The East End is his life.Every Saturday at eleven o’clock Laurie is standing on the sidewalk in front of the subway station Aldgate East. Whether the November wind sweeps dust through the streets of the East End or the glow of summer over London, Laurie is waiting at the Toynbee exit. He looks around patiently, the white-haired man with horn-rimmed glasses and the blue pencil case in his hand. It may be that a few people appear on his city tour, mostly tourists who have found their way to the East End, locals interested in local history or those who are looking for a bit of jack-the-ripper horror. Laurie says he would do his «walk» for one person, but on this grey spring morning in 1996 there are six of us: three Swiss, a Canadian couple, a student from the USA. A nice group, Laurie shines. He shakes hands with everyone, then gets straight to the point. The name Aldgate, he explains, comes from «Old Gate», a gate in the city wall that has since disappeared. Borough of Tower Hamlets is the name of the district, just like the villages in the east of the Tower. Here, troops exercised in the sandy terrain, streets like Artillery Lane or Gun Street remind of it. Farmers from the surrounding area brought their products to the market in front of the city gate, craftsmen settled here, carpenters, tanners, dyers. With the construction of the docks down on the Thames in the nineteenth century, trade in the British Empire got going, dock workers hunched bags of coffee, tea, spices, cotton and barrels of wine from the ships into the warehouses. Barges, pulled by horses, distributed the goods over a canal system into the country and on the way back brought the products of the textile industries from the Midlands to the docks. The villages in the east of the Tower grew together into an overpopulated and stinking conglomerate of houses, factories and warehouses, a workers‘ quarter where great misery reigned. The men buckled crookedly in the docks, drunk in the taverns their meagre wages. Women and girls dug their heels in match factories and poisoned themselves with sulphur and phosphorus. The fine London rulers wrinkled their noses and settled more and more in the West, where the wind kept the stench of the East End away. Coaches clattered through the streets at night and in the fog, the fine gentlemen helped themselves to the «Ladies of the Night» in the poorhouse of the city, who sold their bodies out of sheer misery. Laurie tells the story as he moves at a brisk pace through an alley paved with natural stone. The East End and its history is his passion. He grew up in the years after the Second World War and spent most of his life here. «I’m a cockney!» He says this with a glow in his mostly melancholic looking eyes. «A cockney is who was born in the sound of the church bells of St Mary-le-Bow.» His family was poor, living in a three-room apartment. Between the ruins of the houses bombed out in the Second World War, he was looking for wood for heating. In 1955 he earned half a crown for a supporting role as a rascal in the East End cult film A Kid for Two Farthings by director Carol Reed. We pass the Canon Barnett School, which he attended, a four-storey brick building with a barred forecourt. «On the first day, the teacher and three students took me aside and told us all the others in the class were Jews. Today the school is one hundred percent Bengali». The East End was already a refuge for immigrants and displaced persons in the seventeenth century. We squeeze through the stalls of the Pettycoat Lane Market, one of the historic East End markets that has become a tourist attraction. The name is reminiscent of the Huguenots who planted mulberry trees, pulled silkworms and woven textiles. «Petite coat» they called the petticoats that had become fashionable among ladies, maidservants and prostitutes. The Huguenots formed the first big wave of immigrants in the East End. As Protestants fleeing persecution in Catholic France, they had brought with them their culture and crafts, especially the art of silk weaving. Laurie points us to a green painted door in a street: This colour means that the house was inhabited by Huguenots. He leads us into a backyard, where he has discovered one of the last mulberry trees. Somewhat obtrusively, he gives us access to 18 Folgate Street, where Dennis Severs, a Californian, furnished his house in the style of the Huguenots. In a gloomy salon, porcelain vases and crystal glasses stand on embroidered tablecloths, a meerschaum pipe and a silver knife lie next to them. Severs lives as before, cooks on the fire, heats with the fireplace, reads by candlelight and uses the chamber pot. Guests who have booked a tour of the house are greeted with a bowl of punch from the bowl, which is depicted on an oil painting on the wall. In the hall of the Spitalfields Market Laurie offers us «a cup of tea» at a stand. The market drivers of the traditional grocery market know him, he comes here regularly with his guided tours. He talks about his life over tea. He used to be a chef, «also in Switzerland, in a hotel in Montreux». He still speaks a little French, «parlez vous français? Later, Laurie was employed as a messenger by the London public transport company, carrying folders of documents from one office to another. Then he was rationalised away by electronic data transmission. He had to come up with something. When he walked along on a city walk, a «Jack the Ripper Walk», he said to himself: «I can do that too, I grew up here and know the East End better than anyone. Every step here is history, and I’m part of it myself. The East End is my life.» After the Huguenots, Irish came to the East End, Africans and especially Jews, who had to flee from pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century from their stetl in Poland and Russia. Jewish immigration continued during the Nazi persecution. Laurie stops in front of a light limestone portal on Brune Street. «Soup Kitchen. For the Jewish Poor» is carved into the stone parapet. Merciful people scooped soup or a stew from the poor Jew into the crockery they brought with them, and a piece of bread was enough. The Jews were skilful tailors, brought the craft to the East End, became wealthy with ready-made clothes and moved on to the West. Immigrants from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh found a new home and work in sewing factories after the collapse of the British Empire around the middle of the twentieth century. Walking through Brick Lane, past Bengali and Indian clothing stores and restaurants, we feel like we are in a city on the Indian subcontinent. An East-End tour includes Jack the Ripper, the mass murderer who bestially murdered and mutilated six prostitutes in the fall of 1888. Laurie lives on Goulston Street in a social housing near the scene of one of the crimes. Here, after a double murder of the Ripper, a mysterious message was written on a wall with chalk. The so-called «Goulston Street Graffitto» seemed to blame the murder on a Jewish perpetrator. The text is as mysterious and ambiguous as most traces of the Ripper’s crimes, which have never been solved and still employ a large number of «Ripperologists». Laurie leads us to «The Ten Bells», the pub where the last victim of the Ripper tipped a drink before disappearing into the dense fog and endless speculations of the «Ripperologists». A dark place, despite the big windows against Commercial Street and Fournier Street. A small table with cast-iron feet and worn upholstered furniture, a board with the names of the six murdered women opposite the counter, as well as facts and figures about the murders. Newspaper clippings hang on the wall, ripper bodies, caps and videos can be bought. Here we feel a hundred years back in time, marked by poverty, unemployment, vice, violence, cheap pleasure and diseases such as consumption and syphilis. «The times they are a-changin‘,» quotes Laurie Bob Dylan, leading us finally to Bishopsgate, where the old East End world ends and the granite and glass facades of the city’s banks and commercial buildings rise beyond the wide street – a world that gradually penetrates the East End, hollowing out historical buildings and transforming them into expensive apartments, galleries, boutiques and studios. A development that Laurie deeply regrets as it eats away at his business foundation. He says: «The East End is becoming a sought-after place to live, so close to the City of London. Rich bankers buy houses, the old East Enders are driven out of their cheap flats. London’s east becomes ‚a rich man’s paradise‘. At least some historic house fronts will be preserved, such as those of the Jewish Soup Kitchen. But behind the facades luxury apartments will be built.» «Can you live off the walks,» I ask over a beer at Ashby’s in Artillery Lane, a friendly restaurant run by Italians. Laurie’s smile makes the worry seem, almost despair, that’s how it seems to me. The calculation is made quickly. He took six by four pounds today. He could never afford the two thousand pounds that an official city guide has to pay for the concession. So he tries to keep himself afloat, also with walks in other parts of the city. But the competition is great. Other city walking guides appear in historical costumes, staging a kind of street theatre at the scenes of history. Laurie hopes that the very personal, warm-hearted of his Walks will get around. We say goodbye, he remains sitting in front of the half-empty beer glass. A lonely person, for whom the two hours of the city walk also mean social contact, the exchange with people from all over the world. While his world gradually disappears. Whoever comes to visit during the half year that I spend in London in 1996, Saturday eleven o’clock, Aldgate East, belongs to the obligatory program. And everyone to whom I recommend Laurie’s city walk or who I take with me is thrilled. Over time we have become friends. I often see him wandering the streets when I’m in the area on a Saturday morning, with the blue pencil case in my hand, two or three people in the wake. During that time I was planning a novel based in London, and once when I saw Laurie I flashed through my head: «That’s a character for my story. Now Laurie also appears in my fiction as a life-ravaged person with a good heart, as I experienced my friend and city guide. Back in Switzerland I occasionally get a letter in a sweeping handwriting, he talks about new walks he offers, sends flyers and newspaper clippings. At Christmas always a card with greetings, also to Christa. I write back that he is a hero in one of my novels, and after «London’s last guest» has appeared, the Swiss Embassy invites to a reading at the Swiss Church in London’s Soho. I have a special relationship with the Swiss Church, as one of the initiators of the church, which was consecrated in 1854, was a priest Peter Stäheli from our village of Obstalden. In 1720 he fled with his wife to London by night and fog. The Obstalder authorities wanted to put him under guardianship because his maid had born a child of his and had buried it secretly in the cemetery. In London Stäheli became a respected priest and «highly learned theologian» in Hammersmith. He applied to the Crown for the construction of a church for the numerous Swiss abroad. It took a hundred years before it could be built. A tranquil oasis on Endell Street in Soho, inconspicuous between shops and houses. Laurie is the guest of honour at the reading. I introduce him as London’s friendliest and most interesting city guide, advertise his East End Walk. And Laurie, sitting a little crooked in a chair, begins to talk. His story and the story of the East End, the Huguenots, the Jews and so on. He can’t be stopped, and it gradually becomes embarrassing, he speaks with a heavy tongue and not very loud. Finally I manage to interrupt him and come to the reading. The story of Reverend Stäheli in English, and a scene from my London novel translated especially for me, where the fictional Laurie enables the protagonist and a boy to escape through an old tunnel under the Thames. I have also incorporated much of Laurie’s historical knowledge and stories into the book. In a report about the reading in a newsletter of the embassy it says: «The real Laurie stepped forward.» Afterwards, the embassy’s cultural officer invites us to the «Sarastro», a chic restaurant in Soho, equipped according to the motto «Arabian Nights». It is stuffed with all kinds of junk, red curtains are waving around mirrors in which bouquets of flowers made of plastic multiply, lampshades provide subdued light. Hardly any space is free, there is activity and noise. We sit on sofas and enjoy Mediterranean appetizers and lamb skewers. Laurie seems to enjoy it, his voice gets louder, he provides for supplies of wine, his glass is quickly empty. Two female Swiss artists who spend a work semester in the East End get along splendidly with the city guide, he slips them crumpled flyers and they promise to show up next Saturday. Punctually at eleven o’clock, Aldgate East. It’s late when we say goodbye to our friend in front of the restaurant, who swings threateningly and looks into the night with sad eyes. He would have liked to stay longer to enjoy the food, the wine and the charming company. Anyway, he made his way home, before Christmas a card arrives with the usual greeting and new flyers, thanks for the invitation and the wish to see us again. In one of his last letters he mentions a treatment for arthritis in a medical research program, free of charge. A photo I find on the Internet shows him leaning on a stick in a street in East End between market stalls in suit, plaid shirt, the white hair hidden under a cheeky hat, a fine smile in the round face. Again and again I intend to visit Laurie, but as it is … I postpone it, apologize every year when his card greetings arrive, until they finally fail to arrive. At first I don’t even notice it, but during the course of the year I ask myself: What’s actually going on with our Laurie? I write, no answer. Has he died, or has he been accommodated in a desolate old people’s home? Or has he finally got tired of my empty promises to visit him? Sometimes we do a writing exercise in courses that goes like this: you imagine yourself walking through a city, coming to a door, ringing the bell. Then you write the sentence on paper, «The door opens …», and then continue writing fluently for a few minutes, without thinking much, simply writing down what you see, who you meet, what happens. Often, when I do this exercise, the door is open and Laurie meets me. «The real Laurie», dressed a little dirty, he looks at me, amazed, then he recognizes me, a smile flies over his face, and we hug each other. From Emil Zopfi, «Menschen am Weg. Begegnungen», Rotpunktverlag, Zürich 2018 Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator |
Laurie Allen |
