Chelsea Sunset

Living in London in 2019, I was reminded of the diesel smells of buses which dominated the city streets in the early 1960s, when I also spent summers in Wales and London. My goal back then was to find spoken word records and vinyl albums of Royal Shakespeare plays with Olivier, Burton, O’Toole, Scofield, Richardson, Gielgud. Today much of it is available on the web for free. But back then, you had to brave the insidious Soho fogs, the louche Dickensian cobblestones of Limestone and Bloomsbury, the bookstores of Charing Cross, Shaftesbury, and Cecil Court. So the smell of diesel would take me back to 1590, to carriage lamps and even denser fog, to Nayland Smith and Watson, to the theatres which for me were immensely more real than the leafy suburbs of Northern Westchester where I grew up. They still are, although the backroads of my youth and our first house together in Bedford in the 1980’s have now become as mythic to me as Stratford.

I made pilgrimages, to Burton’s birth town of Pontrhydyfen, to Dylan Thomas’s Laugharne, to the Old Vic, and starting in 1964, to Olivier’s National Theatre on the South Bank. It was a time machine for me, and every street lamp and miniature volume of Shakespeare plays was a holy grail to me.

By 2019, when we got around to actually living in London, there were still musical revelations at Wigmore and at Nick Hytner’s Bridge Theatre, but much of the mystique exists now only in my mind, and I suspect in the minds of everyone who was there back then. The light on a church (it may have been St. Mary’s, in Bourne Street) in the warrens and mews of Belgravia, a village down around Ebury Street where Mozart stayed, which remains much as it must have been when Thomas Cubitt developed around it in the 1850’s.