In the 1980s, I worked in a shop in Leinster Terrace, Bayswater, and this man would come in every lunchtime to buy the first edition of the Evening Standard. While waiting for the van to arrive with the newspapers, he would chat to the shop staff, including me, and his routine was to mention something notable that happened on that day of the year. I can’t remember any examples, but it would be things like ‘On this day, Margaret Thatcher was born.’ I don’t know if he ever said that, but he was certainly a fan of Margaret Thatcher.
The other members of staff found him annoying, plus they typically had no idea what he was talking about. I could find him a bit annoying, too, at times, but I knew about a lot of the things he mentioned, so he latched on to me. Eventually, I had some longer conversations with him.
He was in his eighties, and my memory is that he was originally from a somewhat well-off background. I think the family owned a business of some sort, but he’d either fallen out or lost touch with his relatives. Or maybe they’d all died, I can’t remember. He’d never married, but he mentioned girlfriends he’d had when he was young. (He had fond memories, he said, of ‘lying down in a cornfield’ with one.) I can’t remember what he did for a living earlier in life (or maybe he never told me), but he’d lived in that part of London for many years. At that time, his home was a bedsit or hotel room somewhere close by, but he mentioned that in the 1960s, when the Profumo scandal blew up, he was living in Sussex Gardens, near Paddington station, in a room in the same house where Mandy Rice-Davies was also living, across the hallway.
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