Read Alma Cogan for Free Online

door to door.
    *
    I had been pathetically reassured to see a rank of what I regarded as ‘London’ taxis waiting with their engines turning over at the station. Then I had been just as pathetically disconcerted to find myself cheated of the familiar, unreproducible, to me dependably balm-like and curative sounds and smells of the classic black FX4, ‘the special FX’.
    The back of the cab, I soon saw, had been turned into a replica of the shoebox rooms in the sodium-coloured towers and terraces which made a corridor out of the city for the first three or four miles.
    There was what had once been a brightly coloured, now uniformly greasy piece of carpet remnant covering the floor; a stretch-cover so pocked with cigarette burns it resembled nylon netting lay over the passenger seat. Two dish-type lavatory deodorisers were stuck to the back window and a black metal grille had replaced the sliding glass confessional of the London cabs.
    The grille was necessary, the driver told me, on account of the number of Navy fares he picked up after they had been lagering hard on The Steyne (rhymes with stain). ‘Usually it’s just verbal they give you, but sometimes it gets more heavy. You get stacked by women even – smashing you over the head with bags full of deodorant.
    ‘I had one of them do a nasty on me in the back there last night. I only smelled it when I pulled over for a smoke. Sitting at the edge of a wood down by Wollaton here, breathing in the clean air, listening to the owls – “the loud-hooting owl/That loves the turbulent and frosty night/And hallooes to the moon”. ( Was this supposed to ring bells? )Then I suddenly get hit with a whiff of that. I tell you. Nice people.’
    The shift from city-and-suburban to country-creepy (hedgerows high as houses shoring up a vast unvariegated blackness; skidding and skeetering movements picked up in the sweep of the car lights) happened abruptly. So abruptly thatelectric advertising signs from the main road were momentarily imprinted as after-images on the pitch dark, and the sense of strangeness and panic nearly overwhelmed me.
    My banishment happened (can this really be right?) six, seven years ago, in the late seventies/early eighties. I spent most of the seventies living on or just above the cake line (a crack borrowed from the original cast album of Pal Joey which has proved endlessly useful for deflecting cat-house queries about my circumstances).
    I’ve never been ashamed to admit when I’ve been broke. As my bobbeh and zaideh used to say, What’s to worry? You’ve heard of people so poor they thought knives and forks were jewellery? So poor they … Those old chestnuts. Well that was my parents’ parents. Both sets. But regardless of how broke I’ve been, I have rarely denied myself certain basic luxuries: good gargle, good music, fresh flowers, taxis.
    Few evenings were ever able to live up to the taxi-ride through the London dusk which began them. The contrast between the blank, dim, gently vibrating interior and the lights and stark specificity outside (plus of course the couple of stiffeners I’d tucked away before leaving home) never failed to produce that perfect balance between excitement and boredom, anticipation and relaxation that is the condition in which I’m sure most people would live all their lives, if they had the choice.
    I always was a great go-outer. My appetite for the social whirl even surprised me sometimes. In the ten or so years before I decided to cut out and head for rural entombment, socialising – partying, lip-flapping, throwing it back – was all I seemed to do. If I wasn’t preparing for a drinks, a first-night, a private view, a record launch, a supper, I was picking myself up from the night before. (The formula: sleep, ice-cream, plenty thick brown tea.)
    What can I tell you? I enjoyed it. Although I had been there and back myself and was aware of the shallowness, the fatuity, the whatever you want to call it, the truth