Desk Notes No.13
Despair and Daydreams: Patrick Hamilton and Team Lotus
Dear friends,
They say April showers bring May flowers. They’ve brought me April weeds. Thousands of little sycamore helicopters land on the garden every autumn, impossible to find until they burst open in spring. Overnight they transform the pebbled patio into a lawn, each brown husk unfurling two long, slender leaves. They appear in the most unlikely places; deep in the centre of a crispy fern or the minuscule crack between patio and fence; the places you’re least likely to see them until they take root hard and fast. This year is a bumper crop and not only for sycamores. The borders have been invaded by ‘purple dead nettle’ and ‘hairy bittercress’ too. After spending hours pulling them out, I learned both are edible. Purple dead nettle can be used to make tea, while the leaves of both plants can be used in salads. According to forager Melissa Norris, purple dead nettle tastes grassy and minty, while Rachel Lambert describes hairy bittercress as having a peppery taste that, “balances strong flavours well and can be used with sharp or sweet dressings.” Could these weeds be a blessing in disguise? The only salad leaves the slugs don’t touch? Next time, instead of tossing both in the bin, I’ll give them a try.
In this month’s issue of Desk Notes you’ll find the things I’ve been thinking about in April.
Print - Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky a trilogy by Patrick Hamilton first published in 1935
Places - Lotus Factory and Test Track at Hethel, Norfolk
Print
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, a trilogy of books by Patrick Hamilton, first published in 1935
Until a friend recommended Twenty Thousands Streets Under the Sky last year, Patrick Hamilton was only on the periphery of my consciousness, as the playwright behind the 1940 film Gaslight and its later Hollywood remake. Given the concept of ‘gaslighting’ has become part of our modern dating lexicon, it’s curious that Hamilton isn’t more well known. His writing is marvellous, from the intricacies of his characters to the way his structure contrasts and exposes them.
Each of the three connected protagonists in the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy is at the centre of their own book: Bob, whose literary talents are squandered in his work as a waiter in The Midnight Bell; the prostitute he falls in love with, Jenny, in The Siege of Pleasure; and barmaid Ella in The Plains of Cement. These are ordinary people with ordinary problems, left to struggle with their worries - financial, familial, romantic - alone. Against the grey backdrop of rain and dense London fog, its streets swarming with unfamiliar faces, loneliness and unrequited love are unrelentingly bleak. Each night when Ella returns to her room above The Midnight Bell, she can hear the man she loves, Bob, through the wall:
“To Ella, Bob was never so near, and never so far way as at these few minutes at the end of the day. She knew every dim bump and clink and splash and thud of his business-like undressing and washing; she could visualise every movement. But where were his mind and soul disporting themselves? Somewhere, she knew, in that region which she could never penetrate in her intercourse with him, however intimate they became. In other words, he was grinding out his own private problems, and those she would never share. She was nothing in his life. The nightly reminder made her own cave more bleak.”
The genius of Hamilton’s structure is that the first and second books in the trilogy (belonging to Bob and Ella) cover the same period of time. They are parallel stories — as Bob fritters away his hard earned money trying to rescue beautiful prostitute Jenny, plain and poor Ella finds herself manoeuvred into an engagement with an older, wealthier man she’s ashamed of. They need nothing more than each other’s advice. Every moment of crossover creates a circle back; a moment that exposes how detached and separate its characters are; that reveals the tantalising possibility of intimacy; of missed opportunity. It’s desperately sad.
The placement of the second and third books also offers an interesting juxtaposition. This time between the two women, Jenny and Ella. Jenny’s short and racy story traces her descent from pretty domestic servant to prostitute. Both women are in similar financial situations, both presented with the opportunity of a ‘chance’ to escape their financial circumstances and rise above their allotted class. Their attitudes couldn’t be more different. While Jenny thinks life owes her something, Ella has a firmer grasp of reality — why should life owe a poor, plain barmaid, anything at all? What makes Hamilton’s writing so nuanced is that these women are not directly compared and contrasted — Jenny’s no villain and Ella no saint. Social language prevents both from articulating their feelings and making sensible, clear decisions. They have been raised people pleasers; they struggle to assert themselves. Jenny’s story reveals the dangers of vanity and shallowness, but it also plays out as a cautionary tale about peer pressure. Enticed into a pub by her friend Violet and two unsavoury men, Jenny can’t summon the strength to leave:
“Quite evidently his soul was not ruffled by the slightest intimation that she was serious, and she did not see what form of protest she could make against such a glance. In fact, there was no protest. All she could do now, if she really wanted to go, was to get up and briefly and discourteously depart. But to one so long and arduously trained in the practice of pleasing strangers, to one so wary of her genteel dignity, so morbidly fearful of participating in the minutest dimension of a Scene, such a line of action was a practical impossibility.”
Later, Ella finds herself negotiating the hopelessly prejudiced language of courtship. At the end of her first date with Mr Eccles she cannot summon her voice, or command her body language:
“In stopping like this, she had imagined that Mr Eccles must automatically release her arm. To her horror, however, she found that he still had hold of it, and that in turning she had somehow got hedged in against the railings at his mercy.
‘What?’ said Mr Eccles without exactly knowing what he was saying, and looking hard at her.
Now, she realised, the crisis of the day had come. Was he going to kiss her, or something? And could she repel him, after all he had done for her?…
‘Well — it’s been a lovely day,’ she said, and pretending he was not holding her arm, and that she did not know that he was staring at her, she looked along the street.”
As we might expect from a playwright, the dialogue is remarkably authentic, but it’s the things going on between the spoken words that make Hamilton’s writing so involving. It doesn’t surprise me that his work has helped shape the discourse surrounding modern relationships. There are moments here so poignant that I saw the pages through tears.
Places
Lotus factory and test-track
A few months ago I wrote about industrial photographer Maurice Bloomfield who began his career working for Rolls-Royce in Derby. The company is famous not only for its luxury cars but for its contribution to the aerospace industry. In a recent visit to the Lotus factory and test track, it was interesting to hear about the historical relationship between Lotus cars and another famous player in the aerospace industry, de Havilland.
Booked through the Lotus Driving Academy, a full day at Lotus includes a tour of the heritage collection at Team Lotus (the racing branch of the brand), followed by a tour of the factory which is now producing its final petrol sports car, the Lotus Emira. The tours combine history with an immense amount of technical detail, designed to prepare drivers to get the best out of the Emira in a 40 minute track session later in the day.
Beginning with the Austin Seven (see featured image), which Lotus founder Colin Chapman used as the basis for the Mark I in 1948, the heritage tour took us through the iteration and development of the Lotus ethos car-by-car. In other words, how Lotus became the exemplar of lightweight sports car engineering. The Lotus VII is the basis of the Caterham Seven and the beautiful Lotus Elan reputedly inspired the Mazda MX5.
It was with the smooth silhouette of the Mark VIII that Lotus began to embrace aerodynamics with the design created by Frank Costin of de Havilland. This was the first car to compete as part of Team Lotus, taking home a team award at Silverstone in 1954. The aesthetics were refined in the gorgeous Lotus Eleven (the car I longed to drive home!). The Eleven was designed primarily as a customer car, to raise funds for the racing side of the business. Even the name was popular. Avoiding confusion between the number 11 and the Roman numerals used for the Mark II, Chapman began spelling it out. He liked ‘Eleven’ so much that all Lotus road cars have begun with a letter ‘E’ ever since.
Inside the factory, things get very technical. The precision engineering which goes into every vehicle is astounding. On the production line, Toyota engines arrive in bags to be taken apart and tuned. Gearboxes are dismantled and re-built. Nothing here is off the shelf. The chassis is glued together with aerospace quality solvent. And each leather seat cover, ironed in situ so it fits perfectly, no creases or bubbles. All this and a car rolls off the production line every twenty-three minutes. It sounds quick but comparing this with MINI (a car every 60 seconds) and the Nissan Qashqai (every 24 seconds) reveals just how hand-built these cars are. Having visited the MINI factory a few years ago only to be stunned by the sheer scale of the robotics, the number of people on the factory floor is striking. And yet, as a small manufacturer, Lotus is even more vulnerable to the economics of the ‘just in time system’ of production — by which parts arrive at the factory ready for immediate use. Every 23 minutes of delay on the production line costs at least £75,000, the base price of an Emira.
Out on the track, I was excited to catch a brief glimpse of the £2 million hypercar, the Lotus Evija, which will get you to 186 miles per hour in a mere 9.1 seconds. Hethel is a working test-track and although I was a spectator to the driving portion of the day there was plenty to see. With official Lotus testers out on the tarmac, there was an opportunity to hear the difference between the original Emira’s 3.5 litre supercharged V6 and the new 4 cylinder AMG turbo engine. And of course, plenty of time to configure the Emira of my dreams — that’ll be ‘dark verdant’ please with a tan leather trim. So rare is it find something fantastically new, with such a deep connection to its past.
Have you read anything by Patrick Hamilton, what did you think? I’d love to hear what you’ve been doing this April, so let me know what I’ve missed in the comments.
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This month’s featured image is the Lotus Mark I courtesy of Lotus and the Colin Chapman Foundation. Print, places, & post office banners are courtesy of the Internet Book Archive.
I've read all of Patrick Hamilton's novels and started with Twenty-Thousand Streets. He's a great writer of gloom and glum, of the warm lights coming out of a pub on a winter night and the reflection of street-lights in the raindrops on a window. He also writes the best self-important bores.
Slaves of Solitude was my favourite of his books, there's even almost a hopeful element to it.
As a people pleaser, I was just thinking to myself 'won't I feel triggered by these books?' when I read your last sentence: '[...] so poignant that I saw the pages through tears.' Not ones to read when you are feeling down. As to the last part on cars, I don't know a thing about cars :) And I felt quite impressed by how much you seem to know about them.