London Calling Read Online Free PDF

fresh pink carnation in his lapel,
     his black wavy hair swept back, waving a long cigarette holder housing a Royalty extra-large gold-tipped cigarette and sometimes
     gesticulating with his gold-topped malacca cane, Maclaren-Ross had successfully reinvented himself as a member of London high
     bohemia. Before the war, he had been a lowly door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman in Worthing, a tragedy retold in
Of Love and Hunger
(1947), but his stories of war-time conscription had been well received by both the critics and the public. Now he was a
     fixture of Fitzrovia, drinking beer with whisky chasers which he ordered using the Americanism ‘Scotch on the rocks’ that
     he had picked up from the popular films and thrillers he loved so much. When red wine once more became available after the
     war he switched to that.
    After a late lunch at the Scala restaurant on Charlotte Street he would stroll around the bookshops on Charing Cross Road,
     where the only shop that sold Royalty cigarettes in Soho was located. He was back at the Wheatsheaf for opening time. He drank
     until 10.30 closing, then came a quick trot down Rathbone Place to the Highlander on Dean Street for a final half-hour drinking.
     He then walked back to Fitzrovia for supper and coffee at the Scala and home to wherever he was staying at the time: hotel,
     flat or park bench. Throughout all these hours, Maclaren-Ross would have been talking non-stop; virtually anyone would do
     as an audience. ‘At the sound of his booming voice, the habitués of the back tables, accustomed though they were to its nightly
     insistence, looked up in a dull horrified wonderment. There was no getting away from that voice,’ wrote Henry Cohen in
Scamp
.
    Even at closing time, Maclaren-Ross would avoid going home, and would stop off for a nightcap with any of his long-suffering
     friends who would let him in. The writer Dan Davin and his wife were a frequent target and it never occurred to Maclaren-Ross
     that they might need to rise at a normal hour. He would settle down, drinking their whisky, an endless flow of anecdotes,
     some entertaining, others boring, and descriptions of movies recently and not so recently seen, emitting from his mouth until
     the bottle ran dry or his hosts nodded off to sleep in their armchairs. When he finally got home he would write, taking more
     amphetamines to keep him alert. In the middle of the night, using his gold Parker fountain pen, which he always referred to
     as ‘thehooded terror’, he would fill endless sheets of paper with his tiny meticulous handwriting, always writing two drafts, and
     correcting neither. They were always perfect, ready to be typeset.
    Maclaren-Ross was known for his series of witty, cynical, largely autobiographical short stories collected as
The Stuff to Give the Troops
(1944),
Better Than a Kick in the Pants
(1945) and
The Nine Men of Soho
(1946). These days his reputation rests on his evocation of London’s wartime bohemian literary scene in Soho and Fitzrovia,
Memoirs of the Forties
(1965). Sadly he had only completed 60,000 of the projected 120,000 words when he died of a heart attack on 3 November 1965,
     but these chapters alone are regarded as masterful. The critic Elizabeth Wilson wrote: ‘For bohemians such as Maclaren-Ross,
     life was an absurdist drama, a black joke. This bleak, stiff-upper-lip stoicism was a rather British form of bohemianism,
     and Fitzrovia was a very British Bohemia.’ This was a view echoed by the critic V. S. Pritchett: ‘There is nothing else that
     more conveys the atmosphere of bohemian and fringe-literary London under the impact of war and its immediate hangover.’
    Anthony Cronin worked for the literary magazine
Time and Tide
and employed Maclaren-Ross to write the occasional piece. Sometimes he would appear in the office quite broke, unable to
     write because ‘the hooded terror’ and his malacca cane, both heirlooms from his father, or so he claimed, were in pawn.