Last Train to Palookaville

I arrived at 57 Cliveden Road by taxi from Wimbledon Tube station early on a pleasant autumnal Sunday evening, together with my two battered suitcases. 57 Cliveden Road was a smart looking house at the end of a road of smart looking houses. Inside, the house was very well furnished, evidently by someone with rather good taste. That person was Eileen Naylor. The lounge was open plan with simple bright colours. The most striking thing was the contrast with 267 Morton Street. 267 was a dark, pokey hovel compared to this maison brillante. I sat in the lounge with a cup of tea and some cake or a biscuit, chatting to Mrs Naylor and her husband Joe. They were both fortyish and had a daughter, Helena, aged five, and a black cat named George. There were reproductions of famous paintings on the walls, especially Van Gogh’s and it became evident that Mrs Naylor dabbled in art herself and, later, that she had some talent for writing. She attended creative writing classes and had a short story about George and his fleas broadcast on Woman’s Hour. Joe, an engineer, worked at Tate and Lyle. He was a Polish refugee. Eileen was a very impressive looking woman. She was five foot eight inches tall with short dark brown hair with a side parting. She wore glasses and had a somewhat imperious manner as she bustled round the house in her flip flops. She wore skirts that came down to her knees and sat very correctly on the sofa. However, the knitwear she wore flattered a very full bosom. She had a good expressive, unusual, face and beautiful radiant skin. The whole effect was electrifying. As I was to sleep in the lounge, I could not go to bed before all the other occupants of the house had retired to their bedrooms. … The first night I sat up in bed into the small hours reading a hardback book on the life of Van Gogh, which I got from Eileen’s shelves. I befriended Eileen and sat with her rehearsing a play she was doing in amateur dramatics. I got along fine with Helena. Life was vivid, exciting, in Technicolor. I was living in some sort of paradise. All seemed fine even when, after two weeks, I quit Wimbledon Art College and started work. I seemed to be lucky in that I was able to start work at once at Wimbledon Electricity Power Station as a boiler cleaner. However, this was a dirty job that entailed crawling inside the boiler, wearing overalls and a face mask to filter the dust, while you swept out the ash. You worked in pairs, with each of the pair taking turns at cleaning the boiler while the other kept a watching brief outside. … My partner was a big black man called Amos, a dead ringer for Idi Amin. He was a spiritualist and read the Bible during the breaks. He didn’t exactly read out loud. It was more like he was speaking in tongues. Perhaps this changed the dynamics chez Naylor and, after five weeks, Joe told me that Eileen was finding it hard to cope with her responsibilities for four adults and a child and I was asked to leave. I found rooms in a house in Crescent Avenue in Wimbledon and left, to the evident sadness of the tearful Helena and Eileen. During all my time at Cliveden Road, I never saw Eileen in any state of undress. … There was no physical contact to speak of. … There was no flirting on her part, no fluttering of eyelashes, nothing coquettish whatever. Her deportment was almost punctiliously correct, but there was something quirky about it and there was a tension between what one saw on the surface, the imperious manner, and what one sensed was going on below it, an intriguing second self. The tension was sexual. Eileen dressed in skirts or slacks. She had very good dress sense and her clothes fitted very well. She dressed conservatively, exactly appropriate for a woman of her age. But her clothes did not detract from the figure they covered. She wore no jewellery, no earrings, nothing around the neck and her make up was subtle. She knew how to keep things simple. Her skin was beautiful and there was a cleanliness about her, an aphrodisiac cleanliness. Once, after the residents of the house had retired to bed, Eileen came downstairs in her nightdress. The nightdress covered her figure perfectly well. It revealed no cleavage. But Eileen had removed her bra and her breasts wobbled beneath the fabric of her dress. I stayed in touch with Eileen by letter and was invited back to the house on several occasions. While working at the power station, I had lost a lot of weight and was down to about ten and a half stone. Eileen noticed and expressed concern. … My friend Robin Cookson was also living in Wimbledon, working as a guard on the London Underground. We both began saving to finance further study to get the university entrance requirements. Then the tenant chez Naylor left and Eileen suggested that I should now return as the new tenant. By some tortured high-principled logic, I decided that this was somehow not the honourable thing to do. However, I suggested that my friend Robin could become the new tenant. I accompanied him chez Naylor and he saw the room, the tenant’s room I had never seen, but, contrary to a fault, he turned it down. The five weeks I lived at 57 Cliveden Road were amongst the happiest of my life. It was Paradise Lost when I left there. Now, I had been given the chance of Paradise Regained, but had spurned it, ridiculously. I had taken leave of my senses. I can only plead temporary insanity. If only Eileen had had the courage or the wit to say “Please come back, I need you”. But life can’t be that simple.