If he’d made a move towards Bob I would have attacked him. I would have defended him like a mother defending her child. It’s the same thing. He was my baby. But I knew that would be fatal, from the
So I made two decisions there and then. I picked up Bob and headed elsewhere for the afternoon. I wasn’t going to work anywhere near Stan when he was in this mood. But I also made the decision to move away from Covent Garden.
It would be a wrench. Bob and I had a loyal customer base there and, besides anything else, it was a fun place to work. The inescapable truth, however, was that it was becoming an unpleasant and even a dangerous place to work. Bob and I needed to move to a less competitive part of London, somewhere where I wasn’t so well known. There was one obvious candidate.
I used to busk around the Angel tube station in Islington before I went to Covent Garden. It was a good area, less lucrative than Covent Garden but still worthwhile. So I decided the next day to take a visit to the coordinator there, a great guy called Lee, who I knew a little bit.
‘What are the chances of me getting a good pitch here?’ I asked him.
‘Well, Camden Passage is pretty busy, as is the Green, but you could do outside the tube station if you like,’ he said. ‘No one fancies it much.’
I had a feeling of déjà vu. It was Covent Garden all over again. For other
As I’d discovered at Covent Garden, however, Bob had the magical ability to slow them down. People would see him and suddenly they weren’t in quite such a rush. It was as if he was providing them with a little bit of light relief, a little bit of warmth and friendliness in their otherwise frantic, impersonal lives. I’m sure a lot of people bought a
We started that same week. I left the Covent Garden vendors to it.
Almost immediately we began to get people slowing down to say hello to Bob. We had soon picked up where we had left off in Covent Garden.
One or two people recognised us.
One evening, a well-dressed lady in a business suit stopped and did a sort of double take.
‘Don’t you two work in Covent Garden?’ she said.
‘Not any more, madam,’ I said with a smile, ‘not any more.’
Chapter 16
Angel Hearts
The move to Angel had definitely met with Bob’s seal of approval; I only had to look at his body language each day as we headed to work.
When we got off the bus at Islington Green, he wouldn’t ask to climb on my shoulders in the way he tended to do when we’d been in central London. Instead, most mornings he would take the lead and march purposefully ahead of me, down Camden Passage, past all the antique stores, cafés, pubs and restaurants, and along towards the end of Islington High Street and the large paved area around the tube station entrance.
Sometimes we’d need to head to the
When we eventually arrived at his favourite spot, facing the flower stall and the newspaper stand near one of the benches by the entrance to the Angel tube station, he would stand there and watch me go through the arrival ritual, placing my bag down on the pavement and putting a copy of the
I felt the same way about our new stamping ground. After all the trouble I’d had at Covent Garden over the years, Islington seemed like another fresh start for us both. I felt like we were starting a new era, and that this time it was going to last.
The Angel was different from Covent Garden and the streets around the West End in lots of subtle ways. In central London, the streets were mostly crammed with tourists and, in the evenings, West End revellers and theatregoers. The Angel wasn’t quite as busy, but the tube station still saw a mass of humanity pouring in and out each day.