LONDON LETTER
385
pausing unconcerned at the curb--mop-haired totties and
louchll
lads.
The plane
had
been a Time Machine and England had spun on two
thousand years during the six hour flight. The Eloi had taken over;
lovely teen lollipops strutted about, beautifully tricked out in a camp
sort of way, while middle aged Morlocks went about their prosaic biz.
The London teen scene is
very
different from New York. It's cool and
cocky-very modern, but cursed perhaps too by an unsettling indifference
maudite. There
were
those holiday riots. Blown up, of course, by the
press; but at the Bank holiday weekend, the creaking smelly trains to
the sea
were
packed with natty narcissists looking for a giggle and a
light-hearted punch-up on the sands.
It was a field day for the news hungry summer press and the Beaver–
brook photographers splashed their front pages with big pictures of the
turmoil. The one I liked best seemed to have been taken from the air,
high above the beach at Margate, showing a black, dehiscent swarm
of young Mods, racing like little swastikas across the sand. In the left
hand bottom corner some abandoned deck chairs ballooned in the wind
of their approach. A good snip for Canetti.
Next day came the vindictively self-righteous editorials and letters
from the Morlocks. A certain Dr. Simpson, a Margate JP, came out as
the hero of the occasion, praised all round for his brave invective as
he handed out whacking fines to the "useless defectives" before him in
the Toytown dock and next day we got an improving, full page snap of
"the real hero of the Margate sands" . . . the Solomonic Doc himself,
strolling thoughtfully along the now deserted beach.
Strangely enough, in the midst of all this alarm and adult irritation
there was much less talk of beating and flogging than there would
have been, say, three years ago. There was plenty of verbal violence,
mostly betraying a sad, middle-aged envy for the swish and gaiety of
modern English youth, but the flagellant fury of yesteryear has vanished.
Or has it? Perhaps it's just been driven into a photo-pornographic
annex of the mind. The little Soho Art-Books-and-Mags shops are
crowded with studiously casual middle-aged men of an afternoon, idly
turning the pages of the girlie mags until they can get a turn to
riffle through the packets of "pies" in the little cubicle at the back
of the shop. Here, in two or three file cabinet drawers are packed
about fifty cellophane wrapped packets of photos, broadly classified into
"flag," "bondage," "lesb duos" or "straight perv." "Straight perv," which
turns out to be the boring old two backed monster with variations,
takes up relatively little space by comparison with your "lesb duos"
and "flag" tableaux which sell like hot cakes at fifteen shillings a set.
