BENNY GREEN
It is only when confronted by a tourist that I realise how sadly I have neglected my London lore. Tourists, I know, are pro- fessional sightseers, and professional sight- seers, I know also, are guide-clutching meg- alomaniacs who would think nothing of trampling the residents into the pavements at the mere glint of a blue plaque in the distance. I was forewarned many years ago by the sad tale of the tourist who was so busy sightseeing that he had no time to notice London at all. Even so, I suppose I am ready to concede it is remarkable that after all these years I have never seen the inside of Madame Tussaud's, especially as for the first thirty-two years of my life I lived within walking distance of it, if you can call that living.
As a matter of fact, it was precisely because I lived so near to it that I never went inside. I suppose in the course of my life I must have walked past its facade something like five thousand times, and on most of those occasions have noticed, at least subcon- sciously, that the photographs of the exhib- ition's prize portraits, in little glass cases let into the outer wall, bear so little resemb- lance to the originals that, were it not for the fact that the proprietors have always made it policy to accompany each photograph with a name, guessing the identity of the waxworks might have become one of the most popular outdoor sports in Britain.
Mind you, I am always willing to concede that my strictures are antedated, that since the days when I quickened my pace as I walked past the building, the standard of portraiture in wax has improved. I seem to remember in my youth a Churchill head which had that unmistakable texture of chop- ped liver the day after a barmitzvah; and another of Roosevelt which made him look like an old woman after a bad experience in a turkish bath. If this was fame, I used to think to myself, who needed it? And even the dubious honour of being perpetuated in wax was not, it seemed, a lasting one. I can recall seeing them one afternoon deliv, ering a few new dummies, so presumably at that very moment a few of the old ones must have been earmarked for melting down and sending off to the nearest toffee factory.
Almost opposite Madame Tussaud's (pro= flounced as in 'Adam Towards'), there stands what is left of Luxborough Street, where a very close friend of mine lived at a period in our lives when to walk was to talk and think. It usually took him until at least two o'clock in the morning to prove scientifically that going to work was an anti-social act, by which time we would have arrived outside his block of flats, where he would lean against the railings, overcome by the sheer impersonal beauty of his own dialectics, and, pointing to the building across the street, re- mark how convenient it was to live opposite the workhouse, because if ever catastrophe struck he could accommodate it almost without altering his location. Today neither my companion nor the workhouse remains
In place of Luxborough Lodge there stands a great pile of decrepitude of a different kind; as for my talking partner, Macmillan's Rent Act drove him farther north years ago.
One of the ports of call on our conver- sational walks used to be a tiny Italian café with one of those rabbit-hutch arrangements in its front window through which the staff could pass ice-cream and fizzy. drinks. The proprietor's son, an old contemporary of ours, although eager enough to chat away with us, had not the slightest interest in either literature or politics or history or indeed any thing except football and, in the close season, the fantastic variations on the theme of the female form which you could see promen- ading by even as you stood there. But he was a student of life for all that, who would think nothing of half-volleying a cheese roll through the rabbit hutch as an empirical experiment in the science of his beloved game. He once told me that the girls who boarded the 27 buses outside his shop had larger breasts than those who jumped on the 18s and 30s. Eventually he married a girl who lived up in Highgate somewhere. Walk- ing along our old route this Easter, I noticed that the café had disappeared, buried forever now beneath the underpass which houses the traffic jam linking Euston and Paddington stations. In such ways do the planners enrich the texture of our lives.
It was on this same recent walk that my old dialectical hiker said that the real reason I had never been inside Madame Tussaud's was not the Chamber of Horrors, or the hook-in-the-stomach stuff, but simply that to visit the waxworks was the last definitive act of childhood. I was hoarding this one last experience because subconsciously I didn't want finally to kiss childhood goodbye. I con- ceded that his theory was an interesting one, doubly so since he had never been inside Madame Tussaud's either, which had the effect of shutting him up until we reached `The Volunteer' in Baker Street. As far as I can remember, this is a record.
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