London Assurance

WE ARRIVED in the nerve-center of England with very little planned. The evening meal is always a good starting point, so we took a walk in the neighborhood of our hotel to see what came to hand, so to speak.

We were in the borough of Camden, where it turns out that Euston Station – where our train from Edinburgh left us – essentially put the place on the map. It was opened in 1837 to offer train service to Birmingham, the first inter-city line in England, and it was a tremendous success. And this came only 27 years after Euston Square was created, giving a name to this area. It’s still best-known as a transportation hub, with tube and bus service here as well, but it’s also home to University College London.

Which means that we had UCL housing located in our neighborhood, as evidenced by the crowd spilling onto the sidewalk at the Crown and Anchor pub. We were walking up North Gower Street, site of our hotel, toward Drummond Street, where I understood I could find a restaurant.

Good thing we like Indian food. Among the eateries there were Raavi Kebab, Dwana Bhel Poori House, Drummond Villa, Ravi Shankar Bhelpoori House, Sizzling Bombay, Taste of India Euston, and Chutneys. Why did we settle on Masala King? Because a pleasant gentleman in the doorway of that place exhorted us to try it. He was one of several eager souls hawking their restaurants, reminding me of the sales pitches I’d hear in Manhattan’s Little Italy on a Saturday night.

Nothing extraordinary about the place, but we got a good meal at a good price served efficiently – and that can be extraordinary in itself these days. The place was very uncrowded, perhaps a phenomenon of this being a Wednesday. It was more difficult finding a convenience store in the neighborhood, but eventually we were able to load up on soft drinks and snacks. Which make any hotel room that much more comfortable.

Thursday was a big day insofar as we had theater tickets, secured months before, for a popular show. But not to be overly saddled with an unambulatory millstone, Susan visited the Charles Dickens Museum without me, reporting back that its five floors of furnishings and memorabilia were an absolute delight, as were the conversations that sprang up among docents and patrons. I was happy for her, and even happier for me for avoiding it. Otherwise, we put aside the hope of doing any sightseeing in London. There’s too much to see and we had done none of our usual research. What I wanted to do was make a pilgrimage to Grafton Arms, a pub near St. James’s Park. But our Uber ride to the pub turned out to be the sightseeing tour we thought we weren’t going to get.

It was partly coincidence, partly due to the fact that London is crammed with tourist destinations. Right away we saw the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where our daughter spent a semester in 2018; not far from that, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. We passed the Shaftesbury and Cambridge Theatres before sighting Trafalgar Square, but when Big Ben came into view, we knew to look out for the Palace of Westminster (home to the Houses of Parliament) and Westminster Abbey. And not once did we have to get out and walk around those venerable edifices! Instead, we were dropped at 2 Strutton Ground for a pint at the Grafton Arms. (There are more than one Grafton Arms in London, including a place that’s also a fancy boutique hotel. Make sure you locate the correct one.)

This was the birthplace of the Goon Show, and that’s a story in itself. After the end of World War II, several former soldiers who’d worked as entertainers during the war sought similar employment in civilian life. And several of them found a congenial meeting place in a pub operated by another ex-serviceman, Jimmy Grafton, now managing the family business. Michael Bentine, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers, and Spike Milligan invented silly bits in a variety of characters they created, and Grafton steered them to the BBC. They impressed almost no-one there except producer Pat Dixon, who persuaded the BBC to take a chance on the show.

It was devised very much with radio in mind, pushing the limits of how stories were told, how jokes were constructed, and how sound could be used, all in service of a surrealistic form of humor that changed the face of British comedy. I told the tale of my history as a fan of the Goon Show here, so it was a treat to have a good pub lunch at the place where it all began. Many of the walls at Grafton Arms are painted with Goon Show-related murals, and photos and other memorabilia adorn the walls. “Unfortunately, you can’t see the room upstairs where Milligan lived and worked,” the bartender told us, “because it’s now where the manager lives.”

Unfazed, we enjoyed a pub luncheon and quietly tapped into the ghosts of the foursome whose antics, six-and-a-half decades ago, led to this legendary radio series. Very difficult from my perspective, of course, as I hadn’t gone through the often brutal military service to which the four Goons were subjected, nor had I the background in pre-war comedy traditions. It was only through the Goon Shows that I caught whiffs of the music halls and the crosstalk acts that lived there. But discovering and decoding the shows as a teenager changed my way of thinking, teaching me to better cope with an alcoholic mother (responding to her verbal attacks with non-sequiturs became my most successful strategy) and to welcome the world’s other vagaries. The Byron you see in the photo on this page is a person feeling very much at home.

As of this writing, “Guys and Dolls” is still running in London. My friend David Baecker saw it late in 2022, and recommended it, so we bought tickets. It was a terrific way to finish our time in London and, by extension, in the UK. It’s an immersive experience, an approach so overdone and over-rated that I’m ready to run screaming from the next such production that’s thrown my way, but the script and songs are so good that the show easily survived it. Our tickets put us in the more traditional seating area, a sort of mezzanine area; others, unafraid of standing and moving throughout the show, were on the floor alongside the actors, who moved from one area to the next in order to signify the scene settings, often with the help of platforms that rose from the floor and later lowered again. You wouldn’t have a New York City setting without cops, and these were those who made sure that audience members were out of the way of whatever it was that moved.

What lay ahead was our final limo ride of the trip, and another ocean crossing, but they’ll be covered in what mercifully will be the final piece in this series.