My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin (most read book in the world TXT) 📕

just been built when I was a boy and, passing its entrance, I had caught a glimpse of the gilt and splendour inside, and ever since I had had a curiosity to know how the rest of it looked.

An enormous crowd was waiting outside the hotel and I made a little speech. When at last I was settled in the rooms my impatience to get out alone was excruciating. But the milling crowds were outside, shouting their greetings, and I was obliged to go on the balcony several times and, like royalty, acknowledge their cheers. It is hard to describe what went on under such extraordinary circumstances.

My suite was crowded with friends, but my one desire was to get away from them. It was four O’clock in the afternoon, so I told them I would take a nap and would see them that evening for dinner.

As soon as they had gone, I hurriedly changed my clothes, took the freight elevator and left unnoticed by the back entrance. Immediately I made my way down Jermyn Street, hired a taxi and was off, down the Haymarket, through Trafalgar Square, down Parliament Street and over Westminster Bridge.

The taxi turned a corner, and at last Kennington Road! There it was! Incredible! Nothing had changed, There was Christ Church at the corner of Westminster Bridge Road! There was the Tankard at the corner of Brook Street!

I stopped the taxi a little before 3 Pownall Terrace. A strange calm came over me as I walked towards the house. I stood a moment, taking in the scene. 3 Pownall Terrace! There it was, looking like a gaunt old skull. I looked up at the two top windows – the garret where Mother had sat, weak and under-nourished, losing her mind. The windows were closed tight. They were telling no secrets and seemed indifferent to the man who stood gazing up at them so long, yet their silence communicated more than words. Eventually some little children came up and surrounded me. I was obliged to move on.

I walked towards the mews at the back of Kennington Road, where I used to help the wood-choppers. But the mews had been bricked in, the wood-choppers had gone.

Then on to 287 Kennington Road, where Sydney and I had lived with my father and Louise and their little boy. I gazed up at the second-floor windows of the room that was so familiar with my childhood despair. How innocuous they looked now, calm and enigmatic.

Then on to Kennington Park, passing the post office in which I had a savings account of sixty pounds: money I had skimped to save since the year 1908, and it was still there.

Kennington Park! In spite of the years, it still bloomed green with sadness. Then to Kennington Gate, my first trysting place with Hetty. I paused a moment and watched a tram-car stop. Someone got on, but no one got off.

Then on to Brixton Road, to 15 Glenshaw Mansions, the flat which Sydney and I had furnished. But my emotions were spent; only my curiosity was left.

On my way back I stopped at the Horns for a drink. It had been rather elegant in its day, with its polished mahogany bar, fine mirrors and billiard-room. The large assembly room was where my father had had his last benefit. Now the Horns was a little seedy, but it was all intact. Near by was the seat of my two years’ learning, the Kennington Road County Council School. I peered into the playground: its grey patch of asphalt had shrunk with additional buildings.

As I wandered through Kennington, all that had happened to me there seemed like a dream, and what had happened to me in the States was the reality. Yet I had a feeling of slight uneasiness that perhaps those gentle streets of poverty still had the power to trap me in the quicksands of their hopelessness.

*

Much nonsense has been written about my profound melancholy and loneliness. Perhaps I have never needed too many friends – celebrity attracts them indiscriminately. To help a friend in need is easy, but to give him your time is not always opportune. At the height of my popularity, friends and acquaintances crowded in upon me excessively. And, being both extrovert and introvert, when the latter prevailed I would have to get away from it all. This might account for those articles written about my being elusive, lonely and incapable of true friendship. This is nonsense. I have one or two very good friends who brighten my horizon, and when I am with them I usually have an enjoyable time.

Yet my personality has been high-lighted and low-lighted according to the disposition of the writer. For example, Somerset Maugham has written:

Charlie Chaplin… his fun is simple and sweet and spontaneous. And yet all the time you have a feeling that at the back of all is a profound melancholy. He is a creature of moods and it does not require his facetious assertion: ‘Gee, I had such a fit of the blues last night I didn’t hardly know what to do with myself’ to warn you that his humour is lined with sadness. He does not give you the impression of a happy man. I have a notion that he suffers from a nostalgia of the slums. The celebrity he enjoys, his wealth, imprison him in a way of life in which he finds only constraint. I think he looks back to the freedom of his struggling youth, with its poverty and bitter privation, with a longing which knows it can never be satisfied. To him the streets of southern London are the scene of frolic, gaiety and extravagant adventure… I can imagine him going into his own house and wondering what on earth he is doing in this strange man’s dwelling. I suspect that the only home he can ever look upon as such is a second-floor back in the Kennington Road. One night I walked with him in Los Angeles and