Past Places

Mews Flat, London. Semi-deserted Hostel, Belle-Isle, France. Environmentally “correct” B & B, Vermont. Converted Castle, Vallo de Nera, Italy. Hillside room, Molyvos, Greece. Small apartment, Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Hotel room, Ceuta, Morocco.

I can no longer travel further than Oakland from my Berkeley home, and even within Oakland and Berkeley I frequent fewer than half a dozen places.

So I will, alas, never revisit the many stations where Train LMB paused in the past.

But I now can be there in memory via the imperfect instrument that what’s left of my mind has become.

Sometimes my memory starts up involuntarily while doing, or recovering from doing, exercises (leg lifts) that doctors and other health professionals have advised me to do.

Can’t say why the mews flat in London came to mind first. It was two small rooms above a converted horse and carriage garage in a fashionable neighborhood. The garage was rented to someone I never met who announced their presence daily by noisily opening and closing the garage doors beneath us. Then starting a car motor whose noxious fumes penetrated upward.

Across the street from the eight mews flats around the cobblestone courtyard where hooves once clattered was “the local.” A pub (public house) where “licensed” alcoholic liquids were sold. And homemade food was served.

I was one of the first in the pub every morning. It had a roaring fireplace; any such source of creature comfort after the deadly privations of the World War Two years, very fresh in the collective memory, was welcome.

In London I remember only Winter. My young artistic/literary community was composed almost entirely of people from the British Isles, provisioned in tweed garments and waterproof shoes. The wartime mantra of “mustn’t grumble” was still ingrained against shortages of food and fuel.

Gas and electricity were purchased in each housing unit. The art of staying alive required a constant supply of coins - “thrupenny bits” - to feed the household utility meters.

If you didn’t “feed” them, the hot water in your shower would be immediately cut off. Or your tea kettle wouldn’t boil.

Another way of staying warm was to stay in bed, under thick quilts and/or next to the body, or bodies, of humans. I had found by accident, such a human who had body, quilts, and bed.

Moreover the bed wasn’t just a bed. It was “the” bed, featured in the 1954 French film “The Bed. How did a large prop bed make it “across the pond” from Paris to London? My bedmate told me it arrived as part of a settlement between French and British film production companies. She was a typist at such a company.

She could have been much more, but in those years “girls” were restricted to the lowest rung on the jobs ladder. My “girl” had highly ranked degrees in literature from prestigious Oxbridge universities. (She introduced me to Thackeray and Yeats and Jane Austin.) Her pay was ludicrously low, however. So she was paid with a bed.

As part of the deal she had done what she had to do, which was an implicit part of such arrangements. Share the bed in late afternoons with a married superior.

Word got around about the bed. And about the superior. Nobody shamed her or blamed her. Or him. That’s just the way things were.

So our crowd descended on the mews flat, minus “superiors,” armed with the ultimate privilege, never talked about. We were alive!

To drink, to smoke (mostly cigarettes, still) to talk about politics. Anarchists, trotskyites, Marxist-Leninists, Third World Liberationists, sex and gender activists, animal rights stalwarts, teased and taunted constantly before laughing and roaring (have you ever heard an Englishman bellow?) off into the night.

Parties in our little flat couldn’t get too loud or run too late, however, because the mews neighbors were all older than us. They’d been through the war, they had lost friends, neighbors, close relatives , some just a few miles from Belgravia where we now lived They seemed to have high tolerance for noisy, boozy youngsters.

But they had their limits, and we knew what they were. So at a certain hour we stumbled across the street to the local for a few more smoky, inebriated hours.

I’ve lost touch with everyone from that crowd. Though I recently did find one retired professor of physics and exchanged e-mails with him. He’s still married to the same woman he was with at mews flat time. Now they’re grandparents many times over.

Sorry, George Bernard Shaw, youth is not, in my experience , always wasted on the young. Mine wasn’t.

My mews flat and the time it brings to mind proves that to me. And all the things and people I experienced in the other places I mention in paragraph one above, and in so many other places, too , prove it, too!

(Larry Bensky welcomes hearing from resders. Lbensky@igc.org.)