The clown looks to his right. Springfield Road. Street names all that is left to describe the paradise he knew. Where today’s wanderer is afforded excellent views of the gaunt, grey towers of distant Abbey Estate, the pleasure gardens began. Elegant willows and manicured lawns stretching out behind the Old Bell; spreading north beyond the present railway lines. A fenced off glade where stockinged and bewigged players coaxed allegros, adagios and largos from viol, lute and harpsichord. Kilburn Wells, where gentlefolk from the city came to hear Vivaldi, Scarlatti and Handel, and taste reviving waters from a spring that bubbled up beneath a brick arch beside the pub. Inside, a great room filled with the elegant and the mannered, Handel himself once visiting with his niece, a wan girl with dark curls and a slight limp who the clown waylaid on the pretence of asking the name of an air by Rameau. The two walked between twin oaks, conversation polite but intention clear, he admiring her for her boldness; she thrilled by the sin of it, finding a rough stone shed where tools were kept, the clown bending her over a wooden sawhorse, hitching up her skirts and enjoying amorous and consensual congress with her.

In later years, the musicians packed away their instruments and the great room at the Bell gave way to bar stools and tables for loo, crib and dice. Sometimes, they cleared the floor, scattered sawdust and marked out a rough square. He fought a butcher here, a lumpen man with a lazy eye and breastettes, more flab than heft, an easy contest when you know you cannot lose. The clown barely landed a punch; only when it bored him not to capitalise on the lurching anger and brawn trying to pummel him did he crack the man in the teeth. The cheers of the crowd, the explosion of sweat when the giant’s fist smashed into the clown’s face, the blood, his head under the man’s arm, thumbs in his eye sockets for there were few rules and none to keep them. The righteous pain, his foot in the brute’s groin, the man’s howl, a raised barstool, then blackness. Waking where he had been thrown on the floor of an anteroom, a rough cloth over him and a wooden beaker for water. The crack of bones reordering, sinews mending, flesh healing. Running his tongue across his teeth and finding them all intact. He stepped back into the bar and seated himself next to the triumphant butcher who, terrified at what he was seeing, spilled grog over his bruised belly. Stumbling away, the man gaped at the clown who now danced around the room collecting money in a cap, for this was the show they had all come to see. He walks past the old pleasure house now, long since rebuilt, brown Edwardian polished tiles cladding the lower walls. Like the old broom that outlasts new heads and handles, yet remains the old broom, a building has been sloshing ale into mugs hereabouts under the name of Old Bell for four centuries. Before the creep of the city, before the pleasure gardens, before they rediscovered the well then lost it again, in the time before the Conqueror, a woman bathed his wounds in its waters, and he kissed her.