Departures and Arrivals. Eric Newby

city from the sea is big medicine, powerful magic, unforgettable, however much of a let-down it may prove to be on closer acquaintance. New York seen from the Hudson in the early morning with the sun roaring up over the East River turning the tall buildings into gigantic Roman candles; Venice as your vessel runs in through the Porto di Lido into St Mark’s Basin with the domes and campaniles liquefying and reconstituting themselves in the mirage; Istanbul as your ship comes up the Marmara and sweeps round Seraglio Point towards the Golden Horn and you see silhouetted against the evening sky the fantastic, improbable, incomparable skyline of Old Stamboul.

      It is not only the great cities that have this effect on the arriving traveller. This is how T. E. Lawrence described his first sight of Jidda, the then little port of Mecca, seen from the deck of a passenger ship in the Red Sea while he was on his way to meet the leaders of the Arab Revolt in 1917: ‘When at last we anchored in the outer harbour off the white town, between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless … There were only lights and shadows, the white and black gaps of streets: in front, the pallid lustre of the haze shimmering upon the inner harbour; behind, the dazzle of league after league of featureless sand running up to an edge of low hills, faintly suggested in the far away mist and heat.’

      It is these and similar vistas, whether wild or civilized, that make one want to shout ‘How beautiful the world is!’, that made an elderly lady of my acquaintance, when taken on an outing from her native village in the Po Valley which she had never previously left, cry on arriving on the watershed of the Apennines from which there was an extensive view, ‘Com’è grande il mondo!’ … ‘How big the world is!’ … and insist on being taken home.

       Up to Ther Bend and Back

      Castelnau Mansions, Barnes, SW13, the block of flats in which I was born, in 1919, on the south side of Hammersmith Bridge, was one of several such blocks built in the 1900s on what had been marshland and open country.

      Our flat was on the first floor – Three Ther Mansions, as it was known to the tradesmen who sent their delivery boys out on bicycles from the nearby shops to deliver my mother’s orders. And it had what the estate agents used to describe in the twenties as ‘commanding extensive and splendid views over the Metropolitan Water Board’s Reservoir and Filter Beds’. The filter beds were lovely, full of golden sand that I longed to play with, but was never able to do so as they were fenced in.

      Castelnau, the main road which separated our block of flats from the reservoir, was and is the almost dead-straight road which runs from Hammersmith Bridge to the pub called until recently the Red Lion, and, although it is only about a mile long, it appears to be much longer. It was built in 1827, at the same time as the original Hammersmith Suspension Bridge, a beautiful, slender structure designed by William Tierney Clarke. In 1887 it was replaced by another suspension bridge of cast-iron, a rather elephantine structure designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the man who designed the London sewers. (The IRA tried to blow it up in 1939, but was thwarted when a heroic passer-by picked up the bomb and threw it into the river.) The street was named Castelnau after the family seat of the Boileau family, Castelnau de la Gard at Nîmes, the head of the family being a General de Castelnau.

      The Boileau family also had a house by the Thames at Mortlake, upstream from Barnes. In fact the family must be still turning in their graves to hear their beautiful street called ‘Castlenore’, and the Boileau Arms, the handsome pub at the bridge end of it, built in 1842, ‘Ther Boiler’.

      Castelnau has only one almost imperceptible kink in its entire length, again known to almost everyone as ‘Ther Bend’, which effectively prevents anyone from looking up or down its entire length from either end, except from the top of a bus.

      ‘We’ll just walk up to Ther Bend and back,’ my mother would suddenly say when I no longer had a nurse and was too old to travel by mail cart – which my nurse pushed while I sat looking ahead with my back to the engine.

      And we used to set off for this short walk up Castelnau, something less than half a mile, suitably clad against the elements, which were as unpredictable in Barnes as anywhere else.

      Facing our front door on the same landing as ours, which was the only place for me to play when it rained, was Number Four. It was occupied by a friend of my mother’s. A jolly, long-legged dress-buyer at Derry and Toms, the large department store in Kensington High Street. She loved parties.

      She was known to me as ‘Auntie Lil’ and she had been installed in Number Four by her friend, to me a rather elderly dentist who had his practice in an elegant little house behind Kensington Church Street. He was known to me as ‘Uncle Max’. I wasn’t as keen on Uncle Max as I was on Auntie Lil, as he was also my dentist and not surprisingly I associated him with pain. But ‘Auntie Lil’ was all right, and she gave me bars of Fry’s Chocolate Cream to munch, which made more visits to Uncle Max inevitable.

      On the whole things were not going well at Number Four. Then Uncle Max left Auntie Lil, and I remember a good deal of wailing taking place while she was being comforted by my mother; but she still stayed on at Number Four, and then, some time later, she went away. I missed Auntie Lil, and her Fry’s Chocolate Cream bars.

      The descent to the ground floor, where One and Two were to be found, was by a linoleum-covered staircase with shiny wooden banisters, down which I used to slide. In fact I could slide the whole way down the banisters from the topmost floor to the ground floor, if so inclined.

      The only other occupants of the flats on the upper floors I knew were a Hindu doctor named Dr Wallah and his Scottish nurse/girlfriend. Dr Wallah bore a striking resemblance to Gandhi in early life (in South Africa), but both were so desperately shy that it was difficult for even a five-year-old to talk to them.

      Down on the ground floor Number One The Mansions was occupied by Mr and Mrs Ludovici. She was called Marie, was French and clever. He was partly Italian and known to his friends as Ludo. He was something pretty important in the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Company in Regent Street, and had dealings with Indian princes. He went to work each day by taxi, dressed in a double-breasted black jacket, striped trousers, starched white collar and cuffs, and he always wore a clove carnation in his buttonhole, supplied by a florist near the Boileau Arms. Neither Mr nor Mrs Ludovici suffered fools, and/or small boys, gladly or ungladly and I wouldn’t have dared call them Uncle Ludo or Auntie Marie for all the tea in China.

      Although posher than the Newbys, the Ludovicis, I was pleased to note, had a much poorer view of the reservoir than we did on the first floor of The Mansions, due to a privet hedge in front of their windows having been allowed to grow to an excessive height. In fact they couldn’t see the reservoir at all. Perhaps they were the sort of people who didn’t care for views of reservoirs.

      Down here on the ground floor there was a space under the stairs in which my chained-up mail cart had been parked until recently, still awaiting my parents’ decision as to how to dispose of it. Eventually, they bequeathed it to a tramp – what was then known as ‘a gentleman of the road’ – who was on his way to spend the summer in the vicinity of Penzance but had got blown slightly off course. He said it would be invaluable to him for carrying his gear when sleeping rough in the open. At that time the main roads of Britain were full of tramps, many of them ex-soldiers on their way southwards to the sun, or else, in winter, travelling from one workhouse to another. There were even some women tramps, but they were rather more frightening than the men. Our particular tramp was about forty and had been a corporal in a Rifle Regiment. He was smart as tramps go, but when he left us, pushing what was now his mail cart, after having transferred his possessions to it from a sack and after a slice of fruit cake and a nice cup of hot sweet tea, the following day we found some strange, cabbalistic chalk marks on the wall outside the entrance, which I later learned years later was tramps’ language to the effect that the occupants of Number Three were a decent touch; but none ever came to try us out.

      Now, down on the ground floor, we pushed open the main door,