Forty-four years ago I rented a room in the house next door to my present home, where I have lived since 1984.
I used to leave at 8.45, walk to the tube, take the District Line to Tower Hill and walk to the Czarnikow office in Mark Lane. 9.30 seemed to be considered an acceptable time to arrive in those pre Big Bang days. I think the sugar market opened at 10.00 or maybe later. Then it shut for lunch for a couple of hours and the Closing Call started at 5.00. I was paid £2,500 a year and was allowed four weeks holiday, both generous in those days, although my pay did not start to rise until I had been there for five years. It was annoying to discover that new trainees were joining on a higher salary than me but remembering Christ’s parable of the labourers in the vineyard I soldiered on.
Yesterday morning I made the same journey on a dismal, damp overcast morning. It was my first time on the tube since 11th March, sixteen weeks ago. The Arrivals hall at Tower Hill hasn’t changed much since 1976, except for the ticket barriers. (Tower Hill gets busy with tourists arriving to visit the Tower of London and Tower Bridge, so these days has an Arrivals hall and a separate Departures entrance.)
I inspected the war memorials in Trinity Square gardens; one designed by Lutyens. I wrote about it 2 1/2 years ago here, so will not repeat myself. Then I walked through almost deserted streets to Mark Lane, passing five closed hotels. In 1976 there was only one hotel in the City: a Brutalist concrete tower beside Tower Bridge. I looked with nostalgia at what had been the premises of The Fenchurch Colony, a wine bar chain in which I was a small shareholder in the 1980s – it went bust. When I started at Czarnikow the office was only a few years old and had unusual features like open plan offices, air conditioning and a turntable in the small underground car park. Now it has been replaced by another bigger glass clad building.
My destination was the dentist, housed in a rebuilt Corn Exchange where the sugar futures market was in 1976, until it moved to St Katharine’s Dock. On arrival a compulsory visit to the bogs for hand-washing ritual, then a pretty receptionist fired a thermometer beam at my forehead with unwavering accuracy and I was admitted. There are three hygienists working instead of the normal quota of seven and they alternate between rooms to allow the last used one to be swabbed down.