The life of Mr Pussy
Every night, Mr Pussy sleeps at my feet just like those dogs you see curled up at the feet of effigies on medieval tombs. There is a sheepskin, strategically placed across the corner of the bed and this is his rightful place. Sometimes, when I roll over in the night, my feet meet the reassuring resistance of a solid lump and I know it is Mr Pussy. At first light, he wakes, climbs down and then strolls along to the head of the bed, full of the joy of morning, and miaows in my face. Commonly, I open my eyes to confront him eyeballing me and then I turn my back on him, rolling over to sleep further because this may be five in the morning. Mr Pussy is full of optimisim and delight at the new day and cannot understand my reluctance.
Mr Pussy’s disappointed response will be to scratch half-heartedly for a little upon the side of the bed to encourage me to rise. Once this avenue is exhausted, he leaps in one bound onto the oak chest of draws, where I place my watch and rings at night. The thunderous plonk as Mr Pussy lands upon the chest of drawers always stirs me from my slumbers because I know what comes next. A little tinkling, a little scraping and a little scratching, as Mr Pussy manoeuvres my possessions to the edge of the chest of drawers in preparation for knocking them onto the floor. As I lie there in a half-slumber, I am trying to remember if I left my phone on the chest of drawers or not. So I roll over in bed, sitting up, and our eyes meet as Mr Pussy looks down at me accusingly, because he expects better than this sleepy-headed disinterest. Mr Pussy wants me to get up. “Pussy!” I yell in a melodramatically over-reactive tone, throwing back the covers as if I am about to rise. Mr Pussy jumps down and runs from the room, eager to be the first into the bathroom – but I am too smart for him, I pull back the covers and return to sleep. It works every time.
I know what Mr Pussy wants, because sometimes I play along if the fancy takes me. Mr Pussy wants me to rise when he does, so he can follow me into the bathroom to lick the pools of water in the shower, then return to the bedroom to observe me dressing. Once this is complete, he runs to the head of the stairs and pauses, preparing for the moment of triumph when we run downstairs together to embrace the glorious day. If Mr Pussy’s desired scenario does not to take place then he skulks off out of the house in frustration, as happened the other morning when I woke to a frenzied screaming in the back yard. Mr Pussy was halfway up a tall willow with his hackles up, snarling, eyes popping and generally letting rip like a wild predatory beast. At the top of the tree was a young brown cat clinging onto mere twigs. Mr Pussy had pursued this poor creature that had invaded his territory until it had nowhere left to run, just like those fearsome pirates of old who made their adversaries walk the plank.
There is no doubt Mr Pussy has his dark side. The pet shop owner who sold him to me in Mile End years ago told me that he had been rescued as part of a litter from an East End street. I took the cat, who was the size of my hand then, to Devon on the train that night. My notion was that a kitten would be a consolation to my mother, who was recently bereaved, but he caused havoc, running around the house screaming and smashing things. Even the neighbours complained, asking her to keep her cat quiet. Although, at first, he was not quite the joy I had anticipated, I told myself that a cat problem was preferable to a bereavement problem. It was an exorcism, and sure enough, over his first year, he settled down under her placid influence.
I knew my mother wanted a female cat and when I entered the shop, one kitten ran up to me. I realised, in a moment of mutual recognition, that this was the one. The owner assured me this was a female. My mother named the kitten Rosemary and it was only after a year, when we sent the cat to be neutered, that the plain facts were revealed. I broke the news to my mother, “Pussy is a boy.” Immediately she responded,“That’s why he is so bossy!” with characteristic insight. This was when he first acquired the name Mr Pussy, indicative of his early gender confusion. He was never Rosemary again, except very occasionally when we chose to tease him and Mr Pussy responded with filthy looks that could make Silvio Berlusconi look clean.
Now, years later, my mother is gone and Mr Pussy has made Spitalfields his home. When I leant out of the window last week to confront Mr Pussy in the tree here, I only had to yell “Pussy!” and a transformation came upon him. The wild beast vanished to be replaced by my domestic cat once more. Mr Pussy came running back into the house and we performed the morning ritual just as he likes it. I respect Mr Pussy for being his own creature and as long as we can maintain the pretence of a pet and owner relationship, I am prepared to accept his animal instinct that is wild at heart.
Harvey Cabaniss, Verde & Co
If you go round to Verde & Co, the delicatessen at 40 Brushfield St on any given Friday morning at ten, you will discover Harvey Cabaniss, the head chef and proprietor, serving the eminent Edith Randall, his most favoured and loyal customer who gets special service. “You mustn’t tell everyone about the special service” said Edith, regal in her velvet hat, when I stumbled upon the Friday ritual last week, “otherwise I’ll have rivals and that will be no good at all.” Fortunately, I know I can rely upon my readers’ discretion to maintain this best kept secret in Spitalfields – of the special service at Verde & Co – because I have no doubt it could also be arranged for you too, if you ask Harvey nicely and avoid ten on Friday mornings.
What is the nature of the “special service” that has kept Edith Randall coming back, walking in all weathers from her home in the Barbican to buy her weekly supplies here every Friday at ten, since Verdes opened a few years ago? Emerging with the immaculate brio and theatrical timing of a stage conjurer, in one step Harvey appeared from the kitchen and held up a rabbit in triumph, the only difference being this rabbit was skinned and ready for the pot. Overawed at the prospect of this delicious leporine specimen, Edith clasped her hands in delight, but this was merely the overture to the performance. Harvey vanished into the kitchen again and returned with a sirloin steak, then an ox tail, delivering up a fresh box of John Dorys as his grand finale. It was an embarrassment of edible riches and with each option I could feel the rising excitement as Edith Randall rubbed her hands together in hungry anticipation of the culinary treats that the coming week held for her.
Very soon, Harvey had the pieces of meat and fish lined up neatly on the counter in boxes, supplemented by some salad, mince pies and quiches from the Sally Clarke’s famous bakery in Kensington Church St. For Edith Randall, next week’s menu was taken care of. “I’ll weigh the empty box first this week,” said Harvey catching Edith’s eye with a knowing grin. “Harvey always weighs the empty box first so he knows how much a box weighs,” said Edith inexplicably, “Sometimes, I get home and it puzzles me why there is a box with nothing in it, until I realise it is the empty box!” Clearly, this is one of those rare private jokes that can run and run, accumulating greater humorous import with further repetitions.
I think we have established that Edith Randall is a female of descriminating tastes but what I have not revealed is that she is Canadian, not that these things are mutually exclusive, though it is Edith’s prerogative to disagree. “I came here from Canada in 1951 to escape from the lack of culture, I had to get out and I just simply loved it, because I had a desire to be in Europe. Even though, in 1951 everyone was going the other way and it was pretty grim here with rationing, bomb sites and flowers growing on the ruins around St Paul’s.” A graduate of the University of Canada with a passion for European literature, Edith Randall never looked back, she is at the opera almost nightly and scrupulous in keeping up with the latest exhibitions. “I killed the Turner yesterday,” Edith declared in a throwaway that is distinctly North American in its laconic irony.
It is no surprise that Edith and Harvey have become soulmates in a formal, highly respectful, mutually amused kind of way, because Harvey too is a refugee from the former colonies. Coming here and washing the dishes for Fergus Henderson at his first restaurant “The French House Dining Rooms”, Harvey quickly graduated to be a chef, working with Fergus for six years before becoming head chef for the top notch catering operation run by the Caprice group. The surprising part of Harvey’s story is that he is of Huguenot origin, his ancestor Henri Cabiniss passed through here from France in 1695 before leaving for North Carolina. After three centuries, Harvey feels he has come home now.
When Jeanette Winterson bought the building in Brushfield St and renovated it, she wanted to lease the shop to a grocer and Harvey took it on. Retaining all the charm of the quaint old premises, enhanced with a fine display of antique china, Staffordshire figures, toy theatres and nineteenth century clocks, Harvey has stocked it to the roof with his favourite foods.“The best things you can buy in London,” he terms it simply. Sometimes, I have noticed that oranges are the only fruit on sale here and I always wondered if this was a subtle joke at the landlady’s expense, but I was too shy to ask.
Just like the planets in the heavens, Harvey is in a constant state of motion. Even as I took the photo above, I was aware that he was poised, about to run off to the next task. A tall man with agile grace and a powerful physical presence, who lifts his head up to look you in the eye, I should not have been surprised if, like Nijinsky, Harvey was capable of spectacular leaps, though maybe this would not be especially practical or entirely advisable in such a tiny shop crammed with pots of jam stacked up and valuable antiques.
Paul Gardner, Paper Bag Seller
Recently, I have taken to dropping in to the premises of my new friend Paul Gardner, the paper bag seller at 149 Commercial St, to observe the constant parade of long-standing customers that pass through, creating the life of this distinctive business. One morning, I called round at six thirty, opening time, to enjoy a quiet chat before the rush and Paul explained that his great-grandfather James Gardner began trading here in this same building as a Scalemaker when it was built in 1870 – which means Paul is a fourth generation Market Sundriesman and makes Gardners the longest established family business in Spitalfields.
Paul still has his great-grandfather’s accounts from the end of the nineteenth century, when as Scalemakers they serviced the scales for all the traders in the fruit and vegetable market on a regular basis. Turning the pages and scanning the lines of James’ fine copperplate handwriting your eye alights upon the names, Isaac, Isaiah and Ezekiel, indicative of the Jewish population that once defined the identity of Spitalfields. There is an ancient block of wood with two scoops carved out that are smoothed with wear, it has been in use since the days of Paul’s great-grandfather. Then his son Bertie (Paul’s grandfather) used it, then Bertie’s son Roy (Paul’s father) used it and Paul still keeps his cash in it today. As the twentieth century wore on, each of the successive Mr Gardners found that customers began to expect to buy their produce in a paper bag (a trend which is now reversed) and so the trade of dealing in bags supplanted the supply of scales entirely over four generations.
Turn your back on the traffic rattling down Commercial St and stand for a moment to contemplate the dignified Brunswick green frontage of GARDNERS Market Sundriesman. An old glass signs reads “PAPER & POLYTHENE BAG MERCHANT” and, sure enough, a variety of different coloured bags are festooned on strings like bunting, below them are some scales hinting at the origins of the business and then your attention is distracted by a mysterious wooden sieve, a momento of Paul’s grandfather. Enter the shop to be confronted by piles of bags of every variety in packets stacked up on either side and leaving barely any room to stand. Only two routes are possible, straight ahead leading into the dark recesses where the stacks grow taller and closer together in the gloom or turn right to the makeshift counter, improvised from an old counter-top supported upon yet more packets of bags. Beneath the fluorescent glow, the dust of ages is settling upon everything. You think you have entered a storeroom, but you are wrong because you neglected to notice Paul sitting at the counter in a cosy corner, partly concealed by a stack of bags. You turn to greet him and a vista appears with a colourful display of bags and tags and tapes and those old green-grocers’ signs that say “Today’s price 2/8” and “Morning Gathered” – which creates a pleasant backdrop to the figure of Paul Gardner as he stands to greet you with a genial “Hello!”
With his wavy grey locks, gentle face, sociable manner and innate decency, Paul could have stepped from another age and it is a joy to meet someone who has successfully resisted the relentless imperative to haste and efficiency at any cost, that tyrannises our age and threatens to enslave us all. When you enter the shop, you enter Paul’s world and you discover it is a better place than the one outside.
Paul was thirteen when his father Roy died unexpectedly in 1968, creating a brief inter-regnum when his mother took over for four years until he came of age. “I came here the first day after I left school at seventeen”, says Paul, “It was what I wanted to do. After the first year, my mother stopped coming, though my nan used to live above the shop then. I haven’t had a day off since 1972. I don’t make much money, I will never become a millionaire. To be honest, I try to sell things as cheap as I can while others try to sell them as expensive as they can. I do it because I have done it all my life. I do it because it is like a family heirloom.”
Paul Gardner’s customers are the stallholders and small businessmen and women of East London, many of whom have been coming for more than twenty years, especially loyal are the Ghanaian and Nigerian people who prefer to trade with a family business. Paul will sell small numbers of bags while others only deal in bulk and he offers the same price per bag for ten as for a hundred. Even then, most of his customers expect to negotiate the price down, unable to resist their innate natures as traders. Paul explained to me that some have such small turnovers they can only afford to buy ten carrier bags at a time.
In his endeavours, Paul supports and nurtures an enormous network of tiny businesses that are a key part of the economy of our city. Many have grown and come back with bigger and bigger orders, selling their products to supermarkets, while others simply sustain themselves, like the Nigerian woman who has a stall in Brixton market and has been coming regularly on the bus for twenty-three years to buy her paper bags here. “I try to do favours for people”, says Paul and, in spontaneous confirmation of this, a customer rings with the joyous news that they have finally scraped enough money together to pay their account for the last seven years. Sharing in the moment of triumph, Paul laughs down the phone, “What happened, did you win the lottery or something?”
Paul has the greatest respect for his customers and they hold him in affection too. In fact, I think Paul’s approach could serve as a model if we wish to move forward from the ugliness of the current business ethos. Paul only wants to make enough to live and builds mutually supportive relationships with his customers over the longterm based upon trust. His is a more equitable version of capitalism tempered by mutual respect, anchored in a belief in the essential goodness rather than the essential greediness of people. As a fourth generation trader, Paul has no business plan, he is guided by his beliefs about people and how he wants to live in the world. His integrity and self respect are his most precious possessions. “I have never advertised,” says Paul, “All my customers come because they have been recommended by friends who are already my customers.”
However, after Gardners survived two World Wars and the closure of the market, there is now a new threat as the landlord seeks to increase the annual rent from £15,000 to £25,000 in a single step this June. “I earn two hundred and fifty pounds a week,” reveals Paul with frank humility, “If I earned five hundred pounds a week, I could give an extra two hundred and fifty towards the rent but at two hundred and fifty pounds a week, the cupboard is bare.”
Ruminating upon the problem,“They’ve dollied-up the place round here!” says Paul quietly, in an eloquently caustic verdict upon this current situation in which his venerable family business finds itself now, after a hundred and forty years, in a fashionable shopping district with a landlord seeking to maximize profits. Paul needs to renegotiate his rent increase and we must support Paul by sending more business his way (at the very least, everyone go round and buy your bin bags from him), because Paul is a Spitalfields legend we cannot lose. But more important than the history itself, is the political philosophy that has evolved over four generations of experience. It is the sum of what has been learnt. In all his many transactions, Paul unselfconsciously espouses a practical step-by-step approach towards a more sustainable mode of society. Who would have expected that the oldest traders in Spitalfields might also turn out to be the model of an ethical business pointing the way to the future?
Below you can see Paul’s grandfather Bertie Gardner, standing with Paul’s father Roy Gardner as child outside the shop around 1930. In the next picture you see Roy, now a grown man, standing outside the shop after World War II, around 1947. The third picture is Paul Gardner outside his shop today.
The strippers of Shoreditch
Last night, I met a nice girl called Lara for drink in The Pride of Spitalfields with her good friend Sarah, a photographer. Superficially, if you were introduced to the fresh-faced Lara Clifton and she flashed her dark eyes and her lovely gap-toothed smile that gives her an appealing aura of gaucheness, you might assume she was once a member of the Brownies or the Pony Club. You would certainly recognise her as a well-brought-up girl. You would never in a million years guess that she enjoyed a successful career as a stripper. You would not believe that it is her in the picture above. But Lara has far more sophistication, intelligence and moral courage than meets the eye upon first introduction.
“My flatmate started doing it,” says Lara, explaining how she began, “And I was shocked until I realised that it was less exploitative and better paid than the office temping I was doing. It was a more honest form of commerce and a lot of the girls enjoyed doing it. It was not sleazy or seedy.” I was very startled to hear this because I perceived stripping as a degrading activity that humiliates women, but this is not Lara’s view. Commenting on the notion of the dominant male gaze, Lara proposes a different perspective, “The punters are like little boys in a sweet shop, it’s a gentle gaze, it’s passive, very respectful. Everyone knows what’s going on. Nothing is hidden.” And Lara speaks warmly of the relationships between the girls too, “There is this genuine camaraderie. You quickly get to know people if you are naked together.” In Lara’s description, it sounds like they enjoyed a high old time, “The girls used to jump from table to table, it was like a crazy circus. They were the best group of people ever.”
Lara is quick to qualify her comments, emphasising that she can only speak for her own experience. And I must applaud her audacity in making such a brave career move because, even if Lara took to stripping like the proverbial duck to water, I have no doubt it took strong nerves to step out naked in public and laudable self-confidence to be open about what she did when there are plenty who would not hesitate to censure. Lara explained the routine to me whereby three women would perform in sequence during an evening, giving three shows each over three hours and passing the jug around before every strip. In Lara’s eyes, entirely preferable to the many more hours temping in an office to earn a comparable sum. I was intrigued by Lara’s interpretation of the power relationship between stripper and punter and it was my understanding that a strip ended at the moment of full nudity, but I learnt this not the case in Lara’s world. She ran around the pub naked, performing not on a stage but commanding the whole space, though, significantly, Lara always kept her high heels on, as the symbol of her dominant status within the performance arena over which she held control.
One day, Lara put a note on the changing room wall requesting written contributions from her fellow strippers and quickly found she had enough material for a book. Before long, Lara met photographers Sarah Ainslie and Julie Cook, who visited the pubs and the dressing rooms recording every aspect of the culture in hundreds of arrestingly candid and delicate pictures. “It was a gift,” admitted Sarah,“I drifted in and out for months, so I built a relationship with the girls.” “We forgot she was there,” says Lara, which is quite remarkable considering that in most pubs a single toilet served as makeshift changing room for all the dancers.
Three years in the making, the result is “Baby Oil & Ice – Striptease in East London”, a large format full-colour hardback limited edition book of nearly two hundred pages edited by Lara, that blends writing and photographic imagery together to create a broad and authoritative picture of the particular hidden world of East End striptease. “I wanted to capture something that was dying,” says Lara fondly, but she has achieved far more. Her remarkable book is an exuberant celebration, created by women, of the life, poetry and contradictions of this entirely absurd practice of a woman cavorting naked in clunky high heels for the pleasure of a mesmerised (and paradoxically emasculated) bunch of fully-dressed men. Previous books about stripping were written by journalists and academics with their own moral agendas, but Lara’s book is important because it is the first written by performers -allowing the voices of real live strippers, who are usually silent, to speak in their own unedited words.
Until very recently, there were several pubs in Shoreditch that hosted stripping and formed a circuit for the performers, Ye Olde Axe, The Royal Oak, The Spreadeagle, Browns, The Crown & Shuttle and The Norfolk Village. Now this has ceased and some are closed entirely, although Lara says The White Horse still has strippers. Lara gave up when table dancing came in, because it took away the quality of performance from girls who could no long do their acts with their own music, and “I was rubbish at getting money out of people,” admits Lara wryly and somewhat unconvincingly.
Although Lara no longer strips, she feels connected to that world today through all the friendships formed in her days as a stripper and she offered to take me along one night and introduce me to her pals who are still performing. So, on behalf of my curious readers, I think I will take her up on her offer because this is a subject that merits further investigation.
You can buy a copy of “Baby Oil & Ice” direct from Lara Clifton for £25 and she will sign it for you personally. Definitely a collectors’ item. Simply email lclifton76@gmail.com
The three pictures of strippers are by Sarah Ainslie and the shot of the interior of Ye Olde Axe is by Julie Cook.
Dickens in Spitalfields
It is my great pleasure to welcome Charles Dickens as a guest writer for Spitalfields Life. On 5th April 1851, Dickens published a feature entitled “Spitalfields” in Household Words, his weekly journal. Here, to whet your appetite, is the opening of the piece written by Dickens in collaboration with his sub-editor W.H.Wills. The article will be serialised here over the coming weeks.
When Dickens came to Spitalfields, the weaving industry was in decline, unable to compete with cheaper imports and the mechanised mills of the North. Liverpool St Station had not yet been built, instead there was an Eastern Counties Rail terminus at the junction of Shoreditch High St and Commercial St, fragments of which still survive. Fascinated by the precarious ramshackle wooden constructions upon the tops of houses, used for breeding pigeons and as weavers’ workshops, Dickens and his colleague Wills entered Spitalfields from Bishopsgate, walking into Spital Sq, site of the former Priory of St Mary Spital.
Have you any distinct idea of Spitalfields, dear reader?
A general one, no doubt you have – an impression that there are certain squalid streets, lying like narrow black trenches, far below the steeples, somewhere about London – towards the East perhaps – where sallow, unshorn weavers, who have nothing to do, prowl languidly about, or lean against posts, or sit brooding on doorsteps, and occasionally assemble together in a crowd to petition Parliament or the Queen; after which there is a Drawing Room or a Court Ball, where all the great ladies wear dresses of Spitalfields manufacture; and then the weavers dine for day or two, and so relapse into prowling about the streets, leaning against the posts, and brooding on doorsteps.
If your occupation in town or country ever oblige you to travel by Eastern Counties Railway ( you would never do so, of course, unless you were obliged) you may connect with this impression, a general idea that many pigeons are kept in Spitalfields, and you may remember to have thought, as you rattled along the dirty streets, observing the pigeon-hutches and pigeon-traps on the tops of the poor dwellings, that it was a natural aspiration in the inhabitants to connect themselves with any living creatures that could get out of that and fly into the air. The smoky little bowers that you may have sometimes seen on the house-tops, among the pigeons, may have suggested to your fancy – I pay you the poor compliment of supposing it to be a vagrant fancy, like my own – abortions of the bean-stalk that led Jack to fortune: by the slender twigs of which, the Jacks of Spitalfields will never, never, climb to where the giant keeps his money.
Will you come to Spitalfields?
Turning eastward out of the most bustling part of Bishopsgate, we suddenly lose the noise that has been resounding in our ears, and fade into the great churchyard of the Priory of St Mary, Spital, otherwise “Domus Dei et Beate Mariæ, extra Bishopsgate, in the parish of St Botolph.” Its modern name is Spital Square. Cells and cloisters were, at an early date, replaced by substantial burgher houses, which, since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, have been the chief depositories of silk manufacture introduced into London, by the French Huguenots, who flew from the perfidy of Louis the Fourteenth. But much of the old quiet cloistered air still lingers in the place.
The house to which we are bound, stands at an angle with the spot where the Pulpit-cross was anciently planted; where on every Easter Monday and Tuesday, the Spital sermons were preached, in the presence of the Lord Mayor and Corporation, and children of Christ’s Hospital. We cross the many cornered “square” and enter a sort of gateway.
Along a narrow passage, up a dark stair, through a crazy door, into a room not very light, not in the least splendid; with queer corners, and quaint carvings, and massive chimney-pieces; with desks behind thin rails, with aisles between thick towers of papered-up packages, out of whose ends flash all the colours of the rainbow – where all is as quiet as a playhouse at dawn, or a church at midnight – where, in truth, there is nobody to make a noise, except one well-dressed man, one attendant porter (neither of whom seem to be doing anything particular), and one remarkably fine male cat, admiring before the fire, the ends of his silky paws – where the door, as we enter, shuts with a deep, dull, muffled sound, that is more startling than a noise – where there is less bustle than at a Quakers’ meeting, and less business going on than in a Government office – the well-dressed man threads the mazes of the piles, and desks, and cupboards, and counters, with a slow step, to greet us, and to assure us, in reply to our apology, that we have not made any mistake whatever, and that we are in the silk warehouse which we seek: a warehouse in which, we have previously been informed, by one whose word we never before doubted, that there is “turned over” an annual average of one hundred thousand pounds, of good and lawful money of Great Britain.
We may tell our informant, frankly, that, looking round upon the evidences of stagnation which present themselves, we utterly disbelieve this statement…
In the next installment, we shall meet Mr Broadelle, the proprietor of the silk warehouse and encounter the silk-buyer of Messrs Treacy & McIntyre and discover the circumstances of their business. In further installments, we shall accompany Dickens and Wills on their tour of Spitalfields to a ragged school, a weaver’s loft and a young artist’s studio.
Spital Sq (with the Spitalfields Market beyond in Lamb St) seen from the Bishopsgate end where Dickens entered Spitalfields. Although this picture was taken by C.A.Mathew in 1912, the square had altered little from when Dickens paid his visit in 1851, it is today as you see below.
Nathaniel Lee-Jones, antiques dealer
Although Nathaniel is only thirty three, he has the style of wit, gravitas and experience of a gentleman twice his age, and speaks with all the beguiling rhetoric and arcane poetry of an old-school London antiques dealer. My belief is that Nathaniel was born advanced for his years. When he told me he was the son of an antiques dealer and started out dealing from a stall in the Portobello Rd, I wondered how he would react if I suggested we have marmalade sandwiches and mugs of cocoa, in the manner of Mr Gruber and Paddington bear. But as you can see from the picture above, Nathaniel’s concerns are far more adult.
This painting is the only nude from the collection of the late Benny Hill, sold at Christies in 1991 when the contents of the comedian’s Kensington flat went until the hammer. Its provenance renders this bizarre painting on velvet, of a Mediterranean woman taking off her skirt with a provocative smirk, as a uniquely significant historical artifact. Brazenly, she invites your gaze, tantalising the viewer by playing the moment before she reveals her glory. There are many photos of the reception rooms in Benny’s flat but none show this painting, suggesting he kept her in a private place for his sole pleasure. At present, she is in pride of place at M.Goldstein, the candy coloured shop at 67 Hackney Rd that Nathaniel runs with his girlfriend Pippa Brooks – selling art, antiques and attire – and you are welcome to go round their to feast your eyes upon Benny’s Latin lady’s gorgeous endowments.
My father switched the television off whenever scenes of copulation appeared on wildlife programmes, but he always tuned in to Benny Hill’s raucous comedy shows and choked with laughter at the knobs and knockers jokes, much to my prurient adolescent embarrassment. Then, I disapproved of the shabby humour of sexual euphemism but now I have learnt to laugh at the absurdity induced by the culture of sexual repression that Benny Hill celebrates. These days, Benny Hill is dead, is rehabilitated and is big in the USA, as Nathaniel discovered last time he took a taxi from Manhattan to JFK airport and the Indian cab driver enthused “You’re English! – You like Benny Hill?” In fact, I hope Nathaniel will forgive me if I say that when he is telling an amusing story (as he always seems to be), his eyes roll, his eyebrows rise and his ironically insinuating smile lifts his rounded cheeks to reveal more than a casual resemblance to the great comedian.
Once upon a time, Nathaniel was a teenage street urchin who lived as a caretaker in his father’s business premises, Elms Leicester Painting Rooms (theatrical scene painting workshops), up an alley in Denmark St off Charing Cross Rd, next to St Giles’ church. These were the days when the strip clubs and sex cinemas were closing and young Nathaniel roamed the streets of Soho in the early morning scavenging the discarded neons and signs from sleazy clubs like Charlie Chester’s Casino and Raymond’s Revuebar, saying STRIPTEASE, FULL NUDITY and PEEPSHOW. “I supported myself for two or three years on erotic signage,” he reveals proudly, confirming his acute eye for spotting the precious things that others discard as worthless. Nathaniel cultivates an appealing levity that makes him great company and he obviously relishes the opportunities his profession offers to search through the detritus of the world. “I go to places, auctions, flea markets and car boot sales, and people are throwing out stuff – they don’t realise the charm and importance of old things that are worth more than money, small things, personal bits and pieces, and photo albums, as well as furniture, neon lights, paintings and clothes.” A sentiment you will find expressed repeatedly in different forms throughout the pages of Spitalfields Life.
Today, Nathaniel lives in a tiny flat in Waterloo with Pippa and their two sons Joe and Duke, travelling back and forth to the shop and to the Spitalfields Market, where you can find Nathaniel and his stall every Thursday. Customarily behatted, he cuts a rakish bohemian figure dressed from head to toe in carefully chosen examples of fine vintage clothing and is currently wrapped up in a long sheepskin coat. “I quickly realised that Spitalfields rather than Portobello was the place to trade and be seen,” he says with the dignified authority of a seasoned professional, explaining that there is a wider mix of customers, including City gents, here in the East End. Characteristically, Nathaniel kept the beautiful original sign “M.Goldstein” (that he uncovered on the front of the shop), as the name for his business and I never miss the opportunity to call in here to enjoy the loving displays of Nathaniel’s recent offbeat discoveries and revel in the endless repertoire of intriguing stories that comprise the colourful life of Nathaniel Lee-Jones.
Columbia Road Market 20
The market was full of life this morning on account of the milder temperatures and wider range of plants and flowers that are now available, including colourful displays of Mimosa and Lilac already in flower in pots, and bunches of Cherry blossom to celebrate the Chinese New Year. I opted for some Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) at four pots for a fiver and planted them in this old clay pot of indeterminate age that I dug out of the Thames mud at Strand on the Green, where I had the good fortune to rent a room in an eighteenth century house when I first came London as a young writer. The Snowdrops in my garden that I planted in-the-green last year are just beginning to show, so these will see me through until those outside come into flower.
With my humble Snowdrops in hand, I had the pleasure of bumping into Cynthia Grandfield, the Queen of Ryantown, deliberating over which richly coloured flowers would best complement Lulu Guinness’ Columbia Rd Bag (featuring all the Columbia Rd shops along the side) which will go on display in the shop window today. I think I shall have to go back and take a look.
