Bent

Bent is about a copper. A real life copper named Harold Challenor who was the scourge of Soho in the fifties and early sixties.

Bent is a war hero, who now would be diagnosed with PTSD after what he went through in World War Two, but then, was shrugged off with a ‘what do you expect? You go to war, you come home bent out of shape. Tough!’

And bent he was - as you’d expect from the title. Maybe, maybe not.  Maybe just a regular bloke trying to survive in the urban jungle. And what a jungle. The West End, a wondrous place where normal old black and white post-war Britain, suddenly turned technicolour, and people of all stripes, colours and creeds put on flashy clothes, drove flashy cars, and lived high on the hog with little thought for tomorrow. And I was there, maybe bumping into Challenor in the narrow alleys between one adventure and another.

The book reminds me of Fridays bunking off work early, slipping and sliding on the mashed fruit and veg through a deserted old Covent Garden market where during the morning, porters could still be seen carrying half a dozen baskets of mixed salad, before the whole place was shifted down to soulless Nine Elms, and the market turned into a poncey shopping mall.

Hitting Soho hard, down to Berwick Street to buy a few ex-jukebox records for half a dollar each, then to the Nellie Dean for a couple of pints of Guinness, followed by a nap in Soho Square gardens if the weather was clement. Later, shoot off home to change into something sharper, maybe a Madras jacket, tab collar pink shirt with a skinny knitted tie, Levi’s bleached just right, and desert boots. Then back up for an all-nighter at the ‘mingo, all piled up and glassy eyed’.  Sweating all the normal stuff trying to scratch a living in a boring nine to five office before heading home in the light of dawn.

We were far from innocent, but they seemed like innocent times. Not bent at all.

Read this book to get the feel of it.