Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop:
The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst

Mighty Baby
Mother Rachel! Mother Rachel! That's the cry I remember going up in the middle of the night from the kitchen at 93 Oakley Street, Chelsea. It was the Glasgow poet Eddie Linden, drunk, with red hair, frightening the unmarried mothers. There were always lots of them there. My own mother was one of them. We used to sit in a circle of mothers watching the black and white TV. The Wednesday Play or The Virginian or All Our Yesterdays.

It was a permanently shabby kitchen. The walls were yellow and there was red lino on the floor. There was a Sellotaped collage of magazine photos from the Sunday papers almost covering one wall. Starving Africans. David Hockney's Tired Indians. Over and in between the pictures were pencilled and felt-penned phone numbers, and slogans from the writings of R.D.Laing.

Rachel Pinney, who ran the house, was a psychiatrist and a campaigner for world peace. This was the last of the several homes she used to own. She had made it into a shore for the lost and drifting to wash up on, for £3 and £5 a week rent. Eddie Linden wasn't really her son, any more than I was. He had been one of her patients. He was just drunk and raving and had washed up here briefly. Her real son had been hitch-hiking in Israel, so news reports about the Six Day War was another thing we used to watch. I passed through here every weekend between the ages of six and thirteen, when I lived in a council-run children's home in St Mary's Cray, in Orpington. I came to Chelsea on the train on Fridays and returned to the home on Sunday evenings.

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