Chapter 25
The Bombardier is almost a fantasy pub. If George Orwell had drunk here, he’d never have named his dream place the Moon Under Water, and half the crummy chain pubs in the country would now be called the Bombardier instead.
It’s off a large common in south London – presumably two hundred years ago it was the only building of any size around, barring the church – and even with the city now sprawled out for miles around, the common has kept it isolated, so as you arrive it feels like you’re deep in the countryside.
It doesn’t feel dangerous, which is good, given that the last time the four of us approached a large rural building together on foot was when we got into this mess in the first place. Although that didn’t feel dangerous either, so who am I to judge?
Anyway, it’s lovely. Huge triangular awnings looking like sails shield the outdoor tables from the spring sun.
Insects are already buzzing their way around the flowers in the borders.
The car park is a hundred yards away, so you’re not inhaling fumes with your pint.
And on the inside, it’s that beautiful combination of dark wood, old prints, crisp linen and – somewhere – a highly stressed kitchen team, all of which combine to make the Bombardier ‘the perfect place to meet old friends or make new ones’ (credit to the website writers).
Huge fireplaces, too. I bet they do obscene business at Christmas.
I can see why Davy and his friends come here every year for their AGM.
We arrive on foot. We thought about getting the bus, then realised buses all have CCTV cameras and switched horses to a big Uber, booked in Elle’s name for more anonymity.
Finally, as a bit of magnificent subterfuge, we got ourselves dropped off at the edge of the heath, only to realise we’d miscalculated just how far away the pub was, and spent the next twenty minutes walking, steadily getting warmer and crosser.
Em’s cross because she’s worried she won’t look at all like a staff member by the time we arrive, as her uniform will be all crumpled.
When I point out that probably the staff’s uniforms will also be quite crumpled, given that they’re running around a pub all day, she snaps at me that she’s the one taking the risk here and if I’m not going to be helpful I should just go back to Balfour Villas.
I’m cross because I wanted to show willing by coming along and I’m only unable to do the risky bit because I took the risk last time, and because that appears to have gained me no brownie points whatsoever, and also because Em appears to have gone cold on me.
Jonny’s cross because he’s the one with the heaviest bag. Today’s T-shirt is a picture of an Ancient Greek bloke and the slogan WE SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE CAVE. I swear they’re getting weirder.
Elle’s not cross at all, which is – I’m starting to realise – classic Elle.
We arrive at 12.15. That gives us plenty of time to get a secluded booth, and time to check the serving staff are dressed exactly like the clothes Em bought this morning – white shirt, black trousers, dark brown apron – so to any inattentive punter she’ll look just like a waitress.
The other advantage of this place is that it’s massively overstaffed. She’ll blend right in.
We all order drinks (Doom Bar for me, double vodka tonic for Em, pint of Diet Coke for Jonny, heavily diluted lemonade for Elle).
Elle gets ‘lost’ on the way to the Ladies, and reports back that the table is already laid for five in the pub’s private dining room upstairs.
Jonny looks in his bag and makes sure the tech is working.
Em rehearses her role again. And, in the time between us and our targets arriving, I open my phone and try to unpick the tangled history of the Balham Brats.
Now, anyone who knows south London knows what the leafy suburb of Balham is like these days.
It’s chic. There are pizza restaurants where sometimes they don’t even put any tomato on.
There are still grocer’s shops, and a butcher, but they’re the posh modern sort who know about graphic design and have given themselves whimsical names like Mr Barney’s Meat Emporium.
There are lots, and lots, and lots of prams.
Basically, for Balham virgins (rare commodity), it’s where the young lawyers and management consultants go when they’ve tired of Clapham, the next staging post on the way out to the Home Counties.
As inevitable as salmon, the well-to-do start in Zone 2, in posh places their parents have helped them with because even a top law firm position won’t get you a flat these days.
Then they gradually head outwards to spawn.
Eventually their own young will wriggle against the ferocious tidal wave of money sloshing back the other way, and – with a bit of help from their parents – secure their own starter flats in the centre of town, and the cycle will begin once more.
It hasn’t always been like this. Forty years ago, Balham was rough.
A colleague from my snappers’ agency lived there back in the eighties.
Red lights in every other window, red and blue lights flashing down the street every five minutes.
Fights spilling over from the pubs to the street and from Fridays to school nights.
Sometimes, if you didn’t have any cash, the minicab firm by the station would give you a lift home for free just because they didn’t want you getting in any trouble, my colleague told me.
This is the Balham that Davy and his friends started out in. A foundation to help the area’s poor boys and girls probably made sense at the time, even though these days it seems a bit like a sick joke.
The other thing I often think is: how the hell were all these places so shabby within living memory?
I’ve had people tell me that when they were young, Clapham was edgy, that you wouldn’t go to Notting Hill without an armed escort.
Some have even told me that Wimbledon used to be a bit ragged round the edges, although that one I find hard to believe.
Were people just not aware how lovely all the homes in these places were? I guess not.
I suppose people a few decades ago weren’t to know about the right to buy and about the government not building any more social housing, and about 2008, and about the tripling of assets since then because of all the money being pumped into the economy, and about the failure to sort out planning, or council tax, or the bank of Mum and Dad setting up shop, or the Boomers getting a nice seat at the table then clearing the other places off it before anyone else arrived.
Anyway. Here are the Balham Brats, one by one:
Rob Wallace we know already. Swish agent, angry man.
Killer? No idea. I wonder if he’s planning to tell his friends today what Davy was up to, and why they had such a furious row.
Now that Davy’s dead, I suppose the relations between the four survivors are going to start evolving a bit.
They must have had all sorts of arrangements over the years – Davy keeping a nice flat back for someone here and there, maybe without Wallace knowing? Don’t know.
Jay Hawthorne is one of the two men who was smiling in the South London Gazette snap.
He’s a senior police officer in the Met.
I get briefly excited that maybe he’s in fraud like our new friend Kate McAdams, but he isn’t.
From the little I can tell, he’s simply a senior officer, with all sorts of phrases like ‘operational command’ and ‘urban pacification unit’ swirling round him in news reports.
At the few public appearances we’ve been able to find, he’s either been explaining that this or that corrupt police officer is positively the last in the force and it’s all going to be fine from here, or stonily refusing to answer the questions of a parliamentary committee who are trying to find out why the bad apples keep on tumbling out of the barrel.
He must have been a very good copper or a very bad one to get this far.
Conor Vane is an MP, and the other man smiling in the publicity shot.
Lots of the newspapers call him ‘Weather Vane’ because in the last fifteen years since he entered Parliament he’s somehow managed to stay on the right side of almost everyone.
(I’m actually impressed that anyone with the words ‘con’ and ‘vain’ in their name went into a career where it would be referenced every single day.
I guess that’s nominative determinism for you.) He’s had three ministerial jobs of increasing seniority, and he’s on a staggering number of committees.
Horse-racing, manufacturers, European relations, defence …
he has left no pie un-fingered on his way to the top.
He’s a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for at least fifteen different countries, lots of them vibrant beacons of autocracy across the Middle East and north Africa.
He’s frequently written up as ‘one to watch’, presumably because if you don’t keep an eye on him, he’ll go through your stuff.
The one I can’t work out is Ben Westcott.
I’ve searched for him online. He pops up a bit in the nineties, in the newspaper archives Jonny helped me look through.
He appears to have made a stack of money with a gambling firm when the industry was starting to deregulate – he came up with some clever new ways of undercutting the old-school bookies – but sold up for a colossal amount of money in about 2004 and has hardly appeared anywhere since. Maybe he retired.
The final member of the group, of course, is David Harcourt (deceased). Going on his diary, he really wanted to be here with his mates today. I wonder why.