2 Warwick
Mansions
by Jilliana
Ranicar-Breese
I don’t
remember how I found the cozy bedsit but it was
well located in Pond Street opposite what is now
the Royal Free Hospital which I witnessed being
built in the late 60’s.
My ‘landlord’, Brian, was an English
language teacher to foreign students long before
it was fashionable to be an EFL teacher.
My small room was influenced by colourful Polish
textiles that I had bought in Poland.
Philippe my French boyfriend moved in with me and
I had a promiscuous neighbour next door with the
unfortunate name of Patricia Hooker and Anne
further down the long corridor. She worked in a
health food shop in Hampstead, who was to
influence my life years later. I guess Brian did
too because I became an EFL teacher at St Giles
school of languages.
On the ground floor of Warwick Mansions was the
Prompt Corner cafe. Famous because George Orwell
had sat there and written his masterpieces. It
was known for men meeting to play chess on the
clock like my friend Maurice Sumray the artist.
Philippe and I used to cook in the communal
kitchen and socialise as there was no living room.
I never went out in the evening and in the day
worked for a student organisation sending
students abroad. My boss Dieter was Austrian and
very personable. The department was eventually
closed down and I was without a job. Years later
Dieter would write to me for a job when in the 80’s
I founded my nostalgia archive called Retrograph!
I loathed not having a job and never thought of
being independent and work for myself. That would
happen a decade later. The thought of not having
a regular job terrified me because, in those days,
I was very conventional but that changed a decade
later when I was ‘free’.
Written
5/12/24 at Nightingale.
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