Apparently, it was Lytton Strachey who coined the term ‘filth packets’ when he was describing Virginia Woolf’s room of her own; for Virginia this meant envelopes containing bits of this and that – old nibs, bits of string, used matches, rusty paper clips, all the stuff that gathers on the desk of a writer, or did in the 1920s. According to Lytton, Virginia sat in the kind of armchair very familiar to me to write, which appeared to be suffering from ‘prolapsis uteri’.
Nevertheless, in spite of her filth packets, Virginia had staff – albeit not as many as there were in the house where she grew up in Kensington – but there was always someone to cook and clean the house and stop the grot spreading into other rooms.
Postwar, domestic staff became a rarity only the really rich could afford. As a Baby Boomer, my generation redesigned the notion of what a proper filth packet could be when left undisturbed in his or her natural habitat. One only has to think of Withnail and I’s astonishing flat in the film, which came out in 1987. In her book Hoorah for the Filth-Packets, Alexandra Artley gives a brilliant description of Mr and Mrs Filth-Packet’s bathroom: ‘On opening his razor to inspect the blade, Mr Filth-Packet discovers that his wife shaved her armpits the previous day… In a chipped commemorative beaker stands his Kent toothbrush, ancient, soft and splayed.’ Wonderful use of the word ‘splayed’. ‘Casting around for something to wash with, Mr Filth-Packet gathers together two or three watery soap slivers which slowly turn to coloured slime around the bath and basin.’
Oh yes, I remember those slimy slivers, those disgusting razors, those appalling toothbrushes. One of my oldest and dearest friends had mice living in her oven that fed off the remains of whatever had died in there or been forgotten about. My family still recalls with glee my elder daughter shouting to me from the bathroom of that ravishing cottage in Suffolk, stuffed with books and paintings where the cats licked the butter unchallenged, ‘Mum, my feet are sticking to the floor!’
I remember my awe when I first came across a proper filth packet in its natural habitat in adult life: my friend Sian used to tap her fag ash into whatever saucepan happened to be on the top of the cooker with majestic unconcern. She didn’t even bother to stir the contents. You looked twice at any glass she handed you for fear of what its cloudy surface might conceal within – fag ash or something worse.
Having been brought up by a mother who I now think might have suffered from ataxophobia (an extreme fear of untidiness or disorder), whose pride was the fact that her kitchen was laboratory clean, I was in awe of people like Sian. People who disobeyed all the petit bourgeois notions of how to run a house and simply dwelled, quite unconcerned, in squalor. I didn’t particularly like it but I deeply admired the spirit behind it. In Sian’s utter disregard for any rules regarding cleaning or eating or the storing of food, I felt the glorious freedom of choice that adult life can bestow.
I like to think of him as the last vestige of a rackety version of central London that no longer exists
When I first lived in Notting Hill in the mid-1970s, the whole place seemed to be occupied by filth packets. I and my boyfriend, Dick – a poet who fulfilled all the criteria of filth-packetry – lived in a damp basement on Ledbury Road, where many of the houses were ramshackle and inhabited by artists and friends, all also living in varying degrees of fabulous shabbiness verging on the squalid.
When I returned in the early 2000s, almost all those people had been swept away by the vast quantities of sterilising wealth. Now the place is run by bankers and slebs who have ‘discovered’ the glories of Notting Hill’s architecture. I blame the film.
When I walked down dear old Ledbury Road, I thought I was hallucinating, so comprehensively had it been cleaned up. The filth packets could no longer afford to live in those glorious white wedding cake houses and had moved to the burbs or out of London altogether. The capital is the poorer for it. Central London is now like a toy town filled with only one class of people: the very rich.
I recall the glory days when another friend had an entire enormous downstairs room as a studio, complete with long windows onto the vast unkempt garden. The flat was part of a temporary artists’ colony that dwelled in the marble halls of a then almost-derelict house in Kensington Palace Gardens that is now the consular section of the Russian Embassy. My friend would sit in the garden painting at his easel en plein air. I like to think of him as the last vestige of a rackety version of central London that no longer exists – the lost world of filth packets and genteel poverty in beautiful but run-down houses, the prelapsarian world of those pre-internet days. In my mind’s eye I see him as a kind of Kensington Sargent in his panama hat and brogues – a vanished world now, more’s the pity.
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