we live in the most vulgar part of Hampstead, a chunk of millionaires' suburbia where the living is done behind electric gates away from the lanes of the famous "village." The carbuncular alarms on every villa look like strongboxes. "Burgle me! Make my day!" These lovely avenues, once a part of "forever England," have been tarted up by residents who favour gold letters and coaching lights. Our bit of Hampstead seems distinctly unintellectual and philistine, though someone did shout "Stoic!" when I was running in the rain.
In Balham, "gateway to the south," a man in a van once shouted "Fucking leftie!" when I was slow parking my 2CV, also in the rain. Young men still whistle at girls, old men greet each other in broad Jamaican accents. I lived there for 12 years and-mostly-loved it. Before the last recession a public meeting agreed to a) preserve the art gallery and b) erect a statue of Peter Sellers (owner of the "gateway" joke) in the planned new shopping centre. Ten years on, there is a giant supermarket and recycling centre and some bronze murals, but no art gallery. "The Council have sold Balham to Sainsbury's" people say in the newsagents (one rogue TLS, no copies of Le Monde). The drunks who used to sit under a solitary chestnut tree where people now post bottles, have taken to the tube steps.
Many little-known writers and composers live in Balham. Those I know appreciate the density of human life round about, as if it makes up for the smallness of their cheques. You can't avoid life here even if you are a recluse, because it comes in through the windows. A small contingent is always ready to unload litter and aggression into your front garden. Our old fence reminds me of when my daughter lost her front teeth. Why did I bother trying to save a neighbour's new larch panels from those toe caps? At least I finally managed to get the front window reglazed. Petty victories against thy neighbour are less conspicuous in Hampstead. But what offends the eye and the heart are those militaristic People Carriers with fancy number plates, sashaying down the middle of the road. Might is right round here, too-except that is doesn't have to infringe the written law.
You can swim for nothing in the muddy Hampstead ponds-and for a fee in Tooting Bec Lido (cleanest in the morning). I've driven late on warm nights from one end of this city to the other, and I fancy life is now more vibrant in the south. The roof is ready to lift off Clapham, just up the road from Balham, on a hot Saturday night when thousands seem to stand about drinking outdoors. When the sun shines, passing cars pulsate with rap. A single sound system one street away and ten doors up makes it difficult to doze in a deckchair. All year round, the living is easy. I know because a young, talentless band rehearses on the other side of the wall where I work.
In Hampstead they disturb you differently. Practitioners of what the poet Hugh MacPherson calls "the Slobodan Milosevic school of gardening" start around ten o'clock. Roaring chainsaws alternate with strimmers and petrol-driven backpacks which suck up leaves. Everyone has "a man." The banging and whining of nearby refurbishments also distracts from the birdsong of the private park, although last year I managed to discern what sounded like an old-fashioned children's party. A persistent pentatonic tinkle came from the garden of the Chinese ambassador.
Balham is mixed in colour, talents and virtues. Hampstead is strikingly white: north Americans and west Europeans are the most evident foreigners. The oldest people I see and talk to, ?migr?s from before or after the war, many of them Jewish, strike me as the most cultivated.
Foxes seem to like Balham and Hampstead equally, but the Hampsteadshire would have a better day out on the Heath, with a stirrup cup at Jack Straw's Castle, than on Tooting Common, which is small and flat. By day, Balham is good for saris, halal meat, Jamaican salt cod, chillis and plantains. Balham has an excellent library and a good second-hand bookshop, a bargain-price fruit-and-veg market, and you can go everywhere on foot. Also it's south and flat, which means less frost in the winter; I swear my basil grows better than up on this exposed hill. Hampstead has double-yellow lines in force 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but it also has Maison Blanc, with enough people wandering past who know that means Blanc's place, not a white house. Hampstead, in short, is part of a quaint old England which can be bought by the nervous and the foreign, and status-seekers, for a high price. It has doorstep milk and-quite unfairly given that it lies as far from the centre as Balham-zone 2 status and a 7-telephone prefix. Its reward is to attract a decent type. Well, sort of. On New Year's Day this year, when the paper shop failed to open, eager readers cut the string from the pile left on the pavement and helped themselves, though not before popping pound coins through the shop letterbox.
I am not the sort of person who wants to tax my Hampstead neighbours to benefit my Balham ones. I think it's great that NW3 and my corner of SW12 can both count themselves part of present-day, pleasure-sodden London. Balham seems to me to be more purposeful, and oddly, less impatient. The worst of Hampstead is the narcissism which encloses souls old enough to know better. Down south-inner city, but off many people's map-we're still struggling to be something bigger and better than our present selves; and we've less to lose. n
