{“Never mind, dear. Better luck next time.”}
I was inspired to seek out Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, after watching the 2005 made for TV adaptation starring Bryan Dick as the waiter Bob, Zoë Tapper as the penniless West End prostitute Jenny Maple whom Bob falls so hard for, and Sally Hawkins as the barmaid Ella who harbours a secret longing for Bob. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky includes Hamilton’s novels The Midnight Bell, the story of Bob and his love and longing for a woman who is never likely to return his affections, (Jenny’s) The Siege of Pleasure, and (Ella’s) The Plains of Cement, three beautiful and bleak interwoven stories that unfold in a London public house off the Euston Road. The adaptation brought to screen follows faithfully the trilogy in three fifty minute instalments. Impossible and unrequited love and all its accompanying disappointments and wasted dreams set against a background of poverty makes for a beautifully sad read. There were many sentences and paragraphs I underlined by indentation with the side of my nail as I read, but most beautiful of all for me, that one last line in which (to hopefully not give too much away) the barmaid is heard weeping.
For all its bleakness, I still can’t help feeling that I’d like to be able to walk into The Midnight Bell for a drink.
I loved it for its swung bar door which “announced you to the saloon bar with a welcoming creak”. For the Governor and owner of The Midnight Bell who “was the same shape as the world, but a little smaller”. For emerging from indoors snuggery to find the world “transfigured by dusk”.
Bob identified and adored this transfiguration. All day long the Hampstead Road is a thing of sluggish grey litter and rumbling trams. But at dusk it glitters. Glitters, and gleams, and twinkles, and is phosphorescent – and the very noises of the trams are like romantic thunders from the hoofs of approaching night. In exultant spirits he strolled down towards the West End.
This description is one I intend to keep perched on my shoulder as I work with Louise on drawing out and adding lustre to a series of new nighttime collages to accompany Hila’s evening approaches words. As promised every post of late, presently the three of us will have a new zine to share with you, and as soon as there is more for you to see, we shall be sharing a tease of our shadowy velvety night views.
To return to the well thumbed book in my left hand awkwardly held as the right types on the keys, Ella’s experience of the theatre is another I treasured. A rare treat, for Ella, the theatre, it is something she adores.
Perhaps because she went so seldom, going to the theatre was an event of enormous, indeed historical magnitude to Ella. She anticipated it days ahead. As soon as the curtain went up she surrendered to and prostrated herself before its illusions with the freshness and gravity of a child. Plays were neither bad nor good to Ella, merely absorbing, frightening almost, with their terrible power of letting you in through the key-hole at real human beings and passions. After such a stimulus her serious, ruminative soul could think about little else for days afterwards. But, of course, she could hardly ever afford it.
...
About three hours later, with her entire world transfigured and charged with new meaning, and practically in tears, Ella, scarcely trusting herself to speak, stepped with Mr. Eccles and the rest of the audience out into the street. They turned automatically up towards Cranbourn Street.
‘Well – that was pretty good, wasn’t it,’ said Mr. Eccles, not unmoved himself.
I love it for its descriptions of bedrooms like tombs or cold retreats or caves to which one takes back with them all their “passions, delights, schemings, ambitions, triumphs” for nightly inspection; “caves were a serious business”.
Yes, I’ll take with me “the subtleties and charms of the gloaming” and set to work on night collages. More soon. And those charmed golden finches in store flight.
{"He went to bed with a rich and glorious evening, and he awoke at seven to find that it had gone bad overnight..."}
+ On the trail... Milly Sleeping takes you to "a time when Eugene Von Guérard resided at Von Haus, having come to Australia in search of gold!"
