Winter Garden, by Beryl Bainbridge, and The Confidential Agent, by Graham Greene

Gather round online generations. There was a time when a young person of some small means would sew a Canadian flag onto a large, unwieldy backpack, say goodbye to their family, and disappear for months without any reliable communication keeping them attached to the home base. No texting, no facetiming, no emails; just the very occasional long-distance phone call from a dodgy booth on a heath somewhere, and physical post that was by its nature weeks behind on the actual news.

Between March and September 1987, I backpacked my way through Europe, visiting German relatives, and even crossing the iron curtain briefly to ride the rails through what was then Yugoslavia on my way to Greece with a friend. At the end of my wanderings, I spent 12 weeks living as a Londoner in a little bedsit on the ground floor of a three-story walk-up on Philbeach Gardens in the then-grimy Earl’s Court neighbourhood of Kensington. With my live-in partner, Judy (who has remained a beloved friend despite our lives going in very different directions), I jumped into the cosmopolitan life of what quickly became my absolute favourite city in the world.

I remember with perfect clarity the end of that experience, sitting in my aisle seat on the Heathrow taxiway in early September, waiting to take off for a return to Canada and my suspended university studies. Head down as though praying, I thought “I will graduate and immediately return. I will live in London the rest of my life.” Three decades later, in March of 2017, I finally touched down back in London, on a business trip. The intervening years had seen me stay in Toronto, build a career in writing and publishing, father two sons, and ride the wheel of emotional fortune through marriage, divorce, and blessed re-marriage.

I will admit to some tears when I walked up to my old apartment in Earl’s Court, feeling arthritic stiffness in my joints and noting that my £15-a-week room had become yet another £1 million luxury home in London’s west end. Being a hyper-connected man in late middle-age, I immediately texted a selfie to Judy to show her where I was. I don’t remember her exact response, but likely it was “Gah!” or “OMG!” or some other exhalation meaning how the hell did we get so old?

We tend to think of the times we’re living through right now as somehow more dangerous and more filled with global strife than most of recent history (see the above reference to Westminster Bridge), but recall that 1987 was two years before the end of the Cold War, and one year after the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl in what was then the Ukraine… still part of the USSR. When Judy and I shopped at the outdoor markets that summer, vegetable vendors would loudly declare the provenance of their wares so that one might check against the radiation-spread charts we’d all saved from the daily papers.

Train stations all over Europe displayed wanted posters for various known terrorist bombers and warned never to stand near abandoned luggage. Harrods department store had been shattered by an Irish Republican Army bomb not four years earlier. That attack killed six and injured ninety. This was one of the most contented times of my life, but it was tinged with near constant anxiety over physical safety. Not a year after our summer there, a bomb would kill a soldier and injure nine others at the Inglis Barracks in North London.

Our immediate neighbourhood was rough — how else could we afford it on our measly earnings from washing dishes and serving lunches to bankers in the City? A heroin dealer lived in the basement of our building, and we would regularly be woken by “customers” banging on our street-facing window to be let in for a late-night purchase. The 1983 novel Londoners, by the wonderful Maureen Duffy, ends with a pub bombing in Earl’s Court, so the zeitgeist was not very optimistic about us either.

Novelist and poet, Maureen Duffy, was a dinner guest on my return to London. A delightful vegetarian restaurant in Hammersmith, as I recall.

I mention all this to build some atmosphere for a discussion about two of my recent reads; books that took me right back to London in my head and pinned me to the couch with remembered anxieties and experience. As it happens, I read Winter Garden (Beryl Bainbridge, 1980) and The Confidential Agent (Graham Greene, 1939) at the same time — doesn’t everyone have several books on the go at once? — and enjoyed how they mirrored and spoke to each other. The similarities were so striking, I sometimes had to remind myself of each book’s cast of characters before diving back in, so I knew which plot I’d be following.

These are both literary entertainments (as Greene was fond of calling his work) involving clandestine travel and international intrigue. The Confidential Agent is more typically a spy novel set in what seems to be Spanish Civil War times — though to say Greene’s writing is anything like typical will start an argument — while Winter Garden is a dark comedy involving a bumbling middle-aged Englishman attempting a complicated extramarital assignation on a secret trip to the USSR during the Cold War. The threat of violence emanates from the pages of both books, mystery abounds, and neither ends in a very satisfactory manner for its protagonist. That is not a spoiler, because neither feat of writing here could be spoiled by knowledge of plot. If after the first page of either, you are hoping for a happy ending, you’ve come to the wrong hotel. What the reader gets from these books are brilliantly understated characters engaged in sharp dialogue, in the service of a rather grim existential dread that, in both cases, is inexplicably entertaining.

The Bainbridge I bought at the wonderful Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road in London several years back, and while the Greene is most definitely a UK edition (its price is listed on the cover as 3/6) I picked it up in Parry Sound, Canada at Bearly Used Books.

The store that now adds an hour to every northern drive I take.

But let’s travel back to 1987 again. That was the summer of Margaret Thatcher’s last election victory, and London was positively vibrating with protest and politicking. We had many doorknockers come by, loudspeaker vans cruising the roadways, and soapbox speakers at every weekend market. I followed the campaigns very closely, amused and astonished by how absolutely filthy UK politics can be at street level. A local candidate was caught up in a sex scandal, and shouts of “Shame!” rang through the neighbourhood. Literally. His political rivals must have hired leather-lunged blokes to walk the sidewalks with large photos of his face, and bellowing out their one-word disapproval. It was an absolute circus.  

In all of that, I found myself made suddenly hot-under-the-collar by an Evening Standard newspaper columnist who made, in my opinion, ignorant assumptions about the disaffected youth of Britain and their ability to responsibly engage with politics. Feeling for my generation, I plunked down with pen and paper (there were no online comments sections back then), and wrote directly to this columnist care of the Standard. “How dare you… etc.”

Britain’s astonishingly well-run postal system being what it was, my note went out in the next morning’s post, and I received a response THE SAME DAY in the evening mail. The columnist’s note began “Well, I seem to have rubbed you the wrong way…”; it went on to convincingly explain to me that I was incorrect on facts if not feeling, it wished me well, and ended…

“Cordially,

Beryl Bainbridge.”

I seek out Dame Bainbridge’s books whenever I’m browsing, and never miss an opportunity to keep learning from her. May she rest in peace.

For a delightful television interview with Dame Bainbridge circa 1977, see here.