1974.

I am twenty-one and I’ve lived a privileged, you could say molly-coddled middle-class life. I have been to London before but I’ve never lived there. And here I am, right in the thick of it, in Drummond Street, living in a squat with my brother Jamie. The house is beautiful and murky (the result of years of neglect); it feels exciting, pioneering, daunting. Subversive, yes, but, sensible. Lovely Georgian houses left empty, left to rot, perhaps to be demolished – an insane waste. Political, yes, but practical (I am trying to be a composer and I’m earning almost no money). Jamie, being Jamie, has chosen the wallpapers with great care. The household is extremely sociable. I cook supper and suddenly there are fifteen people in the kitchen.

The street is like no street I’ve ever been in – a thriving South Asian culture. Men standing around chewing betel root (us whities give it a go, hoping for a cheap legal high, and find it has almost no effect except to make our gums go brown); market stalls; shops selling food I’ve never seen before. Next door is the Diwana Bhel Poori house. This is a revelation – I’ve never had Indian food before, and I’ve never been to a vegetarian restaurant. England is still 95% meat-and-two-veg. And here are brilliant cooks for whom vegetarianism is a natural part of their culture. The food is amazing – light, subtle, spicy (without necessarily being chilli-hot), and the meals, based around dhosas, have a different structure from European ones, consisting of many small dishes. What an education.

Oh and there’s Ambala, which sells Indian sweets. Our favourite is gulab jamun, which is like the best rice pudding you ever had, though actually it contains no rice. (It’s made with khoya, milk reduced to a solid by long heating, and then kneaded to a dough with a little flour. And cardamon, saffron, rose water – all new to me.) Rohit, who serves behind the counter, thinks it’s a huge joke that we whities are so keen on gulab jamun. His gag is to give it a different name every time we go in. Ulab ramun, fulab chamun, dulab gamun.

2am. Burglars. Burgling a squat? What? I am still struggling into my clothes when Jamie and his boyfriend Richard emerge naked from their bedroom and chase the burglars down the street. It’s a magnificent sight.

I have elderflowers and will make elderflower champagne. But I have nothing to make it in. So I go round to John and Vera’s. John and Vera are ex-addicts who have radically reformed, becoming macrobiotic and slightly stroppy, and now run a coop selling organic vegetables. (As ahead of the game as the Diwan-I-Am.) And John and Vera have on their premises a bath, for some reason. I borrow the bath and make a huge amount of elderflower champagne. I take a bottle round to John and Vera as a small thank you. What’s in it? they ask. Elderflowers, lemon juice, sugar, water. Sugar? White sugar?? They are horrified. Ahead of the game.

We shop at Laurence Corner, which sells vintage military uniform. Not the only shop in London selling military stuff – there are several others, fashion shops, including I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. Weird – hippies and dedicated followers of fashion wearing military uniform. The precise level of the irony is ambiguous. Laurence Corner is more down-to-earth, more of an emporium. I have a pair of sailor’s trousers, with huge flares, and a strange nest of flaps over the crotch which makes having a pee a major event.

I am walking through Tolmers Square, past a hoarding displaying the poster for The Who’s Tommy, which has been made into a film. ‘Tommy – he will tear your soul apart’ runs the strap line, in huge font. A vertiginously long ladder leans against the hoarding, and at the top of the ladder is Vince, altering, with extreme care and precision, the strapline to ‘Levy – he will tear your home apart’. Joe Levy, who has bought most of the area in a complex fabric of deals, and built the hugely profitable Euston Centre, has big, brutal plans.

In the middle of Tolmers Square, grand Georgian architecture in a state of dilapidation, there used until recently to be a cinema. Originally a church, it was converted by some bright spark in the 1920s, the spire removed, a Wurlitzer organ installed. The Tolmers Cinema showed double bills of B-movies round the clock. It was a haven for movie buffs and vulnerable people, who could spend the day in the skuzzy auditorium becoming experts on The Curse of the Werewolf and Die Slowly, You’ll Enjoy It More.

Jamie and Corinne and Sacha move into Tolmers Square, and I move round the corner into Warren Street. More beautiful Georgian terraced houses, the pioneering Open Space Theatre, and, during the daytime, hard-core second hand car dealers. (At the end of a long Friday afternoon, a car dealer to his boss: Can I borrow the green Jag for the weekend? Boss: You’re fucking joking. Dealer: Ok, I’ll fucking buy it.) 

We live above Boldings, the plumbers’ merchants. When we arrive, the house is like the Marie Celeste. The tenants have obviously been evicted brutally, and everything is still there – bedclothes, books, half-cooked meals. We paper the sitting room in sheet music (it’s not only Jamie who is obsessed with wallpaper). No hot water. A Baby Belling stove (one hob and an oven), but it’s impossible to use the hob and the oven simultaneously because the electrics are so basic. I become an expert as a one-pot dinner cook. But unfortunately never as a roofer – despite regular efforts with strange kinds of sticky black paint and bits of hessian, the water flows in and flows in. 

I start a band, The Lost Jockey, which rapidly grows to thirty players (I’m so flattered that anyone wants to join that I always say yes), including four pianists. We rehearse in the house, half the band in one room, half in the next room. The pianos are carried up and down the stairs. Next door are Boy George and Marilyn. We lend them electricity. Oh, I’m so proud of this! Without me, no Karma Chameleon. No It’s A Miracle.

Boy George and Marilyn tend to rehearse between midnight and 6am. It’s 2am one night, and I can’t sleep, can’t sleep, can’t sleep. (And it’s my electricity!) I get up, put on my dressing gown, which is a heavy military trench coat, go out and knock on their door. Of course they can’t hear. I am incensed. I go back, get a hammer, and knock again, hard, furious knocking. It is pouring with rain, torrentially. Marilyn answers. He is charming, polite, welcoming. Why don’t I come in for coffee? And at that moment I have a vision of myself, wearing only a military trench coat, carrying a hammer, sodden, beside myself. Could you turn it down a little, I say, and flee back into my house.

1984.

I unlock the front door, but can’t open it. I look through the letterbox. The hall is piled high with identical packages. I push and push, squeeze in. The packages are eviction notices, twenty-seven of them. There aren’t twenty-seven people living here, there are two, but I suppose the lawyers need to cover their backs. I go off to live in a much less exciting part of London, and to pay rent. Huh.

Read more about the author Orlando Gough