The Day I Didn’t Die
In the nineteen sixties, I lived in SW16, Streatham, Norfolk House Road. In the cosiest little flat I have ever lived in. A real little penthouse on floor three and a half. A small cold dark room with sloping roof which sometimes moved towards your head aggressively. I didn’t mind about the room because I spent all my time next door, in my kitchenette, which though small, was very airy and had a good light coming from a window which gave on a cheerful street from which I could see some beautiful coquettish neighbours. My attic flat was obviously the only one on my floor, and the two flats on floor three were ten steps down. A Jamaican man lived in one of them.
Call me Thamson, he told me when I first met him. He was a fitter and earned good money, but he gambled, and regularly borrowed from me.
I was teaching at the Streatham Modern, about a mile from Norfolk House Road, was earning good money too, and felt very comfortable. I rented a radio from Mr Robinson (who rented a million more to the rest of the country), I went to the cinema in Streatham, at the Astoria, or Tooting Bec where there was a classic cinema house showing all the films I had read about before I left Mauritius, and always wanted to see, including most of Ingmar Bergman’s. And the theatre was thriving with new blood, offering Brendan Behan, whose Hostage was delighting and offending audiences equally, Shelagh Delaney with A Taste of Honey etc… I had two women in my life_ safety in numbers! What more did a man need?
As Thompson often worked nights, and would come back hungry we had an arrangement whereby he could go into my kitchen, make himself coffee and eat whatever was left over. I never locked my kitchen door.
My bedroom was very cold, and with me spending most of my time in the kitchen, I only heated it before going to bed. My landlord had provided me with a small gas heater. The supply to this and to my gas cooker was metered, and you had to feed the box with shilling coins. On cold nights, I would get the heater in the bedroom going before going to sleep, by inserting one shilling, which would provide about two hours’ heating. I had a good strategy for not having to get up from under my warm blankets to switch it off: when the meter ran out of money, the supply stopped. Naturally.
I am happy that Thompson was a bit of a fibber. When I lent him ten shillings or a pound, he usually repaid me on Saturday, as he got paid on Friday. It happened that he sometimes repaid in dribs and drabs, and at one point he owed me two shillings. I cornered him one morning, and asked if he had forgotten about that. He grinned at me and said that last night when he came in well after midnight, he was making coffee in my kitchen when the gas ran out, and he had put three shillings in the slot.
Had he done that, I would have been gassed, because my heater would have gone off at eleven, and as the gas came back after Thompson’s alleged replenishing of the meter, the supply would have restarted and with no more flame, to light it, I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.
Reluctantly I reviewed the arrangement, and began locking my kitchen.
