NOMADS IN LONDON.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 209, 3 September 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

NOMADS IN LONDON.

A COLONIAL'S MANSIONS. BOOMING IN BLOOMSBURY. (By H.H.) During my first six months in London I had a different dwelling for every full moon. Changing your abode in London, even though you move only half a mile, provides you with a new world of sights, eounds, types of people and modes of thought, for the greatest city in the world is more than one city. It is a 6uceession of towns strung together by tram, bus, and tube services. Each centre, whether it be West Ham or Weet Kensington, has its main street, its bright spots and its dull spots, and the colonial is surprised to find that the inhabitants of each district live an almost watertight existence and seldom hop over into the neighbouring group. Michael, and I, however, were determined that if we did not see London steadily we would at least see it whole. Our first abode was in an Italian cafe in Great Windmill Street, Soho. Englishmen other than us there were none, the three rickety floors being occupied by two Frenchmen (one a head waiter, and one a gigolo), a Cyprian, a negro boxer who 10 years ago had been worldfamous, but was now washing dishes for a meal and bed, two Greeks, a wealthy Argentinian, and Nina, the dancing girl from Belgrade. The cafe wae run by one, Professor Tiger Delmonte, ex-welter-weight of Italy. He was conversant in six languages and I really believe that had a Laplander, a Hottentot and an American strolled in together he could have said, "Nice —morning—have—a— CU p —of—coffee" to them all, and been understood. In Bohemia. After a month in the Windmill cafe •vre migrated to Chelsea, and dwelt for a while in a semi-eubterranean studio that could not have a more eccentric shape had it been designed by a vorticist and built by a lunatic. It had an emerald green door, a concrete floor (on which we slept) and acres of window. A railway line grazed the rear wall, and Epstein, who once occupied this studio, was in love with the place because the noise of ehunting wagons and escaping steam kept him awake at night and compelled him to get up and work. Funds getting low, we left Chelsea and moved back east to Theobald's Road, Holborn, the most unlovely street in Central London. For three weeks we lived in a tremendous room, with a convex ceiling, a gas oven, and a view of a German pork butchery across the tramlines. When "we fried saueages on the debilitated gas stove everything looked blue. Then came Bohemia once again in the shape of a studio in Fitzroy Street, once the hub of London's art life, but now only a shadow of what it was in the days of Whistler and Constable. Nowadays you can wander up and down Fitzroy Street from dawn till dark and never see an orangecoloured shirt or a black beard. In long, bsrn-like rooma where once the easel stood, the pants-pressing machine is supreme. People may tell you that studio life is the perfection of existence. Don't you believe them. It is a. far, far better thing living in a furnished room, providing your landlady has a kind heart and knows a clean sheet when she sees one. I've tried them both and have sworn off. studios.

Bloomsbury Lodgings. "It was," declares Arnold a novel, "one of those resorts in which New Zealand visitors to London stay," and goes on tq describe a respectable but unfashionable, efficient but dull hotel in Bloomsbury. All New Zealandera in London, however, do not spend their days in demode hotels. For instance, the nearest my companions and I ever attained to staying at any hotel at all was a brief few days in the Y.M.C.A. hostel. Then, after sampling life in cafe and studio for some months, I ultimately came to rest in one of Blocmsbury's "superior rooms for single men." When, in return for a week's rent of ten shillinge, the landlady handed over a duplicate key to the front door and I took possession of the third floor front in the name of my two weary and travel-tired euitcases, the room had that discouraging' un-lived-in appearance. After a conference with Mrs. M — I was permitted to raze from the walls the inevitable "Stag At Eve," and "Kiss Me, Hardy." The room was also disencumbered of a soulless marble-top washstand affair and a fretworked atrocity over the mantel. A couple of weeks later, when the good lady had decided (either rightly or wrongly) that I was neither a lunatic nor a bird of passage, she busied hersejf with some flowered chintzes and a more colourful but less depreseing bedspread. These, with the addition of a few specimens of the new commercial art which friend Michael affixed to the walls, gave the room a comparatively cosy appearance.

There were, of course, disadvantages. One penny-in-the-slot gas meter had to suffice for three separate rooms. This meant that on cold nights when all three roomers happened to be lying abed reading, the light would begin to flicker, and then commenced a silent argument as to who should forsake his (or her) warm blankets to drop a copper in the meter on the stair landing. At the last second, three doors would simultaneously open, revealing three roomers in night attire, clutching three humble pennies. A Varied Crowd. It is. only in retrospect that I realise what a gorgeous crowd of brigands had their being in 58, Huntley Street, W.C.I. Allow me to present to you Mr. Austen, chauffeur to a famous actor, Nina, the dancer from Belgrade, who yearned to get a chance at Elstree; M , the commercial artist (preposterous phrase, that—as if all artists are not more or less commercial), who dreamed of a world-shaking new slogan for an antiseptic mouth-wash; and finally "Pierre." This man, a Cambridge graduate, wrote romantic novelettes about people and places that never were on sea ,or land. He used to drown his contempt for himself by periodical drinking bouts, of several days duration. Then, funds getting low, he would telephone his stenographer and dictate at a sitting some fabulous tale of arch-plotters noblemen disguised as dish-washers, and dish-washers posing as noblemen, calculated to wring the hearts of sheltered souls condemned to life-long anonymity. When time time came for my return to New Zealand I was in a way sorry to leave Bloomsbury. Looking back it now seems like something one has only read about. Day by day one forgets more and more, like an "insubstantial pageant fadqd," and this. article is the residue of the pleasant memories left behind.