The Pleasures and Perils of Living Abroad - by Lesley Downer

My Idealed John Bullesses 
by Yoshio Makino 1912

London in 1900 was like New York today, a city where you craned your neck gazing up at the towering stone buildings while all around people rushed hither and thither, sleek and well-dressed, full of importance. At least that was how it seemed to a sensitive 33 year old Tokyoite called Natsume Soseki who arrived on October 28th that year. 

Tokyo too was prosperous and had its share of stone buildings, built largely by western architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright. But it was primarily a low rise city full of narrow streets of dark wooden houses with bamboo shutters and tiled roofs. London was not just huge - a ‘maze’, Soseki called it - but the heart of the greatest empire in the world, whereas Japan had only just had the insulting ‘unequal treaties’ with Britain and other western powers nullified. When the actress Sadayakko performed here, also in 1900, reviewers expressed amazement that someone ‘primitive’ (i.e. not European, let alone British) should seem perfectly sophisticated.

Fleet Street by James Valentine c 1890

Soseki (his first name and pen name) was a pre-eminent scholar of English literature and one of the first graduates of Tokyo Imperial University’s English Literature department. He had been sent to study for two years by the Japanese government, keen to learn as much as possible from the most powerful country in the world.

But he really didn’t want to go. For a start he had to leave his pregnant wife behind. He had a very small stipend and spent most of it on books, which didn’t leave much for rent. He stayed in a succession of shabby lodging houses - in Gower Street near the British Museum, Priory Road in West Hampstead, the ‘gloomy, squalid neighbourhood of the notorious slum Camberwell’, Tooting and lastly Clapham Common, the one place where he felt even remotely contented. 

Farewell photo before Soseki's departure
for London. Soseki is bottom right

From the start he was lonely and miserable. He hated the weather, the food and the tube, ‘the foulness of the air and the train’s swaying.’ He spent most of his time holed up in his room. The only English people he got to know were his landladies and their families.

When he did go out for a walk, he felt terribly self conscious about his smallness of stature. Everyone he met was ‘depressingly tall,’ he wrote. Once he saw an ‘unusually small person’ approaching and thought, ‘Eureka!’, then realised this person was still 2 inches taller than he was. Finally ‘a strangely complexioned Tom Thumb approaches, but now I realise this is my own image reflected in a mirror.’ In the park ‘herds of women walk around like horned lionesses with nets on their heads.’ He was struck by the fact that even tradesmen ‘are for the most part better dressed than many a high ranking official in Japan ... A butcher’s boy, when Sunday rolls around, will proudly put on his silk hat and frock coat.’

Behind his back he heard people referring to him as a ‘least-poor Chinese’, a very strange adjective, as he noted. He was also mistaken at the theatre for a Portuguese.

To improve his health his landlady suggested that he take up cycling so he set off for the horse riding area on Clapham Common where there would not be too many spectators. His efforts resulted in a series of comic mishaps with him nearly running down a policeman.

Soseki in 1912

Eventually he became so isolated and miserable that his landlady, doctor and fellow lodgers advised him to take a holiday. So he went to Scotland, where he made the discovery that British people didn’t go moon-viewing or appreciate moss and began to doubt whether the British were really worth the reverence in which they were held in Japan.

He did experience some kindnesses. A beefeater at the Tower of London went out of his way to show him a suit of Japanese armour, ‘presented to Charles II from Mongolia.’ He was in London when Queen Victoria died in January 1901 and his landlord lifted him onto his shoulders so that he could see the funeral cortege. 

Nevertheless all in all it was a miserable experience. ‘The two years I spent in London were the most unpleasant years in my life,’ he later wrote. ‘Among English gentlemen I lived in misery, like a poor dog that had strayed among a pack of wolves. I understand the population of London is about five million. Frankly speaking, I felt as if I were a drop of water amid five million drops of oil.’

Plaque at 81 The Chase, Clapham

But in fact Soseki’s lonely years were the making of him. He wrote about them wryly and humorously in several early works and went on to become one of the most beloved Japanese novelists of all time, author of Kokoro, Botchan and I am a Cat, among many others.

Yoshio Makino in contrast adored London. A artist three years younger than Soseki, he arrived a few years before him, in 1897, though there is no evidence that their paths ever crossed.

Makino particularly loved the mist and fog of the English landscape. He wrote, ‘London in mist is far above my own ideal ... the colour and its effects are most wonderful. I think London without mists would be like a bride without a trousseau ... The London mist attracts me so that I do not feel that I could live any other place but London.’

He lived in London for 45 years, mainly in Kensington, and did many paintings - of the Thames, Earl’s Court Station, Sloane Square, all studies in mist; of Fulham Road with a church spire looming out of the gloom, pavements glittering on a rainy night, shadowy nightspots with crowds of women emerging from brightly lit houses into a dark street. 

He also admired British women and painted many pictures of them. He called them John Bullesses (after John Bull). ‘Some John Bullesses bury themselves into such thick fur overcoats in winter. You can hardly see their eyes; all other parts are covered with foxes’ tails, minks’ heads, seals’ back skin, a whole bird, snakeskin, etc. ... But when they get into a house and take off all those heavy wearing, such a light and charming butterfly comes out,’ he wrote.

Soseki’s stay came to an end in January 1903 but Makino stayed on till 1942 when he was reluctantly repatriated. He spent the rest of his life trying to get back to England.

Quotations from The Tower of London, Tales of Victorian London, by Natsume Soseki, translated and introduced by Damian Flanagan, the great enthusiast of and authority on Natsume Soseki. Published by Peter Owen, 2005.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan and is out now in paperback.

For more see www.lesleydowner.com

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A TRIUMPH OF SNOBBERY OVER IDEALISM By Eleanor Updale

It's funny how you can miss history in the making. Sometimes it’s a single big event. A friend of mine came out of the subway near the twin towers just after the first plane struck.  Everyone was looking up.  She thought the city had been comandeered by yet another film crew, and disappeared into her office - unaware for ages that anything was going wrong.  My husband slept through the Brighton bomb.

But most of us slumber as social developments and political trends unfurl around us.  We’re so close to them that we don’t realise how significant (or how fleeting) they might be.  We may fail to note the everyday things that future historians will take as crucial markers of our time. Each of us has, unwittingly, a store of knowledge about some minor part of history, sometimes from odd or interesting angles.  For me, it was being caught up in a brief social experiment in post-war London. 

I grew up in a block of flats in Camberwell. It was owned by the London County Council, and was part of an attempt to stop council estates becoming ghettos of poverty.  The idea was that some blocks would be what they called ‘Higher Rental Accommodation’.  In other words, the rent was unsubsidised (and rates were not included).  The idea was that the young families of men in ‘settled occupations’ (teachers, civil servants, and various arty types) would be encouraged to move in. The flats were very close to a train line into Blackfriars and Holborn Viaduct – very convenient for Fleet Street -- so several of the residents were journalists  on national newspapers.  There were jazz musicians, and the man who sang ‘Aqua Marina’ at the end of Stingray. In exchange for the extra rent, we got a laundry in the basement, with coppers for boiling up the washing, a mangle, and some very early washing machines (which were usually broken).

Otherwise, the flats were much the same as on other council estates.  The rooms were small and there was wee in the lift.  You couldn’t have pianos or dogs, and a stern notice listed all the rules  - threatening dire penalties for breaking them.  It was signed by Alderman Douglas Houghton, who was the Labour head of the LCC Housing Committee when the flats were built. More than thirty years later, when he was Baron Houghton of Sowerby and I was producing the TV coverage of the House of Lords, I still feared that he would lock me up for playing Knock Down Ginger when I was six.

I think the LCC's original idea was that the tenants would mingle freely with the less privileged families in the ‘real’ council blocks (the Yellow Blocks, as we called them, because of the different colour of the bricks), that we would all go to the same schools, and that snobbery would die.  

Well, it didn’t work out that way, of course.  By the time I was a toddler there was a fence between us and the Yellow Blocks.  We weren’t allowed to use each other’s playgrounds, even though they had a better roundabout, and we had the only slide. People in our flats made a point of describing themselves as ‘ratepayers’ and, incredible as it may seem, our block had an official, council-imposed, colour bar.  It was lifted by the time I was a teenager in the late sixties, but I still remember the fuss about whether a Turkish family was on the right side of the line.

Here’s an example of the casual racism of the time. 

This picture was probably taken around 1958. It shows a group of us from the flats on our way to a fancy dress competition at our primary school.  Although there were black children at the school, it was thought perfectly acceptable for someone to go as one of the black-and-white minstrels.

By the way, I’m the Benny Hill look-alike (not in fancy dress) on the right.  My brother is Father Christmas.  This may be a record of the day on which I found out that he isn’t real…

Some of the social engineering worked.  Most of us did go to the local primary - the only exception I can recall being Kelvin MacKenzie, who (as I remember) was at a posh prep school some distance away. But more people from our side of the fence stayed on to the sixth form and university, and more from the other side ended up in prison.  As it turned out, housing wasn’t the complete answer to inequality – the aspirations and background of the parents in those homes mattered too. 

In some ways, what the experiment did was simply jolt old-fashioned snobbery one rung down the social ladder. Although I can remember no trouble emanating from the Yellow Blocks, I have to admit that I was brought up with an assumption that we were ‘better’ than the people living there. This was the exact opposite of what the social engineers had in mind.  Our flats gave people who - before the war - would have been looked down on by their 'betters' in some suburban enclave a platform of their own from which to look down on others.  Given that many of the residents worked on tabloid newspapers, maybe that had a part to play in disseminating the idea that ‘real’ council estates were places for lesser, feckless, beings.

And it got worse…

When the Right to Buy came in, our flats were among the first to go, and they were rapidly sold on.  Nestled alongside two major hospitals, they were snapped up by doctors needing crashpads and yuppies getting their first step on London’s Housing ladder.  The playground was turned into a car park.  They probably have entryphones now.  I just looked on the internet.  A three bedroom flat there will set you back more than £330,000 these days.  

In the early fifties, our block of flats was part of a much bigger social enterprise.  We were not far from the pioneering Peckham Health Centre, though by the 1960s it was little more than a swimming pool. 

The familiy planning clinic (where sixth formers from my school handed over a guinea to get the pill, and where we were shocked to discover that the nurse there was a resident of our flats) had been the very first in London.

No doubt some of the early residents of our flats had gone there out of idealism – even hoping to walk in the shoes of the pioneers who had set up the Health Centre and the clinic.  I remember babysitting for a young couple when I was in my teens. They told me that they had come because they wanted to live in a ‘community’.  It was the first time I had heard the word. Those young hippies were doomed to disappointment.  Most of our parents never spoke to anyone in the Yellow Blocks. They probably felt they were doing them a favour simply by being there – gently raising the tone.  

 In the end, almost all the tenants of our flats sold up and moved on as soon as they had the chance --  happy to leave those in the Yellow Blocks and the council's rules behind them.  

That probably wasn’t what Alderman Houghton had in mind.      

eleanor@eleanorupdale.com