(this is an expert from a memoir I am currently writing. The story takes place in London, in 1977, where I was a part-time student at the Guildhall School of Music and a full time loafer and wannabe boulevardier)
I got tired of my endless couch-surfing and finally was able to scare up a room to let. My landlady was a Miss Fredrick, a thin, 5’11” ascetic spinster in her mid-50’s. By a nice coincidence, the her building was only a few blocks south of the Abbey Rd Studios and famed crosswalk featured on the Beatles’ eponymous album. Yet for reasons known only to London city planners, the address of my building was not on Abbey Rd, but rather on Grove End Rd, even though it was precisely the same street, two or three hundred yards further south. Miss Fredrick’s building stood directly across from London’s hallowed Lord’s Cricket Grounds.
My days passed pleasantly. I practiced my guitar the minimum amount of time needed to get through a piece without completely crashing during my lesson, I studied a bit of music theory, and I wrote a bit of music, and read lots of books on my favorite subject, behavior therapy. But most of my time was spent lounging, taking long walks, visiting second hand book and clothing shops, eating pub grub at the Lord’s – the pub adjacent to the cricket grounds – or a boiled beef sandwich in the basement of Selfridges department store. I found an Austrian deli, where I’d buy lean pink ham for my open-faced sandwiches, which Miss Fredrick considered a foreign abomination. “WE do not eat ham sandwiches at 4 o’clock in the afternoon IN THIS COUNTRY,” she’d give me a sideways look, “and the thing you’re eating is not a proper sandwich anyway. Would you like to have dinner here tonight? I’ll make a lovely beef and two veg.” No matter what name Miss Fredrick gave a meal, they all tasted exactly the same. “Beef and two veg”, “Hungarian goulash”, “Roast beef and mash”. All her dinners came from little plastic bags bought at Marks & Spencer’s on the corner of Oxford and Baker Streets. Occasionally, I’d humor her and have a meal with her. Dinners were short affairs, as all meals are in England. Proper cutlery had to be used, even if dinner had just been fished out of boiling water, still encased in plastic bags and served on paper plates. The knives and forks were washed immediately in what passed for hot water at Grove End Road. “A lovely meal, didn’t you think?” While I tried to distract myself from the discomfort of digesting her “meat and two veg”, Miss Fredrick retired to her living room, turned on the telly, sat her slim tall frame down in a faded armchair, turned on her little space heater and opened a bottle of Scotch. I went to my ice-cold room and soon heard her snore. The armchair creaked as she stood to turn off the TV around 10. She’d pour herself another finger of Scotch (I heard the glass clink) and went to bed. She had placed a tiny heater in my room with strict regulations regarding its use. Never turn it on during the day. You can let it run while you’re going to bed, but if you happened to wake up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you must shut it off. If you sleep through the night, the heater must be switched off at 7 am. Now, London is by no means a city of arctic winters such as Detroit or Milwaukee, but 40 degree days and 34 degree nights - for months on end - feel pretty darn cold without central heating and with your little heater only on for limited hours. In the 70’s, incidentally, central heating was still considered something of a “posh” people’s indulgence. I ignored Miss Fredrick’s rule and when the electric bill came, I’d put a 5 pound note on the dining table alongside it, thus avoiding a tongue-lashing about my spendthrift, continental, UN-ENGLISH ways. Because who eats open-faced sandwiches and warms up his room to more than 60 degrees?
She thought all Europeans were decadent brats and American tourists rude little children, but she loved travelling to the US to visit her brother in St Louis. “Such lovely people, the Americans, as long as they stay in America. Polite, always smiling, always so helpful, even though they all drawl like cowboys. But dear God, the food! The portions are so large, you lose your appetite. I don’t need a steak two inches thick, covering my whole plate! Such terrible waste. But they do have a peculiar custom in America, they offer you what they call “doggie bags”. You may take all your uneaten food with you home. We English would never do that. It’s unhygienic and it’s sinful to serve a portion that no human can finish. But I’ll admit those “doggie bags” did come in handy many a time on my visits. I saved a lot of money!”
Another strict rule of Miss Fredrick’s was “no female visitors under any circumstances” She did not mean just overnight – the rule applied 24 hours a day though she had no way of enforcing it, since she worked full time. Not having at least the occasional female visitor was a mission impossible for a horny guy in his twenties. There were a couple of girlfriends who helped me defile Mrs. Fredrick’s spartan sanctuary. Those trysts broke many rules: we turned on the heater and helped ourselves to a little whisky AND used the bathroom! But much as I enjoyed the carnal pleasures in my freezing room, the quality of the sex, and of my erections, was impacted by my fear of Miss Fredrick returning home unexpectedly. I remember standing at the bus stop with a female acquaintance one rainy, windy day. As we waited for our bus, I asked her to come up to the flat with me. She agreed, but as soon as we crossed the road, I got cold feet and said: “You know what, let’s just take the bus to town, like we planned. This is probably not a good idea.” “Fine,” she said, and pursed her lips. “Whatever you want!” Jesus, I’m such a wuss, I thought. She walked back with me in pouty silence. I saw the bus coming down the street, approaching the stop. “Fuck it! Let’s go have some fun” I grabbed her hand and we raced back to the building. Her giggle made me happy. Good fun was had. We lit cigarettes, and put our winter sweaters back on. Miss Fredrick was a smoker, so cigarettes were not verboten.
I’m certain my strict landlady knew I was not adhering to all her rules. She never gave me a hard time about the girls, despite her outward stringency, but she did often take me to task for my reckless spending. I guess her obsessive frugality extended to other people, not just her own habits. She hated my “wasting good money” on buying German bread (“Our English Hovis is the finest bread anywhere”), Austrian ham, Swiss marmalade, or Israeli halva. Those foods were not English, and everything foreign was either disgusting or threatening. “Why do you need to spend money on all that foreign rubbish? You can buy perfectly good English food at Marks and Sparks for one third of the price. How can you eat that dark bread anyway? I’m sure it tastes like horse feed!”
Miss Fredricks, forged in the Blitz, finest of the Brits.
Ah, yes, those London days! You really brought it alive. Love the descriptions of you landlady and the food. Ugh, English food! I lived there for 7 years, early 80s, although we went back and forth to a village near Lake Bled, at that time Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia. I was cold the entire time in our drafty London flat. In the village of Zirovnica if I wanted hot water I had to chop wood and make a fire under the water heater. No central heating so had to carry in buckets of coal and wood to stoke the big tile stove in the bedroom. Horrible marriage but I loved it there. Thanks for bringing back the good parts of London.