Back in 1965 the Evening Standard ran this:
Anne Sharpley
meets…
The Eros Islanders
Everybody Has Seen
Them …
So Few Know Them
Taken from The Evening Standard, Monday August 16, 1965
By your second day of sitting in Piccadilly you’ve stopped
demanding to know who are all those people sitting around
Eros?” For a start they’re you and
Moloch. And Peter and Geoff, and the boy from the Bahamas who reads William
Tell in German all day, Luis Carlos, from Lisbon, and the rest of the
semi-regular Eros islanders.
Lovely Lynne will be along later. The Yorkshire miner who was so generous drunk
last night that his Haig bottle orbited among us so fast he had to run to keep
up with it, is certainly sleeping it off until he can summon up the first of
his daylong chorus of “Eee, ain’t life grand!”
Vigilant
The plainclothes man is there again looking bored and
vigilant- - which is what marks him off from the rest of us since we’re neither
bored , nor vigilant.
The pigeons are there, of course, though you can never be
sure with pigeons that they’re the same ones.
And there is a cast of hundreds with walk-on parts who just walk on the
island, circle it, and walk off again.
You soon feel very safe on the island, although it can cost you your
life getting on it. Occasionally you see
other would-be islanders running terrified among the traffic, baffled by those
unbroken stretches of railing trying to reach the safety you are enjoying.
The traffic, after an hour of sitting there, stops being
noisy and becomes simply a series of hostile stares. They just hate you for being there, lounging
and idling while they’re working.
Affront
You just go to pieces marooned there. You spread papers
about, scratch, stretch, flop, gangle, open bottles and sleep. You are an affront to London, particularly to
the taxi-drivers who, it has been estimated, circle Eros six times in every
shift – and they show it. But after
another hour you don’t even notice that.
After all, they are mere transients, you belong.
Moloch blows the cow’s horn he bought for a pound in
Watford. It is as plaintive and primeval as he wants it to be. He is 19, a nice quiet boy from Cardiff who
wears wide hunter’s hat, pouched leather belt, armlet of white hide, white hide
trimmings to his jacket, a heavy charm on a leather thong round his neck, a bracelet
and three rings.
He is called Moloch after the Hebrew god to whom children
were sacrificed because he has a “reputation for being cold and
heartless.” Inspired, and perhaps
flattered by this, he has covered himself with Moloch images, including the
huge charm round his neck that he made from fire tile cement. “Peter calls it my biscuit, because he is
obsessed with the idea that everything is for eating.”
Exodus
Peter, his friend, wears a fez, a Jew’s harp round his neck
and carries an ocarina, three harmonicas and two whistles. They, and Geoff, the third of them, have made
what they call an “exodus to sanity,” which means living largely on nothing and
sleeping in the parks. Peter has written
a poem about sleeping out in Hyde Park.
A red sky in the night
Crashing
Booming
Competing
With London’s neon
brilliance …
He takes out one of his harmonicas, licks, pretends to bite
it as though it were a bar of chocolate and plays Ripley’s Blues wastefully and
unimpressionably into the traffic uproar.
Two little Cilla Blacks from Liverpool ask if they like the Beatles. “You don’t
We’ve seen Help ! 25 times,” they scream.
Lovely Lynne who is two yards tall and has a yard of lovely
young brown hair, takes over the harmonica and plays. Lynne lives by sketching other Eros Islanders
for three shillings a time.
Her tight old jeans are smeared with paint, her small pale
perfect face is weighed down with eye make-up.
Together they discuss cheap places to eat and stay, emigration to
Australia, going to Africa, their hatred of society. Near them stretched out insensible and
stinking, is a tramp, round whom the short-term islanders tread with concern
and caution.
Kings
“They’re the kings, those old boys. Live free.
More of a man than all those office zombies,” says Moloch shedding
affection all over the deep, rotten, needy sleep of the tramp.
The drunken Yorkshire miner is trying to persuade everyone
to go to Belgravia with him. “They’re
smashing there, treat you as an equal.
Are you going grouse shooting?” he says imitating an upper-class
soprano. Luis Carlos from Lisbon,
wearing an enormous pair of wrinkled jeans and “je viens de Portugal” on his
pocket confesses he lives on cornflakes and milk but loves London.
The sun sinks over the Café Royal, as it has risen over the
Criterion. The Eros fountain like some
ghastly Victorian weed with its bulb showing is surrounded by explosions of
neon instead of the daytime junkyard of buildings that no one can decide what
to do with. Patiently, steadfastly,
uncritically the islanders sit on …
Check the photo above. Which one is Peter Finch?
