Waterloo Sunset

Ok, here's a pop-quiz question. As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, what am I in?

Yes, I am in paradise.

And what does the dirty old river do?

Quite, it keeps flowing into the night.

I'm in Waterloo now, sitting on the first floor balcony of the Reef Bar, with its commanding view down the sweeping concourse of Waterloo Station.

So, if I were to tell you I was looking down at the millions of people, what would they be doing?

That's right, they'd be swarming like flies 'round Waterloo Underground.

Waterloo Sunset is one of those songs that millions of us know the words to. Ray Davies, its author and leader of The Kinks, is the poet laureate of London, and in this and a clutch of other delightfully evocative, catchy and unforgettable songs about the capital he has succeeded in chronicling its glamour, its seediness, its pleasures, its follies, and its homely suburbs better than anyone before or since.

He wrote Dedicated Follower of Fashion, which is about Carnaby Street, Regent Street and Leicester Square, Lola about Soho, and Muswell Hillbillies about his home turf up on the hill beyond Highgate. His song Victoria is, strictly, about the queen rather than the area, but you can stretch a point and add that in too.

Infact, so good is he at conjuring up the spirit of the capital city that you can take a Kinks Tour of London, starting at Waterloo, delving into the West End, heading north through Archway and ending up in Muswell Hill, singing his lyrics all the way.

And yet, remarkably, it's only by chance that Waterloo Sunset is so called. Originally the song was Liverpool Sunset, and hence the dirty old river would have been the Liver. But before it was recorded The Beatles came out with their Liverpool-inspired double-A side, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, and Ray decided that, rather than seeming to follow in their wake, he would transfer the location of his song to his home city.

And I for one am very glad that he did

From my Waterloo vantage point I can do what is most interesting about railway stations - watch people. Pensioners getting lost, policemen in twos, pigeons in flocks and at any one time at least a dozen fond farewells and heartfelt hellos. In Waterloo Sunset, Terry meets Julie every Friday night. Perhaps beneath the four faces of the station clock suspended, high above, from the glass roof.

These days, Waterloo is not so much a station, more a shopping mall. I could do any number of things here, eat any variety of food or drink, buy a shirt and tie, send an e-mail or text from a public phone, check out a Dali exhibition. There's even an impotence clinic.

Today, of course, the trains don’t just go to the suburban destinations carved into the stone of the war memorial arch - Surrey, Sussex, the Isle of Wight - but Paris, Brussels and Lille.

Waterloo Sunset conjures up the former incarnation, when for children like me the most exciting thing on the concourse was a cumbersome machine which, for 1d, and after much manoeuvering of a brass dial and tugging on a heavy iron lever, stamped out a narrow aluminium strip with your name on it.

When Terry and Julie left the station they crossed the river where, we are told, they feel safe and sound.

Ray Davies feels safe and sound in a little pub just across Waterloo Bridge in Savoy Street. I walk there, against a north wind, overtaking foreign students bent double beneath their backpacks like mountaineers. Ahead of me is the Shell-Mex building like an old fashioned petrol pump in white Portland stone, its prominent clock measuring hours rather than gallons.

The pub is the Savoy Tup. It's a rare find - an unimproved, unthemed, unspoilt pub in the heart of London. Its bar is plain, with a bare-board floor, cream-painted panel walls - the sort of place where Ray feels comfortable.

He mentions it in his book Waterloo Sunset, which is a curious blend of autobiography, fiction and myth-making.

A girl is asked "Who are you waiting for." And replies: "The man who wrote Waterloo Sunset. I've been in the bar at the Savoy every night, just as he said, but he never comes. He's not ready to leave the underground."

It sounds like whimsy, but its also a hint at the less than sunny side of Ray Davies. He is reputed, in 1973 when his marriage was breaking down, to have spent Christmas Day on the Circle Line, drinking cans of Kronenbourg.

From the Savoy Tup I walk along the Strand to Charing Cross. I take the northern line up towards Muswell Hill, stopping on the way at Archway, where the Archway Tavern had the distinction of appearing on the cover and inside the gatefold sleeve of the Muswell Hillbillies album. They weren't dumb enough to stand in their real local, I'll come to that later.

The pub is no longer the dark-wood and etched mirror place it was then, but somehow even more pertinent as a place to gaze into your beer and think, as Ray sang in Muswell Hillbillies, of coming from a nowhere kind of place and dream of a far romantic place you have never been - not Muswell Hill but New Orleans, (?)Oklahoma, Tennessee.

Then it's on to East Finchley station. From here, tree-lined Fortis Green takes me to Muswell Hill. If there is one street that can claim ownership of Ray Davies, this is it.

He was born here 56 years ago and grew up in a cramped house with his mum, dad and seven brothers and sisters. The pub where he first performed is in this road, and so is the grander house he bought when he became famous.

I find the Davies family home, 6 Denmark Terrace, just opposite the Clissold Arms. It's a Victorian brick semi with tiny bay windows attached to a joinery workshop. It was a musical home, with a piano in the parlour, to which Ray's parents Annie and Frederick would weave back from the Clissold Arms with a gang in tow for a singsong.

And it was here that, in 1964, Ray and his brother and fellow Kink Dave worked out the chords to You Really Got Me, the song that first put them at the top of the charts in August 1964.

The Clissold Arms is a real Kinks find. The large back bar has a display of Kinks memorabilia. Among them is a signed copy of the Kinks first single, Long Tall Sally, a guitar, a wall of photographs and a small brass plaque which reads:

Site of 1957 performing debut of

Ray and Dave Davies

Founding members of the Kinks.

Ray hasn't written about this street and the pub, but Dave has. His song Fortis Green goes:

"Mum would shout and scream when dad would come home drunk,
When she'd ask him where he'd been, he said 'Up the Clissold Arms',
Chattin' up some hussy, but he didn't mean no harm."

On my way up Fortis Green I had passed the home Ray bought when he got married. No. 87 is a large white-painted detached Victorian villa set back from the road with a gravel drive. He lived here in the late Sixties and early Seventies with Rasa, who he met when she was still a Bradford schoolgirl and mad-keen Kinks fan and saw them perform whenever she could, and his two daughters. It's Rasa's falsetto that you hear on the backing vocals of classic such as Sunny Afternoon.

Their schools were here, too. Fortismere School in Creighton Avenue, which was called William Grimshaw School when the brother attended and, on the other side of Fortis Green, St James Church of England Primary School. It's now in Woodside Avenue but when they attended was on Fortis Green opposite Fortismere Avenue.

I head off east into Muswell Hill, down Fortis Green Road with its deli, café, record store and bookshop, where Robbie Williams dominates the window display.

Where Sainsbury's now stands was once the Athenaeum, a dance hall that featured in the song Come Dancing. Athenaeum Place is still there alongside it, like a Ray Davies vignette - with a beggar on the corner, and rutted cobbles leading to a former orange brick Victorian church that is now an O'Neill's Irish bar.

I walk down Priory Road where the ground falls away and London is at your feet, first the trees and terraces of the lesser houses in the valley, then the City's tower blocks and Wren churches, finally Canary Wharf, grey and blinking in the winter sunlight

I find myself in another Kinks vignette as I reach the beer-sticky Northern Railway Tavern, step over a yawning dog in a tartan coat and pass a Baptist church with the sign reading "Heaven Knows when You were last Here".

I'm headed for the last outpost on my Kinks tour: their recording studios, Konk, on Tottenham Lane in Hornsey. A blue neon sign spells out the name above the door. It’s a windowless, beige-painted pebbledash place. Very anonymous, very North London rock star.

Why, such scenes are so evocative you could write a song about them. Or at least, you could if you were Ray Davies, the poet laureate of London.

Lakes and monsters

Holidaying with children goes through four phases. The first is when they are too young to voice an opinion on where you go or what you do. This is bliss, though not as much bliss as not having the little bundles of joy along in the first place.

The second is when you surrender your choices for theirs - the years of buckets and spades, theme parks, theme restaurants, Disney and Centreparcs. A chance for the adults to have a horrible time, and generally get in their revenge early for phase three.

For phase three is when the children will complain loudly that they are having the horrible-est time. Ever. In the whole history of horrible.

These are the years when you try to assert yourself and your adult tastes, in the inevitably futile hope of interesting them in things that you like, so you might begin to edge tentatively towards that great unreachable goal - the family holiday in which there is something to please everyone.

The fourth is that merciful stage when they refuse to come on your sad holidays in any case.

We are at phase three. Indeed, we seem to have been stuck at phase three for some time. Possibly for ever.

We decided to introduce our 12 and nine-year-olds to the Lake District, of which we had fond memories from a time BC - Before Children.

We would go cycling, we told them, on peaceful lanes and remote bridle paths, we would scramble up the fells for the exhilaration of hours spent walking on top of the world, from lake to shining lake.

And they replied: No we won't.

The north western corner of the Lake District has always been our favourite spot. You are off the main tourist drag that grinds from Windermere to Keswick. You have, in Loweswater, Crummock Water and Buttermere, three of the most peaceful lakes. And in Cockermouth, which sits at the head of the Vale of Lorton and just outside the boundary of the National Park, a real Cumbrian market town where farming is still more important that tourism.

We decided to break the children in gently. For our first cycle ride I took the two of them on an easy seven mile glide down from Cockermouth to Loweswater.

Swooping down the valley, with the green hills rising to enclose us as we approached the lake, it was not a bad introduction. But the ride was not without interruption. There were halts for water. For the removal of sweatshirts. For the replacement of sweatshirts. For the removal of helmets to facilitate the scratching of heads. For the adjusting of helmets which had not been replaced correctly by father but had instead been jammed back on, trapping ears.

Then came a standoff, when an alleged asthma attack had the 12-year-old wheezing most effectively at the top of a gentle incline. But it wasn't asthma. It was just breathlessness. Something today's sedentary child is entirely unfamiliar with.

But it was the incident of The Spider On The Handlebars that made me abandon the softly-softly approach.

Squealing in terror, the arachnophobe nine-year old released his hold on his bike, veered into the hedge and went flying off, narrowly missing a Larry Grayson lookalike who was busy dusting his gate.

Lookalike-Larry was entirely in sympathy with the children's perception of this as a crisis, and for his benefit I was solicitous. But I decided that from now on it would be No More Mr Nice Dad.

Next day we tried a hike, from Buttermere, around Crummock Water and striding up the fell-side to the spectacular 170 ft waterfall of Scale Force. It was a tough walk over rough and boggy ground, chosen to really give them something to moan about.

Perversely, they loved it.

They enjoyed it most when the path petered out, the ground became boggy, and there was much teetering on rocks and stumbling through marsh, with several bootfulls each of black, brackish water.

Each hardship brought squeals of delight - the greatest coming when I fell over.

Scale Force was a fitting destination. Clambering up the bed of the stream they cooled their hot heads beneath the plummeting torrent of white water, and watched a kamikaze sheep high above them, as it reached ever further over the abyss for the succulent leaves of a scrub oak.

On the way back the children announced that walks were OK as long as they were over bogs, and if I fell in at least once.

In that case, I announced, tomorrow we would try mountain climbing.

OK, at 2,159ft Whiteless Pike is not exactly Everest. But it looked like it to the children, as we set off from the shores of Crummock Water and they had to tilt their heads way back to look up to its pyramid peak.

When we hit the relentlessly-rising ridge there were complaints. But it was no good asking for food or water, because we had purposely left every form of sustenance in the car. There might be treats, but later, and they would have to be earned.

The children found the climb tough, as anyone but the superfit would. But each time they stopped and turned to look back, they found the view got better and better, and the sense of achievement grew. They most enjoyed the bits of steep exposed rock which had to be tackled with hands as well as feet.

There was one protest, however, when the puffing 12-year-old asked:

"What's the number of that emergency hot line?"

Assuming she was harking back to the threats she used to issue, when she felt we were being particularly harsh, to report us to Esther Rantzen I said:

"What, Childline?"

"No," she said, "NHS Direct."

Presumably the complaint would have been "My parents are making me climb a mountain and I think the effort will kill me."

But, fortuitously, mobile phones do not work in this corner of the Lake District, so she was denied any hope of outside assistance.

Things went swimmingly once the children treated the climb as a game, adapting one of their favourite ways of making a journey pass - laughing at people in other cars - to laughing at other walkers. There was plenty of scope. With their nobbly white knees, billowing shorts, beany hats and prawn-pink complexions, fell walkers are not exactly sex on legs.

And as they climbed towards the summit, they began to savour their achievement, delighted to find they could look way across to the Irish Sea to the west and to Keswick and Derwent Water to the east.

Indeed, looking down on the lane that winds up from Buttermere and through the pass at Newlauds Haus before dipping down to Derwent Water, they were indignant to see that it was possible to park there, at an altitude of over 1,000ft, and gain the fell tops with far less exertion than it had taken us to get there.

When we reached the top, I was convinced we had a pair of Lake District converts. They seemed to relish, as we squatted on this natural roof terrace, the deep satisfaction of having conquered a summit. And the descent - performed on their backsides, skimming over the soft springy grass - seemed to bring them unalloyed joy.

So much so that, in a sudden surfeit of optimism I said: "Maybe in 25 years you'll bring your children here."

They gave my pitying looks as they slid past.

"Nah" they said in unison.

Mick and Ziggy and the Spiders from Beckenham

Now, if this were Memphis, say, or Liverpool, you would be left in no doubt that a very famous rock star indeed hailed from these parts. Visiting those cities, no one could remain oblivious to Elvis's Graceland, or The Beatles' Penny Lane.

But this is not Memphis. Its Beckenham, slap bang in the suburban drab-lands of south London, and the fact that David Bowie grew up here and, indeed, did not leave until his 1972 album Ziggy Stardust made him a major star, has passed the place by.

It's the same story four A to Z pages east, in Dartford, where Mick Jagger and Keith Richard grew up.

But why is it, when there is very nearly a superstar for every suburb, that these places are not bristling with blue plaques, offering bus tours round the relevant sites and opening childhood homes to the public, kitted out in period G-plan with a guitar left nonchalantly on a candlewick bedspread and a lyric scrawled in a schoolbook on the kitchen table?

I put it down to a mix of indifference and embarrassment. Indifference from local burghers and the embarrassment of rock stars - for whom image is all - at their mundane suburban roots. Bowie even used to claim he was from Brixton. But the truth is out there, in Beckenham and in Dartford, and took a day trip to find it.

As the train rattles off through South London you can see why these boys would disown their origins. The inner city, with its seedy shops and dubious communal dwelling houses would have been nectar to a suburban kid. How his heart would have sunk as the train took him out past cool and slightly-scary Brixton and relentlessly on through Herne Hill with its detached villas and wide green open spaces. Why, Sydenham Hill station even has a nature reserve! Then it gets really ridiculous - you get places with joke names like Penge.

Imagine the embarrassment of taking the ultra-cool, kookie American chick called Angie who you met in a West End club down this line and getting out at Beckenham Junction, with its ornate Victorian ironwork. Imagine running the gauntlet of shops that sell limited edition prints of the parish church of St George, Fabulous Creatures glass animals and "superb sausages hand made on the premises" as you make for the pub where you run an arts lab and organised a free open-air festival.

But David Bowie did just that, and I don't think we should let him forget it.

The pub, which Bowie knew as the Three Tuns but which is now the Rat and Parrot, was an obvious starting point on my Rock the Suburbs tour. He used to run Sunday night folk sessions here, in the back room between the saloon bar and the beer garden. After his first hit single, Space Oddity, in 1969 he got more ambitious, and renamed these sessions an Arts Lab, where a strange hybrid of mime, poetry, art, Buddhist incantation, tie-dying classes and free form jazz took place. Bowie even wrote a song, called Memory of a Free Festival, about a multi-media event he organised here, which contains the toe-curling line "I kissed a lot of people that day."

Yes David, but how many of them kissed you back?

If this were America, where they know the value of a famous son, the Rat and Parrot, which stands on a bend in the High Street behind a particularly heavy camouflage of window boxes and hanging baskets, would be called Bowie's. The menu would boast Ziggy burgers and Young American fries, and a tall glass of milk would be a Thin White Drink. Mannequins would be sporting the costumes of the Spiders from Mars. Not so in Beckenham.

The barmaid sounded slightly apologetic as she broke it to me that they had absolutely no Bowie memorabilia on the premises. "There might have been some once," she said, "but since it was taken over by Scottish and Newcastle it got themed like this". She looked around in silence at the open-plan-but-olde-worlde place with its customers sipping cappuccinos and eating late breakfast. There was nothing more to be said.

In between his first, isolated hit single and his emergence three years later as a fully formed rock star, David Bowie lived with Angie in a cavernous flat at Haddon Hall, a vast Gothic Victorian villa just north of the town centre, at 42 Southend Road. He wrote most of the material for the albums The Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust here. Night after night, with his guitarist Mick Ronson and the rest of his band he honed songs like Moonage Daydream, Changes, Andy Warhol, Queen Bitch and Kooks. Bowie has said that the character of Ziggy Stardust, the first of many strange and compelling personas that he created for himself, was born in Haddon Hall. The picture for the cover of Hunky Dory, with Bowie wearing a dress and reclining on a sofa, was shot here.

But as I reach the spot, past houses so vast and set so far back that they are almost out of sight, I discover that Haddon Hall is no more. Number 42 has been replaced by a block of yellow brick Sixties flats and a road called Shannon Way.

In 1970, while they were living at Haddon Hall, David and Angie got married at Bromley Register office, then at Swan Hill. If they had married at one of the wedding chapels in Las Vegas, their names would still be up in lights outside. But in Bromley, I discovered, they won't even confirm whether a marriage took place there or not. This could be another handicap for any travel entrepreneur thinking of opening up the Bowie trail.

Haddon Hall became a commune, a court in which Bowie was the ever-feted king. Over indulgence in sex, drugs and anything else that was going, was the norm. Maybe this over-indulgence helps account for the fact that, on the day Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon, David saw an alien space craft land on the corner of Southend Road. And perhaps mind-expanding substances fuelled his desire to get in touch with any aliens who might be in the Beckenham area. One night he stood on the roof aiming a wire coat hanger at the skies until a golfer on the Beckenham Place Park course which Haddon Hall backed on to yelled at him: "Do you get BBC2?" This, presumably, was a topical joke at the time.

Bowie's weirdness was not an act. There was madness on his mother's side of the family and his constant fear was that it would be visited upon him, as it had been on his older half-bother, Terry Burns. Terry, 15 years Bowie's senior, suffered increasingly severe bouts of schizophrenia and was finally committed to Cane Hill Hospital in Coulsdon, five miles south of Beckenham. He eventually killed himself by jumping under a train at the neighbouring Coulson South station.

When Terry was troubled he would come to live in Bowie's house, and for several years shared his bedroom. He had a huge influence on David during his early teens. Bowie would escape up to Soho, where Terry took him to free-from jazz sessions, bistros and beat 'happenings' . Terry inspired the songs All The Madmen on The Man Who Sold The World and The Bewlay Brothers on Hunky Dory. When the picture of Bowie in a dress that appeared on the cover of Hunky Dory in Britain was rejected for America, Bowie substituted a sketch of Cane Hill Hospital.

In the days he was close to Terry, David was living at the family home, 24 Plaistow Grove, a mile or so to the west. As I walked there I reflected that it was his streak of madness that made Bowie who he was, that lifted him out of the ordinary and made him a star, someone who could constantly re-invent himself.

Without the weirdness he would never have risen above his suburban roots. He would have been merely Ziggy Sydenham, Aladdin Penge, and The Thin White Dulwich. And who would pay good money to see them?

Plaistow Grove is a tight, square cul de sac of terraced cottages beside Sundridge Park Station, a place of pebbledash and replacement windows. The house next door to Bowie's old home bears a plaque which reads: "An artist lives here." An artist lived next door too, but there is nothing to tell you so, or hint that this was the place where a nine year old picked up a guitar, thrashed out a Chuck Berry song, and announced to his startled parents that he was going to be a rock star. Today, the only music comes from a pub called the Crown, which the house backs on to. "Live Duo Karma" and Mike and Beanie are among the forthcoming attractions.

I took the train from Sundridge Park in search of Mick and Keith. Trains and stations had become inseparable to the story I was following, and Sundridge Park was a particularly nice one. Its a spotless little place hidden in a cutting and flanked by beech trees, and exists on a little three station backwater that would take me just one stop on my journey to Grove Park. It has even got a period open-air gents urinal. I could tell I was in a timewarp from the only other passenger. It was Wednesday, and he was still reading last Sunday's News of the World. I changed trains, headed for Lewisham, from where I could get to Dartford. On the way I sat back with my feet up, improvising that scene from Quadrophenia where the sound track is Out of My Brain on the Train.
Dartford is not a pretty sight. The town centre is swamped under monoliths including the Orchard Theatre, a multi-storey car park and a string of wharehouse shops. To the east the Glaxo Wellcome headquarters managed to look exactly like an architectural model of a new building rather than the real thing. All immaculate grass, gushing fountains and neat little figures striding purposefully. Beyond its roof the Dartford River Crossing was strung out over the Thames.

This station is a mess. The indicator boards don't work and nor do the staff. It is, nevertheless, historic. Because it was here, in 1960, on the London-bound platform, that former friends and neighbours Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were reunited. Mick was going to lectures at the London School of Economics, Keith to Sidcup Art College where he was studying technical illustration. Mick was carrying a pile of blues records and on the train journey they got talking about what music they liked. Shortly afterwards Keith joined Mick in a band called Little Boy Blues and the Blue Boys, and the partnership from which the Rolling Stones would develop was born.

I walked out to their childhood homes past the schools which had divided them. Mick went to the grammar in West Hill, Keith to the technical school one street away in Miskin Road. If Dartford is a suburb, then the little thirties enclave where Mick and Keith grew us is a suburb of the suburb. Keith lived in a flat above a now empty shop at 33 Chastillian Road, across the street from a pub called the Dart - referring, if its sign is to be believed, to a river rather than the game of arrows - and a gift shop called Grott, presumably in homage to Reggie Perrin.

First left is Denver Road, where Mick lived at number 39 and in the garden of which, each morning, he went through a daily regime of physical exercise instilled in him by his fitness instructor father. Oh how the neighbours laughed. As I walked along it, those old familiar suburban smells of creosote and conifer hedges hit me once again. There was Number 39 with its neat little front garden full of orange marigolds and its semi-detached front freshly pebbledashed. And suddenly I realised that the suburbs were growing on me. That they have a character that is cruelly overlooked. After all, if stucco is quite acceptable on New Mexico pueblos, why is pebbledashing so derided? If cobble stones and sash windows are OK in Coronation Street, why can't uPVC and pink concrete brick-effect paving be admired in Acacia Avenue?

And then, as I trekked on down Chastillian Road to Wentworth Primary School, where the Glimmer Twins first met as five-year-olds, the answer to my question presented itself. It is because pebbledash, plastic windows and concrete blocks are innately, irrefutably horrible.

The suburbs were beginning to get to me, as they got to David, Mick and Keith. But before I fled I had to pay homage at one last location - Bexley Hospital, just across the A2 in old Bexley Lane. Actually, this hospital features twice in the Rolling Stones story. In the Seventies, it was the place where Mick's ex-girlfriend, Marianne Faithful, spent seven months trying to cure her drug addiction. But, in the late Fifties, it had a far more important role in forming the Mick Jagger that we know and love. For it was here that, working as a porter during his school holidays, Mick lost his virginity, in a cupboard, to a nurse. Proving, once and for all that, whatever else they may lack, there is sex in the suburbs.

Don't mention the war

It wasn’t me who mentioned the war. It was the waiter. He asked if we would like to see the Nazi command bunker they had just discovered beneath the garden of the Albergo Elena.

How could we refuse. So he took us, by the light of an expiring torch, down a neatly-rendered tunnel that zig-zagged at right angles and descended to a vaulted brick hideaway. And we were able, before the torch flickered and died, to sift through the discarded wartime junk and wine bottles with which the floor was littered.

Actually, I have no way of knowing whether the bunker was what he said it was, but the locals nodded sagely when told about it. They certainly had an eventful war here. For it was on the shores of Lake Garda that, from 1943-45, Benito Mussolini made his last stand.

Springing him from Allied incarceration in a ski-lodge in the rugged Abruzzi region to the east of Rome, the Nazis installed him in the puppet Republic of Salo, in what little Italian territory they still controlled. A big fascist in a small pond.

Here he starred in his own little side show to the main war which, if not quite ‘Ello ‘Ello, was certainly Salo Salo.

His strutting ground was the elegant little towns of the Garda riviera - Gargagno, Gardone and Salo itself . Each a hot huddle of ochre and blood-red villas clustered round a tiny harbour and a couple of slightly dusty but still-grand hotels, they have the white mountains behind them and the silver lake at their feet. There are palms, cypresses and oleanders, and a lakeside road which was cut through the rocks on the orders of Il Duce to link the tiny towns of this tinpot kingdom.

You can mention the war in all of them. I did, and I got away with it. It is, after all, a significant anniversary this year. Not for Mussolini, but for his greatest mentor, the Italian patriot, soldier and poet Gabriele d’Annunzio.

It is 60 years since the death of d’Annunzio, who built a spectacular monument - to Italy, to the Italians but most of all to himself - on the foothills above Gardone and bequeathed it to the nation. Mussolini was a regular visitor and, when given the run of northern Italy, chose Garda for his fiefdom because of d’Annunzio. Why, he even installed his mistress, Claretta Petacci, in a villa on the estate where d’Annunzio used to keep his wife tucked away while he frolicked in the main house with his lover and a harem of girlie admirers.

I mentioned the war in the tourist office in Gargagno, and the girl pointed me up the lane to the northern edge of town where Mussolini’s former private residence, the Villa Feltrinelli, stands.

Once neglected, this pink iced cake of a country house is now being converted into a luxury hotel. The forest of saplings that have colonised the extensive gardens were being thinned by a gang of men with chainsaws, but the main gate still seemed to be in active use as a public urinal. I peered through the gloom of the house, with its disturbing ghosts, to the lake beyond, where windsurfers sailed past in an altogether brighter, newer world.

A few hundred yards back towards town I found Mussolini’s official residence, the Palazzo Feltrinelli. Home and office are separated by a grassy public beach where adults sit beneath the olive trees while children leap from a short concrete jetty into the lake.

The Palazzo Feltrinelli, which looks like a provincial town hall with extra flourishes, is now a summer study centre of the University of Milan. Its grand rooms have been sub-divided for tutorials and offices, and students wander in and out - without a shiny boot between them.

Driving south down Mussolini’s road, where the contrast between cool pitch-black tunnels and blinding sunshine is disorientating for the driver, you reach Salo itself, where they would much rather you came to admire the Gothic cathedral or the Palazzo Fantoni with its ancient library than dwell upon the dubious interlude with Mussolini. In any case, from 12.30 until 5.00 the whole place seemed to be asleep in the sun, doors firmly closed, so we moved on.

A few kilometres further, in Gardone, there is another landmark - the Villa Fiordaliso where il Duce and his mistress would meet up for what the Michelin guide delicately describes as “trysts”.

Once the home of Gabriele d’Annunzio, until he moved up the hill to the grand memorial he called Il Vittoriale, it is now an exclusive six-bedroom hotel. The restaurant is renowned, but the doorhandles still have swastikas on them.

But perhaps the best place to mention the war is at Il Vittoriale.

It is a huge bordello of a mansion. An incredibly rich, eccentric and voluptuous place where, in its design, furnishings and decoration, Biba meets the Third Reich. A blending of the sacred and profane, it easily eclipses such monuments to kitsch as Elvis Presley’s Graceland.

The rooms are each very different, but share an overpowering atmosphere of cloistered theatricality. Hating direct light, d’Annunzio ensured that the sun is diffused by coloured glass, windows within windows, shutters, blinds and curtains, giving a subdued, muffled intimacy to the house. A black cat slunk along with us on the tour, until nabbed and slung out by the guide.

There is the Stanza della Musica, the music room, where a thick black silk drapery covers walls and ceiling and the two grand pianos, bass clarinet, rustic pipe and violin are squeezed in among 15 Doric columns of varying heights, topped with sculptures or lamps in the shape of pumpkins and bowls of fruit.

There is the Stanza del Mappamondo - room of the globe - in which you find the death mask of Napoleon, alongside his hour glass and the snuff box that he used in exile on St Helena. Among the war relics is a tripod-mounted Austrian machine-gun which sits in the middle of the carpet.

There is the dining room where, on one end of the long table, sits a huge turtle with a genuine shell and bronze body. The original expired after consuming a surfeit of tuberoses in the Vittoriale gardens, and the model was placed here by d’Annunzio as an admonition to moderation. Gluttony was one of only five sins which d’Annunzio considered deadly. He conveniently left off lust and avarice from his list.

But by far the most affecting room is the Stanza del Lebbroso - the room of the leper. This was d’Annunzio’s death chamber, and when he died on March 1, 1938 his body was laid out on the narrow ceremonial bed behind gilt banisters. There is a disturbing touch of the Hannibal Lecters in the squares of chamois leather with which the walls are covered and the curtains before the death bed are made.

Though this was d’Annunzio’s house, the echoes of Mussolini are very strong.

In the Stanza del Mascheraio, the room of the mask maker, into which guests were ushered, is an inscription placed there before one of Mussolini’s visits and addressed particularly to the man who hoped to turn Italy into one of the greatest powers in the world:

“To the visitor: Do you bring the mirror of Narcissus?
This is lead glass, O mask-maker.
Adjust your masks on your visage
But remember that you are glass against steel.”

As Mussolini’s forerunner, d’Annunzio was keen to keep il Duce in his place. He refused to travel to Rome to meet him. Mussolini had to come here. Had he chosen to visit d’Annunzio in his writing room on the first floor he would have had to bow like everyone else as he came into the presence of the master - d’Annunzio had the door made low so all had to duck to enter.

Yet the photographs of the pair in the house and the souvenir guidebook show d’Annunzio as a hunched and deferential little figure strolling in the gardens alongside Il Duce; a Mother Teresa to his Princess Diana.

Nevertheless, it was when d’Annunzio gave up on politics himself and retired to this house that he left a gap which Mussolini stepped in to.

d’Annunzio had fought heroically for Italy in the First World War, and lost an eye in the process. Yet he, and many Italians, were sorely vexed at the perceived wrongs which occurred before that conflict, in which Austria dispossessed Italy of Trento and Trieste and, afterwards, that the US and the League of Nations ignored her claim to the Gulf of Istria.

d’Annunzio took swashbuckling direct action to help avenge those wrongs. Setting off in his Fiat 4 convertible with a horde of cohorts he occupied the port of Fiume on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia and established a regency there that lasted from September 1919 to December 1920.

While the man on the Rome omnibus thought this was a great wheeze, the authorities did not. Italy’s then Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolitti, ordered the shelling of the
city in an attack that D'Annunzio called "the Christmas of Blood."


d’Annunzio’s reaction was to abandon political life for Lake Garda and il Vittoriale, leaving a vacuum for Mussolini to fill. And as he built, he hit upon the perfect way of financing his grandiose vision. He bequeathed the Vittoriale estate to the nation. In return, a grateful nation was prepared to advance whatever funds d’Annunzio needed to create his monument.

The 12 hectare grounds are as remarkable as the house. With a series of loggias, porticoes, piazzas and gardens, stuffed with war relics and props, he created a surreal landscape dominated by the huge grey hulk of a battle ship - the Puglia. The ship has been dug into the hillside, and the aft section recreated in stone so that it blends seemlessly into the garden.

The moment when you come upon the towering prow nosing between cypresses, as if the ship is steaming silently toward the lake below, is one that stays with you.

Even the mausoleum, where d’Annunzio’s remains lie in a Roman sarcophagus elevated 20 ft above the ground on a white stone column and surrounded by his greatest chums, all on top of smaller columns, does not top the Puglia.

Amongst those who surround this supreme performance artist is Gian Carlo Maroni, the architect who turned his visions into reality. Maroni was to live for 20 years after the poet’s death. As a spirtualist, he claimed to be receiving regular spirit messages from d’Annunzio which enabled him to continue with the great work, including adding an amphitheatre in which his plays are now regularly performed and, coincidentally, keeping himself in gainful employment.

Later, as I sat in the restaurant opposite the Vittoriale’s main gates and cut into my D’Annunzio pizza - with rocket and shaved parmesan topping - a German couple who I recognised from the tour of the house came and sat at the next table. We swapped impressions of d’Annunzio. But I didn’t mention the war once.





Factfile

Albergo Elena, 54 Via Gardesana, Assenza di Brenzone. Tel 045 6590015 / 7420074.

Villa Fiordaliso, 150 Corso Zanardelli, Gardone 0365 201 58. fax 290011.

Il Vittoriale, Gardone. tel 0365 20130. Gardens open daily from 8.30am until 8pm ( April to September) and from 9am until 12.30, then from 2pm until 5.30 (October to March). House open daily from 8.30am to 8pm (April to September), and from 9am to 12.30pm and from 2pm until 5.30 pm (October to March).

Chasing Soane and Hogarth across London

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A man in a pink tail coat and a black top hat opens the door to me. A quick sniffer-tool probe in my bag and I’m in to the room with all the gold. There it is, in great fat slabs like rich-boys’ toffee.

A neat round hole in the thick glass of a display case allows me to poke a forefinger in and touch the fat buttery surface of £70,000. My damp fingerprint fades reluctantly.

They are rather keen on gold at the Bank of England. In their museum they have Roman ingots, stretched and twined like barley-sugar twists, and Japanese bullion crafted into Yin and Yang bars, in an effort, presumably, to balance more than the books.

But I’m not here for the money. I’ve come to this great white stone, windowless monument to cash to satisfy my curiousity about its architect, Sir John Soane who, from 1788, spent 45 years of his life on the old Lady of Threadneedle Street. For him the building became “the pride and boast of my life”.

He had other prides and boasts. There is his other great creation, the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and his two houses, the London home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the ‘country’ villa, now subsumed into suburban Ealing. And there were other friends and connections, which I would string together into a leisurely Soane-themed amble half way across London.

But I wandered first through Soane’s Bank Stock Office, a high, cream, coolly elegant oval shaped hall, lit from above and with curving mahogany counters around the walls like a rather superior bank in a county town. Infact its not exactly as Soane had it built in the late 18th century. They knocked the lot down in the Twenties when the whole of the bank site was redeveloped, but had the decency to rebuild this room in exact accordance with the original plans.

There is a little more Soane to see in the other main room of the museum, the 1930s Rotunda with, in the centre of the room, a display case of gold ingots piled up like profiterloes, or Ferrero Rocher chocolates. Ambassador? Eccellente!.

Around the room are draped female figures, or caryatids, helping support the domed, glazed roof. These are Soane originals, rescued from the demolition. They look as if they have a weight on their minds.

My second Soane spot was just four stops away on the Central Line at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he bought three adjacent houses in the tall, grey brick terrace on the north side of the square and spent several decades creating a unique family home in which to house his remarkable collection of architectural artifacts.

It’s a house of incredible richness, from the Pompeian red of the ground floor dining room and library, to the sunshine yellow if the first floor drawing rooms with their loggia extending the length of the house. Soane created a magical illusion of space by placing mirrors behind exhibits, above bookcases, in recesses alongside fireplaces and then packed every nook and crany with books, paintings and his vast collection of architectural fragments. Every cranny has been used, from the niche in a turn of the stars which is designated the Shakespeare Recess to the corridor which doubles as a tiny study.

With the ingenious use of great hinged panels a room the size of a lift becomes a picture gallery in which the works of art are fanned out before you, as if on the pages of a giant book. And what works. Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress is here - the tale of a young man’s fall, from inheritance to madhouse, in eight canvases. In another tiny picture room the size of a council flat kitchen are no fewer than three Canalettos.

This wasn’t always a happy house. After his wife died prematurely he described it as “the mansion of woe.” Soane had hoped to found a dynasty of architects, but neither of his sons - George and John - were interested. The dissolute George, indeed, ridiculed his father’s architecture in two spiteful newspaper articles. Soane believed these were the “death blows” which killed his wife.

The sons scowl from a portrait in the otherwise sun-filled first floor drawing room, looking not unlike the Rake in the series of paintings downstairs

My Soane-inspired route west took me close to Hogarth’s country house, and I got off the tube at Turnham Green to make a detour for it.

If you have ever driven into London on the A4, and negotiated that landmark of automotive misery, the Hogarth Roundabout, you will have passed the house. When Hogarth bought this rustic, homely and now cruelly mis-placed old farmhouse in 1749 it was to provide a place of retreat from London for his last 15 summers.

Today, despite the fact that four lanes of traffic blares right past its door, a high wall ensures, rather miraculously, that the garden, dominated by the 400 year old mulbery tree beneath which Hogarth used to sit, is still an oasis of calm.

Once, Soane’s own country house was just a few fields and a bend in the River Thames away. Today it is a grind out through the suburbs. As I made the journey I pondered on how I first became aware of Soane. It was the first week I had moved into a house in Ealing. And the front page lead on the local paper was how three local men had staged an abortive armed raid on Soane’s Lincoln’s Inn house. The police were waiting for them, and one of the would-be robbers was shot dead That man, I learned from the paper, had lived in the very street I had just moved in to.

Did those raiders know of their target’s local connection? Who knows. But it is a strange coincidence that, if they had walked to one corner of the remnants of Ealing’s village green, they would have seen Pitshanger House, which Soane bought in 1800 and turned into his ideal vision of a Regency Villa, enhancing its yellow brick facade with four towering columns topped my caryatids rather like the ones holding up the roof of the Bank of England. Except that, here, they had nothing but sky above their heads.

Pitshanger Manor has had its ups and downs. The grounds are now Walpole Park, and until the Eighties the house was the town library. But now half a dozen rooms have been beautifully recreated, often with reference to water colours showing original furnishings dating from 1802.

The other imposing thing about the place is the arched gateway. I’d seen that gateway dozens of times, long before I moved to Ealing or heard about John Soane. And the reason for that is a little further down the green, in a whitewashed thirties building which bears the name Ealing Studios.

This was was not just the home to the Ealing Comedy of the Thirties, Forties and Fifites, but also to much of the BBCs drama and comedy output, from Steptoe and Son to Monty Python. Indeed, it still is. And, down the decades, if ever a director wanted an imposing gateway to film a Rolls Royce purring through, or a mansion for a character to emege from, they popped next door to this place.

The studios are only infrequently open to the public, but across the green is a pub called the Red Lion, which has always been the local for cast and crew.

I finished my journey here, casting an eye over the framed photographs which cover the walls. There was Jack Hawkins, looking terribly British in the uniform of a naval officer, Gina Bellman pouting in Dennis Potter’s Blackeyes and old man Steptoe, Wilfred Bramble, leering away. And I noticed that he had a look in his eye rather like that of the Rake, and of Soane’s dissolute son. What a trio. As Sir John Soane probably never said, but as Harold Steptoe might have: “Fah-vah, do try to behave properly.”




Factbox

All four museums are free. Bank of England Museum, Threadneedle Street, open Mon to Fri 10 - 5.
Sir John Soane’s Museum, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3BP open Tue to Sat 10 - 5, first Tuesday evening each month, 6 - 9.
Hogarth’s ouse, Great West Road, London W4 2QN, open Tues to Fri, 1 - 5., Sat and Sun 1 - 6.
Pitshanger manor, Mattock lane, Ealing W5 5EQ, open Tues to Sat 10 - 5.

Oxford and Alice in Wonderland

Down St Aldate's hurried a little man in a bowler hat, his black overcoat flapping in his wake. As he bustled along he took a watch from his waistcoat pocket and, having glanced at it, hurried even more.

Curiouser and curiouser. He reminded us of someone. Or he would have done, if he had been a rabbit, rather than a bulldog.

For we were in Oxford on the trail of Alice in Wonderland, and were very susceptible to flights of fancy. It was my fault of course. I had told the children that there had been a real Alice, and that we could visit her old home, and go on the trip up the river on which the story if her adventures in wonderland was first told.

All we had to do was follow the man in the hat, who was a bulldog, or guard, and he would lead us to Alice's old home, Christ Church College.

This is going to be Alice's year. January 14 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of her friend/biographer/creator - call him what you will - Charles Dodgson, who wrote her adventures under the pen name of Lewis Carroll.. There will be special celebrations. And there can be no better time to follow in the footsteps of Dodgson, his friend Canon Robin Duckworth, and the three daughters of Henry Liddell, the dean of the college, Ina 10, Alice 7 and Edith 5.

They took a picnic from the college on the blazingly hot afternoon of July 4, 1862, down to Folley Bridge were they hired a rowing boat from Salters boatyard and rowed three miles upstream for a picnic near Godstow Lock.

On the way, Alice got bored and begged for a story. It began: "Alice was beginning to get very tired sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do..." and children have been entranced by it ever since.

I had half suspected that the college authorities would be rather snooty about their Alice connection. Christ Church is, after all, the largest, grandest and quite possibly the proudest of the Oxford colleges. But not a bit of it. As we shuffled round the guides were eager to point out each little Alice landmark to the children.

In the great Hall, as we stood, dwarfed beneath the high hammerbeam roof like a group who had unwisely swigged from a bottle labelled 'drink me' and shrunk to a fraction of our normal size, we had pointed out to us the Alice window high up on the south wall.

This is a magnificently imposing and intimidating dining room, panelled in oak and with the portraits of renowned Christ Church men gazing loftily down. Indeed, the only mundane thing about it are the little stainless steel salt and pepper pots set at intervals down the long forms.To be in keeping with their surroundings they would need to be at least a foot tall, rich in gothic decoration and wielded by flunkies who might be called the Shaker of the Salt and the Grinder of the Pepper.

Charles Dodgson has his portrait here - on the right just inside the door - as do Cardinal Wolsey, who founded the college in 1525, six of the 13 Prime Ministers including Gladstone and Eden who were educated here, William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, John Wesley, John Locke and WH Auden.

Dodgson looks like a rather glum Duke of Windsor. Glum, perhaps, because he seems to have acquired Michael Aspel's hair.

On the opposite side of the cloister to the Hall is the cathedral, which is built on an altogether different scale. Here, you feel as if you have eaten a cake marked 'eat me' and soared to several times your usual height. But the guide book reassures you that you are infact in one of the smallest Anglican cathedrals in England. It is full of treasures. A charming elderly lady steward grabbed the children and showed them Alice's sister. Edward Burn-Jones used Edith Liddell as his model for the central figure of St Catherine of Alexandria for the St Catherine Window which is in the Lucy Chapel to the right of the chancel.

Outside, as we entered Tom Quad, we bumped into our bulldog, who was no longer in a hurry, and took time to show us the memorial to the fallen of the first world war. Towards the bottom of the second column of names was Leopold Reginald Hargreaves. And Alice, he told us, grew up to be Mrs Hargreaves.

It was altogether too sombre a piece of information for us on our Alice day. And as the only other Alice landmarks - her home, which is still the private quarters of the Dean, and Dodgson's rooms, which are now the Graduate Common Room, were out of bounds - we headed off down to the river.

We had the energy for walking, but not for rowing, so crossed Folley Bridge and turned right to follow the Thames path up-stream, passing the pleasure boats laid up for winter, their bench seats piled up on deck.

Two canoeists scattered the ducks on a river that was brimming and clay grey, and a sparrowhawk tumbled on the wind like an escaped black bin liner. There were slivers of ice on the towpath puddles, but the sky was clear and the sun bright.

As we walked we swapped remembered snippets of Alice, of the Hatter and the Cheshire cat,
and we annoyed Fred, who had a cold, by reciting every time he snuffled:

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

At Osney Lock, where a man in the blue jersey of the Thames Conservancy sipped from a mug of coffee, untroubled by any passing boats, the river curves around the outskirts of town, corralled between allotments and back gardens.

Then, as the houses are left behind, it becomes a watery avenue flanked by pollarded willows before emerging on the wide-open, waterlogged expanse of Port Meadow. We stopped for lunch at a pub called the Perch before rejoining the river and making for Godstow Lock.

It was here that Alice was sitting in the shadow of a haystack, and thinking about making a daisy chain, when the white rabit ran past, muttering about being late and Alice followed him down his hole, into an amazing adventure.

We sat - carefully checking first for rabbit holes - beneath the walls of the ruined Nunnery that stands in the meadow just beyond the lock and was a substantial Benedictine monastery before Henry VIII had a bash at it.

And I realised that I am actually in my third age of Alice. The first was reading about her myself as a child. The second came when, as a student and intrigued by an Alice-inspired pop song in which Grace Slick wailed on about magic mushrooms, I re-read it and thought 'phew, what was that guy on? And where can I get myself some??' The third comes when your own children discover the book, and is the best of all.

After all, Dodgson ends Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with her sister imagining Alice as a grown woman, "and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale,perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland."

It is good to know that the magic still works.