killed. I didn’t lose you. And I am not a victim, I am an angry survivor.”

Sometimes extraordinary events can reveal extraordinary qualities in human beings and Nina Bawden proved herself to be truly extraordinary, not only as a top class novelist but also as a woman with moral courage who risked everything to stand up for justice. It is one thing to write as a humanitarian, but is another to fight for your beliefs when you are at your most vulnerable – this was the moment when Nina transformed from writer to protagonist, and became a heroine in the process. Nina may not have looked like an obvious heroine because she was so fragile and retiring, but her strength was on the inside.

Whenever I visited Nina, my sanity was restored. I walked home to Spitalfields along the canal and the world seemed a richer place as I carried the aura of her gentle presence with me. Concluding our conversation in the study one day, before we went downstairs to enjoy our lunch – on what turned out to be one of my last visits – Nina smiled radiantly to me and said, ” I’ve decided to get on with my novel…” in a line that sounded like a defiant challenge to the universe.

Our final conversation was in March 2012 when, after a silence of many months, Nina rang to offer her congratulations on the publication of my book of Spitalfields Life, and it made me realise that our friendship had travelled a long way since we first met. Now it is with great regret that – unlike Carrie in Nina’s most celebrated book – I must accept I cannot go back. I shall never walk back along the towpath to have lunch with Nina again, though I shall carry her inspiration with me for always.

Nina Bawden (1925-2012) with her husband Austen Kark (1926–2002)

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A Plaque for Nicholas Culpeper

I paid a visit to Pepys’ Library in Cambridge recently as research for my Cries of London book

You cross the bridge over the River Cam in Cambridge – the one from which the city takes it name – and there is Magdalene College, with a magnificent border of dahlias at this time of year but otherwise not significantly different from when Pepys was an undergraduate there.

Samuel Pepys bequeathed his library of more than three thousand books to his college, where they were installed upon the death of his nephew and heir in 1724 and where they are preserved today. Pepys had them all bound, catalogued according to his own system and stored in order of size in twelve cases manufactured to his design in the workshops at Chatham dockyard. This library can be seen as a natural complement to Pepys’ personal writing – gathering together essential cultural texts and images of the physical world, just as his journal recorded salient detail of his experience of daily life.

Although one volume of Pepys’ diary is open on display in a glass case, revealing the meticulous shorthand he used to write his journal, the rest are not conspicuous within the library. I felt foolish, once I had searched the shelves for the other volumes in vain, so I had no choice but to ask the librarian where they were since I could not visit Pepys’ Library without casting my eyes upon the most famous diaries of all time.

Magnanimously, the librarian led me to one of the cases and directed me to look at the second run of books, set behind those at the front of the shelf. There, at the back, were five modest volumes labelled simply ‘Journal’ and each numbered with a Roman numeral on the spine. It was breathtaking that these works were placed there with such discretion and bound modestly. In setting up his legacy and including the diaries, Pepys must have known that it was only a matter of time before someone read them. Yet it was only in the early nineteenth century that these journals were transcribed, using his shorthand manual in the collection, and the phenomenon of ‘Pepys Diary’ as we know it came into existence.

The earliest collection of Cries of London I have found is that belonging to Samuel Pepys and they are also kept in his library. Driven by his acquisitive nature and infinite curiosity about life, Pepys amassed more than ten thousand engravings and eighteen hundred printed ballads, including several sets of Cries. Alongside those published in his own day, Pepys included those of a generation before, which are among the earliest surviving examples – a significant juxtaposition suggesting he recognised the value of these prints as documents of social history.

In two large albums entitled ‘London & Westminster,’ Pepys arranged his architectural and historical prints of these locations, including a section labelled ‘Cryes consisting of Several Setts thereof, Antient & Moderne: with the differ Stiles us’d therein by the Cryers.’ In these folios, three series of Cries were pasted on successive pages, placing them there as an integral element of the identity of the city as much as the lofty monuments of brick and stone.

Ordered in chronological sequence of their publication, these three series illustrate the evolution of the form of the Cries during the seventeenth century, from a single sheet to a chapbook to a set of individual prints. The earliest set in Pepys’ collection, believed to date from the beginning of the seventeenth century, is described thus ‘A very antient Sett thereof, in Wood, with the Words then used by the Cryers.’

Twenty-four alternating male and female Criers inhabit niches in four storeys of arcades, displaying wares to indicate their identity like medieval saints parading upon an altarpiece. Suggesting a procession through time, they are introduced by the Cryer at daybreak and interrupted by the Bellman and the Watchman, just as the Criers each had their own place within the rhythm of the passing hours.

This is followed on the next page with a set of thirty-two engravings, believed to date from around 1640, described by Pepys as “A later Sett, in Wood – with the Words also then in use.” By comparison with the woodcuts representing stereotypical figures of Criers, these have more self-possession – though close examination reveals that the same models recur, posing in a variety of guises as different street vendors. Yet in spite of these enacted tableaux, there exists a convincing presence of personalities among these Criers – glancing around in circumspection or meeting our gaze with phlegmatic stoicism.

These two anonymous sets from the early and mid-seventeenth century pasted across double spreads are followed by pages of individual prints by Marcellus Laroon. On a more ambitious scale than had been attempted before, they permitted sophisticated use of composition and greater detail in costume by granting each subject their own sheet, thereby elevating the status of the prints as worthy of separate frames.

Laroon was employed as a costume painter in the studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, who painted Samuel Pepys’ portrait in 1689 which perhaps has drapery by Laroon. Certainly, Pepys acquired drawings by Laroon of the Lord Mayor’s Show and other subjects which were collected into his albums alongside the engravings of Laroon’s Cries from 1687, that were ‘moderne’ for Pepys to the degree that he could caption eighteen of them with the names of the subjects.

Thus, turning the large folio pages of  ‘London & Westminster’ invites comparison – and allowed Samuel Pepys to contrast those ‘antient’ prints from his parents’ generation with those of his youth and adulthood, contemplating the hawkers that populated the streets of the city before he was born, distinguishing the differences in their clothing and wares, and wondering at how London had changed in his time.

Pepys’ Library, Magdalen College, Cambridge

‘A very antient Sett thereof, in Wood, with the Words then used by the Cryers’

“A later Sett, in Wood – with the Words also then in use”

Drawn by Marcellus Laroon and published by Pierce Tempest, 1687

Accompanying my book of Cries of London published on 12th November, Bishopsgate Institute is staging a festival around the culture and politics of markets and street trading, and Spitalfields Music is opening its Winter Festival with a concert of Cries of London by Fretwork on 4th December at Shoreditch Church.

I still need a couple more investors for the book and you can learn more here

Who Can Help Me Publish An Illustrated History Of The Cries Of London ?