Anyone who has lived a while will remember The Breakfast Club. In brief, it is about a group of teenagers who have failed to conduct themselves according to the rulebook, and who spend an entire Saturday in detention in the school library. They begin as enemies and stereotypes; by the end of the day, they have discovered one another’s vulnerabilities and stumbled upon an unexpected solidarity.
The ground floor was the first port of call: an entirely ordinary café, where ordinary people came to hang out. They read newspapers, argued gently about football, drank coffee, beer or wine, and conducted the small, unhurried business of their lives. It was a place for meetings that could have taken place anywhere.
Upstairs was a refuge for those who did not quite fit the way society had been arranged. They were not dropouts, thieves, villains, or people living on the margins. They were simply people who needed company, without necessarily having very much in common.
There were students who had run out of lectures before they had run out of opinions, and people who had discovered that their home was too quiet. There were artists without galleries, writers without deadlines, musicians without gigs, and one or two people whose occupations, if they had ever possessed them, had long since become a matter of private speculation.
Nobody was obliged to explain themselves. That was the great luxury of the place. People could sit by the window for three hours and leave without having spoken to anybody and be welcomed again the following week with no questions asked.
It was not a club that required membership and rules. It was not a therapy group. Nobody was under any illusion that talking would solve very much. It was simply a room above a café, where the socially inconvenient could be inconvenient together. Up here they had gathered by choice — or, more accurately, by the absence of anywhere better to go. Those who were single in the sense that they had few friends, or peculiar hobbies, drifted upstairs. In time, they became a crowd. A motley crew, if you like.
Both small and large revelations were made without anyone raising their eyebrow. There were no speeches, no condemnations, no sudden conversions to a better way of living. The transformation, such as it was, happened in the ordinary way: a chair pulled out for a newcomer, a second glass poured without being asked for, a name remembered, a silence allowed to sit comfortably between two people who had only just met. It was a temporary republic of the misunderstood, convened above a café, sustained by coffee, wine, conversation, and the stubborn human refusal to be entirely alone.
They met regularly on Fridays and Saturdays. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, we organised events up there, but at weekends it was mostly these slightly alternative, odd-bodied souls who turned up. They arrived without ceremony, occupied their accustomed corners, and treated the space as though it had been made for them.
One of them ran a limousine service for which there was limited demand. I hired him whenever writers or artists needed collecting. I suspect we were his largest customer — possibly his only one. He was always ready, always dressed in a black suit, white shirt and tie, even on Friday and Saturday evenings. He never drank, as though he were waiting for a job to come in. It never did.
There was a girl who knitted constantly, said almost nothing, but was always cheerful and always there. She liked dry white wine. Her needles clicked softly through the loudest arguments, and somehow her presence made the room feel more settled than it had any right to be.
Then there was the drummer, who was open about being bisexual and managed to work it into nearly every conversation — much like vegetarians do. There was also a girl who had mentioned that she was also bisexual, and the two of them found their rhythm and became a couple. It was one of those affairs that nobody had predicted and everybody, once it had happened, considered inevitable.
A young girl studying music, training to be a singer, used to hang about upstairs too. She was probably too young, and for a while she had an eye on me — until she realised it would never come to anything, and that I was roughly her father’s age. Even so, she stayed with the crowd. She sang occasionally, badly at first and then increasingly better, and the room forgave her everything in between.
A very strange crowd, but one full of wild notions and conversations that made having them there worthwhile. They were not financially sustaining, but socially they were invaluable. They were an inspiration, and a source of ideas for events that, in the end, made us good money. You learn most from the people who do not simply nod along, but ask, “Why, exactly?” And it is in that apparent chaos that the really good ideas are born.
This was no Breakfast Club, where different people were forced together by detention and the arbitrary cruelty of a school timetable. Here, they sought one another out and found their gang without any common ground except being human. They had not been assigned to one another. They had simply recognised something familiar in the general air of misfit and decided, with admirable good sense, to stay.
