A Hand-Carved Aston

I.

Could it be that we have children, utterly selfishly you might say, out of a subconscious longing for our own lost childhood? When, as adults, we cautiously essay parenthood, clumsy, sly, awkward and ad hoc, do we not reference all we do, our few mild successes and many guilty, shame-faced defeats, against all our stored up memories, happy and sad? Watching my own three steadily grow, my thoughts have been bending this way of late. Our youngest is at an age where she picks her way balletically on the joins in the pavement on jaunty, happy treks back home from school with her mother, races against the door closer to the top of our creaky, narrow wood stairs, and then on long, lazy, empty, holiday afternoons, careless of her older siblings, in perfect self-sufficiency, occupies herself in a frenzy of “making.” A current fad is “woolly dollies,” dear, delicate little creatures of brightly coloured wool making shocks of green, orange and yellow hair atop heads of finely painted beads, bodies of pipe cleaners wound round tight with more wool, outstretched arms, and finished with pretty skirts like gossamer overlapping pansy petals. Wooden spoons have pert little faces and scraggly wool hair. Acrylic paints are squeezed out of tubes on makeshift palettes, then thickly brushed on miniature canvases. Painted figures, a black cat with egg carton ears and an emerald green crocodile, are fashioned with cloth dipped in white plaster, like the plaster which once set my forearm as an overly energetic little boy, it having been bent most emphatically, outwards in a right angle, after a fall from my grandmother’s back steps. A greenstick break, the doctors called it. I can feel even now the prickly blue tartan mohair rug my mother covered it with in the back of our big old Ford on the way to the hospital, just to save me the sight of it, tears stinging my cheeks all the long way there, scratchy like the bath towel bigger than me she padded our skinny nut-brown limbs dry with at the end of each Summer day, before tucking us up under smooth and luxuriant pink lambswool blankets on our ply-sided beds, three in a row, over white cotton sheets, or pastel-striped flannelette in winter.


On rainy days our mother, who frugally made all our clothes, as a hundred worn family photo snaps faithfully attest, three lots of everything cut out from the same inexpensive fabric roll-ends, then a pretty, slim-waisted, puffy-sleeved dress for baby sis, got us productively working on balsa wood airplanes and Meccano and fleets of plastic American warships and crystal radio sets and clay modelling and “Knitting Nancy” projects (placemats, I remember) with wooden cotton reels nailed at one end, for when the elegant, painted, long skirted turned original was finally lost or broken. We craved this attentiveness from her, drank it in, and how unstintingly she gave of it! It was her artistic side, not inconsiderable, which expressed itself thus, so abundantly in this fashion with her diligently practical parenting. She painted in watercolours, landscapes of raw bushland like the dry scrubby places she conjured for us in stories of growing up on farms out West. Rudimentary cottages with rusty tin roofs and rainwater tanks were set among rough open farm buildings and scraps of trees. This might have been my grandfather’s rundown chicken farm, made actual for me by the many rusty old hand-wrought tools still bundled in my grandmother’s dark, carless garage. Mother told us how, late at night on Christmas Eve, he startled them in their beds by rolling bricks down the corrugated iron roof, in mimicry of Santa’s fallen toy sack. (Like eagerly-awaited trunks of books, presents of doll’s house toys for Mum and Ena and Auntie May came all the way out West from Sydney by slow train, but seldom arrived whole and undamaged.) Flat, open, washed-out painterly horizons were the vast fenceless spaces where as a little girl she brought home the cows at the end of each day, so far she didn’t know which way, except that running at them turned the sullen cows for home, and she followed. She made us feel that little bit special, and there was the pressure of it always at our back, this sense of being different and apart. I once modelled in Plaster of Paris for a school project, with generous input from my (it must be) highly competitive mother. A 3D map of Australia on a wooden stand was complete with raised Kimberleys and Great Dividing Range and separately coloured states and capital territories. It was beautiful and intricate. They hardly knew what hit them in the Second Class at sleepy suburban Lane Cove West Primary.


Steps to school some mornings get mentally toted up: 504 to the pedestrian crossing on Houndsditch (...wine bottles in a palette... a famous French automobile...); 585 the final score at Bevis Marks, our point of fleetingly sad, daily separation. We are together with our two very unruly small dogs, on short leads. They flick about on the grey pavement, tugging and straining this way and that on their short leather leads, ungovernable, like two kites on a blustery day. They scatter headscarved undersized Muslim women and their timid children like flocks of startled pigeons. My daughter gathers up school pals along our route, all girls of course, plucky and proud in their final year, veterans each of half a dozen years of a little local primary school a lot like my own. She calls out from across the street, each name in turn: “Rachel,” “Sophie,” “Tyana,” “Norhan.” They call back in turn. There is laughter, and wordplay, and for me the intense pleasure of being the disinterested observer of such precious, boundless high spirits. Sometimes she encircles my waist with her arms and gives me a hug. Such unselfconscious public display of affection we both know has all too short a date. I watch her take the crossing and briskly walk to the school gate. She has my Mum’s straight, flat back, and slightly awkward, tin soldier way of walking. I wait for a little wave before turning back for home with the dogs. Her trust and love for each of us is unqualified, unbounded. She smiles her accustomed farewell from across the street. She has poured every fibre of her tender young life into each of us, and it seems sometimes we hardly even know. Everything just now is opening, unfurling, and she can barely contain her excitement at the endless possibilities before her. May I count myself worthy of such gifts of love? Who can say?


By contrast, in my own bushy fringe of suburban Sydney, where snakes, possums and heavy lumbering lizards come up to our backyards from the dark creek valleys, paths for my young, bare, summer-toughened feet are worn and winding soil, carved from couch grass that pricks at soft skin and is everywhere snared with tiny round, bothersome bindy-eyes. Summer stretches before us like a dizzying dream, careless, schoolless, seemingly never-ending. Ramrod–straight cement paths take me away from limitless bushland and empty lots for playing in toward shops and school and church; toward damp, misty playing fields in winter or, in flipside summer, tennis courts and crowded municipal swimming pool. These are marked out with the same set of curious hand tools my father keeps on a tool-bench in a garden shed, for I recognise his bent round back, a plumper and older version of my own, leaning over little paths he has laid out so carefully in similar fashion, between rows of tomatoes and cabbages and leathery-skinned flat pumpkins. He is never so happy as when concentrating on these practical trades. He is a house builder turned chartered accountant, and in some mild confliction of the heart always slightly mourning his missed vocation. Mother leads us on “improving” excursions through narrow winding paths of archetypal Sydney bush, in hissing and crackling midsummer heat, shadowing ghosts of tribes of naked Aborigines over timeless landscapes of jutting black sandstone mounds, through groves of sinuous, wilting, loose-skinned gum trees. We carry unlined exercise books and pencils, for careful pressing, preserving and superscription of delicate wildflowers: Banksia, Wattle, Bottlebrush and a dozen varieties of Eucalyptus.


Coming to the end of my own Elysian, Sydney-suburban, primary school years, we troupe of similarly boisterous, semi-delinquent, frequently brattish boys, always together in parks and playgrounds and so many rich, hidden places, known only to ourselves, were by now grown weary of each others’ company, and its constraints, and longing for mental and physical escape. I would soon be leaving the neighbourhood altogether, and starting at a boys’ independent school, in this respect alone among all my classmates in this predominantly working class suburb. Old school photographs in black and white are occasionally prised from the drawer, one of “KIN. [for kindergarten] 1959,” ranked with adorable, plump-faced poppets with mops of sun-bleached hair and (for the girls) plentiful bows, holding up the chalkboard to the camera. I am easily identifiable in the back row, but mysterious now even to my adult self. The other is of the very same children, now a tad more worldly and knowing and self-possessed (“4th 1963”). Each picture is crowded with faces whose features and character are simply etched and wrought in my memory forever. This little Sydney suburban primary school gave me a palette of colours and personality types to serve me all my life. The girls are of course all utterly fascinating to us, and objects of feigned insouciance. Some of them are clever, always getting the best grades. One, Helen, slim and vivacious, is writing a novel. They make us boys feel dull and resentful. There are crushes, to be sure, and stirrings of pre-sexual interest, like the time I caught sight of pretty Sally’s white pants in the midst of rehearsals for the end of school play, me lying on the stage looking up, next to the curtain, she stepping right across me in her knee length pleated blue skirt. It was like a gift. When Johnny D., my best friend, who walked every day to school with me since kindergarten, takes up with Helen, and walks together with her to school in the mornings, instead of me, it is like a betrayal. I am devastated. I can hardly understand it. We take bets, on who will be married soonest, and who hold out longest. I still don’t know who won.


On the return journey from my youngest’s school one morning I round a corner and surprise M., my friend, in a moment of great discomfiture. One of his little ones has just lost a deciduous tooth. “He can’t find it in the snow,” his father explains, bravely laughing out loud. The dear little fellow is distraught, wailing uncontrollably. Amid this consternation, office workers are hastening past in thick coats. “The tooth fairy will still come, just the same,” I want to say. But before I can they hurry forward, out of range, a child caught in each of his two giant hands. After all, they are late for school. Little spots of blood stain the fresh snow at my feet. I am grateful my daughter is spared this vignette. Looking down, I can barely move from this place. I am left with the image of my friend’s long big face, visibly contorted by pain, fighting back tears as much for himself now and, being suddenly bereaved, for his cruel, unfathomable fate.

What’s nice, exactly, about Spitalfields? (Or all the pools I ever swam in.)

My friend and near neighbour, whose unfailingly fresh, open and upbeat personality feels sometimes a rebuke in contrast to my more lugubrious own, reckoned recently in conversation how he gets a thrill living and working here in Spitalfields. You know the sort of thing: cool, edgy, stuffed with celebrities. We were sat in his elegant house (long dining table; brightly-lit gallery space; contemporary art draped on white, fully-panelled walls; marble slip fireplace; sparky, garrulous wife hovering over) at one of those every-day dinner parties where you're meant to pretend that having someone internationally-famous, in telly or films or whatever, sitting opposite, is just the most normal thing in the world.

I am not so sure. About Spitalfields I mean. We are recently returned from the French countryside, where we keep a holiday home. We spent the whole of August there, in the wilds of the Aveyron: "congee annuelle," as they have it in the boarded-up store windows, then reprised the experience for one week only in autumn half-term. My girls were dizzy with thoughts of more-or-less non-stop horse riding. My son, now in a sort of mid-teen torpor, was intent on relaxation. My wife and I were hoping for some awesome restaurant meals. What struck me most was the tranquillity of the place, at night, where only the call of a distant great grey owl might tug at the velvety silence. Out in the dark, a slender crescent moon hung over our little, lit-up gingerbread house, with constellations of stars and galaxies in naked profusion. Our children would be settling upstairs in bed with books and story tapes as I take in the evening air, lamplight glowing through odd, non-matching, old-fashioned dormer casements. My habit is always to count out five "shooters" before retiring to bed: meteors or space debris, up there with the winking planes and slow-moving satellites, sometimes in showers (the Perseids in summer), colliding with our atmosphere and tracing brightly-coloured arcs across the sky. A faint drone trails after the impossibly high, vanishing planes, heading always either South, or West to America, every one. Later, curled in the plank-walled, oaken, pitch-dark downstairs room, with its wormy, sculpted cherrywood armoire craning over, my wife and I slept right through to the mornings, in perfect gratitude and astonishment at this unexpected, unbidden, heaven-sent peace. Back here in London we strive to shut out ubiquitous, polluting electric light. Stars are but a memory. Sirens wail, girls shriek and cackle, boozy Brick Lane revellers sing till their lungs are fit to burst. Crashing and clashing restaurant deliverymen work through the night. No-one imagines there are actually people living in these buildings among the shops and businesses. So at best we sleep fitfully, if at all.

Getting home late on Sunday night, we pulled up to find a young woman trawling through our rubbish, right outside our door. This was indeed curious. We asked politely if she was okay. Her arms were buried deep in bags of filthy, greasy coffee house waste. She seemed respectable, well-dressed, together. She grunted, sullen-eyed, then shuffled off. There was no explaining this apparition.

This was but a curtain-raiser. There was a lot going on back here in England. For starters, our cat had gone missing, and not for the first time. We have three cats in our upstairs flat and this summer, flicking across the rooftops, making a staircase of the building being erected at the opposite end of our terrace, they took turns at getting themselves lost, and driving my wife crazy with worry. It is a brand new building replacing a nearly new one, and Igor, its builder, though unquestionably nice, would never take steps to prevent it from harbouring our pets. This time it is Ginny, named by my kids for Ginny Weasley, a street-smart undersized female, freakishly ginger, mother to Rufus, who upon questioning of friends and neighbours infuriatingly had left us no clue as to her whereabouts.

Also, fairly dramatically it must be said, during our absence, a hoax letter was circulated in the neighbourhood, kind of funny and witty, certainly hurtful, about a local celebrity with a penchant for swimming pools. It seems that she is putting one in her own place, down in the cellar, which would be all fine and good, except that she had to demolish a little, late Victorian range of buildings to do it, then neglected to tell the authorities or anyone else about it. Do I mind? Not especially. I grew up in a suburb of Sydney where it was considered somewhat eccentric not to have a pool. Only I did absolutely mind about the loss of an old building I admired and wanted conserved. I even wrote to object at the time (I was one of very few), which is the sort of thing you can do in a democracy, or so they say. Many were called upon to write letters of support after the first application fell, and sadly complied. Did these people look at the plans? I rather doubt it. Or it may be that if it's not Georgian, no-one much cares. Not for the first time, I find myself running against the grain of popular opinion. This makes me sad. Afterwards it seemed to go through without a challenge. But all that is history now and nothing anyone says or does can bring the building back.

Then, late in the evening on about my second day back, the buzzer is pressed for the outside door. It is Marion and Daniela, my Slovakian builder friend and his partner. Daniela is distraught. Marion has a kind of weary, defeated look. They returned home that night to their newly rented flat to find all their possessions – clothes, furniture, passports, everything – out in the street. The locks were changed. This was a disaster I knew at once I had indirectly contributed to. I had found the flat for Marion, a cheap council flat in Whitechapel, a filthy tip of a place sub-let from the drug-addled brother-in-law of Bashar, my contact in the Bangladeshi East End, and afterwards decorated and made liveable by Marion's own skilful hands. I had brokered the deal. But Marion had made it too liveable, indeed too beautiful it would seem, for now the wastrel brother-in-law wanted it back, and was not disposed to wait the agreed six months.

My wife and I wander the streets calling out for our lost cat. There is just no sign of her. As I pace the streets I begin to wonder whether some of my friends are avoiding me. Are we dropping off drinks party guest lists? Is it possible, or am I being paranoid? One or two ask me whether I wrote the letter, even hinting they believed I did. I tell Bashar about how my friends were slung out of their flat. He first claimed to know nothing of it, then at last with screwed up, bitter face said that it was a good thing. We trade insults. I call him a thief (there is the £600 of rent needing to be repaid). For the first time ever I notice our different skin colours: his dark, sub-continental chocolaty brown in contrast to my mildly-tanned Anglo white. This is not a good situation. One afternoon my wife and I ask a familiar rough-sleeper by the cash-point about our missing Ginny. He says he saw a small ginger cat by Brick Lane not half an hour before. We walk along the pavement briskly, me several car lengths ahead of my wife. At the end of Princelet Street, where the Halal grocers have their pallet lifts and open-shuttered storerooms, I pull up abruptly, and turn to caution my wife. Stretched out in the gutter is a small ginger cat, struck by a car, dead, one eye facing skywards bulging out of its socket. It is a young cat, not much more than a kitten, probably loved by someone, and soon to be much missed, but not our Ginny.

One Saturday morning two uniformed police come to my door and question me about the hoax letter. It is a warm day, we are just setting up for business, and sunlight reflected off the great steel-and-glass behemoth opposite floods into our coffee house. One asks questions, the other takes handwritten notes. They want to know whether I knew of the letter and, if so, how. I explained I was in France at the time, but someone had collected it with my other mail. They ask to see this person but I answer no, they are not here. This is all slightly surreal. They ask what I think of the letter, whether I still have it. I say yes, I do still have it, and think it is quite funny. "Don't you?" I ask the policeman and policewoman. Then I say: "But surely this is not a police matter. And anyway, none of this is untrue." They mutter something about fighting racism and I find myself suddenly very perplexed. I begin to sense some reticence, even embarrassment, in their manner. I tell them I did not write the letter and couldn't think who did. To my knowledge, I am the only person questioned by police on this matter.

I ask Bashar what has become of the missing rent money. His response is wordless, but highly articulate: he pinches thumb and forefinger together and holds them to his lips. This drug habit is not cheap. Apparently his brother-in-law is hard, some kind of gang leader. I decide to pay him a visit, though not without a certain trepidation. I suppose I fondly imagined he may be disposed to want to redeem himself, if I gave him the chance. Doesn't everyone? His place, Marion's place that was, a ground floor pad in a sprawling sixties Council estate, was easy to find. A flush white door had a security spy glass in the centre, its sole feature. A scraggly shrub stood in the narrow kitchen window. For some time there was no reply to my knocking. At last I heard "Who is it?" from inside. I say: "I'm from Bashar." This seems to work. A lithe, tall, muscular man, naked from the waist, opened the door to me. I told him who I am. I recounted the story of my friends' betrayal. "They squatted my flat," he spits in reply. I say I want the money repaid, otherwise I get him evicted for sub-letting. He says he knows my gaff, my place, my car. I say in that case I will get the police. "Do you think I'm afraid of the police? I've been in gaol plenty of times before this." I try a different tack. I say he can pay back the money slowly, £50 a week. I tell him I'm asking politely. He stands and looks at me narrowly. "Go f*** yourself," he finally says, before slamming the door.

It wasn't long before I realised I would need to repay the lost rent money myself. It's a penance for interfering, for getting involved, for not minding my own business. But it's not so bad. I am once more talking and laughing with Bashar, just like in the old days. I have not yet been taken in by the police, my car has not been trashed and the brother-in-law is not skulking about my place. One day, sipping lemon tea at one of the outside tables before the customary walk to school with my daughter, I recognise the girl with the bike, the one that time with her arms deep in our rubbish. With some annoyance I stop her and challenge her to explain. I hint at identity theft and other dark motives for her behaviour. But it is unworthy of me to harbour such thoughts. She turns out to be an utter ingenue, wholly innocent, and was only hoping that evening to find one of our cakes sunk in all that dire waste.

Oh yes, and Ginny is back. We asked one of the beggars, the one who says he wants eight hundred pounds to get to Barbados, and apparently he saw Ginny in that supermarket lock-up. He asked a couple of girls in the street to bring her back to us. She must have climbed back up through that half-finished building and got in the window. Early next morning I came downstairs to find her curled up asleep on the tapestry-coated armchair in the corner of the sitting room, bathed in insistent, slanting light, indifferent, heedless, just like nothing ever happened. I couldn't believe my eyes. That damned cat! I have to admit I like her style.

As I Live, I Loved that Man

On the afternoon of 27th January 2009, my birthday, John Updike, celebrated American writer of novels and short stories, died aged seventy-six.

It had already been a momentous day, even without this lightning bolt. The previous night was spent, after close of business, knocking out the wall which separated our coffee house from its expansion into next door, and lifting and fixing in its place a panelled and carved wood arch. This was the climax of a project begun four years earlier - exactly, to the day - to dig out a new cellar for a new restaurant kitchen, to underpin all round, and to fit out new dining areas across the ground and first floors. It was the culmination of all our hopes and dreams for I don’t know how long. It was a great occasion, and I felt ecstatic. I was walking on air, kind of like after the birth of my first child. That all this should be happening on my birthday was a mixture of sly contrivance and pure serendipity.

Pilasters, cornicing and boxing-in came next. Rubbish was hauled out to the pavement, then slung in the back of the car. We sat at one of the tables to eat a feast of my wife’s curry half way through. Dark oak stain was applied to match up colours. Skirting boards were fashioned from old church prayer book racks and fixed to the walls. At three a.m., all work done, with the trusty family estate weighed down almost to the floor, I found myself cautiously driving my two Slovakians back home through empty streets to rented accommodation in Golders Green.

In the morning, opening as usual, I watched staff and regular customers alike do theatrical double-takes at the dramatically enlarged space, as they entered by the twin doors. I felt blissfully happy. For me, in my head, though much work remained in kitchen-fitting and upstairs dining areas, this thing which had come to seem my lifework was basically done, my restaurant finished. The rest was mere detail. (I might even earn some proper money with it someday.)

It was early that evening I heard from my sister-in-law of Updike’s passing. This was hard news, and unexpected (all alike were surprised at the rapid onset of this savage illness). It caught me in a reflective frame of mind. I had been reading this man for slightly more than thirty years, and felt I knew him as a friend. I had spent most of my adult life in his literary company, snapping up each new autumn offering and greedily devouring its aesthetic pleasures, watching the surprising twists and turns of his creative intelligence. He never disappointed. There was always something fresh, vivid, abruptly true from this restlessly inventive source. Selfishly I mourned a future with no new Updike novels. I was devastated. I had grown with him, and now a chunk of me was gone.

It was a certain Associate Professor of English, University of Sydney, pedagogue of my Victorian Novel Option (final year English Lit, summer of ’78), who got me into Updike. This was in the cool, shadowy corner of our Anglo-Australian stone quad which abutted Traditional and Modern Philosophy on one side, Modern History on the other, above the solitary jacaranda craning over our sun-bathed, cropped lawn. She had a fat hardback edition of Rabbit Redux on her shelves, and recommended I read it. I had been scouring the shelves of “Stack,” our copper-coated concrete reference library and study digs, for an armful of longed-for demob holiday reading: Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Ernest Hemingway, Mary McCarthy, William Styron, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov... I was very American centric at that time. But it was only John Updike who properly did it for me.

I had been reading Ulysses you see, Joyce’s modern epic of an ordinary man’s journey through everyday Dublin. The Rabbit novel sequence seemed to be doing the same for that poor sop Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom: picking out in detail his motivation and plentiful urges; making urgently real in all his descriptions the bright surface texture of our world; injecting celestial poetry into the dull life of a middle American. I liked how these books tracked contemporary America, “ensnaring time” in Updike’s own phrase (too American, of course, for many tastes). It began to take the form of epic, with updates every decade I would eagerly await. I read all the novels, short stories, even collections of criticism: such was my enthusiasm for this writer. His style was elegant, easy, almost offhand, in that wonderfully self-confident American manner. To love Updike was to love America, and I never had a problem with this.

To further his range and skill he assayed new settings, periods, voices. He seemed at times a writer almost drunk with ambition and his own skilfulness. One novel-sequence soliloquized a much-garlanded, famously-blocked Jewish American author (Bech). It was hilarious. We were taken inside the head of a terrorist, never before so convincingly. We journeyed to an imaginary African state in the midst of a coup, to the sultry sex-soaked hinterland of Brazil, to the ancient Danish kingdom of Hamlet’s forbears, to a future cauterized by nuclear war and, most effectively, again and again, drawing deep from the wellsprings of his own origins, to rural and small-town America, which came to life with such sureness and tender feeling at his touch.

About sex he wrote plainly and clearly, and with customary precision. He didn’t hold back: and why should he? He treated us readers as the responsible grown-ups we clearly would wish to be.

I once saw him, in early 1980 at the ICA in The Mall. I had only lately arrived in England was busy supping on its many cultural riches. He gave a talk on the subject of his new novel, and afterward took questions. I was enraptured, in that embarrassing literary groupie way. One young fellow spoke for me when he said he’d probably read his every published word.

I have been reading his last book of poems, Endpoint, with its mournful, valedictory tone, and many presentiments of death. If a writer’s purpose is intimacy with his reader, then this gets very close indeed. Some lines just leap out at you, and take your breath:

I drank up women’s tears and spat them out
as 10-point Janson, Roman and ital.

Every artist refashions the raw material of his own life, however obscurely, to make his art; none more so than Updike in our time. I wonder if other readers, like me, sometimes find his work almost too unbearably, painfully true. A last, posthumous collection begins with a story, "Morocco," describing a family holiday taken in 1969 and written from the perspective of a decade later. It is clearly autobiographical, notwithstanding the publisher’s disclaimer on the rights page. The holiday is a kind of prolonged nightmare, as only family holidays can sometimes be. The young American parents and four small children are beset by a bewildering series of misadventures, yet at the end are bound, or “molded,” more close than ever before. This is all the more poignant for the subsequent betrayal and divorce which the author himself has made a matter of record.

My bookshelves hold pretty much all the published works of James Joyce, Patrick White, Charles Dickens and certain favoured others. I recently noticed that my Updike collection lacked only, with perhaps one or two others, his first book of poems: The Carpentered Hen or, as it was renamed for the UK, Hoping for a Hoopoe, first published 1959. This book promised a contrasting lightness of tone, and sense of unfolding promise. I went on the internet and found a copy: first edition ex-reference library in hardcover and in good condition, three or four pounds. It duly arrived in the post neatly parcelled in bubble wrap. Enclosed was the Newcastle bookseller’s elegant, tasteful comp slip. The dust jacket bore a restrained fifties design. Inside the front cover was glued the librarian’s cornflower-blue lending grid showing just three neatly-stamped borrowings, all shortly after the book’s release in 1959.

Who were these three inquisitive readers of this unknown, youthful new writer’s book of light verse? Neighbours of mine, as it would seem, for the black-ink library stamp declared: Central Library, Bancroft Road, Stepney E1. This book, in the half-century span of its author’s great and eventful writing life, had come home.

Out on a Limb with Mr Racheed

Amidst the little knot of fashionably-restored, newly gentrified panelled houses that huddle so discomforted alongside throbbing Brick Lane, one curious survivor stands out in lonely isolation, a boarded-up ruin. In place of elaborate door-cases, drawing rooms lit with Dutch chandeliers, and mouldings picked out in heritage colours, here are light wells piled with careless litter, peeling stucco and broken window panes hinting at darkened, rotting interiors unchanged for generations. A thick-trunked buddleia springs from half-way up its crumbling, open-jointed brickwork at the rear, complete with nesting blackbirds. Inside, it is quite untouched. Here, in this dark, glamorous place, three hundred years or more of history are subdued and silently, wonderfully ensnared. It is the last authentic, un-restored, early Georgian house in Spitalfields.

Who is the legal owner of this precious flawed gem, this picturesque ruin, this treasure, these last thirty-five years or so? It is Mr Racheed, local businessman, wholesale grocer and scion of the local Bangladeshi community.

As basket-cases go, it is a much sought-after wreck. At a recent meeting of the local amenity society, voices were raised in protest at the continued neglect of this historic building. "A disgrace," it was murmured huffily all around the room. "Source of vermin," people muttered. This was the sound of gentrification in full throat. Here were people with one eye cocked on the estate agent's window, intent on making the world, or their little corner of it, after their own image. Mr Racheed and his tumbledown house didn't fit the bill. They were not about to let the matter rest. Was this entirely disinterested? Or did one or two among them covet Mr Racheed's house for him or herself? Many have tried over the years to prise this property from its owner. Did someone maybe think they might pick up a bargain? I don't suppose so. I do not impute so low a motive to anyone.

Meanwhile the local worthies, the historic buildings people, agitated to get the building compulsorily purchased. These property paramilitaries do not let mere sentiment, and churlish, diffident owners, stand in their path. They had done heroic work in the sixties and seventies to rescue the area from dereliction, even demolition. For a couple of decades we were all in rehab. But the saving of Spitalfields had the unintended consequence of making the neighbourhood "safe" for white people. Now the ethnic trades and businesses are all gone, a middle class ghetto has emerged, and we are all poorer for it.

About this time I began to get visits from Mr Racheed. He cut a striking figure at the counter of our coffee house, his great girth shrouded in buff-coloured flowing robes, sort of male Hijab I suppose, incongruous trainers poking out from under his hem. A white beard encircled his smooth round brown face, querying eyes and mouth. He looked good amid the assembled bankers and businessmen queuing for their morning coffee, a glamorous figure, though without his customary sparkle. I had known Mr Racheed some ten years or so, principally as a customer of his cash and carry business. It seems I won his confidence when I opposed the City Corporation's plan to demolish the London Fruit and Wool Exchange, site of his premises.

Mr Racheed sniffed conspiracy in the air, and spoke darkly of "a gang" intent on separating him from his house. He was angrily determined not to sell. He'd been trading from this building before some of his neophyte persecutors were even born. He'd worked alongside jewellers, furriers, cabinetmakers, market sundriesmen, machinists, tailors, haberdashers, clothing manufacturers...it was all commercial. It is a lost world now.

But he had a problem. He'd neglected the building and allowed it to decay. The authorities were rounding on him yet he was powerless to act. He fussed over imagined slights and flawed protocol in correspondence from the council, whilst quite failing to recognise the real and imminent danger of losing his house. I coaxed him. I counselled him. I bullied him. I told him bluntly how perilous was his situation. At last I made him understand. I found an architect, previously my own architect, who urgently drew up plans and applied for listed building consent for repairs.

A committee meeting was called to invoke the compulsory purchase order. Mr Racheed was invited to attend, backed by his architect. At the appointed hour, high in an alien tower somewhere in Docklands, he entered a hushed modern room. A dozen or so men and women awaited them. At the head of the table the Chairman, slowly and deliberately, intoned his welcome: "Salaam-Alaikum." His name? Racheed, as it would seem.

The order was suspended, but not revoked. It continued to hang threateningly over Mr Racheed's head, spurring him to act.

Eventually the work got started. The modernizing thin ply was peeled off to reveal early Georgian panelling throughout. Three times the tired worn-out stairs had been revived by stacking new treads one atop the other. Looms of fine wire spread across boarded-up windows, doors, even floors: primitive burglar alarms that once protected stacks of rare furs. Wig rooms and panelled closets helped enrich and articulate a five-bay, one-room-deep house. Descending the rickety wood stairs to the basement was like entering one of those heritage museums. In place of smart new kitchens and crisp plaster were an old flagstone floor, stone cistern, match-boarded ceiling, ancient dresser and handsome, paint-encrusted corner cupboard. These things were not retro-fitted, in homage to antiquity, but undisturbed, forgotten, like archaeology. This house, awaiting rescue, was in point of fact rescued by neglect, indifference, disdain. It is money that hurts these houses; its want their best conservers. Modernization strips out their souls.

I sense excitement at beckoning opportunity, but also trepidation at what lies ahead. Will I be able to unlock and unfurl the limpid beauty wrapped up in this house? Whispers of Mr Racheed not paying promptly are not borne out. (There are plenty who don't.) What is he looking for? Same as the rest of us: status, recognition, respect, as well as a nice place to live. "We make a good stewardship," he told me proudly. There is goodwill here, and encouragement, but what if I screw up? I am project managing in an honorary capacity. There is no payment. It is a favour for a friend and colleague, but a favour too for me. Old buildings have a way of tugging at my feelings. They leave me vulnerable, open, susceptible.

They say that no good deed ever goes unpunished. I wonder what special punishment lies ahead for me. One day last week my clever Slovakian builder began tackling the buddleia. From a high window at the back a shrill female voice commanded him to stop. "The nesting blackbirds," she shrieked. "It's against the law." Our crumbling pile must play gracious host some few weeks longer to squawking fledglings as nature takes its heedless path. None of this is going to be easy.

Another Letter to the Planners

In Memoriam 1-5 Tenter Ground, Bell Lane Elevation, circa 1900-2008. (Is the Fruit and Wool Exchange next?)

Dear Laura Webster

I was not surprised that you decided to allow the partial demolition and redevelopment of 1 -5 Tenter Ground, only that you showed the courage and integrity to refuse these at the first attempt. What happened? Did the higher-ups intervene, and take it out of your hands?

You said, in refusing the first application, that "the extensive demolition, design, scale and bulk would not preserve or enhance the character and appearance of a locally listed building and Conservation Area." None of this has changed with the new application. If something is true in May, how can it be no longer true just a few short weeks later? With some candour, you call the Bell Lane elevation "simple and attractive." Amen to that. So why not act to keep it?

I do not blame you in the least. I guess Planning Case Officers have to do as they're told, just like in any hierarchical setup. Nor do I expect a reply to this letter (though your silence will speak volumes).

So yet another period building in Spitalfields gets pounded to dust, with scarcely a murmur of protest. Does this have something to do with the celebrity-status of the applicant? You have to wonder. Am I a sore loser? You can say so I guess. Will I alone mourn it? I don't think so. Where will this slow-moving hurricane of demolition end? Is the Fruit and Wool Exchange next?

It is a curious thing that ordinary local people, in particular residents of the housing estate opposite, whose views you choose to disregard, want in the main to keep these buildings, while the trendy conservation professionals all want to pull them down. It is a cruel irony, don’t you think? And whatever happened to Highways’ objection to traffic entering the building across the pavement? Were they overruled? Pedestrian safety, an issue in May, just fell off the agenda in July. Pedestrians can go hang, I guess.

You’ve countenanced the merging of three separate premises into one. Doesn’t this go against the grain of government planning policy, as well as plain common sense? You said that “numerous” people will be working there. Oh really? You know that for a fact, do you? You do not cite any evidence for this. Up to ten households and businesses rubbed along together there in times past. What happens when the new owner retires to the Bahamas? Will this rebuilt 1–5 Tenter Ground someday be boarded-up and empty?

I bear no ill-feeling toward the applicant, my new neighbour. This is all about the building. It is my misfortune to feel great distress at the destruction of fine old buildings. Is this so odd? Many people, myself included, will feel hugely let down by the planning process. I predict a Soviet-like silence and indifference to my protests. But at least I have ventilated my indignation with this letter (which will be posted on my blog). It takes away some of the hurt. This is therapy!

Yours faithfully

Peter Sinden

An End to Hostillities

Dear Alexander,

Several weeks have passed since last we spoke (in those days charged with promise of foreign travel and longed-for repose), on that subject so pressing to us both.

There was a real end-of-term feel to the proceedings at St John's that Sunday, the last before our annual recess. "God goes on holiday," you once quipped, mischievously, as if religion may be subverted to the insistent demands of our modern, busy lives. "Lord dismiss us with thy blessing," wasn't on the hymn-board that day, but I felt myself transported just the same, back to my old school chapel, a fake-Gothic Victorian pile poised above Sydney Harbour, among spreading Moretan Bay figs, we boys all herded there gleefully under the Head's scary, gimlet eye.

The church organist (and choirmaster) marshalled for us the most sublime musical accompaniment to Sung Eucharist. With a thrilling trumpet solo, and impossibly beautiful Panis Angelicus, it all added up to a damned fine show, if you'll pardon the expression. The Cathedral Dean preached a jaunty sermon, comparing the woman of Canaan to a pushy mum in a TV talent show, and the apostles' angst to his own status anxiety at one of those City livery dinners, where you measure yourself by the seating plan. Here were more jokes than our mainly septuagenarian congregation are accustomed to, but no worse for that. Our regular band of dinner ladies served a celebratory lunch, which we steadily munched our way through in the pews. You will be well-pleased with the outcome.

I mean of course the parish room, your proposed modern stick-on addition (though dressed in traditional garb), to our majestic Wren lantern church. I am aware that you are anxious to see this project through to completion, after twenty years or more of debate and indecision in the PCC. I never knew a vicar who didn't want to leave his mark; my own brother, who I love and admire, modernised a beautiful, original Dutch colonial church in Indonesia, filling in the sloping, wooden-louvered verandas all round with rendered brick. His congregation swelled, but at the cost, it would seem, of architectural heritage.

I wish to urge caution. You've cast your lot with Matthew, energetic young churchwarden, old Harovian, and hardworking civil engineer, who is ramming through the project with the diocesan architects, and condescends to brief us only at bi-monthly meetings, where he bridles and rears up at the least little questioning of detail. Is Matthew too close to the architect? He is certainly dynamic, and gets things done, but the fellow clearly has no interest in sharing responsibility.

It's more than I can stand, as I think you already know. You are frightened of upsetting Matthew, who seemingly has a febrile, uncertain temperament. You think him a demigod, and infallible in that buttoned-up, Establishment kind of way. He has the advantage of both of us, Alex, status-wise.

I am no better than a lowly builder, yet have considerable expertise with old buildings. I should love to be consulted on the parish room, but can't see it ever happening somehow. I do not want to be forever sniping from the sidelines.

I must bow out from the PCC, and my negligible role there, though not, I hope, from our charming, amiable church. I leave with some small pleasure and satisfaction at having done a positive good. By some strange miracle, I did manage to rescue you from your architects' lunatic scheme to fit toilets in the front entrance hall (though not without first locking horns very memorably with Matthew once or twice).

I trust our friendship will continue unabated. Our family are all grateful for your support over the years: for the most fantastic Sunday school; for the christening of our youngest; as well as for the patient, careful preparation you gave for our two older children's eventual confirmation. I look forward to many more celebrations and happy rites of passage to come!

Yours affectionately, Peter.

The Idea of the Coffee House

I made a coffee house, it must be, because I love coffee. But more than this, I am fond of people, and enjoy the countless opportunities for human interaction it brings.

Our coffee house occupies a sort of promontory, jutting out into the broad concourse of Brushfield Street, a boulevard connecting the City with the East End. We overlook historic Spitalfields Market; hence our name. But, beyond this, many of our customers work in the financial markets. At its best it's a busy social hub: personal, intimate, sometimes funny, always friendly, and not much that happens around here, it seems to me, escapes our notice.

Our staff know each regular customer by his or her coffee choice, and will be getting this ready even before they get to the head of the queue. One customer (decaff latte, no sugar), a thin slip of a girl with a mane of blonde hair and always a ready, demure smile, turns out unexpectedly to be a powerhouse of business, and owner of a chain of local Japanese restaurants. One day I even caught her in conversation, in fluent Japanese, over two of our very English cream teas, apparently signing up a new chef.

One morning I was joined at the counter by a local man, a musician, and we chatted happily about the music festival at Christchurch, at the end of our road. From the edge of my vision, as we stood speaking, waiting for his takeaway coffee (large latte, no sugar), I could just make out a tuft of white shirt poking out from the unzipped flies of his dark suit trousers.

With superhuman effort, I managed to conclude the conversation with my head and eyes dead level. I accompanied my friend to the door. Just before parting, I clasped his arm and whispered: "There's something I've got to tell you. Your flies are undone. It's best if you know, to save embarrassment later."

Will I see this customer again in my shop? Or will delicacy of feeling send him to Starbucks, or some other coffee joint in our road? Only time will tell. Still, I suppose I did the right thing. Didn't I...?

I have been reading a history of the coffee house recently*, given me by my friend Jim Howett, an American antiquarian and furniture designer. The author relates how Samuel Pepys used coffee houses to cultivate the acquaintance of influential people in seventeenth century London. These places crackled with energy. He found men furiously transacting business and exchanging political ideas. He also made illicit assignations with women. From what I've seen, not so much has changed these three hundred years or more.

When ABN Amro, in their handsome new building at the top of our road, gave every appearance of fast disappearing down some investment banking plughole, we had a ringside seat. Traders came in and confided their woes over frothy cappuccinos, at a safe distance from the company canteen. One customer asked to use our upstairs flat to pitch, undisturbed, for a new job. Another returned from his honeymoon to find his whole department shut down, and empty desks stretching out across the trading floor. "They've sacked all the good people," he told us, grinning broadly, "and left themselves with rubbish like me."

Hiring and firing was always a popular pastime at the Market Coffee House, as is eavesdropping, a guilty pleasure for owners of premises like ours the world over. We've known the excruciating agony of seeing a friend and neighbour, a fund manager having a bumpy ride in the markets, getting roughly dismissed by his boss before our very eyes. We've seen managers interviewing eager new applicants day by day, each time with the same weary, repetitive phrases. Little start-up businesses dig themselves in among the Windsor chairs and creaky gate-leg tables of our cafe, crackle and fizz with energy for some few weeks, then slip away into extinction.

There's a sprinkling of political caricatures on the walls of our coffee house, mainly old Spectator covers. Most people notice the brilliant one of Blair, bare-arsed and brandishing a missile, and strangely conclude the proprietor must be left-wing. I adore the notion of the coffee house as an arena for impromptu, informal, educated debate. On the day of the recent mayoral election, which revived at last, for me, some of the fun and excitement of politics, I clashed politely with a loyal, unswerving adherent to Ken. When next I saw him (takeaway cappuccino), I duly apologised for Boris's victory. "I don't suppose it was just your vote," he told me, coyly smiling.

Sometimes there is too much information. The informality and supposed anonymity of our place rather loosens peoples' tongues, sometimes to their detriment. Someone once told us how he bet his shirt on the price of oil going down at $90 a barrel. We haven't seen him since. (I guess he lost it.)

What will become of the future? Soon we will be a restaurant - very much bigger, and better we hope - but ever we remain the coffee house.

And oh, what a vivid passing show! We see neighbours doing property deals with estate agents; hungry-eyed, infatuated Japanese girls; businessmen taking French conversation with pretty instructresses; spinsterish women meeting up after early church services; architects and entrepreneurs plotting restaurants; speculators meeting portfolio managers; artists and musicians indolently just looking cool; big butch gay men ordering pots of tea and slyly embracing.... There is so much here, in short, to amuse and divert us. Could we possibly bear to be without it?

*The Coffee House, A Cultural History, by Markman Ellis, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004.