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  His alert features were full of tiny signals, humorous and anxious, enquiring and defiant, as he expanded on his philosophy one autumn afternoon. We strolled around the outer path enjoying the late roses and early chrysanthemums forming an archway roofed with fading honeysuckle. He wore his green raglan, his yellow scarf, his hideous turf-accountant’s trilby, and gestured with the blackthorn he always carried but hardly used. “The world is never still and yet we continue to live as if turbulence were not the natural order of things. We have no more attained our ultimate state than has our own star! We have scarcely glimpsed any more of the multiverse than a toad under a stone! We are part of the turbulence and it is in turbulence we thrive. Once that’s understood, my dear, the rest is surely easy? Brute warfare is our crudest expression of natural turbulence, our least productive. What’s the finest? Surely there’s no evil in aspiring to be our best? What do we gain by tolerating or even justifying the worst?”

  I sat down on the bench looking the length of a bower whose pale golds and browns were given a tawny burnish by the sun. Beyond the hedges was the sound of a tennis game. “And those were the ideas which so offended the Church?” I asked.

  He chuckled, his face sharp with self-mockery. “Not really. They had certain grounds I suppose. I don’t know. I merely suggested to my congregation, after the newspapers had begun the debate, that perhaps only through Chaos and Anarchy could the Millennium be achieved. There were after all certain clues to that effect in the Bible. I scarcely think I’m to blame if this was interpreted as calling for bloody revolution, or heralding Armageddon and the Age of the Antichrist!”

  I was diplomatic. “Perhaps you made the mistake of overestimating your audiences?

  Smiling he turned where he sat to offer me a reproving eye. “I did not overestimate them, my dear. They underestimated themselves. They didn’t appreciate that I was trying to help them become one with the angels. I have experienced such miracles, my dear! Such wonderful visions!”

  And then quite suddenly he had risen and taken me by my arm to the Duke’s Elm, the ancient tree which marked the border of the larger square in what was really a cruciform. Beyond the elm were lawns and well-stocked beds of the cross’s western bar laid out exactly as Begg had planned. Various residents had brought their deckchairs here to enjoy the last of the summer. There was a leisurely good-humoured holiday air to the day. It was then, quite casually and careless of passers-by, that the Clapham Antichrist described to me the vision which converted him from a mild-mannered Anglican cleric into a national myth.

  “It was on a similar evening to this in 1933. Hitler had just taken power. I was staying with my Aunt Constance Cunningham, the actress, who had a flat in D’Yss Mansions and refused to associate with the other Beggs. I had come out here for a stroll to smoke my pipe and think over a few ideas for the next Sunday’s sermon which I would deliver, my dear, to a congregation consisting mostly of the miserably senile and the irredeemably small-minded who came to church primarily as a signal to neighbours they believed beneath them . . .

  “It was a bloody miserable prospect. I have since played better audiences on a wet Thursday night in a ploughed field outside Leeds. No matter what happened to me I never regretted leaving those dour ungiving faces behind. I did my best. My sermons were intended to discover the smallest flame of charity and aspiration burning in their tight little chests. I say all this in sad retrospect. At the time I was wrestling with my refusal to recognise certain truths and find a faith not threatened by them.

  “I really was doing my best, my dear.” He sighed and looked upward through the lattice of branches at the jackdaw nests just visible amongst the fading leaves. “I was quite agitated about my failure to discover a theme appropriate to their lives. I wouldn’t give in to temptation and concentrate on the few decent parishioners at the expense of the rest.” He turned to look across the lawns at the romantic rococo splendour of Moreau Mansions. “It was a misty evening in the Square with the sun setting through those big trees over there, a hint of pale gold in the haze and bold comforting shadows on the grass. I stood here, my dear, by the Duke’s Elm. There was nobody else around. My vision stepped forward, out of the mist, and smiled at me.

  “At first I thought that in my tiredness I was hallucinating. I’d been trained to doubt any ecstatic experience. The scent of roses was intense, like a drug! Could this be Carterton’s ghost said to haunt the spot where he fell to his death, fighting a duel in the branches after a drunken night at Begg’s? But this was no young duke. The woman was about my own height, with graceful beauty and the air of peace I associated with the Virgin. My unconventional madonna stood in a mannish confident way, a hand on her hip, clearly amused by me. She appeared to have emerged from the earth or from the tree. Shadows of bark and leaves still clung to her. There was something plantlike about the set of her limbs, the subtle colours of her flesh, as if a rose had become human and yet remained thoroughly a rose. I was rather frightened at first, my dear.

  “I’d grown up with an Anglicanism permitting hardly a hint of the Pit, so I didn’t perceive her as a temptress. I was thoroughly aware of her sexuality and in no way threatened by it or by her vitality. After a moment the fear dissipated, then after a few minutes she vanished and I was left with what I could only describe as her inspiration which led me to write my first real sermon that evening and present it on the following Sunday.”

  “She gave you a message?” I thought of Jeanne D’Arc.

  “Oh, no. Our exchange was wordless on that occasion.”

  “And you spoke of her in church?”

  “Never. That would have been a sort of betrayal. No, I based my message simply on the emotion she had aroused in me. A vision of Christ might have done the same. I don’t know.”

  “So it was a Christian message? Not anti-Christian?”

  “Not anti-religious, at any rate. Perhaps, as the bishop suggested, a little pagan.”

  “What brought you so much attention?”

  “In the church that Sunday were two young chaps escorting their recently widowed aunt, Mrs. Nye. They told their friends about me. To my delight when I gave my second sermon I found myself with a very receptive congregation. I thanked God for the miracle. It seemed nothing else, my dear. You can’t imagine the joy of it! For any chap in my position. I’d received a gift of divine communication, perhaps a small one, but it seemed pretty authentic. And the people began to pack St. Odhran’s. We had money for repairs. They seemed so willing suddenly to give themselves to their faith!”

  I was mildly disappointed. This Rose did not seem much of a vision. Under the influence of drugs or when overtired I had experienced hallucinations quite as elaborate and inspiring. I asked him if he had seen her again.

  “Oh, yes. Of course. Many times. In the end we fell in love. She taught me so much. Later there was a child.”

  He stood up, adjusted his overcoat and scarf and gave his stick a little flourish. He pointed out how the light fell through the parade of black gnarled maples leading to the tennis courts. “An army of old giants ready to march,” he said. “But their roots won’t let them.”

  The next Wednesday when I came to lunch he said no more about his vision.

  2 A Brief History of the Begg Family & of Sporting Club Square

  In the course of my first four hundred lunches with the Clapham Antichrist I never did discover why he abandoned his career but I learned a great deal about the Begg family, its origins, its connections and its property, especially the Square. I became something of an expert and planned a monograph until the recent publication of two excellent Hubert Begg books made my work only useful as an appendix to real scholarship.

  Today the Square, on several tourist itineraries, has lost most traces of its old unselfconscious integrity. Only Begg Mansions remains gated and fenced from casual view, a defiantly private museum of human curiosities. The rest of the Square has been encouraged to maximise its profitability. Bakunin Villas is now the Hotel
Romanoff. Ralph Lauren for some time sponsored D’Yss Mansions as a fashion gallery. Beardsley Villas is let as company flats to United Foods, while the council (which invested heavily in BBIC) took another building, the Moorish fantasy of Flecker Mansions, as offices. There is still some talk of an international company “theme-parking” Sporting Club Square, running commercial tennis matches and linking it to a television soap. Following the financial scandals involving Begg Belgravia International and its associate companies, the Residents’ Association has had some recent success in reversing this progress.

  When I visited Edwin Begg in 1992, he welcomed me as if our routine had never been broken. He mourned his home’s decline into a mere fashion, an exploitable commodity instead of a respected eccentricity, and felt it had gone the way of the Château Pantin or Derry & Toms famous Roof Garden, with every feature displayed as an emphatic curiosity, a sensation, a mode, and all her old charm a wistful memory. He had early on warned them about these likely consequences of his nephew’s eager speculations. “Barbican wasn’t the first to discover what you could do in a boom economy with a lick of paint, but I thought his soiling of his own nest a remote chance, not one of his first moves! The plans of such people are generally far advanced before they achieve power. When they strike, you are almost always taken unawares, aren’t you, dear? What cold, patient dreams they must have.”

  He derived no satisfaction from Barbican Begg’s somewhat ignoble ruin but felt deep sympathy for his fellow residents hopelessly trying to recover their stolen past.

  “It’s too late for us now and soon it won’t matter much, but it’s hard to imagine the kind of appetite which feeds upon souls like locusts on corn. We might yet drive the locust from our field, my dear, but he has already eaten his fill. He has taken what we cannot replace.”

  Sometimes he was a little difficult to follow and his similes grew increasingly bucolic.

  “The world’s changing physically, dear. Can’t you feel it?” His eyes were as bright a blue and clear as always, his pink cheeks a little more drawn, his white halo thinner, but he still pecked at the middle-distance when he got excited, as if he could tear the truth from the air with his nose. He was clearly delighted that we had resumed our meetings. He apologised that the snacks were things he could make and microwave. They were still delicious. On our first meeting I was close to tears, wondering why on Earth I had simply assumed him dead and deprived myself of his company for so long. He suggested a stroll if I could stand it.

  I admitted that the Square was not improving. I had been appalled at the gaudy golds and purples of the Hotel Romanoff. It was, he said, currently in receivership, and he shrugged. “What is it, my dear, which allows us to become the victims of such villains, time after time! Time after time they take what is best in us and turn it to our disadvantage. It’s like being a conspirator in one’s own rape.”

  We had come up to the Duke’s Elm again in the winter twilight and he spoke fondly of familiar ancestors.

  Cornelius Van Beek, a Dutch cousin of the Saxon von Beks, had settled in London in 1689, shortly after William and Mary. For many Europeans in those days England was a haven of relative enlightenment. A daring merchant banker, Van Beek financed exploratory trading expeditions, accompanying several of them himself, and amassed the honourable fortune enabling him to retire at sixty to Cogges Hall, Sussex. Amongst his properties when he died were the North Star Farm and tavern, west of Kensington, bought on the mistaken assumption that the area was growing more respectable and where he had at one time planned to build a house. This notorious stretch of heath was left to Van Beek’s nephew, George Arthur Begg who had anglicised his name upon marriage to Harriet Vernon, his second cousin, in 1738. Their only surviving grandson was Robert Vernon Begg, famous as Dandy Bob Begg and ennobled under the Prince Regent.

  As financially impecunious as his patron, Dandy Bob raised money from co-members of the Hellfire, took over the old tavern at North Star Farm, increased its size and magnificence, entertained the picaro captains so they would go elsewhere for their prizes, ran bare-knuckle fights, bear-baitings and other brutal spectacles, and founded the most notorious sporting establishment of its day. Fortunes were commonly lost and won at Begg’s; suicides, scandals and duels no rarity. A dozen of our oldest families spilled their blood in the meadow beneath the black elm, and perhaps a score of men and women drowned in the brook now covered and serving as a modern sewer.

  Begg’s Sporting Club grew so infamous, the activities of its members and their concubines such a public outrage, that when the next William ascended, Begg rapidly declined. By Victoria’s crowning the great dandy whom all had courted had become a souse married into the Wadhams for their money, got his wife Charlotte pregnant with male twins and died, whereupon she somewhat boldly married his nephew Captain Russell Begg and had three more children before he died a hero and a colonel in the Crimea. The twins were Ernest Sumara and Louis Palmate Begg, her two girls were Adriana Circe and Juliana Aphrodite and her youngest boy, her favourite child, was Hubert Alhambra born on 18th January, 1855, after his father’s fatal fall at Balaclava.

  A youthful disciple of Eastlake, by the late 1870s Hubert Begg was a practising architect whose largest single commission was Castle Bothwell on the shores of Loch Ness (his sister had married James Bothwell) which became a victim of the Glasgow blitz. “But it was little more than a bit of quasi-Eastlake and no rival for instance to the V&A,” Edwin Begg had told me. He did not share my admiration for his great-uncle’s achievement. “Quite frankly, his best work was always his furniture.” He was proud of his complete bedroom suite in Begg’s rather spare late style but he did not delight in living in “an art nouveau wedding cake.” He claimed the Square’s buildings cost up to ten times as much to clean as Oakwood Mansions, for instance, at the western end of Kensington High Street. “Because of the crannies and fancy mouldings, those flowing fauns and smirking sylphs the late Victorians found so deliciously sexy. Dust traps all. It’s certainly unique, my dear, but so was Quasimodo.”

  Hubert Begg never struggled for a living. He had married the beautiful Carinthia Hughes, an American heiress, during his two years in Baltimore and it was she who suggested he use family land for his own creation, tearing down that ramshackle old firetrap, the Sporting Club Tavern, which together with a smallholding was rented to a family called Foulsham whom Begg generously resettled on prime land, complete with their children, their cow, their pig and various other domestic animals, near Old Cogges.

  The North Star land was cleared. North Star Square was named but lasted briefly as that. It was designed as a true square with four other smaller squares around it to form a sturdy box cross, thus allowing a more flexible way of arranging the buildings, ensuring residents plenty of light, good views and more tennis. Originally there were plans for seven tennis courts. By the 1880s tennis was a social madness rather than a vogue and everybody was playing. Nearby Queen’s Club was founded in Begg’s shadow. Begg’s plans were altogether more magnificent and soon the projected settlement blossomed into Sporting Club Square. The name had a slightly raffish, romantic reference and attracted the more daring young people, the financiers who still saw themselves as athletic privateers and who were already patrons to an artist or two as a matter of form.

  Clients were encouraged to commission favourite styles for Begg to adapt. He had already turned his back on earlier influences, so Gothic did not predominate, but was well represented in Lohengrin Villas which was almost an homage to Eastlake, commissioned by the Church to house retired clergy who felt comfortable with its soaring arches and mighty buttresses. Encouraged by the enthusiasm for his scheme, the architect was able to indulge every fantasy, rather in the manner of a precocious Elgar offering adaptations of what Greaves called, in The British Architect, “Mediterranean, Oriental, Historical and Modern styles representing the quintessence of contemporary taste.” But there were some who even then found it fussy and decadent. When the queen praised it as an e
xample to the world Begg was knighted. Lady Carinthia, who survived him by many years, always credited herself as the Square’s real procreator and it must be said it was she who nudged her husband away from the past to embrace a more plastic future.

  Work on Sporting Club Square began in 1885 but was not entirely completed until 1901. The slump of the 1890s destroyed the aspirations of the rising bourgeoisie, who were to have been the likely renters; Gibbs and Flew had bankrupted themselves building the Olympia Bridge, and nobody who still had money felt secure enough to cross into the new suburbs. Their dreams of elevation now frustrated, the failed and dispossessed took their new bitter poverty with them into the depths of a North Star development doomed never to rise and to become almost at once a watchword for social decrepitude, populated by loafers, psychopaths, unstable landladies, exploited seamstresses, drunkards, forgers, beaten wives, braggarts, embezzlers, rat-faced children, petty officials and prostitutes who had grown accustomed to the easy prosperity of the previous decade and were now deeply resentful of anyone more fortunate. They swiftly turned the district into everything it remained until the next tide of prosperity lifted it for a while, only to let it fall back almost in relief as another generation lost its hold upon life’s ambitions. The terraces were occupied by casual labourers and petty thieves while the impoverished petite bourgeoisie sought the mews and parades. North Star became a synonym for wretchedness and miserable criminality and was usually avoided even by the police.

  By 1935 the area was a warren to rival Notting Dale, but Sporting Club Square, the adjoining St. Mary’s Convent and the churchyard, retained a rather dreamy, innocent air, untouched by the prevailing mood. Indeed locals almost revered and protected the Square’s tranquillity as if it were the only thing they had ever held holy and were proud of it. During the last war the Square was untouched by incendiaries roaring all around, but some of the flats were already abandoned and then taken over by the government to house mostly Jewish political exiles and these added to the cosmopolitan atmosphere. For years a Polish delicatessen stood on the corner of North Star Road; it was possible to buy all kinds of kosher food at Mrs. Green’s grocery, Mandrake Terrace, and the Foulsham Road French patisserie remained popular until 1980 when Madame Stejns retired. According to Edwin Begg, the war and the years of austerity were their best, with a marvellous spirit of co-operation everywhere. During the war and until 1954 open-air concerts were regularly performed by local musicians and an excellent theatrical group was eventually absorbed into the Lyric until that was rationalised. A song, “The Rose of Sporting Club Square,” was popular in the 1930s and the musical play it was written for was the basis of a Hollywood musical in 1940. The David Glazier Ensemble, perhaps the most innovative modern dance troupe of its day, occupied all the lower flats in Le Gallienne Chambers.