‘He writes as though he lived in the nineteenth century’: I’ve heard this sentence not once but many times of this or that thinker or philosopher. But I have known them, the ones who live in another era, and at one time they were all around me.
Who were they? Monks, hermits, and those who choose to live on the fringes of academia, snatching a few part time hours here and there – although they are well into their fifties -, conversationalists, impassioned intellectuals, scholars of Sanskrit or Hebrew, speakers of a dozen modern European languages and a half-dozen classical ones – belong to another time. They are relics of a civilisation whose time has passed. Above all, they had time, hours to read and think and talk and when they came to our house, it was to spend a full and leisurely day in our company as I imagined people did in the 1940s or 50s.
A household of sadomasochists with an S-and-M dungeon built into their cellar (I saw it – fur lined cuffs and strange machines) would visit to discuss the Philokalia. One would always bring half-size bananas with him. When he visited on his own, after the big row which severed his household from ours, he would work back to back with me, for there were two computers at that time in the lounge. He was a DJ and liked to speak of those who danced in his club: the bears and cubs who, one day, were surprised to find that another friend of ours brought women to the club – women, who hadn’t been seen there in living memory.
That friend, whom we all thought was dying, was still alive to my delight when I saw him at the funeral last year. Why hadn’t he visited in the last years of the house?, I asked him. He had had a heart attack, he said, and needed a bypass operation. But he was bright and happy, and though he walked with sticks he was a healthier man than the one I knew, who had thought death was coming and used to plan his conversion to Orthodoxy and his funeral service. I have photographs of him in a leopard skin top with a monk’s arm around him – that same monk whom I heard from a young lad who stayed with us (the son of a Professor) had tried to abuse him.
That lad, as pleasant as his mother was eccentric, came to live with us after his elderly father died. He had been expelled from school for drinking at lunch time; later, telling me the story of the monk, he drank himself into a coma. I spent a panicked night at his bedside – I who had taken him to a party in sympathy where we drank punch as we would orange juice, cup after cup, while talking of monks and their ways. When I came home later that night, still drunk, I confronted the monk and he denied all charges. Who knows whether he was telling the truth?
Then there was the princess who always visited with a 6 foot crusader’s sword she used to ordain knights of the order of which she was a kind of royalty by dint of marriage. Her busband had died, and she was alone, this middle aged teacher from Yorkshire – an ordinary woman whom we always called the Princess. She delighted in that. There were other itinerant Royals around – princes and princesses of vanished Byzantine kingdoms. One, who had inherited a concrete block manufacturing plant in an African country, only to find it was an elobrate front for a drug smuggling operation, appointed me his imperial pimp. He was looking for a wife, he told me, and we would go out to Latin American clubs in search of candidates.
This immensely fat man, who would only wear tracksuits prepared for him by his staff, was eventually proved to be intersexed, which accounted, perhaps, for his massive and unpleasant misogyny. In search of a legitimate business, he thought of importing Roobush tea from South Africa to England. I told him he was too late, and that the tea was readily available from the shops, but he never believed me. Later, his cousin, co-inheritor of his estate, would try and murder him by cutting the brake cables of his car. But he survived, the visitor to the house and survives still, although his country is in near civil war and one day the doors of his compound will burst open to the revolutionaries.
There were often alcoholics and sometimes drug addicts living in a dry and a drug free house. When they were out, I would fetch beer from the off license and we drink a few guilty glasses of wheatbeer or kriek. Sometimes they would fall off the waggon and speak impassionedly of the great secret vouchsafed to them by drinking or by drugs. What was the secret? I would never know; they never got to it, for all its importance. One of the drunks, a burly rig-worker turned student, was, I was warned, wrestling with his sexuality. ‘Be careful, he’ll rape you’, said David. But I felt responsible for him and upon learning he’d gone back to drinking as I returned from holiday, I went to search for him in the bars, finding an appalling booze-soaked man picking fights until calmed by a pretty and patient girl. We asked him to leave. A few days passed. Every morning he would come down, red faced, booze-ridden, and go out for more drink. We feared violence (he was a tough man) but eventually he left. What became of him? He retrained as a teacher and I thought of him in his native Glasgow when I saw the film My Name is Joe.
One summer, a melancholy Texan came to join us in the house. Depressed, he took occupancy of one of the vast, deep armchairs in the lounge and watched American teen shows all day, a three-litre bottle of Coke by his side. He would eat only chicken, and we would make to make sure there was a whole one there for each evening meal. How we tired of him! The lounge became a dead zone, the life drained from it by his melancholy. We remembered how happy he seemed when he first came to England to study: what had happened? He was another ex-boozer, and though he stayed off the drink, was prone like other drinkers I knew, to great changes of mood.
For a long time, we hardly saw R., who lived in the self-contained flat in the attic. We made it a house rule never to knock on one another’s doors. There were phones in most rooms, each with a private line, and so we would phone one another. ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’ But R., severely melancholy, would only rise in the evening, working all night. Sometimes, he would go outside for a smoke and interrupt the burglars who would come to peer through our windows. I would hear hordes of burglars running through our garden, which they used as a run through.
Still, there were happier times with R. We formed, he and I, a secret society called the Friends of the Kitchen. We would meet so I could watch him smoke in the old stables in the garden. We’d look back at the house over the long grass we’d let grow so we could enjoy its flowering. R. knew an immense amount about flora and fauna. We’d sit outside, summer or winter, and sometimes venture out to our favourite cafes. Often we’d remember his arrival at the house, a bearded vegan hippy featured on a German documentary as a saver of turtles on a Greek island, and how he was transformed into a businessman who wore crushed red velvet trousers. For a while the pair of us became dandies, encouraged by my then girlfriend who like to make us up.
But all this belongs to the past. I was unemployed then; vast days opened before me. I had no money and so I took up residence, as did many others, in a house of retirees and the unemployed who lived in another century. Often, it was madness. But the years passed pleasantly until I left that city for this one, moving further north. When David died, we, his tenants and vistors, were scattered. He was the centre of that world and we orbited around him like the moons of Jupiter. We are scattered now and for all of us, I think, it seems like a long dream, those years we spent in another century, where talk was always of God and of services, where famous composers would ring daily for advice and David would compose vast fantasy novels no one would publish.
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