Free London Blues by Anthony Frewin Page B

are written by local hacks for £1 a thousand words. The hacks are semi-literate too and the stories are bereft of wit or saving graces. They are even bereft of imagination. One typescript I had was called Nurses Like It Always (there was some confusion in the ‘story’ as to whether it should have been All Ways). Here’s the opening sentence verbatim:
    Pretty Staff Nurse Susan of Saint Hildas’ hadn’t had a good hard cock up her for at least 24hrs so when Syd the decorator walked up to her in the Laundry cupeboard her juices start flowing right away and she says “Get them offand show me your a Man” and he did and she took his big cock and gave it a real sucking while she rubbed herself andbrought herself off and then he said lay down there I’m going to stick it right up you and he did and while they were doing this Harry’s mate came in [who’s Harry?] and saw the real horny action for himself and got his big dick out and decided she’d have it at the same time up her arse.
    The other hot titles to be found on the reader shelves are the Olympia Press ‘Traveller’s Companion Series’, paperbacks smuggled over from Paris. These are often called greenback readers, from the colour of the covers. The Olympia Press has published dozens of obscene novels with titles like Roman Orgy, With Open Mouth, Rape, Tender Was My Flesh, and so on, but it’s also published serious stuff like Vladimir Nabokov. Indeed, I saw a copy of Lolita on one of the shelves a few weeks back. What would the average punter make of that when he got it home?
     
    If, as we now know from the Sunday broadsheets, Soho is the current centre of the pornographic trade in England, where was it before? Where, one hundred years ago, would you have gone to purchase a hot reader? Where would you have gone to buy an obscene engraving, an erotic chromolithograph , a dirty photograph? The answer is Holywell Street. But that’s disappeared now. That’s where one hundred years ago and, indeed, two hundred years ago, all the dubious action was.
    There you could buy anything almost, and certainly sheepskin condoms and other devices. But you’ll search for it in vain now – it was all pulled down in 1901 and Bush House and Aldwych were built upon its site. If London is haunted by any pornographer’s ghosts then the southern end of Kingsway is where you’ll find them.
     
    Something that really pisses me off about England (and I suppose this is true of other countries as well) is this: fucking and so on is legal to do but illegal to show in any way, whereas murder is the exact opposite. I can walk down the Charing Cross Road and go into Foyle’s or any of theother big bookshops and see walls and walls of shelves full of murder books: detective mysteries, amateur sleuths, non-fiction studies and so on. Acres of them! There’s even a publisher who has a series called the Murder Club. I can go up to some virginal spinsterish shop assistant and say ‘I want your top dozen murder books.’ But try asking for the top dozen fucking books.

2
Intermission Riff
    If you couldn’t change the room, then the room changed you.
    – Charleen Page (1969)
    AN ANECDOTED INVENTORY OF MY ROOM AT NO. 16 ALBERT TERRACE, PORCHESTER ROAD, LONDON W.2., AT 4.30 P.M. ON SUNDAY, 20 DECEMBER 1959
     
    The ‘furnished’ ( sic ) room measures approximately 30 feet by 16 feet by about 9 feet high. It is on the second floor, above the mezzanine. The room is directly over the front door. When I look out of the window I am facing west-south -west.
    Ignoring just a few degrees of direction I will refer to the four walls of the room as the north, the south, the east and the west. The single door in (and out) of the room is situated at the end of the east wall where it joins that of the north. I will begin the inventory here and work my way around in a clockwise direction. But first, a word or two on the floor, walls and ceiling.
    The floor is covered in a brown linoleum that was badly