Memory is not ‘an exact science’, unreliable and vulnerable and at the mercy of a subjective conscious self both at the point of experience and in recollection, those images and sensations locked in our brains (joy, tragedy, pride, shame) are never exposed to historical analysis (hardly a reliable discipline in itself) and without the verification of external witness, our perception is necessarily personal and thus reliable only as a record of our own emotional state at the time. So I might be doing an injustice to the people and places I describe here (even myself) but these descriptions are as true and accurate as they are ever likely to be.


Barnham Street

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Life begins in SE1, in Barnham Street, Bermondsey,  the slow, unconscious decay of dockland facing the river above Tower Bridge; the once beating southern ventricles of the bustling Port of London (Hay’s wharf, Butlers wharf) before the 70s transport revolution moved the whole operation to container ships downriver. Tooley Street, once the home of smoke choked ‘drinkers’ packed with dockers, sailors and small time ‘crims’, Genuine Sarf London, Millwall turf and territory, is now a sedate centre of a more high end transitory tourism (Hay’s Galleria, The London Dungeon) and, of course, local government; the glass dome offices of the London Mayor look out beyond insulating green lawns, lobby gangs and TV crews, across Tooley Street and down the narrow channel of Barnham Street, the short road disappearing after no more than a moment’s hesitation, a shuffling backward glance, into the railway arches below the slow grind of trains pulling into London Bridge station. 


So, here we are now back in those first days, easing ourselves from an unremembered six week incubation in Guys, a convenient hospital only a short stroll of new-parent stress along Tooley Street (where you‘d been curled up behind glass walls ‘like a little rat’), back into premises which exist now only in the dredged haul of memory, Barnham Street Buildings. To connect with the  place and the people, you have first to see the stage set of two rooms (each roughly 12’ square; one operating as a kitchen/living/bathroom, the other a bedroom sleeping four, the floors of both covered by the same blue-grey, baby-crawled lino, sub-Mondrian cityscape of lines and squares (turning to scuffed Pollock in the more trafficked patches).


So, a two room, shallow-walled space, papered in surprisingly well matched rolls of surprisingly discreet pattern. The flat is a relic, holding on to an accidental minimalism of another, meaner century, unencumbered by cabling, wiring or pipes, devoid of ‘mod cons’ (running water, electricity, etc). A single gas lamp in either room provides ambient, sepia lighting: the short, quadriplegic iron arm reaching up from the wall, holding out a white gauze mantle in the ‘thumbs up’ gesture of traditional British resilience. The bandaged thumb, just within Mum’s stretching reach, she calls a ‘mantle’: a delicate white flower in the light straining daily through the single child-sized window, glows under her dextrous hands to become a red bud, blossoming white hot in the curtained dark (or not, if a tactile child with curious fingers has already explored the fragile texture in its fresh new box). 


Heat is furnished and sustained by a cream, cuboid gas stove, the lighting of which is a winter morning ritual of sensations, from the baby-gurgle of funneled pink paraffin to the scratching explosion of the Swan Vesta, anointing and igniting two sides of an exposed felt circle where silent blue flames rise into violent yellow and, shuffling sideways, rush to join a circle before Mum twists the prophylactic metal container back into place and we watch the red glow slowly fill its net cap. 
 
With greater urgency than form, colour dominates this re-creation;. Apart from a red sofa the length of the windowed wall, the living room is mostly kitchen; a lipstick-bright red and vanilla pantry shares one wall with a small white gas cooker, while a matching red formica folding table owns the centre of the room (with its flaps up, say for a family meal, any knock on the inward opening front door, will have a delayed, embarrassed answer). The surrounding ‘space’ is packed with the bustling, optimistic industry of a new mother, cooking, cleaning, crooning, painting the wooden kitchen chairs a matching red to create a ‘dining room set’ she’s seen in adverts for the modern home. Lipstick red, Butlins red, the red of cheerful, breezy post-war hope. The table itself is a carefree make-do-and-mend multi-tasker: cook’s worktop (daily), ironing board (daily), washstand (for daily shaving Dads), decorator’s paste table (for seasonal repapering of damp walls), school desk (occasionally, boosting a mother’s pride in teaching her pre-school son to scrawl cave-art versions of his name or copy the one drawing she knows herself: two joined circles, one lined with whiskers, the other a tail, suggesting the pet we will never own within the property). 


This mother seems happiest employed in the ritual of ironing; husband out of the way, child pinned safely to the sofa, bedsheets draped across the table (softly supporting the swift, controlled industry she applies to the piled shirts, blouses and tops the small flat somehow generates with abandon) she is free to rehearse all her childhood melodies for a captive audience,  The iron itself is just that, a solid lump of iron (familiar to old school Monopoly gamers) heated on the stove to the exact smoothing temperature (of steaming spit), the handle wrapped for comfort in pages of the Daily Mirror, Mum’s strong, deft hands precisioning the cuffs and collars of shirts with professional brio, room humming with her straining soprano as she works her way through a repertoire of songs like ‘I know where I’m going.’


The bedroom is surprisingly accommodating to furniture; beside a parents’ double bed side-by-side with a cot, soon to morph into a child-sized bed (narrowing the gap to a side-shuffle squeeze into which Mum wriggles to shake out the sheets each morning), somehow, wedged in either side of the window stand a dressing table and wardrobe (whose soft, muffling womb of packed entrails will serve as a hiding place for crawling children and storage for laughably ‘hidden’ Christmas presents). Later, at the foot of the double bed, a cot will appear for a second child, who, waking at night may find a space between the two large bodies in the double bed.


With no experience and no alternative, so much is accepted unquestioned by a child; life is just the way it is. Years later an interrogating girlfriend, relishing the details of this domestic arrangement, suddenly asked ‘How did your parents ever make love?’ A question nakedly obvious to both of us lying across the kingsize bed in her high ceilinged, white walled Kensington bedroom, a light summer breeze billowing the brilliance of the voiles. So obvious, so natural was the inquiry, the answer remained lodged a silent open mouth, not so much by the impossible answer as the question itself, opening like a stunning revelation.


Our arrangement, however, was hardly unique, the two room scenario found its mirrored clones across the landing (on the third of 4 floors); five more flats, filled with families, widows or widowers shared the same two cubicle toilets at one end and one cold tap in its thick walled sink at the other; and of course the chute, a trapdoor for refuse which could be heard sliding its way down the bumping helter-skelter of its ride to thump into one of the vast maw of heavy bins residing in an open annex by the entrance to the block (an unlocked treasure trove for children on slow Bermondsey days, where discarded dolls and tawdry Teds could be reclaimed with a change of heart or recycled as presents for parents).


The landing lay open to the elements (candy-twist prison bars by the sink, straight railings traveling from sink to toilet; childproofed only for the obese). The cubicles on hot summer days were evil-smelling noise-boxes, while residents probably welcomed constipation during icy winter mornings (diarrhea must have been a nightmare). Chamber-pots were standard equipment under beds and their swilling contents disposed of, prisoner style, in the flushing toilet bowls come morning (I hope). ‘What? Didn’t the whole place stink of urine?’ enquired my Kensington interrogator who again was left awaiting an answer. The landing had its own unique smell, urine somewhere low in the mix. Graduating from potty-training to ‘the lav’ (in Mum-speak) must have passed as naturally as ‘passing water’ (in doctor-speak) and I recall visiting one of the cubicles in the night (it was dark, at least) to find, after stretching to lift the latch on the stiff wooden door, the looming emaciated figure of ‘Oldancate’ (or old Ann Kate as I eventually came to know her) a worn out, widowed pensioner, sitting pants down, head drooping, asleep on the throne. I must have returned pale faced with the news, as Mum busied out to restore poor old Ann to her flat on the far side of the landing where, a few months later, she was discovered dead in her bed; the top drawer of her dressing table packed with neat piles of carefully ironed bank notes (or so my mother told us).


As the sole source of water (and fecal relief), the landing became a communal extension of the flat and one in which my mother (a one-woman 24/7 news broadcasting service) thrived. Although I can’t recall washing even my face on any daily basis (and certainly no other part of my anatomy), it must have happened, perhaps in a basin filled from the cold tap and heated on a gas ring, which, at least, is how Dad shaved. Sometimes a tin bath appears, hanging from a nail somewhere beside the front door (although this may have been in my friend Steve’s flat); I can only guess at the time and effort required to raise the temperature of even a modest level of water (perhaps as a baby I’d had some smaller, plastic version, a dishwahing basin). What happened in severe winters when the pipes froze is lost to me now.  Contrary to the popular image of the Irish (pigs sleeping in the bedroom, etc), we were (for our circumstances) a scrupulously clean family. Bath night, however, was once a week and involved a trip to Southwark Baths. Holding Dad’s hand (Mum has found no way into this image so must have attended some other night) we queued behind homeless ‘down-and-outs’ who, for a penny, could buy the luxury of a filed tub of hot water (of a strict and economical allocation and temperature; there were no handles on the taps). Although years later I read Orwell’s description of hostel bathing in ‘Down and Out in London and Paris’ with a sense of recognition, our baths at least began with clean, fresh water and a new sliver of slippery carbolic soap for each punter. I can’t say how well I used the soap but climbing out of one of these man-sized tubs was an awkward job for an infant-sized infant, especially having to balance on the slats of a wooden bath mat raised above the slopping floor and toweling myself while keeping up a response to the interrogation of  Dad in the adjacent cubicle behind the wall (Had I washed here? There? Had I toweled here? There?). Ironically, throughout my years in Bermondsey, Southwark Baths were only ‘the baths’, the tubs in which we cleaned and renewed ourselves (for the next seven days). On leaving, bug-free and fresh, I would consistently disguise the disturbing tremor I suffered in passing a set of frost glass doors at the end of a corridor and the echoing madhouse screams of whatever lay beyond them.  Mysteriously, a strong swimmer himself, Dad not only saw no reason to teach me but failed even to notice whatever troubled look I had in passing these asylum doors, which eventually I discovered to be the entrance to the main pool.


Our Barnham Street Buildings block was one of six, stepping back in partnered pairs, the two furthest from the road conjoined at the hip as if designed to function as a windbreaker; these blocks were spaced by narrow yards, themselves divided almost permanently by limp, damp sails of pegged washing. Pushing the blocks to right and left, a ‘courtyard’ offered a sense of space (and the weekly bin lorry room to manoeuvre). A set of tall (adult-sized) black iron gates stood at the head of all this, keeping intruders out (or residents in) and opened only, it seemed, for those bin men; the milkman with his oddly effeminate yodel of ‘Milkooo’, was left to park his snub-nosed, orange float out on the road, prey to scavenging street rats hungry for an extra pint or those small bottles of watery ‘orange juice’; a robbery so relaxed, the criminals had enough time to even replace the empties in the crates, which they often did, either out of a warped mockery or hoping ‘Milky’ failed to notice the lighter drag as he pulled away.
 
Our block rested (or slumped) at the front of the property, facing onto the quiet, narrow channel of Barnham Street. Beside us our twin had  long since been abandoned and fallen into disrepair, a state  compounded by the regular rhythm of steam trains rocking across the bridge only yards to the right, edging in or out of London Bridge station, their lingering misty smoke caking the walls with the accumulation of a century of soot. The destruction of this empty block was hastened by the desultory smashing of (what was left of) the exposed glass of the windows through the gradually improving aim and reach of our throwing arms; as if, by exaggerating the contrast, we were improving the comparative appearance of our own homes. On certain days, however, the surviving twin, just as grime-caked, must have looked hardly more alive, a state perhaps only suggested by the heads protruding from windows, stain-vested and staring blank-faced at the gradual erection of the ‘new building’ across the narrow street. The ‘new building was a title designated by my mother who had to watch it rise (from foundations to roofslates) through its skeleton scaffolding like an anatomical education, while elbow-greasing the windows daily and repapering the walls of our own space every few months ‘to keep out the bugs’; a task to which I was soon conscripted, stirring like a slave (with an increasingly resistant and rebellious wooden spoon) a mix of flour and water into a decorator’s paste (indistinguishable from the mix she used for baking cupcakes as a reward); all the while her muttered commentary documenting the progress of brickies and sparks across the road, festering with an envy of those future neighbours; coveting their electricity, their hoovers, their running water, their washing machines in a mantra reproduced with increasing intensity through the daily grumble of gossip, until finally the building was complete, the residents installed and she was left with nothing but the privileged view of the blue glow of televisions lighting every window every night. 


Dividing the road from the new building was the low rise of a red  brick wall, toddler height yet carrying all the significance of its Berlin cousin, behind which a narrow, anorexic ‘lawn’ stretched the length of the new building, A sometime venue for ‘courting’ teenagers in twilight, the wall extended up to the arches at one end and Devon mansions at the other, where it half-concealed a small wasteland of carelessly tossed rubbish, smashed beer and milk bottles (like a slumland art installation). Whenever we passed, few could resist the temptation of tightroping the top for a few (unsteady) paces, arms outstretched for precarious balance along its narrow beam. One toddler acrobat, however, a girl (with Olympic delusions, perhaps), pirouetting on the narrow brick parapet had slipped and fallen (like an omen) on to the wrong side. Although I hadn’t seen the act itself, my mind has consistently refused to form the seemingly readily available image of her screaming struggle among the tins and glass shards (which, by coincidence, is now the name of the highest building in London, next door to Guys).


The build complete, Mum’s passion and envy condensed into a ‘look’, although on occasions I’d hear this look translated through the boom of her raw Dublin accent down in the street (in ordinary conversation her dial was permanently locked on 11) frequently dropping the name ‘Bob Melish’ like a bomb. Melish, a Labour MP, Chief Whip and dockers darling was our saviour, apparently; a Moses who would eventually lead us to the Promised Land (a new high rise in Abbey Road, a short walk away, or an extensive estate in Abbey Wood, in another future world, Thamesmead). Either in a dream or in my mother’s reality (often very like a dream), I recall sitting in the office of Bob Melish (polished wood, drooping union flags, serious cross-legged adult talk) which must have been the initial discussion of ‘a move.’ In the meantime (and there were years of meantime) Barnham Street Building continued to decay alongside Mum’s resilience. 


Who were the lodgers of these slums?  Owned by British Rail, the privilege of residency was restricted to employees of the company, so a certain imposed homogeneity was in evidence. Residents had, of course, to have failed to find any accommodation economical enough to compete with the privileged rates of BR. As these were the days of ‘No dogs, No Blacks, No Irish’, it was no surprise to find Barnham Street Buildings a multi-cultural colony of migrants, although predominantly Irish (and sans noir; white being the unofficial colour of docklands Bermondsey at the time). The cast list of my immediate friends in the block happened to be Irish (Steve Keena, the effusive athlete), Scots (Andrew Duggan, the reliable, loyal friend) and Maltese (Tony and Rita Scerri, the cynic and the feisty female, respectively). Beyond this circle, a variety of nationalities had their representatives but only a few of the pensioners and none of the children I can recall were of English heritage. My own family, as many who filled the building, were recent emigrees from Dublin. 


Dad, along with an adventurous schoolfriend, had found his own way to London in his early Twenties (only just; another story in itself) working his way through a range of short-term, unskilled occupations in a variety of south London pubs and factories, before securing the more permanent position of nightshift shunter with BR, allowing his wife to take the ferry to Holyhead and join him in the Promised Land. By way of celebration (space and privacy undoubtedly being less of a problem for the act of procreation in those early days) I followed via Guys Hospital a year later (stalled only by six weeks quarantine in my made to measure greenhouse).


Nightshift shunter might sound a vaguely pornographic occupation until you discover it involves coupling and uncoupling trains in the arc-lit dark, sending the sundered cars down the silver criss-crossing tracks of Nine Elms; a job of limited skill but significant danger, especially following several rounds of Guiness and a heavy loss at cards in the workman’s hut. My ‘uncle’ Sean (one of Dad’s closest friends) lost his right leg to the job. Sean had been a frequent bi-ped visitor to our flat in the past, often athletically ascending the stairwell two steps at a time (perhaps less in the simulation of youthful vigor than in the hope of driving through the sagging smell of cat piss and stale cabbage which hung in the air like depression). Although it is hard now to summon the details of his face (just the odd way he drank tea, pouring it from cup to saucer to sip like a cat), the time I remember most was when we visited him in the curtained seclusion of a ward in Guys, sitting at his bedside and trying to avoid staring at the stretch of neat, flat blanket where his right leg should have been. With the stern warning: ‘Don’t mention his leg’, still vibrating within me, I sat in obedient silence, enduring the usual relentless boredom of adult conversation, called upon only to parrot a ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and then remain ‘behaved’ in the background while Mum took the floor. Something, however, of the dogged false levity I sensed in the to-and-fro of light-hearted (and determinedly legless) banter drifting above me must have worked its way inside my soul, for perhaps it was here I developed a life-long aversion to the sound of false laughter. 
We saw less and less of Sean in the succeeding months and years (depression obviously hardly found it a challenge catching him up on the stairwell now) but Dad continued in the job undaunted and undamaged (until redundancy a few years later) and my first attempt at lettering could be found in his bible-black BR handbook as well as my mother’s wedding-white prayer book, my artistic blue biro democratically embellishing the monochrome photos of steam trains and saints.


The Early Years


Despite the existence of biographies which simulate (for the sake of literary structure) first encounters with all the drama of Columbus on his knees on the washed beach of the New World, genuine experience in childhood is almost never discovery but rediscovery, consciousness waking to an awareness of events already in existence rather than experiencing them for the first time. So it was that one day, left by myself, I ‘discovered’ myself alone in Barnham Street.


Social services developing through the same stage of infancy as I, my family were able to evade any hint of the prosecution they might have suffered in our present more sensitive, child-centred times. I wouldn’t know if there had been any discussion leading to the decision (or whether any real decision had actually been taken) but in leaving a child at home alone for several hours in the day they merely seemed to be following the mores and customs of their background and environment (the Coombe district of Dublin). Why wouldn’t you; it’s early morning, he’s fast asleep, you’ve locked the front door; what could possibly happen? Safe enough; at least as safe as the birthday cake candles decorating our small, plastic Woolworth Christmas tree each year. Did the place burn down? So it was that while my father shunted his trains and whatever else he did into the early hours, my mother was cleaning the offices of Hay’s Wharf before the business day erupted into life and, without the back-up of an extended family, the children or child (me) had to be left at home, hopefully still sleeping, although in reality exploring the two-roomed world on hands and knees. 


Once out of the cot, the lino covered floor became my crawl space, the chairs my props and climbing frames as I struggled toward my first steps (perhaps in an attempt to escape). There was, however, precious little to discover and explore as I felt my way like a forensic investigator over creaking floorboards, air-trapped pillows of ill-fitting lino, tracing angular threadbare streaks in the soft, cool grey surface, working my way between the thin copse of chair and table legs, climbing the soft mound of the red sofa.   To take a measure of just how restrictive our rooms would seem to a developing child, I have a strong recollection of our first visit to a caravan (in the Welcome Stranger caravan park, Dawlish Warren) where beds magically folded into walls and a child could run several steps, up and down the space, which I did, again and again, with an unbridled adrenalin rush (for several hours, it seemed) while the rain lashed the roof and the skylight stuttered in that loose texture of child-time in which days expand to eons. 


Trapped in solitary, after months of occupation even the soft textured dark of the wardrobe failed to engage me and sitting on the sofa, waiting for the sound of the key in the door while gazing at page after page of pictures in books and comics (some of which had been ‘hidden’ in the wardrobe as future Christmas presents), I must have laid the foundations for a studious life. Just as well you never tried to open that window, Mum would smile ruefully in later life, the frame was so rotten, one good shove (the palm of her hand simulating a stalled Karate move) would have taken it out (never considering the value of such an air vent, had I somehow turned on the gas).


Market Day


Although several of our most immediate supplies could be easily attained from the small Aladdin’s cave of a shop on the corner of Tooley and Vine (translucent salmon pink paraffin for heating, bandaged thumb mantles for lighting) apart from the occasional job-lot of seedless grapes (perhaps falling off the back of a docked ship), food and clothes required a trip to one of the nearby markets (‘Tarbridge’ Road, Caledonian, East Lane) or further afield (Petticoat Lane). Despite the desperate appeals of friends, (‘David’s Mum, can David come out to play?’) all too often children had no choice but to accompany mothers, usually, it seemed, for nothing more than to feed their habit of display or perhaps moral support. It surely wasn’t for the child’s benefit as, in retrospect, the dangers of leaving your child to roam the streets for the day pale in comparison to leaving them locked up in Barnham Street Buildings. 


In those pre-supermarket days, the seemingly bi-or tri-weekly trip to some stall-lined road or other involved numerous gossip stops where the child, cut adrift from the absorbed, expressive voices above, would wander and return within a defined radius as if attached to some invisible lead, waiting at first patiently (for sometimes as much as 20 seconds), then impatiently (then praying) to move on. Plenty of time for observation of the increasingly familiar adult body language above: the raucous waved greeting (‘Whoo-whoo’), the matching balanced hips (settling in for a long discussion), the close up intimate ‘whispered’ confidence, swiveling heads checking up and down the road for a hovering snitch (Mum’s lowered contralto stalling fruitt and veg barkers a road away), pulling back into a moment’s pursed-lipped silence (for dramatic emphasis) and, always, the inevitable cruelty of the false farewell, laughter pulling the women apart (at last, now we can go) before some remembered thought drawing them back again to extend the session. Laughter was, finally, the key to release, Every conversation, it seemed, had to end on a note of laughter and finding that matching laugh was all that might be required to discharge the raconteurs. Although too young to comprehend much of the verbal language, a variety of repeated cliches found a sticking point, only blossoming into meaning years later (‘She likes a touch of the tarry brush’, a phrase rendered meaningless by overfamiliarity in childhood becomes a startling metaphor only in late teen awareness, around the time parents become people). 


The child’s passive acceptance of this torture was achieved not only through the wrenched arm and verbal threat usually couched in the false possibility of choice (‘Do you want a good smack?’ What could be a bad smack?): all protest nuked at the first sign of a sulk: ‘Wait’ll I get you home. You’ll get the hidin o’ your fackin’ life.’ The ‘hidin’ would usually (but not always) remain a threat reserved for the privacy of home, while distraction and bribery were tactically employed in public and might appear in the form of distraction, perhaps nature study lessons (‘Dose Daffs look lovely, don’t dey?’) or images of future attractions (‘Tomorrow, if it’s fine, we’ll go to the zoo’). Tomorrow to a child, however, might as well be next year. More enticing was the immediate tactile temptation of the bakery (consciously forging a Pavlovian link with the shopping experience) and oven-fresh dough rolled into a neat snowball across a tray of sparkling white icing sugar while the child waited in the achingly sweet smelling, mind-altering air, trying to avoid the sight of the burning house on the Fire brigade collection box resting on the counter, the disturbing drama in sickening orange and billowing black often lingering long after the first bite into the warm doughnut. Before you’d even wiped your hands down your coat, however, you were trudging though the bustle, barrow boys and barkers (‘Larvly taters. Freebob a pand’). One after another, with cursory flirtation, unsmiling smiles, the fruit and veg were selected, weighed in their silver cot and either poured into brown paper bags slickly swung-twisted to produce origamied ears or straight into one of Mum’s deep plastic shopping bags. A break may have been taken in the white tiles and sawdust of Manzes Pie and Mash where a spaghetti of black eels squirmed in the window, while slices of their cousins severed bodies floated in the green slime of Mum’s bowl. It may have been here I initiated my hunger strike, rejecting all seafood delicacies and studiously picking out the soft white centres of the hunks of bread to leave oblong rings of crust on the table. Somehow it was still light by the time we reached the end of the stalls at the Bricklayers Arms in Old Kent Road with its distant exotic pub signs (The World Turned Upside Down) and we could trudge back through Snowfields estate with the building hope of release into what was left of the day. 


Hunger Strike


We were never short of food in our home, not that I would have noticed. Although my Maltese friends, Rita and Tony, could be seen wandering the stairwell with a single raw, uncooked, straight-out-the-packet Walls sausage in their hands, glamorising it as ‘Polish Sausage’, I was never aware of malnutrition in the building and the only hungry years as far as I was concerned were self-imposed. Occasionally penetrated by the sickening spike of frying liver or kidney, the lingering smell of stale cabbage was one of the more detectable odours in the cocktail hanging heavy in the stairwell and its solid form lay like a speckled green quadrant on my Dad’s plate alongside the orange of swede, the cream of mashed potato; chops, hearts, liver or kidney completed the Irish pie-chart (before the ritual shower of salt from the swaggering blade of a balanced knife and the bottom slapping of Daddy’s Sauce). Our menu had been inherited from the kitchens of Dublin slums, making the most of the available-affordable and my mother’s limited culinary skills which, despite Dad’s obligatory ‘Lovely meal, darlin’, would be seriously tested beyond the meat and two veg, stews and, of course, fry-ups of our daily life.
 
What is this perennial appeal of fried food to the young? As children, we graded our friends’ mothers by the quality of their chips (some long and stringy, chewingly undercooked, some so absurdly fat they barely qualified as a serious chip at all). Perhaps through familiarity alone, Mum’s seemed acceptable, cooked in a mire of lard which made the journey from solid to liquid and back again on a daily basis, No mother, however, could compete with chip shop chips (our only taste of fast food at the time) with ‘a nice piece of’ cod or skate, ‘sav’ or ‘gherkin’ or, best of all, in their own greaseproof bag, coated by heavily shaken salt bottles, drink-in-the-bag vinegar (all free, so greedily indulged) and, for the connoisseur, complimentary ‘crackling.’ (Imagine the horror in later life of finding cones of chips in mayonaise. Alien food in an alien world. Amsterdam). This was the food I mostly lived on; alongside sherbet. 


Sugar was my drug in the early days and, for a while, like most drugs, shouldered itself into the mainstream to became an almost exclusive diet. For some reason, soon after learning to walk (and think), perhaps asserting some Freudian control over my mother, for several months of stubborn resistance I stopped eating anything but dry bread and sweets. Perhaps she saw it as a comment on her ability as a mother (or a cook) but faced with the child’s only real weapon, passive resistance (you can see them dropping to the pavement outside sweet shops, limp dead weights, forcing mothers into embarrassing grab-and-drags before crowds of tutting, condemning witnesses), her first confident attempts of controlling, commanding anger proved shockingly ineffectual and turned slowly to solicitude before gradually descending into groveling desperation (‘Here, David, sherbet,’ she’d say, holding out a bright yellow spoonful of egg to my firmly pursed lips); these slowly accumulating days of resistance marking out another period she would ‘never forget’.


There was no delirium in my fasting, no dazed saintly sightings of angels and smiling virgins; consequently, months later, no enlightenment in breaking that fast. The stubborn willfulness, apparently no more than a childhood phase, merely faded away, forgotten, at least until its bi-annual reappearance within my mother’s extensive repertoire of honed anecdotes, paying me back in guilt for ‘what I’d made her suffer’.
 
Although she stopped just short of force-feeding (the rubber tube was described rather than fed down my throat), it was around this time she resorted to the tale of how, ‘when I died’ (I must have been 3 years old at the time) all the food I’d been leaving on my plate would be gathered cold in a slop bucket, a slop I’d be made to eat and go on eating until the bucket was empty (after which, I presume, I would be free to enter the chip shops of heaven). I don’t know if the idea was instrumental in breaking my fast but it offered me a concept of death and, perhaps, the unforgiving God of the Old Testament; which might explain how, once through the cold turkey and eating again, for some time I remained obsessively fastidious about my food. Every meal had to begin with a separation and segregation of each portion on the plate. Potato, for example, must never touch meat. If by some freak chance it did, I could eat only as far as the borderline (where the brown rim of juice from the lamb’s heart stained the white of the mash) patrolled as vigilantly  as the Gaza Strip. Stew was obviously out of the question, as was the insanity of gravy. Sometimes, studying with a horrible fascination the habits of those around me at the dinner table deliberately skewering a piece of each item on the same fork before inserting it into their mouth, I longed for the trays familiar from prison movies where each portion of food was provided with its own neat well. Unfortunately, no market stall ever stocked them.


Fun Factory


Apart from a loss of their playtime (or sweets), children within the same environment have no real sense of deprivation, which implies the knowledge of some superior alternative. They know no more than the experience offered them. Possibly the only deprivation we really felt was the lack of TV and then only once we’d started school because some of our classmates actually had this simulated cinema in their homes. Gunsmoke, Cannonball, Popeye, The Lone Ranger were exotic titles bandied about in the playground like porn beyond our reach.  On balmy summer evenings Steve Keena, Andrew Duggan and I would often lie stretched like snipers across the pavement in front of Lennie Wiltshire’s basement flat in Devon Mansions on the corner of Tooley Street, staring in awe at the dumbshow playing on the screen on the far side of his front room; until one night sour-faced Mrs Wiltshire meaningfully drew the curtains. ‘Fackin bitches melt’ was my Mum’s immediate response on hearing the story (the details of which she was to repeat over the years like a fond family memory). Whether this was the inspiration behind the beating I gave Lennie (Steve holding his arms behind his back as we played out Japs and English for real, discovering my surprisingly natural right hook), I have no registered memory (deleted perhaps by my own pasting in a return bout, refereed by Mr Wiltshire; both Ws leaping out from the park bushes as I made my way home from school alone a week later). The deprivation remained like an unsated hunger, fed rather than diminished by our future trips to Saturday morning pictures at the Elephant and Castle.


Cinema was a substitute and often a bi-weekly entertainment those days, such was the glut of B-movies from the major studios in the post-war market (particularly westerns and war movies, feeding the plagiarism of our games). Hence, our casual attitude to the event, as if we were at home (watching TV). There was no urgency to arrive at the start of the programme (or ‘fil-em’), you went in when you got there, maybe taking your seat during the trailers or Pathe News or even the main feature, picking up the story as best you could, the ending merely a popcorn, chocolate and drinks break as you sat through the next showing until someone muttered ‘This is where we came in’ and you shot up, seats flipping like gunfire, forcing a Mexican wave of harumphing punters in your wake, before blindly feeling a route through the dark of the tripping aisle to the red neon of the exit. Although television (like most technological innovation) was condemned at the time with the level of dire warning we associate with Class A drugs, partly out of the fear it might create an insular, ignorant society, apart from the meta-soundtrack of the audience, its collective indrawn breath or waves of roaring laughter, cinema offered no significantly greater social interaction. There certainly seemed to be little awareness of any audience beyond ourselves as, despite an obvious effort to whisper (the habit of a church congregation), Mum’s lowered voice offered muscular competition for any wartime soundtrack and delivered an almost continuous commentary, analysing narrative structure (‘Thought he was dead. Where’d he come from?’) or character (‘Looka the size of him. Just missed being a dwarf’) or, if she’d already seen the movie, helpfully informing us of the upcoming scenes. All of which seemed entirely natural and, in fact, continued to be the way she’d eventually watch television for the rest of her life. I barely listened, having already learned how to tune her out. For a child, entire stretches of movie conversation are incomprehensible anyway and impatience sets in until the hard boiled detective starts swinging or the gunslinger strides out towards the stranger waiting in the empty street; the shift in music could always be relied upon to arouse you from any bored wanderings. My mother once filled an entire scene, berating a man who’d dared complain I was sucking too loudly on my sherbet lemons and when we returned to the action on screen there was the narrative, as lucid as if we’d merely blinked. In the early years, of course, it’s never adults but animals which engage the emotions with identity and empathy; there was heartbreaking romance in Lady and the Tramp, inconsolable tears at the orphaning of Bambi, the rabid demise of Old Yeller, while legions of dying men could fall without a batted eyelid, remembered only for the elegance or drama of their tumble from horse, building or cliff, the athleticism stored in an empathetic muscle memory for audition pieces enacted on sunny afternoons in ‘the bushes’ or the sandpit in Tanner Street park. 


What did we do before television? While the rest of the country was locked into the first flush of youthful programming, naive, experimental or imported, entertainment in Barnham Street focused on the waning popularity of the radio (or ‘the wireless’ as my parents called it): Listen with Mother offered a different line-up for each day of the week: from the educational intent of Monday’s Picture Book to the soap of Friday’s Woodentops. In between hid the dangerously subversive Bill and Ben, ‘Wee-e-ed’ and ‘Slugalug’ (thought to be a serious inhibition to language acquisition in child development). Although absurdly appearing to be nothing more than the audio track of television’s Watch With Mother, it was an entrancing listen; the precision of middle class pronunciation like audio signals from an alien world (‘Was it Bill or was it Ben/pissed into that flowerpot then?’ Listening as avidly as I might, I could only guess). These were the soundtracks to our daily chores: the small joys of popping green pods, scooping their glossy emerald pearls into a matelot blue ringed bowl while Mum (was she really listening with me?) peeled potatoes with the speed, skill and dexterity of an experienced packer of Peek Freans biscuits (another title on her CV). To eventually see Bill and Ben, the Woodentops and the charming Rag Tag and Bobtail (three soft toys tied end to end) after they had lived so long in the imagination was more than an eye-opening experience. Although the ‘memory tray’ quiz of Picture Book must have been a confusing challenge for trusting infant listeners, broadcast within the same schedule as the adult Educating Archie, a ventriloquist performing his extended act on the radio (to 15 million listeners, apparently), it might not have seemed out of place. None of this, of course, much as it entranced me, was my choice. Our radio, a round shouldered, serious brown box, rested on a shelf beyond my reach. Quite often the absurd focus of our gaze (especially during the football results), it never moved and was barely ever dialed beyond the ‘Light Programme’, leaving its list of exotic locations the length of my arm (Luxembourg, Munich, etc) undiscovered.  The daily and unintelligible (to me) Archers, the strange sighing introduction to the alliterative Ha-Hancock’s Half Hour, the Saturday football results (a rhythmic pointless epic poem, its brass band theme invariably accompanied by the tapping of Dad’s sauce smeared knife on the edge of his plate), the Sunday Two-Way Family Favourites ‘With a song in my heart’ (forever linked to the smell of roast chicken on a sunny day) appeared to be the punctuation of my parents’ weekly lives.


Apart from my mum accompanying popular ballads of the day (Gypsy Rover, Skye Boat song, etc) as she cleaned, ironed, chopped or peeled, her high, reedy voice reaching through the open door to solicit compliments (probably flirtatiously) from a  male neighbour (‘I thought I was listening to the wireless’), my introduction to music came in the form of a wind-up phonograph, a bulk-square, coffin-black box easily filling the kitchen table, the lid opening to reveal a green felt turntable and steampunk silver arm. An organ-grinder’s lever had to be inserted in the side and turned through several minutes of elbow grease before we could play any of our small selection of sleeveless and increasingly scratched records (one of which carried the logo of a dog listening to what for a long while I assumed to be our own phonograph): ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Champion, the Wonder Horse’ (or the preferred B side, ‘Drill Ye Terriers, Drill’), ‘16 tons’ (‘I was born one morning when the sun didn’t shine’), ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ and a selection of Irish rebel ballads, including Kevin Barry and The Croppy Boy (the simple Irish lad duped into betraying himself in the confession box by the English captain disguised as a priest), a track, I’d ask to hear again and again, not only indoctrinating myself with an unreasonable prejudice against ‘the English’ (particularly in the guise of the Black and Tans) but a fatal attraction to the melancholy of minor chords (not that I, or anyone in the building, knew anything about chords). What entranced me was the whole experience: the bobbing silver arm, the rhythmic scratch of anticipation before the eruption of the first notes, the darning-sized needle bumping its way across the black gloss of wobbling vinyl, the distant and ancient voices fighting to raise their lament above the white noise of years and stalling sometimes on a repeated phrase as if suggesting samples for future Hip-hop rebels; without visual distraction, this aural experience focused my eyes upon  the labels spinning a mesmeric midnight blue, emerald green, dead-priest purple; muted, matt colours carrying the aura of firework packaging I’d seen rammed behind glass counters or sitting free on landing floors awaiting the igniting match, serious colours, far from the primaries of comics and classrooms; sophistication with explosive potential; a privileged glimpse of an adult world of danger, sorrow and sadness into which I would eventually ascend. One day my mother arrived home with some children’s music she’d found in the local library; the bright coloured sleeves, the novelty red vinyl and jerky rhythm sprung with the childish optimism of advertising jingles offered little appeal and our ancient needle probably damaged them for life.


In retrospect, of course, I was experiencing first hand the insidious power of propaganda and an understanding of the ease with which any individual (like my father, for example) could be manipulated by a romantic ideal through the simple use of language, imagery and music, by-passing reason to instill a purpose and passion for which they can give their own lives or take the lives of others in the name of a cause they have never had the clinical opportunity to analyse. I would endure the consequences of such radicalisation during my twenties, of course, when London became the playground for those repaying the torturers of the Croppy Boy.  


The Entertainer


Besides all this, I guess, to some extent, (at least, according to the evidence accumulated from stories told and retold unto Homeric status) as the first born, my very existence must have provided a focus and significant source of entertainment in those barren days before television.


No memory is entirely secure but childhood memory is notoriously unreliable, even more so the further we travel through time. There seem to be no winters in the past, only long hot summers separated by Christmas with its dark nights, smiling faces and presents. The dark nights are lit by ‘the Christmas lights’ strung across Oxford Street, our own glimpse of Disneyland, finding focus in the fairy-glam of Selfridges’ window displays. Inside, ‘Mr Holly’, in his Doorman’s green suit and tinseled topped hat is the buffer before Santa’s Grotto and the perennial conundrum (children seem to have no trouble accepting) of how you will never see Santa on Christmas Eve (even when he’s hauling a packed sack around in your own front room) yet weeks before he is readily available, daily and somehow simultaneously, like God, in every department store. 


One Christmas Eve, however, returning late at night from a trip to Billy Smart’s Circus, I saw the real Santa. My parents had purchased ringside seats for a birthday treat (I was born on 24th December). Although, I must have been no less enraptured by the hammed up horror of the lion tamer, the slick cossack stunt riders bouncing from horse to rushing horse; neck-straining with the rest to see the elegant kicking tight-white legs of sparkling spotlit gymnasts caught by desperate stretching hands high above, all this, however, would be fabricated memory. What I genuinely recall is a clown in the Coco guise (oversized tartan suit, Jimmy Saville hair, permanently startled eyebrows) suspiciously circling the edge of the sawdust ring with a giant yellow comb in his hands. Now and then. with the erratic energy of a spider, he leapt across the low ring wall to light on some helpless punter, miming the role of a hairdresser, patting, combing and reshaping the hair and leaving them in smiling disarray. Whether I was responding to some imagined random nit inspection, instinctive fear of pedophilia or merely a generalised terror of clowns, I failed to conform to the accepted behavioural response. As he approached the bench on which I sat, turning his plastered smile toward me he seemed to catch my eye and, perhaps stalling for a second, leapt onto the ring wall in front of me. Although Coco must have had some compensatory showbiz B-plan body language to cover the unforeseen in the eyes of the wider audience (and even those around me would have had difficulty gauging the expression in his face as fixed as Botox), there must have been a moment’s shocked hesitation as the child whose crewcut he was about to ludicrously part began lashing out in a fit of hysteria which seemed only to intensify as he was hoisted aloft and carried away by embarrassed, apologising parents like some miniature mosh-pit backstroker from ‘the most expensive seats in the house’ and into a future family reminiscence of raucous, mocking laughter. 


On the way home, calmed by the passing of time, the iced night air and the lack of clowns on the top deck of the bus, on entering our block we were all aware of a movement in the darker dark at the end of the yard, something more than the usual invisible rustling of rats. The possibility of some old down-and-out foraging through the bins or seeking out a secluded space to sleep was dismissed by Dad’s unusually serious tone telling me with some concern it was ‘Father Christmas’ and I had to hurry to bed before he spotted me or I’d have no presents to open in the morning. 


Somehow the thought of missing out must have helped suppress the usual excited insomnia of Christmas Eve, for when I awoke in the faint light of morning the mince pie and brandy had gone and Santa’s sack must have burst with the weight I’d heard scraping against the bins as in front of my still sleepy eyes the floor of the front room was covered in carefully wrapped presents (although, in retrospect, less of an achievement than it must have appeared). ‘Salt o’ the erf’, Bermondsey people were at their most generous when they had nothing. Instead of taking economic advantage of the happy coincidence of my birthday running concurrent with Christmas, friends and neighbours (as though foreseeing my clown-trauma) had gone out of their way to ensure I had two presents from each. However, by the middle of the day, drowning in wrapping paper, following an overexcited hour tearing open present after present, so overwhelmed was I by the choice of toys, I spent the rest of the day playing inside one of the large cardboard boxes which had housed some oversized gift. Of course I’d like to assume this was an example of imagination trumping materialism; more likely, however, it was some craving for isolation from the rest of the world.


Despite the close friendships thrown up within the intimacy of those thrown together by circumstance, some of which seemed to have been born with me (Steven Keena, for example, was as close as the brother I never had), the creation of an imaginary friend must serve some deeper need within an only child, like the unrequited longing of a surviving twin. Perhaps the same need exists in every child, a product of our consciousness, duplicating itself to allow us to commune with (some aspirational level of) ourselves, an early evolutionary stage in learning to think. Whatever the reason, Monkey came into existence early on, so early I have no idea whether he was an offshoot of my bedtime stories or the bedtime stories were compelled to accommodate his already very real existence. Far from trying to talk him out of this existence, Dad appeared to encourage and prolong the fantasy, providing substance with his trance-inducing tales (displaying a level of imagination we were never to hear from him again, ever) of train journeys across hillsides and through rabbit-filled tunnels in which we controlled the cab, pulling levers and sounding the whistle while Monkey shoveled coal like a navvie, handfuls of which we would occasionally aim at passing (probably English) pedestrians, who had begun by waving cheerfully and were now shouting indignantly from the streets below. So, bouyed by this partnership (Dad having provided us with specific and complimentary roles), back in real life we remained inseparable, bonded buddies, Bewlay Brothers, offering no friction to any other relationship, Monkey hung around for a year or more, taking up bus and cinema seats, perhaps even aiding the extension of the hunger strike from the ‘Terrible Twos’ into the Threes. So exclusive and so public became our dialogue, it culminated in an embarrassing episode for my mother when another outbreak of passionate violence (or tantrum) startled a bemused passenger innocently taking the third seat (‘Monkey’s seat’) beside us on the bus (‘He’s sitting on Monkey!’). Soon after, a ‘real’ monkey was purchased, a rubber-faced, yellow and brown woolly-clad infant-sized toy, arms permanently raised in celebration. Although I retain a tactile memory of his chewable pink rubber hands and feet, any trivial, intense or philosophical wittering I might have transferred from my imaginative persona to this toy (trading riffs like sub-Tarantino players) have long since been lost to memory. When he finally left there was no drama and no tears. Perhaps this physical manifestation of rubber and wool absorbed Monkey until he was no more than a child’s toy, perhaps I merely internalised his voice, absorbed the persona and, outgrowing the need, evolved. I don’t know. Sometime, somewhere, probably to the brow-mopping relief of my parents, he left as easily as he’d arrived.


Education, Education, Education


Although as a woman barely able to read and write herself, education held a high value for my mother, (a weakness artfully manipulated: ‘Look at that gun/game/soft toy, Mum’ she’d hear, dragged to some store shelf or window, ‘it’s educational’) the energy, planning and execution of our frequent day trips was probably most influenced by the need to keep us out of the flat for as long as possible. Whatever the motive, Madame Tussuads, the Planetarium, London Zoo, the Kensington museums, even the distant glamour of Brighton and Margate (for privileged BR ‘free rail’ passengers) became installed as familiar venues in our annual grand tour. 


Every Sunday, it seemed, we crossed Tower Bridge for the repetition of some unspoken history lesson in an afternoon amongst the crowds slowly circling the Tower, where Beefeaters guarded the cobbled entrance, where the crack of a whip cut through the gabble, while the straining voices of hoarse barkers, street-circus ringmasters, held up slowly turning eddies in the flow; where half-naked men in black tights and vulnerable, pale-skinned torsos waited, patient, manacled, hands behind their back, in a drama of locks and criss-crossed, wrenched-tight chains, taking a full half hour to secure and only minutes to escape, in the seclusion of spastic, wriggling sacks; where (according to Mum) ‘Legions’ of check-shirted, flat-footed American tourists, (in reality, maybe two or three) queued to take pictures of her son astride the black barrel of a river-facing cannon (these were innocent days before the invention of pedophilia); where  the sheer childish boredom of treks through empty, sun-trapping streets as far as the Monument, longueurs as draining as Meursault’s Sunday ennui opening the tedious world of the Outsider, would sap life of all strength, purpose and vitality. (Here’s where the Great Fire started. Great.) What knowledge can you imbibe at such an age, when you thirst only for Coke and recreation. An instinctive teacher might hope to breed no more than a sense of identity, a familiarity with that which later will become accessible and intelligible; dead places and dead people who wait patiently as you pass (we’re not going anywhere) to be discovered and then rediscovered when you are done with playtime. And Mum was all instinct.


Somehow, it worked. I developed a love for the secondary pleasures: the cool, hushed marble steps ascending the floors of the Natural History museum, the aura of petrified creatures behind Victorian glass cabinets; the playful, interactive Science museum next door with its ‘futuristic’ automatic doors, its teasing, ‘magic’ gold ball centred in the blue round table, out of reach and sucked out of sight as laughing, grasping hands witlessly broke the circuit again and again; the first glimpse of shimmering blue sky squeezed between the gaps in the buildings below Brighton station, when the sea itself is no more than a hazy, hovering blue presence; the penny arcades where we actually spent most of the sunny day. 


The ‘beach’ experience of summer day trips was, in fact, a tedious trek through slumped, dazed and grotesque bodies, hauling deckchairs like Sherpas towards some elusive, perhaps imaginary space in which to erect them; impatiently enduring the obligatory morning hours of blue the prisoner calls the sky, while the sea air ‘did us the world of good’ (the obligatory bread and butter before the joy of cake) before, finally, ecstatic release into the pier long arcades of Brighton or the acres of rides in Margate’s Dreamland.
 
Those days, inspiring glimpses of a wider world though they might be to a child, were perhaps no more than temporary reprieve for a young mother trapped in relentless routine, offering her no more than a tantalising taste, not the actuality of escape. When in Tussuads’ Chamber of Horrors we came upon a recreation of Christie’s front room in 10 Rillington Place, it was not so much any frisson of horror I experienced as the fascination of recognition. I don’t recall the look on my mother’s face. Of course, Christie had let the place go. 


Reading thus made an early appearance into my life; what else would education mean to a mother who had none? The local library, a hushed oasis in the midst of heavy traffic, a small but imposing grey stone structure, had for us the eminence of a stately home dropped into the midst of Tooley Street. The BBC, as the official black letters of its welcome mat declared (Bermondsey Borough Council) could only be entered via a steep set of steps (mountaineering practice for pre-school children), enhancing the imposing gravitas. Perhaps influenced by Mum’s reverential respect for both the building and those who worked there, whenever I heard her talk of the ‘Council’, this was the place I visualised (Bob Melish in loosened tie and shirtsleeves beavering away with his books and papers in some private office above). Of course, Mum had no idea it was here George Orwell, sleeping in a nearby doss house, perhaps slumming for inspiration down Barnham Street in his lunch break, had industriously redrafted the notes for that novice study of capitalism on its uppers, ‘Down and Out in London and Paris.’ Here, within these high pastel walls, edging past sleeping tramps (or undercover social commentators) incongruously smelling like our stairwell, I was allowed to select as many books as the number of brown tickets my mother laid out before the receptionist like a winning poker hand. Obviously I made straight for the oversized section, Orwell-free but stocked with seductive cartoon covers. In studious early morning ‘reading,’ awaiting the return of Mum from her freshly cleaned offices (which would be ‘spotless’ before she left), I worked my way through the whole collection of Tin-Tin adventures, absorbed in the animation and perhaps beginning to identify a few simple words (‘Snowy! Snowy!). The activity, however, was to remain solitary. Neither parent read to me, for although they bought newspapers and wrote letters back ‘home’ to Dublin (‘Hoping this finds you as it leaves us...’) their own education seemed not to extend this confidence. My Dad’s night time stories, for example, were confined to those spontaneous oral tales of Monkey and I powering steam engines (working with what he knew). So my mother’s pride in her son’s  mastery of ‘reading and writing’ before starting school ‘aged four’, was an extension of the inflated PR within her usual pronouncements, delivered in dead-pan, without a flicker of self-conscious guilt (as though she really believed it herself). There was, however, always a germ of truth in her exaggerated spin. Although I had yet to tackle Shakespeare and Milton, those isolated early morning hours in the company of Tin-Tin and my friends from the Beano, Dandy, Topper and Beezer had prepared me, somehow, to graduate from Janet and John to Little Sambo (I kid you not, living happily with Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo) somewhat ahead of my classmates who seemed more at home in the sandpit or Wendy house. 




The Streets


Beyond the reach of parental control, play is the primary area in which the individual can first assert distance and independence; and play is the province of friendship. Our troupe of players, rarely less than three, more usually six or seven, were all drawn from the same building. We had no history, we couldn’t say when, how or why we had first met (not all our parents were close). We had found ourselves in the same place, roughly the same age, background, disposition and had, as far as any of us could remember (if we’d ever been asked) always been together. We just were. 


Memories of our time (in those pre-school years) have no definite chronology, just a series of unlocated impressions, isolated incidents and adventures cementing and bonding a set of ‘mates’ enjoying the freedom of their own small world. Setting out at the beginning of the day under the blue sky of childhood with a who knows where and how far we might roam sense of freedom, we consciously (or unconsciously) confined ourselves to the play pen bounded in the east by the relentless traffic of Tower Bridge Road, in the north by the dockland bustle of Tooley St  and in the west by London Bridge station; a geographical precinct whose borders were patrolled by the mind-forged manacles of Mum’s strong right hand should we venture further, a retribution I discovered one November evening when Steve and I (inspired by the tower of flytipped refuse we’d watched rise to the size of a house on the Snowfields bombsite) commuted our rather lame impersonation of Guy Fawkes (toy monkey in a green goatee mask) on a Dick Whittington journey from the miserable pennies of Barnham Street to the lucrative Rush Hour steps of London Bridge station. The sight of the furious face of my mum and her already rounding body barreling down Tooley Street towards us (surprised familiarity twisting to bladder-squeezing dread) as much as the rhythmic pummeling of hand on backside she didn’t hesitate to deliver (once she’d caught my fleeing arm) remained with me longer than the pyre of cremating heat and crackling flames holding us gaping, goggle-eyed through the weaving blue afterglow of sparklers. 


I was too frightened to ask what had happened to the money we’d managed to collect but a burn mark left by the spinning violence of a pinned Catherine Wheel remained like a black target for years on the door of an empty flat below, while the landing had transformed into an unsettling ecstasy of silver fountains and green genies in our own private display, leaving only a clutch of rockets to fizz from milk bottle launchpads, explode and fade into the bitter black sky above the Snowfields inferno.


Within our defined zone, street smart street rats, we moved through a familiar repertoire of occupations. Although in later years sport, particularly football, would come to dominate our lives, here was another time, another place. Sisyphus was our role model and his was a pre-hygenic world in which collections of discarded ice-lolly sticks could be woven into miniature Kon Tikis to float down the dreamy oil swirls of kerbside puddles; while the morning hangover following the bonfire binge offered the cold turkey of ‘hunting’ down and gathering the spent rockets littering the streets; by noon we were gripping handfuls of these sticks with their strangely seductive matt coloured pods (sets of unquivered arrows ‘hidden’ for  later use beneath some shrubs in ‘the bushes’ and forgotten). These rituals carried the aura of some vague tradition handed down through the generations, an understanding which legitimised even the most absurd mania. Some days nerdish and pointless collections of number plates would be enough to satisfy the infectious, compulsive urge and begun on the whim of someone’s suggestion, by the end of the morning an entire side of A4 paper would be avidly transcribed in the quite useless numbers of car licence plates, (some, gained from treks to distant roads, even bartered) to be lost who knows where by the afternoon; other days, sealed jam jars, lids knifed with breathing slits were packed with the choking, curling bodies of caterpillars plucked from the weed jungle of a bombsite (none ever to survive long enough to see the world through the eyes of their butterfly selves); sacks of off-cuts ‘found’ in the carpenters of Snowfields and stored (‘somewhere’) in the name of a future fantasy in which we repel a siege from the Vine Street lads (a constant threat to manhood); Daffodils in spring from the small church park off Druid Street, filth-caked ashtrays from abandoned brewery storage units served as presents for bewildered Mums (some of whom had never placed a cigarette between their lips). We were often touched by our own generosity. Sometimes engaged in serious debate, someone would ask: ‘What would you buy if you had £100?’ (our standard image of barely imaginable wealth) ‘A rifle..with a special night-time sight...and then a house for my Mum and Dad.’
 
Our climbing frames were the flat bed lorries inevitably parked by the arches in Druid Street; springing up from wheel guards and tyres as solid as rockfaces, we hauled ourselves over the hidden, canvassed load, swinging from rigid ropes and crawling over the rough tarpaulin like future illegal migrants, to where the flattened top, sometimes several infant sizes in height, offered a new perspective on the world. The climb was always fraught with unspoken tension, however, and a cry of ‘It’s the man!’ usually revealed some blue overalled hobbler, shambling towards us from the direction of Tooley Street, a lazy hour in a boozer slowing his pace while his distant shout was enough to set off a sudden scattering like rats from a ship or the ‘fucking little monkeys’ we’d sometimes hear him call after us in a tone of resignation.


There were fewer cars in our playground of streets (the odd brewery dray horse could still be seen in Tooley Street) and some old enough to still carry running boards, allowing  the more daring to sneak up on to the passenger side as the driver slid in, squeeze-crouch on the running board, clinging on by the door handle to ride the length of the street; the skill lay in judging the moment to step off just as the car changed gear to accelerate. I had never been a (legitimate) passenger in any car (my Dad placed his faith in public transport and owned a bike) but for some reason lorries were our Lexus, seemingly veneered in macho glamour, and I was denied the opportunity of a trip in the cabin of a long haul ‘rig’ (as Steve called it) by my outraged Mum who offered no explanation, just the standard ‘No’ of suppressed violence. Andrew and Steve had been squeezed in for the short tour of Southwark, which they related with an excitement and sense of superiority that left me both disappointed and somehow less experienced; which, to be fair to modern Mums not so tight-lipped in articulating their fears, is probably the weakness manipulated by grooming pedophiles.
 
Although ‘Run Outs’ offered the opportunity for Commando cunning and an edge of adrenalin-fueled reality when chased by Pat ‘The Beast’ McCormick (a few years older in physique, a few younger in cognitive development with a mind built on the template of Steinbeck’s Lennie Small), War games became our most frequent and most popular occupation; full scale enactments of jungle warfare in the weed-choked bomb sites or, more frequently, ‘the bushes’ (the hedges fronting a building at the end of Druid Street) in which all due respect was accorded to the sound effects of gunfire or the act of dying well (falling with some balletic elegance). The choice of enemies, like crop rotation, ranged from Germans to Japs to Indians (native-American) and always seemed to be preceded by intense discussion (‘It was Japs and English yesterday’ ‘Jap-san-english’ tripping along the tongue - without a trace of racism - as easily as Nabokov’s ‘Lo-li-ta’) as did the strategic deployment of players, weaponry (whatever guns were at hand) and conduct (‘I’m behind a rock. So you don’t see me. Then I shoot you. And you die’), each statement a falling cadence of strict policy and all coordinated with the martinet discipline of egotistical directors, especially in the act of condemning anyone who might dare transgress the universal self-imposed rule of dying when actually killed (‘I’m not playing - you don’t take your shots’). Within this mini-RADA, Steve’s impersonation of a dying soldier struggling through desert wastes fostered unanimous admiration; his  ‘Wat-er, wat-er’ delivered in what we all assumed to be an authentic American accent, inherited from a Dad who was half-American (‘born in a submarine half way between Britain and America’). Overcompensating for an ineffectual father shut out of his home whenever the temperamental Mrs Keena threw a tantrum (so Mum said). Each scenario (even Commandos ‘silently’ creeping up on an unsuspecting ‘Jap’) was usually accompanied by a spontaneously dramatic soundtrack, heavily derivative of Schoenberg’s 12 tone scale (‘Dan-da-dan!’), and realistic gunshots (complete with ricochets). Guns were highly valued commodities, both the readily available commercial variety (mostly produced in that extension of Woolworths called Hong Kong) and the improvised. I had a double holstered gun belt with twin set colts. I also owned a ‘Buntline special’ distinguished by its extended phallic barrel (protruding absurdly from my holster), which I’d persuaded my mum was ‘educational’ by offering passive resistance in front of the toyshop window. However, for several days (and for reasons long forgotten) I carried around a metal tube contraption (like a set of oversized toy rail tracks) I’d taken from a factory bin, which I used as a snub-nosed machine gun (improvising the rattle of fire like humourless laughter). Years later I saw Travis Bickle utilize a similar appliance in Taxi Driver, to unload a gun from wrist to hand. He, of course, was supposed to be insane. 


Perhaps the most telling activity for investigating sociologists (or so they would think)would be those days we spent building ‘houses’; the best of which became igloo constructions of milk crates and discarded sheets of lino. I was reminded of this some years later by Granada TV’s 7UP documentary enterprise, including a sequence in which children were seen assembling similar (perhaps less imaginative) frameworks to ours, as though acting out a primitive cargo cult ritual, accompanied by a rather crude and facile analysis of slum children. A decade or so later a girlfriend and I came across a similar (beer) crate and lino erection by the side of the road to our hotel in the north of Mauritius (a smiling receptionist obligingly explained how it was common for workers from the south of the island to construct their own accommodation when on temporary employment away from home). Ours, of course, were built simply in the spirit of invention, through which we learned much of the need for cooperation and competition and, once constructed, were abandoned by the afternoon (or as soon as it started to rain). Although, to the educated, it might have appeared we were compensating for the houses we lacked in our lives, more likely we were simply responding to the fact that none of us owned a Lego set.


Days were often divided by ‘dinner’, the purpose of the meal less to stave off starvation than to report home before the second session of the day. Returning home before the absolute necessity of ‘dinner’ or the final call of your name at dusk was never a consideration (at twilight we’d usually hear the adnam of ‘Ge-rald, Li-am’ hollered without a trace of emotion by a Polish mother from the top flat of the last block, on and on until the boys’ reluctant return). We were sustained by whatever sherbet and sugar construction we could buy for a penny, usually a chew (Fruit Salads or Black Jacks were a bargain ‘four a penny’). ‘Caught short’, you merely hiked your shorts and relieved yourself by the side of the street, often leaving careless (or artful) trails snaking across walls or tarmac. So ingrained was this habit, it continued well beyond our move to Abbey Wood, until one day, caught short on a cycle journey out along the far end of the estate, I propped the bike against a garden fence and quite unselfconsciously unzipped to urinate into the newly planted garden when, still in mid-flow, I was shocked by the sudden arrival of a roaring resident exploding from his door (soiling my pants and possibly endangering my bladder for future use).


Playtime was usually confined to daylight, so wandering the streets after sunset became an alluring late summer experience. Such adventures in the darkening blue lit streets are always merged sensually in my mind with the Italian restaurant scene from Lady and the Tramp, the ‘camera’ rising above the candlelit al fresco table and up through the washing strung buildings into the starlit night sky, while the soundtrack lingers and lulls ‘...and they call this...belle amore.’ The romance of the vision has hung about, smiling indulgently at me through the whole of my life. In reality, we were sometimes drawn by curiosity (or the obligation of tradition) into the ritual stalking of ‘lovers’ (probably older children) pressed to the brick walls and penumbra of streetlamps in Crucifix Lane, catching a ‘Fuckoffahtofit’ as we ran our giggling escape through the echoing arches (amusingly disgusted at the thought of anyone kissing a girl). 


Snatches of unlocated dialogue returning over the years can be oddly indiscriminate. Obviously the brain cannot retain and systematically reproduce every exchange but often we wonder why some innocuous, inconsequential line remains embedded in the mind for years while there seem to be no subtitles accompanying the images of serious or dramatic events. Such is the power of language; on the discovery of a set of glass tubes  among the butterfly infested, head-high weeds of a bomb site, we were thrown into excited speculation until Andrew Duggan told us, with an air of authority, they were from a ‘laboratory’; his declaration held us awe-struck, less by any inspirational image of science (we had none beyond lurid film posters of Frankenstein) than his knowledge and almost fluent (we assumed) pronunciation of a five syllable word. The serious sound of the mouthful itself seemed to end any further discussion and confirm what we had to do: transport our find across the busy Tower Bridge Road to the Police station. Had there been CCTV at the time  it would be interesting to review the face of the duty officer dealing with five pre-school children, each carrying a glass tube (not all of them dangerously cracked) and soberly explaining what they were (we encouraged Andrew to say his word again) where they were found (among the rubbish on the bombsite) and where they might have come from (left by the Germans) in the growing expectation of a reward (perhaps to buy that rifle and house for our parents). The tubes were left on the counter and with a ‘we’ll let you know’ we were ushered out the door to discover ourselves, as if waking from a dream, facing a busy road of traffic far beyond our usual boundaries. It may have been this day, in the sudden spirit of adventure, having already crossed our border, we dared advance into the confines of Butler’s Wharf (a later, significant source of adventure) or, daring each other further and further, sidled across Tower Bridge to the centre parting where, standing one foot either side of the gap we could feel the lift and fall of each vehicle passing behind us, while out in the dockland distance gulls mirrored us, lifting and felling in the sunny breeze above the ships and tugs on the grey-green river. 


There were no traffic accidents in our Bermondsey (even before the introduction of Tufty) and turf wars were in their infancy, so, ironically, the main dangers to my health came through the aptly named Health Service. The doctor was a vaguely familiar presence over the years for the usual childhood experiences (measles, mumps, diphtheria, croup, whooping cough, etc) but not as familiar as the cure-all bottle of Lucozade with its transparent crinkling orange wrapping, its liquid sherbet taste encouraging the hammed up invention of many undiagnosed coughs and splutters.


That sugar habit, however, the taste and the dogging drug of childhood, was the source of most grief. My first visit to the dentist required gas: gimp mask. rubber bite-bar, strange dreams and blood soaked cotton balls bulging my Brandoed cheeks as consciousness returned me slowly to the bewildering confines of the waiting room. After a drowsy afternoon at home, I sank into a second dark, awoken by my mother’s screams in the night. A puddling liquid on my pillow was caressing my cheek, the cotton pillow case ‘saturated with blood’ leaking from a wound in my gums requiring several stitches. The experience traumatised the mother more than her son and it might have been years before I saw a dentist again but sucking the sherbet from a penny’s worth of flying saucers soothed my mouth the next day.
 
There was only one source of danger or threat we recognised and that too ranged beyond the safety of our zone. Those tapping on computers or merely tapping fingers or feet in frustrating meetings, gazing across the Thames from the glass Pisa walls of the Mayor’s office are probably oblivious to the history packed below their floors. In our time the wild forays from what we called ‘Vine Street’ carried all the mythology of marauding Danes. The ‘street’ (unseen and later confusingly found on the Monopoly board) has been deleted from existence (studying the map today I can see only the dead end of a Vine Lane) yet the ‘Vines’ carried the same threat to our world as the mystic, misty fjords no Saxon ever saw. We spoke of ancient wars (well before our five year span) and future invasions for which we were on constant alert and in need of preparation. In one plan, conceived while struggling home with an awkward sack of offcuts from a carpenters beyond Tanner Street, several brave ‘men’ would hide behind the low wall across the road from our building with a store of stones and these wooden blocks, ready to reveal themselves only when we’d sucked in the main charge. The plan (possibly influenced by the film Taras Bulba) went the way of so many, forgotten by the afternoon, and the ‘hiding’ of the sack (by Pat McCormick) was so careful it was never seen again. Another plan involved a length of industrial rubber tube, a ‘find’ dragged from who knows where, which we fixed over one of the landing taps, as it proved long enough to reach out over the railing where we would joyously drench the invaders, ‘should they make it’ into the building itself. The plan, however, was also forgotten, almost as soon as my mother saw the dirt smeared by the pipe across the new shirt ’she’d only just fackin bought and paid for.’ 


Home photography had barely advanced beyond the Brownie stage (in Barham Street, at least), so the few snaps of the early years were treasured in shoe boxes, sometimes even labelled (‘Dawlish, Welcome Stranger’) and brought out in later years for relatives to coo a half-surprised ‘Is that you?‘ or a polite ‘Look how you’ve grown.‘ etc.  Today I’ve been left with nothing more from those pre-school years but a solitary monochrome snap of friends. On the narrow, balding strip of scorched grass in front of the new building, a group of four children sit relaxed in a rough half-circle behind the low rise of ‘the wall’. Steve, Tony, Rita and I are talking distractedly, half-absorbed with something in our hands or rooting at a bare, dry patch of earth between us, teasing or racing worms probably; none of us conscious of the anonymous photographer, so relaxed and absorbed are we in our own company. It might have been the only time we were photographed together (there was always a reason for a photograph back then) and if so, it seems a fitting momento for those innocent years.


Travel


Travel is an interlude in life, an impressionistic movie (of first hand impressions and second hand stories). We open in Euston, the scuttle and scramble of the station reduced to a silent stretch of platform below the vast, breathing, steaming steel of the engine; you are fascinated by the suppressed violence of pistons, the distant soundtrack of urgent voices and echoing whistles squeezed beneath sudden shafts of steam. Your parents and the driver, wiping his hands on a red rag like a nervous habit, are smiling together as you’re handed up into his arms and set down on the hot footplate. The blue boilersuited stranger filling the cabin is asking you something with a sweating, grime-lined simian smile, his words lost beneath the weight of the furnace at his back, burning your cheeks, sapping the strength from your legs. With a shout to his friend (your Dad) he slams some snapping steel lever and the engine lurches forward to shrill cries and shouts of remote distress, contrasting with the laughter of the adults around you; somewhere the loading of bags and farewell kisses has been shocked still. You’re on your way, leaving your laughing, waving parents behind on the platform. For an instant you don’t know what you feel, excitement or regret, but In the next heartbeat you’ve returned. The train has lurched no more than a wheel’s revolution and you’re handed back down to your rightful owners to take your place among the relieved, bewildered and still boarding passengers.


For several hours you sit waiting by the window, the glass trembling against your forehead as you strain to see the engine ahead and the first tunnel where you’ll pluck a rabbit from the unseen wall. ‘You can just reach out and pull them off the wall’ your parents have informed you with grinning enthusiasm. Sill waiting, dusk descends, we pass into a night almost indistinguishable from a tunnel and you fall asleep still waiting, waking to bitter disappointment and the train at a standstill. Stupefied by the cold night air of Holyhead and the towering ship lit up above you like a Christmas tree, your sleeping feet negotiate the steep wooden gang plank by themselves. There’s a jump-cut here to a narrow cabin which itself reduces to clean white sheets tightly tucked and a fascinating stillness, seemingly generated by the single blue bulb in the wall above the bed; the lulling tremble of the engine, like the ghost of a distant party, has no trouble sending you to sleep again. Dun Laoghaire is a morning sweep of crying gulls flapping as frantically as the green, white and yellow tricolours snapping from every building in O’Connell Street. 


Dublin, its air thick with hops, doorsteps proudly scrubbed, becomes the walled off dead end of Fingal Street. ‘Off Cork Street’ Dad tells the taxi driver who pulls into a puzzle of empty roads and halts before the roadblock of a whitewashed, crumbling wall (behind which a fecund wasteland will later transform into the Coombe Maternity Hospital) and the city is reduced to ‘Turtynoine’ (39) a single storied terraced home, perhaps a step up from your own, but just a step: two rooms and a hallway leading into a narrow, homemade extension of wood and canvas (a kitchen, with a sink, with a rubber nozzled tap, through which flows water, any time of day) beyond which lies a narrow, neglected garden (with a private toilet in the seclusion of whitewashed walls). A home; in its heyday housing a family in double figures (including your own Mum, the youngest), now has room to spare for an ancient white-haired granny with a wizened face on a shrunken head and two tall, cheerful maiden aunts. The proud, burly moustache of an ancient grandad crowds one wall in browning sepia, while age-darkened saints shrink the rest, their frames leaning down on chains from the yellowing wallpaper to expose their bleeding hearts. Incongruously, a small, white plastic Buddha sits cross-legged centre-stage on the heavy, dark wood table filling the room, a fugurine ashtray around which we gather to talk and stub cigarette butts into the shallow translucent bowl of midnight blue before him. Later, on the same table, now covered in a flower-patterned oil cloth, luminous-pink pig’s trotters are served on steaming plates, concealing Chinese workers labouring under heavy sacks or yokes in a blue tint scenario (as still as Keats urn life). Only the top of a distant pagoda can be seen on the rim of your own as suddenly and defiantly you’re back on sulking hunger strike again and, unable to leave the table, made to stare at the glistening pink foot cooling and congealing in front of you while (as if to compensate for your inadequacy) Dad is excavating an entire village scene. ‘Lovely dinner, Rose.’ Relief comes via a knock at the door and unsmiling, chain-smoking aunt Kathleen offering (now with a slow seductive smile) chips down at ‘dahowse’ (the house, her home) an end of terrace property leaning windowless like a prison wall on the corner of Fingal and Cameron Street, a property, however, with stairs to a second floor and housing the Shaws, your four  cousins, (Tom, Dermot, Moira and John) each neatly separated by two year intervals; you join them, two years younger than the youngest, good natured John (your Dublin mentor). The house is where you take your meals now, a diet of egg and chips, watching Dermot briskly buffing his black shoes in the kitchen, suited and tied for a night out ‘Wit da Mots’ where ‘the crack is brootal’ (a carefree couple of years before he will have to marry an unexpectedly pregnant mot) while worker Tom, looking as old as a Dad, teaches you rhymes with his miming fists: ‘Dis is irdon and dis is steel, and dis is da one your gointa feel.’


The South Dublin accent, particularly in the voice of a woman, is a plaintive cry (evolved from years of suffering, injustice and the loss of so many Croppy Boys),  Your parents sound softer here, less Irish, beneath the cries rising and falling in the air like the sad appeal of gulls or Banshees who sit on roof tops combing their long hair in the late night tales of your grandma. The harsher, less romantic tone of news venders ‘Herdaldamail’ (‘Herald or Mail’, rival newspapers) pierces the bustling gossip in Meat Street market where aunt Rose, taller than many men, knows everyone; and where her flat, nasal one-liners and poker-faced delivery draw easy smiles and laughter. Here and there she finds discarded banshee combs in the road and loose change on the pavement, which being turned over at the sight of a dappled mare, doubles in your pocket by the end of the day.


Sweets (and ‘Lucky bags’) are sourced in sweet smelling ‘Brackens’, a corner shop in Cameron street with a rainbow wall of glass-jarred confectionary and a kindly owner as familiar as an uncle (‘Howya. Mr Bracken’ ‘Howya John, Howya David’); chips (greasy, professional, piss-in-the-batter chips) are acquired from a ‘chipper’ in Cork Street, (with a sideline in homemade ‘ice pops’). ‘Fil-ems’ are found as easily in Rialto as in ‘the Elephant’. Sweets, chips, Fil-ems; what more do you need?


Everyone here is kind and polite (‘Howya’, ‘Howya’), everyone here is ‘Yer man’, everyone here is a friend of the family. Any journey from 39 begins with a ritual greeting of wheelchaired Mr Breen (‘Howya, Mr Breen’), a few doors down, spending the whole day at his open door as if the street were an extension of his home (which it is), entertained by gossip and tennis ball football played on the empty road (covered with what appears to be underlay awaiting its tarmac surface, and its cars). Noon (tolled by the bells of the Angelus) drags a ragged crowd of boys from distant streets to Donnelly’s, where frighteningly real and heavily snorting pigs arrive with their smell by the truck load and, guided by eager prodding sticks, squeal their reluctant way down the gang plank into the fouler smelling entrails of the slaughter house.


Mass draws an even greater crowd to a church in Donore Avenue where your parents had been married (eons ago, before you were born), a backdrop of scrubbed grey masonry familiar from the white wedding folder of monochrome photos at home (dove-grey in rain, wedding white in sunlight) in which smiling faces in ankle-length ‘frocks’ and ill-fitting suits huddle in crowded line-ups before the wide arched doors and the smaller, scrubbed-stepped, Sunday best door of 39. So overwhelming has it been to see so many pictured faces, suddenly animated and welcoming, you never think of the missing or why all those you’ve seen are confined to the same two streets or why they are all from Mum’s family or why Dad is handled like an honoured guest beyond the intimacy of the family. The collection plate at the gothic wooden entrance silently demanding its obligatory fee still had it’s twin passed from seat to seat during the life-sapping service; the up-down, bell-ringing Latin call and response which leaves you longing for the mythic figure of Flash Flannagan, a young priest whose legendary speed through a Mass (less than twenty minutes), guaranteed a full house and minor celebrity,  provided mostly by the significant percentage of ‘Mots’ (young, unattached women) packing the pews (according to Aunt Rose).




Although Dublin is a break from Bermondsey, despite day trips to Bray, it’s no holiday resort, a role regularly accommodated by Devon, and, apart from the duration of Dad’s dinner in the hour before his smiling hair-touseling goodbye as he leaves for work (on permanent nightshift, his breakfast through life is meat and two veg partnered by a ‘glass’ of Guinness), Dawlish Warren is when the Holy Trinity are one, an embryonic family; ironically, it’s also the time, unlike day trips to Margate and Brighton, when no friend from the flats accompanies you, so you’re left to explore your own world, alone.


When do you begin to lose that natural, instinctive bond of trust in your parents? Perhaps with the first small, laughable lie. Dawlish is as distant from London as Holyhead and with short memories or straining patience in the face of relentless repetition (the ‘But why’s and ‘But where’s and the predictable, inevitable lamentation: ‘Are we there yet?’‘Are we there yet?’) they try to pull the same old rabbit out of the hat to hold you silent and studious in your window seat. This time however, despite lowering, darkening clouds, it’s daylight all the way, you’re too excited to sleep and trembling with wide-eyed vigilance as you pass through the first tunnel. Sadly, there is no sign of rabbit ears temptingly protruding from the rushing walls, only a blast of wind shuddering the window and a warning slap as you lean out into the dark; providing an early revelation, despite the influence and presence of God (who, apparently, ‘is everywhere’), your parents don’t always tell the truth. 
 
The Welcome Stranger, is a compact caravan site (recommended to Mum by the ‘Welfare Lady’) and a modest caravan (turquoise, wheel-jacked, two breezeblock steps to the door) is where you return, increasingly less like strangers (but still welcome), for two weeks each year throughout your life in Bermondsey. Dawlish Warren, another deceptive misnomer, proves to be disappointingly rabbit-free. In later years we will discover Westward Ho! on the north coast, (equally devoid of Hoes), possibly an even more economical alternative (where a wide, deserted beach is raked by a permanently biting wind) to compliment Dad’s redundancy.


Here rain hammers on the skylight but the beds fold into the walls and the freedom of space draws you up and down its length like a prisoner feeling his sentence. Toilets (and a washroom) are a small adventure away across wet paths and wetter uncut grass but you find a television room (called the ‘Television Room’). On sunny days with a bamboo cane and net you fish for ‘tiddlers’ in the nearby river, ride a tricycle at insane speed along winding paths through the muted sea-colours of caravans, track the trains passing across the now daily blue distance. 


There is a startling accessibility to trains out here (in Bermondsey they are an invisible rolling thunder above the arches and tunnels of the streets). You stop in awe at open crossings (rails seamlessly embedded in wooden floors) or beneath the shade of the small iron bridge where you stall in the smell of seaweed while engine and carriages rumble over loosening girders just feet above your head, gazing out in empathy with the passing passengers at the distant sea receding before a picture-book beach framed by red rock cliffs and caves. 


Everything is more alive here, colour vibrates in the free, euphoric air, bullying your parents into the background: Mum, rounded and self-conscious in an obligatory multi-coloured one-piece, Dad lean and pale in green Speedo briefs, the palm-sized tattoo on his chest (a bleeding heart inscribed with Mum’s name, Angela) is a blurred rash; they fade, unable to compete with the burnished reds and purples of stretched towels wrinkling over the sand, the  blue and white stripes of Dad’s deckchair fluttering vacantly in the sea breeze (he’s on a solitary ‘walk’ along the beach). You work with a blue plastic bucket, green rubber spade, pouring pointless industry into failing sandcastles. ‘Sand’s too dry’ declares a sun-stretched, sour-mouthed Mum, unimpressed and barely opening her ‘resting’ eyes, as you watch buckets of shimmering water you’ve hauled slop-rimmed back up the beach, across the seaweed barriers, from shoreline race track spring to backshore quicksand plod, to see it sucked out of existence even as it’s poured into the moat. In consolation, small white backed crabs can be collected as easily as caterpillars and their trail of rock pools (familiar from the Daily Mirror’s ‘Perishers’ cartoon strip) lead you into damp, echoing caves, littered with heaps of snot-coloured seaweed, strange sea-smells and a glimpse into another world, more real, uncomfortable and less attractive than the cartoon images of Tin-Tin’s desert island.


When Mum takes you paddling in the lapping surf (feet stepping awkwardly over the stirring, tangling strands of seaweed), she turns you to the cliff-face ‘Look at the chuffer, David,’ she tells you, holding your hand; her grip, tightening now and then as she steadies herself in the waves, feels like affection. The track above the cliff, however, remains doggedly empty, the oncoming train no more than distant tinnitus below the cries of gulls, the slap of sea; yet expectation holds you like an obsession so you don’t feel her ease you backwards out into deeper water. The sea, fascinating at a sun-sparkling distance is still disturbing up close; weekly baths, basins and flushing toilets is the most you’ve seen of water up to now. Around you float bobbing heads, a bright yellow lilo, grappled by the bare arms of some half-submerged wrestler, a couple of inflated rings like iced donuts ride a slow current beyond it, one further away, a black pudding, could be the inner tyre of a lorry, two heads bobbing inside. Just as you notice the rising level caressing your waist, Mum points up the beach, ‘There’s Dad’ she tells you but you see only grouped sunbathers, some sitting, some lying, two or three wading out into the waves, all strangers (not particularly welcome). Still seeking the familiar figure, the strolling athlete, the train suddenly approaches, rattles across the space between the cliffs, pumping pure white clouds which power upward only to fall as grey mist trailing and fading across the rhythmic carriages of brown and cream. As the last car disappears behind the furthest red rock, you are suddenly chest high in the rise and fall, streamers of brown and green seaweed, nudging and rocking and pushing you further out to the blue horizon as you try to wade through a panic back to shore and an assurance you feel is already slipping away.


‘Look at the colour of yous’ Mum says accusingly back in the caravan, although she is admiring Dad’s bright pink torso, lobster-luminous in the shade. You run your fingers over the numb veneer of your own raw skin which has never felt the balm of oil or sunscreen, see the startling negative against the white of lowered trunks. ‘You’ll both be brown as berries by the time we’re home’ she adds, starting the dinner with a confusing satisfaction. The only berries you know appear with green holly on Christmas cards and are as red as the blood of the Sacred Heart.


Away from the beach, only the occasional shuddering rush of piston and carriage relieves the tedium of an adult afternoon ‘stroll’ along the path dividing rail and sea all the way from the Warren to the quiet, narrow roads of the town and its gift shops with their ‘dinky’ black swan, red backed pin cushions and cafes smelling of Horlicks, a drink in its own novel glass mug (actually labelled ‘Horlicks’, like a cartoon), a powder you’d later spoon from jar to mouth as avidly as sugar cubes. At Dawlish you stand on the station’s wooden platform, biting into the foreign exotica of banana fritters on sticks, fascinated by the slits and gaps between the planks revealing the ground dropping away below. At the first glimpse of a distant pulse down the track you climb and wait on the latticed bridge to feel the power of the engine race through the station below, the engulfing smoke as white as the clouds of heaven.


On late afternoons you board airless, nauseous coaches bound for ‘Doone Valley’ so Mum can see the blood stains on the stone floor of the church where Lorna was shot on her wedding day or Buckfast to watch the monks dyeing wool or brewing wine (or just being monks) or ‘Mystery’ tours into the countryside starting with the tantalising expectation of ghosts and ending in disillusion, a pub garden, a bag of crisps and a glass of watery orange. 


No ghosts, no rabbits. You sit reading comics on the long journey home, ignoring every tunnel and ready to return to your friends. 


Christmas in Birmingham (your possible home, had Dad failed to cross platforms on that fateful first day in Holyhead) is another parade of aunts, uncles and cousins (none, however, belonging to your Dad); it is also a birthday celebration. The day before another train journey, the carefully constructed cake (a white iced square dominated by a red 3D steam engine) is laid out on the table (for what, admiration? Psychological experimentation?). Somehow, alone with a crisis of conscience, you fail to overcome the tactile temptation and the roof of the driver’s cabin comes away in your hand in what might have been an accident, had the taste of marzipan not remained in your shocked mouth as you stand facing the duel wrath of mother and father: ‘Fackin Antichrist’ and ‘What were you tinkin? What?‘ are the respective and characteristic reactions.
  
Birmingham itself is a blur of disappointment: the ‘bullring’ no more than a parade of shops. Aunt Siney’s home is, however, a house (indoor stairs, landing, a bathroom on a second level, hot water, electric lights) crowded with three adult-sized cousins (‘Siney’ is Mum’s eldest sister); sharing the same wide face, warm smile and distorted accent, they gang around the coal fire and TV, conversing like adults with your Dad about ‘City’ and ‘Blues’ (football, apparently, which you’ve yet to discover) leaving you, after the first warm words, alone on the carpet (the soft, rough texture, another new experience) forgotten amongst the unopened presents. On the sideboard, in pride of place, sits the damaged cake like a guilty conscience. Only in retrospect will you understand it was never intended for you but, like the Ladybird pajamas and Startrite shoes, ‘for show’; PR compensating for the shame of your address.


In the evening the warm house fills with boisterous party laughter, hushed only when you’re handed up onto the dining room table for your party piece, a recitation of ‘It was Christmas Day in the workhouse.’  Who had taught you this reduced narrative is a mystery, perhaps your mother, suspiciously proud despite the mocking hand almost hiding her face, ‘Knows all the words. Hasn’t even started school.’ ‘It was Christmas Day in the workhouse’ you begin, revolving before the circle of eager faces, ‘and all the poor paupers were there.’ You run on the rhythm, pausing only at the final verse, perhaps conscious of the suppressed, anticipating laughter of an audience awaiting the final line: ‘Then up stood one great hairy pauper who spoke as bold as brass. I don’t want your Christmas pudding so stick it up your arse.’ 


Apart from your sulking face full of righteous resentment in one corner of a table set for an evening meal, your parents and another family smiling back at the camera with the required elan of happy campers, Butlins at Bogner Regis is almost a complete delete, a second holiday reduced to a single second-hand reminiscence; although an occasional flashback, like implanted memory (stage, audience, white stilettos, red blazer, laughter) tries to persuade itself it belongs to you. In this you are centre-stage, the apparent winner of a contest no one wants to win. It means nothing to you, you’ve no idea what ‘knobbly knees’ are, so there is no immediate humiliation; the memory itself might be as easily erased as the rest of the week had your mother not related the event to every visitor for years to come (perhaps having entered you as payback for the hunger strike). It sounds like another peculiar post-war pastime (the things we did before television) rewarding a child for a carefully judged state of malnutrition. The prize is a giant furry frog, for which you are expected to kiss a very kissable redcoat; who, real or imagined (blonde hair, smiley face, red lips, matching blazer), will haunt more than a few future dreams; the act, however, you refuse to perform in front of an audience of giggling hyenas (and possible pedophiles) finding entertainment in an underweight four year old.








School 


Our Lady of La Salette (‘and St Joseph’) sounds a pretentious mouthful for the modest church in Melior Street my Irish Catholic parents attended ‘religiously’ every Sunday and Holy days; blessing their suddenly serious faces, bowing their heads and genuflecting in the ritual of habit, Pavlovian victims ‘listening’ and responding in a language they barely understood: Dominus vobiscum...Et Cum Spiritu tou (Adeste Fidelis sang my mother’s thin, reverent voice while ironing, like an opera singer familiar with the syllables if not their meaning). Our Lady of La Salette is also the name of my first school.


The school could be found in the adjacent Weston Street (where John Keats, a student at Guys, redrafted his early attempts in what would eventually become his briefly held day job), a back alley, opposite a bomb site (later developed into the Greenwood Theatre) and only then accessed via an almost concealed entrance (as though in shame or modesty); an unassuming afterthought annexed to an unassuming church. Now only the church remains, lengthening its name, (‘and St Joseph’) as if to compensate for the educational loss. Joseph, a passive and cuckolded character in a patriarchal society, meekly accepting his minor role in the Christian dynasty like a holy Denis Thatcher, does seem to have found a fitting position as a belated afterthought. When I arrived for the foundations of my education, the two buildings, church and school, were umbilically linked via a wide wooden door in the school hall, a holy portal through which we filed at the end of lessons every Friday afternoon to endure a service of growling intonation (alleviated by intoxicating incense) before our blessing and release into the streets for the weekend (building future clientele through habit and association, much in the way McDonalds services children’s parties). 


Although the main entrance hides at the end of a narrow high-walled walkway, once inside, the building suddenly opens out Tardis-like into a traditional Victorian school with an echoing stairwell rising to 3 tiers of classrooms and, for the observant, a date inlay of 18-something or other in the masonry above the exit to the Infant playground. The brick wall, however, surrounding both yards (infants and Juniors), seen more clearly from an upper classroom window, is strangely topped with rusted barbed wire and ancient broken glass like a maximum security prison (‘To keep out the Germans,’ a five-year-old told me with the authority of a museum curator) as if the building always knew the fostering of education was no more than a temporary phase in its slow evolution into the factory storage unit it has long since become. 


Like a love affair, cruelly cut short before it can emerge from superficial infatuation to something closer to reality, my memories of the school, denied any sense of closure, are tantalising flashes of unresolved sentimental affection. The people and the essence of the place, as vulnerable as a dream, all sadly long gone, would bear reconstructive investigation, if nothing more than to engineer evidence of just how far that linking door, the umbilical cord joining church to school was more than symbolic. In retrospect, it does appear our teachers were themselves the missionaries they so often celebrated and promoted and we were their mission, their benign social experiment.


The first significant moment for me at school was not, in ‘fact’, mine but my mother’s and not (like so many other four year olds) the moving separation of mother and child but an incident within the first two weeks, of which I genuinely recall little more than turning around in an eye-batting burst of playground sunshine and embarrassment. If filming this opening scene now, the screen would fill for an instant with dazzling white light as though through a defective camera (or cinematographer simulating spontaneity) before emerging with intense clarity to focus on an assembly of children lined up in the yard; and here we would be inside my mother’s memory of the event. The fact that she wasn’t even there as a witness was no inhibition to the story she related, again and again, throughout her life. Although the alleged centre of attention, I was really no more than a minor character, an avatar, in this anecdote. Apparently, the Headteacher (a woman whose name has been lost over the years) had been addressing the whole school assembled before her in the playground when she called me ‘out to the front’ and asked the silent, squinting crowd to study my uniform: maroon blazer (oversized to accommodate growth), blinding white shirt, short grey trousers, long grey socks, maroon cap, all pristine new and militarily inspected each morning before I could leave for school. All of which was now being itemised to the assembled audience like commentary on a catwalk ‘And now I’m going to tell you where David lives...’ these words, in my mother’s voice became a punchline scripted with Shakespearian pathos and delivered with just a hint of old school reverberation and a level of understated melodrama perhaps no one else could provide: ‘Barnham Street buildings.’


The fact that she couldn’t have been present to witness the event never came under scrutiny (visitors often too busy dealing with moistened eyes).  Any ‘But...’ to my mother’s stories was futile, dismissed with ‘the look.’ How did she know? We’ll never know. The Headteacher’s actions, presumably intended to blackmail those in the audience falling below my high sartorial standards, may seem highly questionable today and in another environment, tagged with that day, I may have suffered years of retribution. Here, however, no one seemed to hold it against me and my own remembrance barely exists beyond the anecdote repeated at least annually to any new visitor, any relative reminiscing the Bermondsey years, a moving audition piece in which she seemed to have no trouble recreating the depth of her emotion: a cocktail of pride, resentment and the desperation for respect and vindication, all of which must have gone into the creation of that perfect schoolboy standing in the yard.


Memories, happy, sad or dramatic remain within us because they are what it says on the tin, memorable; leaving my mother for school for the first time was not one of them. The moment is so inconsequential it fails to make an appearance even within her own  collection of anecdotes. Perhaps there were tears, a fragile hand raised in farewell; I was an only child at the time and there had been no nursery years providing any incubating transition. Perhaps she checked my shoes one final time (I could write my name but had yet to learn to tie my laces). Nothing. My best friend, Steve, had started a few months earlier and perhaps his related experience had made me feel I’d already arrived; the first day possibly only offering a shade of difference to any other we’d spent together on the outside. Bermondsey knew no clogged street school runs of Range Rover and Porsche; I guess my mother walked the half mile from home to school for the first week at least but after the initial pedo- and psycho-free days during which lorries conscientiously avoided mounting the kerb, Steve and I were happy to make the journey down Crucifix Lane unaccompanied.


What we now know as ‘Reception’ class was run by Miss Curren (green tartan skirt, warm smile, light perfume); here students role-played in Wendy House and sandpit, read aloud at her desk and chalked shivering letters on slates, before graduating to Miss Scriven (beige two-piece, grim-lipped, odourless), notebook and pen. We saw no nuns and only the occasional visiting priest whose holy porn pics (backlit saints, eyes skyward, organs exposed) were handed out like signed celebrity photos and as treasured as the Tufty road safety handkerchiefs, whose instructions we chanted with the fervour of religious incantation: Look Right, Look Left, Look Right again, ONLY WHEN IT”S SAFE TO CROSS....


Real or formal education went on I suppose, I learned how to read and write. I just don’t remember how. What I do recall is the Angora and perfume of Miss Curren leaning into me to hear ‘Run John, run, etc’, mouthing the times tables others chanted and (perhaps showing off to my teacher) forming my whole name in the practiced prison scrawl I’d learned at home. 


There are, however, some ‘lessons’ or rituals students learn from each other while teachers (even those as enticing as Miss Curren) merely provide the materials for the task. ‘Today we’re going to draw your house/family/friends’ for example will usually produce (even in students with no ready access to the homogeneity of television) the same predictable result. Beginning with a bright yellow pencil or crayon they will carefully scratch in a small quadrant, usually in the top left had corner of the paper, the top of the sheet will then become a rough blue border. Rising from the foot of the page, the home (whatever the building the child has actually left that morning) will invariably emerge as the standard detached suburban property (although sometimes exhibiting more floors than a townhouse), its slanting roof perhaps even showing a smoking chimney (how else would Father Christmas gain access?); the whole construction often resting on a green plateau where stick people of various size appear, hand in hand, to confront the viewer with their smiley faces. In the same way, when these children are proficient enough to write, articulating their simple sentences with the one simple connective, their stories will begin with ‘I woke up and the sun was shining and the birds were singing and...’ even though the meanest windows will be curtained and Bermonsey is bereft of birdsong. Later, ‘Horror’ stories will inevitably feature narrow, ‘dark alleys’ and doggedly stalking ‘footsteps’ matching the narrator’s own increased and panicked pace. (‘As one who on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread...’) Jung’s Collective Unconscious or unconscious plagiarism? These learned rituals appear as necessary to socialisation as to formal education and although lacking the evidence, I’m sure I was no exception.  


Although our teachers introduced us to creativity with the ingenuity and enthusiasm of Blue Peter auditioners (egg boxes and cotton wool transformed before our eyes into Arctic homes) much of our lesson content seems, in retrospect, to have been delivered less in the spirit of the natural and neutral development of inquiring minds and more in the holy spirit of effortless indoctrination. Obviously, it was a Catholic school. We learned to chant our prayers in the morning as seamlessly as our times tables in the afternoon, borrowing the same rhythm with which we sang ‘Good Mornings’ to every teacher arriving (even by accident) through the classroom door (unnecessarily extending their name with a learned inflection, which to my ear sounded sarcastically insincere): ‘Good Morning Miss Scri-verrn’. 


Catholic teaching directed us to charity and our mentor in these charitable works (the meta-language of indoctrination) was to be Miss Scriven. It would be very easy to deliver her to you as the standard Catholic cliche of a bone-thin, bespectacled ‘old maid’ dressed like an off-duty nun, head cocked with a fixed, reserved but superior smile embedded in the lines and lips of an ascetic face built over years of sexless severity and betrayed in an instant by a sadistic sparkle given the opportunity for self righteous punishment; and I have to admit, something of this image hovers like a vision behind frosted glass, mainly because of the activities we were employed to carry out under her guidance. She was, however, a pleasant woman (undeserving of the negativity suggested by her Dickensian epithet) and far from the image of religious zealot, may well have merely been a kindly rank-and -file ‘schoolmistress’ following school policy. Most of the memories I retain of her class, however, are not of education but the extracurricular charity work we seemed relentlessly engaged upon in the noble cause of saving the rest of the world.
 
Although few of us might be able to finger Africa on the class globe, we couldn’t fail to know, wherever it was, it was a dire place packed with primitive people who needed our help. A guest speaker introduced our initial enterprise. This white robed, open-sandaled missionary who’d been there, got the T-shirt and hadn’t been boiled alive, had us falling out of our chairs like Richard Pryor on a roll with stories of the absurd English grammar and laughable accents of the natives (they called his moped a ‘Put-put’) while Miss Scriven floated through the aisles placing collapsible navy blue boxes the size of chocolate bars before each of us (all featuring the same monochrome photo of a bug-eyed brother or sister of our friend Sambo) which, milking our already entrenched compulsion for collection, we sailed off to fill with the swag of mugged parents and badgered neighbours through begging or blackmail. After a couple of weeks only the meanest could still collapse the sides of their boxes or hear their lightweight jingle, while ritual applause greeted those swaggering to the front of the class to have their side-splitting generosity held up for display. With sardined coins already forcing an escape through the splitting creases, these boxes were knifed open and the spilling silver and copper, like pirate treasure, counted into piles in front of the excited, cheering class (the accountancy did, at least, stop short of a leader board). Although these blue box collections would become an annual event to rival Lent (and perhaps, the logging of car number plates) none of us, I believe, had any real idea where the money was going (‘To the missionaries’, apparently) or what it was going to do. Why would we ask? We just knew we were saving the world. 


What did we know? Infants, trained never to question (and never trained to question), we accepted (often in God’s unspoken name) anything and everything our teachers presented to us with the same uninquiring minds. One of my nicknames at home, ‘Doubting Thomas’, was earned, I’m sure. less through the scoffing scrutiny of God’s word than my mother’s, it was just another of her ‘light-hearted’ terms of abuse  (I was just as regularly referred to as the anti-christ, or more typically, the ‘fackin antichrist.’). Thomas was the disciple who required physical evidence of Christ’s return from the dead (poking his fingers into the holes made by the nails in ‘his Lord’s’ hands, the spear in his side’). Although, by coincidence, Thomas was also my middle name, just how serious could have been my own transgressions?  It was unlikely any Bermondsey four year old would be a threat to ecumenical doctrine. We were small children in a small school, our teacher’s words were those of truth, wisdom and knowledge and we did whatever we were told, no matter how strange; teachers had the backing of our parents and, of course, God. So, when, alongside whatever academic studies we might have developed, we (both boys and girls) were also taught to sow and knit, we thought nothing of it: place mats for our parents, scarves for the lepers. Yes, this was a school in the middle of the 20th century, in the heart of macho Millwall dockland. Perhaps they were seeing just how far they could go.
 
So when one morning soon after the distribution of blue boxes, we were each handed a tennis ball-sized sphere of wool, stuck through with infant-sized knitting needles, there was no murmur of dissent, no ‘What the fuck...?’ Somehow, we followed what must have been patient and skillful instruction (I recall no dramatic failures) and soon began to produce rows of stitches of limited but strict width, the length of which extended as we resumed our work at regular intervals throughout the week. These were to become, we were told, scarves for the lepers (in Africa, of course). Weeks turned into terms and our efforts (from proficient to sad, all equally valued) were finally stitched together more professionally (by Miss Scriven, I supposed) into lengthy patchwork trains and, on a special day at the end of term, packed into a tea chest along with a ballast of books and handwritten letters from each of us. 


When I thought of the lepers (who possibly made up about 80% of the African population) I saw black, emaciated Sambos (naked, scarfless) their big staring eyes (perhaps borrowed from the picture on the collecting box) dazed with hunger as they gathered around putrid cooking pots on small fires or just the bare ground in front of their mud huts, looking up in gratitude as the latest shipment of scarves from Bermondsey was crowbarred open in front of them (their stumps of hands obviously unable to cope with the tight packaging).
 
Why a leper (draped across the dry ground in 40 degree heat) would want to wrap himself in a homemade rainbow scarf the twisting length of a full grown man, was never questioned (not even by our parents). If Miss Scriven told us he needed a scarf.... Still, wherever the final destination of these infant efforts, the sense of purpose was probably thought to be enough in itself, we were thinking of others at least and no longer our selfish selves.


After knitting we were obviously up for anything, so when later presented with an A4 perforated sheet of stiff cloth, a large darning needle and a supply of coloured thread, we had no macho inhibitions to hold us back. Which again might have been the Feminist point of the enterprise (either that or Miss Scriven was merely teaching us all she knew). Sowing, however, mercifully confined to a single hour in the week (and no defined purpose) quickly became a source of carefully concealed private shame (and frustration) for me. I began to dread the lesson returning with dire inevitability each Wednesday morning, as if it were specifically designed to expose the pathetic wounded effort I kept hidden in my desk for the rest of the week, when once again I would have to spend (as far from sight as possible) the entire hour unpicking the over-elaborate stitch I’d foolishly attempted, immediately tangled and then tangled further into La Salette’s version of the gordian knot. Avoiding Miss Scriven’s eye, of course, ensured I received no help and merely prolonged the misery from week to week. With nothing but burning resentment I found myself mechanically joining in the applause given to the quiet girl sitting in front of me who was first to complete her place mat, vase stand or whatever it was we were aiming to produce, using the simplest possible stitch.


Some of this, some of the less overtly religious do-gooder exercises, might smack of the forward thrust of an Arts and Crafts revival; while sowing and knitting could perhaps have been excused as an extension of the ‘make-do and mend’ mentality of post-war Britain, the revival of Country dancing, however, feels more like the sense of nationalism reasserting itself (over in Dublin, in honour of the Croppy Boy, my cousin John was struggling through lessons in Gaelic). 


Our wooden floored hall, a highly polished sock-slippery surface did service as music studio (each student ‘playing’ one of the few instruments available: joy for the drummers, disappointment for those left with triangles) and gym (coloured bean bags, rubber rings, hoola-hoops, a teacher’s piercing whistle and Music and Movement on the radio). Music and Movement was a nationwide boon to teachers, offering a half hour tea-break while the programme took us through a series of exercises we could all perform with our clothes on: shrinking ‘as small as a mouse’, then growing ‘as big as a house.’ As the kindly, expressive middle class voice felt like an extension of Listen With Mother, the more absurd archaic references passed without a sneer into familiarity (‘This is the way the gentlemen ride: clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop’). 


One morning, however, sitting each in our isolated space (measured by the span of stretched arms), we were informed we would be taking part in ‘Dance’. I had no real concept of this dance business so as the first to be asked to stand and choose a partner, I naturally chose my best friend, Steve. It is hard to convey the head-spinning confusion I was thrown into on being told no, I had to choose a girl. A girl? I scanned the room without really seeing them. Girls were just there, part of the background, making up the numbers, you didn’t actually do anything with them. I remained standing, stumped, with no idea who to select, increasingly aware of my teacher’s growing impatience, having selected me in the hope of others following my lead. As the moment extended, I was asked (rather petulantly, I thought) to sit down and for the next few minutes had to watch in open-mouthed shame as the whole class was, one by one, partnered up by the steely voice of the dominatrix at this swingers party. Finally, my face probably still red raw, I found myself face to face with the only girl remaining, whose hard smile lacked sympathy and whose muscular grip swung me dizzily round with a surprising violence, as if taking revenge for something deeper than merely being chosen last.


Perhaps in a similar spirit, English country life was introduced into the slums when one Spring we were each provided with a daffodil bulb the size of an onion and asked to take it home and care for it as though it were a kitten. Most of us must have discovered pots, earth and the ritual of watering for the first time, as on judgement day we stood behind our seats to be awarded certificates appropriate for the product of our labours standing proudly erect before us. No one, I don’t think, had stolen a ready-made from the local park, although in the spirit of competition it would be difficult to confirm.


For some reason, memories of school are more intense outside the classroom. The medical room, for example, usually sang with the shocked tension of trauma (bumped heads, scraped knees). Tissues for tears and honking noses; white bandages, pink plasters and smears of brown and yellow iodene for bravado. Formal ‘Medicals’ seemed to be both frequent and cursory, hardly the rigorous or scientific inspections you might expect when they appeared as statistical evidence in some later report. What were they for? Ticking some government box for Working Class surveys, assessing privileged access to the NHS or monitoring the Irish immigrant demographic (diseases developed from domestic pigs)? Lining up in skin and vest like inmates in a concentration camp, we waited for the clinical, indifferent fingers feeling through our crewcuts and crops for subtle, slum-hardened and well hidden nits. I recall my first eye test more readily than most. The word ‘test’ galvanized either some low-lying competitive impulse or a deeper fear of having to face years ahead sporting NHS wire specs, perhaps even one lens covered in a pink plastic patch. So, edging forward step by step in the queue, I began studying the chart hanging on the wall by the door. By the time it was my turn to toe the dart-throwing distance, the card pressed to one eye then the other, I already knew most of the letters by heart. No results, however, ever seemed to make their way to my mother.


Cod liver oil tablets (small transparent red plastic beans) were handed out at morning milk break as we queued like passive clients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Two at a time, I was presumably expected to swallow them whole, washing down each with the milk which came in tiny (third of a pint) bottles. When the first bean split, however, the infectious taste of hospital wards lingered on my tongue for an entire morning and milk was no relief. From then on I developed a system of pretending to insert each pill into my mouth, while leaving it cupped magician-like in the palm of my hand before sliding it into my pocket once  the teacher had been distracted. Unfortunately, easily distracted myself, I failed to think my plan through to the stage of disposal and under the Nazi frisking of my mother one morning, licked handkerchief dabbing wildly at my face, her multi-tasking free hand uncovered a stockpile I was too lazy or stupid to unload. ‘Whaa? (the Dublin falsetto) ‘The facking pills I been paying for!’ became the phrase through which she remembered the incident (at least annually). I’d had form: the crime seemed a logical extension of my earlier hunger strike. Exasperated, betrayed, she interrogated the teacher the following day but whatever the focus of discussion (responsibility or economics), cod liver oil was never offered to me again.


Our Infant playground, strangely, was rarely alive with tin can or tennis ball football. At this age it tended to be all the usual fantasies which engaged us from the sprinting, screaming entrance of release to the statue-still silence commanded by a sharp blast from Miss Duty (teacup in right hand, saucer in left, whistle gripped in firm lips).
 
These fantasies were ready-made, made-to-measure, playground-timed trailers for the extended, big budget, post-school productions, stripped down to the minimalism of a single setting and scenario (fingers standing in for guns, slapped sides simulating  stallions). ‘You don’t see me...’; surprising how many unwritten scripts opened with the same instruction (and the same strict punctuation): ‘You don’t see me. I creep up on you. From behind this rock.’ Dan-da-Dan). To the naive observer, these shorts could easily be mistaken for the rehearsals of embryonic psychopaths (fortunately, the social sciences were less developed in those days). 


Every so often, however, we would find our performance interrupted by some collective consciousness spreading through the playground, engineered by a small boy’s piercing cry (like the adhans of a future London). Gradually, some hurried, some slower to commit, perhaps still lost in fantasy, boys would drift towards the wall at the far side of the yard, their backs pressed to the brickwork like victims of a firing squad as the self-appointed barker, usually an older, authority figure (maybe a six year old) would carry on calling out in a passable impersonation of a stall holder or news vendor: ‘All my me- en.’ The last word extended to an extra syllable with an odd priestly intonation. The cry was usually accompanied by a rhyme echoing the same intonation: ‘allee allee i-n, half a bottle of gi-n. Alley alley out, half a bottle of sto-ut’ (a phrase perhaps originating from some dockland strikers call to unification). Simultaneously, another boy would duplicate this whole procedure at the other end of the playground, where his ‘men’ would be lining the wall backing on to the toilets. Once all, or most, of the boys were lined up on one side or the other (the respective lines of volunteers were a clear measure of popularity and loyalty, so each caller had much to lose), there would commence the ritual charge of simulated mayhem in a crude variation of British Bulldog (or the Wars of the Roses). It was never clear which side were the victors, which the defeated, and no one was ever badly hurt (the point, it seems in retrospect, was the test of popularity). 


On one such rites of passage morning, finally at ease with school life, it was my turn to be ‘the man.’ I don’t know what prompted me, perhaps a feeling of increasing popularity. However, I’d just been gathering my men, seeing the wall begin to cover, the playground deplete beyond the tipping point, a sense of pride swelling in my chest, when, incredibly, out the corner of my eye I saw the incongruous figure of my Mum seeking me out in the milling playground to curtail the imminent battle by taking me to a doctor’s appointment. The sense of frustration and disappointment is what moors the memory after all these years; I can’t recall if I made a second attempt.


Religion


Greater than the shadow cast from the height of London Bridge station over our small school was the shadow of Catholicism colouring every year with its holy hue. The ritual of First Holy Communion at the appointed age of seven, was perhaps the climax of every other ritual up to this point and, in La Salette, the opportunity for complete consolidation of Church and school. Prior to the reception of this ‘holy sacrament’, however, weeks of school time had to be devoted to the cleansing of our souls, discs (the size and texture of communion hosts) blackened even at this early age and requiring day after day of serious scrubbing to uncover the original white beneath (‘like cleaning a house before God comes to visit’) before we would be ready for the honour of consuming the ‘body and blood’ of ‘arlawdjesus’ (delivered with a nodding tic). It’s a learning process, during which we had first to be tutored in the definition of a sin; a hierarchical tick list (mortal and venial) was duly rote-memorised like the times tables. We were, of course, already word perfect in the catechism Q and A: ‘Who made you? God made me; Why did God make you? God made me to love and to serve him.’ A ready-made self-interrogation, sounding suspiciously like the ravings of a psychiatric ward. 


The lists of sins, however, helped us customise a couple we could use which might sound bad enough for our First Confession (a sort of deep clean wash for the soul). Obviously, as Mortal sins carried the terror of ‘eternal damnation’, no one was about to admit to any of those, but how serious was ‘Taking the Lord’s name in vein’? which seemed to happen daily in our home. And what qualified as stealing? What if the brewery didn’t actually need those ashtrays? And how could you remember how many times you committed any one of these sins? God, who knew everything, had them all logged; so what if you ‘guessed’ at ‘three times’ and he actually had five on the book? In the end, ‘I’ve done bad things and said bad things’ was a reliable standby for those hedging a bet or lacking a little in imagination.


The confession box sounds like a groomer’s paradise: alone, a child enters the dark of a small wooden hut, where a shadowed adult male, already well versed in the ‘sins’ of children, sits listening to the most intimate thoughts of trusting seven year olds relating details they wouldn’t dare tell their parents. His whispered words of consolation are, of course, the voice of God. As we emerged from the box, our plagiarised sins collecting as far as we could tell, the same cloned penance (‘One Our Father, two Hail Marys’), we assumed our souls must have been brilloed to the qualifying standard. An assumption confirmed a couple of weeks later when we found ourselves  lined up across the school hall, as for another medical inspection, dressed as never before or since (unless commissioned as a pageboy) in a short-trousered suit of Prince of Wales check and white communion sash, hair freshly cut, combed and slicked into shape, the ‘quiff’, controlled by Mum’s green ‘setting lotion’, hardening like the bones of chip shop skate under the irresistible touch (‘Don’t facking touch dat!’). One after another (boys in suits, girls in party dresses of virginal white), we took our place in front of a stretched white sheet and umbrella construction for the photographer’s blinding flash before filing through the connecting door now thrown wide and down the aisle of the church to receive Our First Communion.


Nervously fidgeting on the hard seats like miniature brides and grooms, we have the ritual of an entire (chalice lifting, bell ringing) Mass to endure before our turn is cued up, the priest in full regalia, his kneeling ‘alter boys’ in their frilled starched dresses and scuffed shoes are offered the host first as if in demonstration. At last,  given the signal, we file out of our pews with the stately procession of a Busby Berkley chorus, boy, girl, boy, girl, to find ourselves kneeling at the alter, elbows on the rail, hands joined, fingers pointing to Heaven, the priest working his way down the line, chalice in left hand, host in the right, holding it above the next child’s widening mouth with a ‘Corpus Christie’ (‘Body of Christ’, to you), Some, snagged by stage fright, swallow their ‘Amen’ but the priest doesn’t bother repeating their cue, just presses the host to their quivering, extended tongue. The first taste of the ‘body and blood’ of ‘ArlawdJesus’ is an eye-opener (obviously nothing like the laughable playground rumour of melted ‘human flesh’ or, indeed, the undercooked purple lambs hearts I’d been forced to eat in a dream) the wafer doesn’t even resemble the dry bread Jesus is seen breaking in the signed colour certificate of the Last Supper we are later handed to remember which sacrament we’d received; it is instead, a melt in the mouth experience of rice paper, a disappointing variation of the sweet we called a Flying Saucer; lacking the hidden potency of the usual sherbet explosion, the host merely clung to the roof of the mouth, slowly dissolving into the anti-climax of a hesitant swallow as we followed our joined hands and each other back to our pews and puzzled wait, like someone sold a fake tab of Acid, for the disorientation of senses which was never to come.  


These were the days when church doors were left open (permanently) it seemed as some symbolic gesture signifying God’s open arms welcoming even the most reckless sinner (until a few reckless sinners started recklessly raiding the sacristy). Not long after our initiation, Christ’s flesh and blood still lingering in my digestive system, I recall Tony Dunn and I hysterically daring each other to run down the aisle of the empty La Salette to make a mocking salam in front of the alter (we’d probably just seen Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad on Saturday Morning pictures) then splashing each other with holy water from the font on our running, roaring way out. Having dared trespass once with no obvious consequence, we returned again for a laughing, limping Charles Laughton impersonation, slobbering ‘Sanctuary! Sanctuary!’ (undoubtedly following The Hunchback of Notre Dame). How and why this irreverence? In what spirit of rebellion? Who knows?  We were hardly analytical embryonic atheists (at the time). More likely our actions merely suggested a natural, youthful resistance to imposed authority; probably reflecting just how strong a hold religion held over us.
 
These were the innocent dog days before English translations and folk singers and pedophiles, when the Mass and Benediction and Holy Days of Obligation basked in an unintelligible mystique of Latin and ritual, bells and incense. The Tourette tic of bowing heads as parishioners passed the doors of a church had become as ingrained as the spider-dancing ‘sign of the cross’ at the mention of a dead relative. The casual tentacles of ritual were even more evident in Dublin where Catholicism and culture had become so intertwined as to be almost indistinguishable. Religion, however, in a spiritual sense, had no more significance than pub opening hours (it was just what you did in the course of a day, like taking your drink and conversation out into the afternoon street at last orders until the pub reopened an hour later). Although the forecourt of Donore Avenue displayed a timetable for ‘Sunday Worship,’ it was just that, a timetable; an S and M dominatrix and slave had more connection with the word ‘worship’ than the Dolphin Barn parishioners and those who think the antics and attitude of Father Ted exaggerated have probably never been Irish. 


In a few years, following the change from the mysterious  poetry of Latin to the plodding, prosaic English Mass, my parents would, like so many, turn away from the church, not with the bang of enlightenment and rebellion but the whimper of dawning indifference (‘Is that all it is?’), leaving with the same lack of passion with which they had ‘worshipped’, like viewers switching channels on a soap whose characters and plot-lines have ceased to hold them any longer. Released from their obsession, they were left wondering (like homebird suburbanites watching reruns of The Two Ronnies) how it could ever have once had any hold on them.  


My mum, however, ever the drama queen, holding court to any captive audience trapped by her initial charm, tea and biscuits and once seduced, unable to politely interrupt her fluent flow, ‘confessed’ how she’d lost her faith the day she emerged from the clinical hygiene of Guys Hospital with a second new born baby wrapped in a pure white shawl, and swore (presumably to herself) ‘If there is a god in this world, he will never force us to live another year in Barnham Street’ It was, in fact, another two before we finally moved.




Inspiration


Complimenting our First Communion at the age of seven (ironically entitled the ‘age of reason’), we initiated our own secular weekend litergy in Saturday Morning Pictures. The Elephant and Castle, a walk and a bus journey away, with two cinemas facing each other across a busy roundabout, soon became a familiar venue for our regular ritual. Neither the Trocadero nor the ABC were exclusive clubs and both, enjoying the luxury of packed houses every week, appeared indifferent to competition; however, although our bus left us closer to the ABC, we were mostly drawn to the ‘Troc’ and it was the weekly serial which usually made the decision for us.


This was cinema, but not as we knew it. From the first visit the average punter would be conscious of entering a prescribed ceremonial event with a particularly rigid set of mores and customs to be rapidly learned and observed (just as concerts and matches are never entirely about music and football, so ‘cinema’ was only a minor part of this experience). Initiation was a confrontation with the wall of sound generated by the screams of unleashed children, an orchestrated windtunnel yell which continued more or less relentlessly, rarely dropping a decibel, throughout the programme, and to which we readily acclimatised and contributed so to our ears it soon became inaudible. Before the draped blue velvet folds of the curtain, a microphoned compare guided the roar from the front of the stage to ever higher pitches of hysteria via a series of preliminary warm-up routines: a spotlight trawling and fluttering across the heads of the audience, accompanied by a jaunty organ, would freeze suddenly here and there, the child caught in the centre of its blue light quizzed and ecstatically rewarded (with, for example, a pair of matching biros) thrust into their hand by one of the hovering attendants. Other children might be called up on stage to act as dumb-struck, blank-faced stooges to the compare’s ‘magic’ tricks or ‘comic’ fooling in the Butlins low-fi spirit of ‘good sports’ (never, however, to reveal knobbly knees). 


The programme itself, once underway, was a rigid, unvarying format, Anyone beyond the barred exit doors could trace the running order by the shifting tone of laughter and screams  A few familiar cartoons kicked off (Bugs, Woody and the crew) often cocktailed with shorts (Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, etc; hand-me-downs from my parents’ generation). I say ‘familiar cartoons’ because each of the London termini of British Rail already had its own cartoon cinema running 24/7, warm, dark environments as popular with down-and-outs (and, probably, pedophiles) as children. Children’s cartoons, however, don’t seem to have a shelf life and we were happy to greet them again (and again) as old friends. Following a lucrative munch break where pocket money was hustled for chocolate and ice, the main feature continued the theme of recycled product, with geriatric B-movie gunslingers or detectives failing to find any alternative retirement package.
 
The real deal, however, the deal-breaker for most punters, was the serial (in itself, suggesting the future power of television, the seed of death for everything about us here): Rocket Man with his leather waistcoat of chest switches, fueling our fantasies as we emulated his run and skyward ascent, the sandpits of Tanner Street park breaking our three foot falls; The Purple Monster, a very human ‘Martian’ in a silver leotard, determined to colonise our planet for Mars; Crash Corrigan, shunning ray-guns for fists and silent movie hand speed. With storylines as familiar as breathing (we’d been performing these narratives for years), a child could arrive during any week in the series and instinctively know who was who and what was what. Heroes, villains and expendables might change but the format remained indelible. Each episode lived within its own self-contained structure: recap previous action, escape last week’s cliff-hanger, allow some ‘character development’, some light relief, develop tension to fist/sword/ray-gun altercation culminating in this week’s cliff-hanger; all delivered through jump-cuts, peeling screens, functional, familiar dialogue and the melodramatic ‘Dan-Da-Dan’ score we plagiarised for the soundtrack to our own fantasies. For newcomers (or slow-learners) each installment was preceded by a video portrait of the dramatis personae, cueing the highest rate of decibels of the morning, Colosseum screams for the protagonist, boos for the antagonist; the roar exciting itself to a crescendo so demanding, it forced itself inside the screamer and became what you did to be part of the crowd. Orwell (borrowing from Goebbels or Leni Riefenstahl in reverse) probably had such a source of manipulation in mind for Oceania’s daily ‘two minute hate’ sessions (some of us would later relive the experience on stage or the terraces of second division football grounds)..


Although the keyboard of an acid adult reviewer would recognise and relish these episodes as the weekend work of basement budgets, journeymen directors (financing chemical addictions) and a mix of desperate or deluded actors of limited talent and unlimited ambition, hoping the embarrassment of low level work might lead to some first step on the red carpets of Hollywood; others, on the way down, looking to supplement a paltry pension. To those deprived of TV, however, these serials were often the highlight of a week, not least for their economical distillation of the essence of all we sought in the longer B-movie, and, indeed, life.


‘Undersea Kingdom’ is a good example. Starring ‘Crash’ Corrigan, an ex-wrestler, the serial was ‘undersea’ in name only; somehow Crash and the guys had found their way into Atlantis (we’d missed the earliest weeks) which turned out to be very like southern California, its people (with accents more drawling than Crash himself) living in some new wave Futurist set where technology, however, had developed no further than classical antiquity; chariots (filmed at silent movie speed), costumes and sets borrowed from a Cecil B De Mille vision of the Roman Empire. The only concession to the ‘undersea’ part of the ‘kingdom’ came in the form of matching fins on the gay swimming caps worn by the evil guards; these half-naked gym bunnies, recognising each other with Nazi salutes, are ruled over by the evil dictator, Unga Khan (seemingly one of the actors on the way down and tutored in the posturing of the silent movie era), whose catchphrase, ‘I want to rule the wor-ld’ is always accompanied by a rising, reverberating (Hitlerian) finger to show he could act and offering a cue to roaring jeers.


The Purple Monster, however, stands stronger in the memory, not for its ‘unique’ special effects which allowed the ‘monster’ access to the bodies of Earthlings, superimposing his own (very human form) into their unconscious husks, but for a single episode which became the focus of passionate debate on the bus home. Having a few problems subjugating Earth to his will, the monster had called down a female assistant from Mars. Perhaps it was her face, perhaps her figure-hugging costume or the soft porn cat-fight with Crash’s love-interest for control of a speeding car racing along a cliff edge road which formed the most memorable of cliff-hangers. Both women, thrown from the doomed vehicle were hurtling towards the cliff edge as the credits rolled and already we knew only one would survive. Although her face haunted me throughout the following week like the face of the wicked queen (always overshadowing sexless Snow White), I somehow knew it wouldn’t end well and the following Saturday, with a predictable pain of disappointment, I watched the ‘human’ girl catch in the overhanging branches of a sympathetic shrub while her Martian rival, and my dreams, sailed off the cliff into airy oblivion to the rampant roars and whistles of the crowd. The rest of the episode passed in a blur, leaving me, for a while, wondering whether I’d ever be living quite the same life as those around me.


Above all else, the images lingering most strongly in the memory of those mornings (snagging my day dreams even more than a monster’s mistress) were the scenes of momentary silence between the action, particularly the establishing shots in monochrome B-movies of wide, clean, empty (American) streets, in suburbs and small towns or the manicured lawns stretching out into the vast space surrounding municipal buildings whose clean stone steps rose to vast doors dappled in sunlight; the quiet, remote order of these clinical settings fascinated me like an alien landscape; like, perhaps, a glimpse of something unattainable.


Cinema managers must have been rubbing their hands in silent movie glee over these mornings. A product of bright business acumen, thriving on the lack of universal access to TV while grooming future cinema patrons, the minimal outlay on recycled product would have been recovered by the interval ice and choc sales alone. Yet, although hardly devised as a selfless aid to social interaction, Saturday Morning Pictures was, in retrospect, a valuable social outlet for a generation on the cusp of suburban insularity. 


Although it might seem strange for modern parents to hear of seven year olds making their own way via public transport across several miles of urban landscape to an insecure, darkened space, free of all risk-assessment, we confronted no ‘pedos’ or ‘psychos’ in our world, while the few ‘supervising’ adults encountered in the cinema itself were probably more concerned with crowd control and personal survival. These same parents, taxiing their children to dance classes or football training are perhaps only now only beginning to realise the chances of meeting with dangerous liaison on street, bus or train pale by comparison with those open to the trusted adults in the halls and gyms in which they happily leave their children, driving away secure in the illusion of safety.


Another by-product of business enterprise arrived with a knock on our ‘front’ door (Mum’s habitual term, as if we had any other). What had been the thought process dragging a traveling salesman into Barnham Street and what sixth sense had led him magnetically to the door of the one family in the building aimed at social mobility? How shocked might he have been when my Dad (perhaps having had his extensive ignorance examined once too often over the early years of fatherhood, might finally find out why the sky is blue and how Father Christmas enters a building with no chimney) not only signed up for the full set of A4 bound hardback Encyclopedias in russet-red and ivory-white, but the bonus-earning high end Bible packed with colour plates of Renaissance art. The shock was probably only countered by its second wave as Dad counted out the notes for a there-and-then cash payment (under the watchful eye of Mum, who despised the ‘tallyman’ preying on ‘all and sundry’ in the building, returning relentlessly with ingratiating smiles, one-liners and tawdry gifts to sink the vulnerable and gullible even further into his mire of debt). 


Almost immediately the books somehow found a safe space somewhere (beyond the reach of enthusiastic infants with biros) where they remained on proud display, throwing the rest of the room into dire poverty. Taking one down to read seemed a secondary and unnecessary action (certainly for those whose reading matter rarely strayed beyond the Mirror or the Pic, the Mirror’s Sunday edition), their power worked by osmosis; like a symbol of the future, they represented education and aspiration; enough in itself for inspiration.


The only hardbacks we’d owned previously had been comic annuals and one strange card page picture book I avoided like the recurring threat of a bully. The ‘book’ had a different clownish face taking up most of each stiff page, all sharing the same eyes glued to the back cover (the pupils, loose black jangling beads trapped inside two flattened white backed plastic domes the size of lapel badges) peering through two holes cut into each face. I hadn’t noticed it’s disturbing nature at first, when it may have even provided a benign source of childish amusement, until the day its concealed horror revealed itself (as suddenly obvious as existence in Sartre’s Nausea) and the laughing faces went on leering insanely back at me as I turned the pages. Symbolic of some deeper malaise, perhaps, but after seeing it for what it was, I could barely exist in the same room as this nightmare. Simultaneously, I was ashamed of my fear which I divulged to no one, especially not Mum, playfully shaking the beads as she held a page up to my face.


One evening, having been thoroughly frisked for pens or crayons, I was admitted access to a single volume of these holy books (some graduation had been passed). Obviously, no one expected me to begin studiously grappling with the language of an adult encyclopedia, the sheer size and heft of the 10 books was daunting enough, but Dad, doing what he could to provide his son with the opportunities denied himself, must have thought, like my school blazer, I’d grow into them. It was, of course, the pictures which took me from page to page (a brief and minor distraction from my comics) particularly the colours of the glossed plates: the midnight rich, engineers’ blue of the constellations (where patterns of stars were clarified like answers to ‘join the dots’ puzzles) or the pitch darkness foregrounding the prismatic spectrum of visible light (Pink Floyd might have bought the same set); while a future empathy for Scandinavian minimalism was probably engineered by the instinctive, self-imposed exercises I carried out in grading the flags of the world, (favouring the clean and stark, discarding the fastidious, developing a house style in which clean-lined Roundheads would trump Baroque Cavaliers). 


The thick-backed Bible, twice the size of any individual volume, was always an awkward carry but a sectarian wonder filling the kitchen table with alien landscapes of frozen clouds above barren hills, windless cypress trees lining paths like stations of the cross. The stillness of the Italian Renaissance, in contrast to the dynamic animation of, say the Dundee Beano, became increasingly mesmerising (and as static as the stills of Barbar the Elephant) while the inertia within these images triggered a disturbing aura, a light trance into which I was aware (without some resistance) I could allow myself to slip. The quiet fall of Manna like snowflakes from heaven, the silent purity of Fra Angelico’s white cloistered Annunciation were balm for the eyes. However, it was the drama of Mantegna’s ‘foot of the bed’ perspective on the dead Christ, foregrounding with clinical precision the open wounds in the soles of his feet, which became the climax to any ‘reading’ of the book; perhaps through the linear perspective, leading the eye along the foreshortened body towards the agonised face, the fascination grew more intense with each viewing, so intense I often found myself turning the pages before it with methodical patience, not reading, merely deferring its inevitable appearance (as if unconsciously I could somehow reproduce the initial shock of the vision). 




Nostalgia


First love appeared in the shape of Janet McGlory. Although her name suggests a Troll-wild head of luminous red hair, an unintelligible Glaswegian accent and a kiss to match, I can no longer access even the ghost of that shape wandering the synapses of my brain. There must have been some alluring charm, a smart mouth, a knowing smile, some pert posture setting her apart from the other girls in the school (I say school because so poor is my remembrance, I’m no longer even sure she was in my class); strangely, however, all I have carried over the years is her name and a snatched image, or afterimage, of a hot-pink coat, red polka dots on a white dress. Whatever face (the usual focus of Entry Level attraction), hair, body or character I might construct now would be the work of imagination on overtime. The coat, I feel, must be genuine as I can recall it clearly enough glowing in the twilight street outside the school gates, when (acting out some immature male expression of shy affection) I covered her with the entire contents of a freshly opened sherbet fountain, shaken like a Freudian ejaculation on a wild whim of laughing banter. Attraction to girls is a feeling small boys often find overwhelming and embarrassing in equal measure (shocked to discover, perhaps, these background extras are part of our world after all) and to which we have developed no suitable means of mature response (some throw stones, I happened to have a sherbet dab in my hand). 


Dating the beginning of this attraction is helped by her cameo appearance (as the love-interest) in a dream involving Konga, the giant B-movie ape (perhaps King Kong’s illegitimate child) from an X-rated film I’d obviously never seen, merely stood awe-struck over the stills outside the Trocadero. The ape was ‘super human’, Andy told me (‘super-ape’, I supposed). He’d squeezed one man so hard his entrails had spewed from his mouth (so I was told, by someone else who hadn’t seen the film either). In the dream I was driving an open jeep, quite recklessly over a bumping dirt track. Amazingly, for although no one in my family drove and I’d yet to even become a passenger in any car, I seemed remarkably confident behind the rattling, bucking wheel trying to shake itself loose from my grip. Somehow, despite the twin distractions of Janet (in her polka dot dress) clinging to my waist (confusingly, she’d taken the role of sidekick usually occupied by my best friend, Steve; who had never clung to me) and the towering Konga closing in behind us, his giant hand every now and then brushing the roll bar, rocking the vehicle, I held the road. I was frightened but determined to keep ‘my woman’ safe and we drove on and on into the endless night; waking, I suppose, before any resolution. This, I felt, must be love.


I couldn’t say now whether I ever expressed or Janet ever reciprocated these feelings, even as far as an innocent brush of lips. Perhaps Miss Anon, in charge of extra-curricular, was aware of my crush when casting for the Annunciation, for on a grey, wet morning freed from lessons, the Angel Gabriel in echoing, squelching wellingtons found himself striding up to Janet’s Mary waiting stone-faced on the wooden steps in the growing dark of the empty hall. Genuflecting (‘Just here’ directed Anon) in what he thought was a particularly holy way (Method acting via Fra Angelico), Gabriel delivered the announcement of her pregnancy. 


What was this piece of theatre? The Annunciation?  Another AmDram tale of ‘Our Lady’, from Conception to Assumption? Another date in the already sardined calendar of Catholic celebration? It’s lost now, as is the success or otherwise of the audition. The girl, however, whoever, seems to linger as a symbol of the place itself, La Salette, Bermondsey, the place I had to leave behind. I was gone within a week.
 
One lagging regret on leaving Barnham Street was the wrench mid-term from school before any performance, before any goodbye, like a lover torn from you too suddenly, mid-tryst (by car crash, suicide, children, guilt) without the chance to say all those things you would have said if only you had known there would be no more time; something which will remain forever incomplete, as unresolved as a dream. The chances are, a product of south London (despite her name), Janet became more prosaically pregnant soon enough, without any need of an angel. 


That wrench, however, as suddenly as it came, was not a wrench from close friends (most of whom made the move with me to a new estate in Abbey Wood) but from the place itself: the Dickensian streets, the Victorian school, the romance of the slums. Knowing nothing of ‘slums’, just my home, when the time came, I felt only sadness on leaving Bermondsey and assume my friends felt no different. We all left together, more or less, before the demolition men moved in, Steve, Tony and Rita, to brand new houses a short jog around the corner from my own, the McCormicks, all five, packed into another, equidistant in the opposite direction. 


For a child, your home is merely where you live. The streets of Bermondsey, the warehouses, bombsites and small parks had been our playground, and even at a material distance, viewed from our new world comfort of electricity, television, indoor toilets and hot, running water, these  streets still held the pull of urban substance, a smell (breweries, tanneries, the docks, the river, etc), a landscape, a sensory luxuriance and a history which could never have been matched by the clinical, immature estate, the first stage of an isolated Le Corbusian ghetto on the fringe of London, an obvious experiment in social cleansing disguised as a planner’s utopia into which we had been transported wholesale. The futuristic slumland of Thamesmead, built upon the reclaimed marshland a 19th century Dickens had employed to shock readers opening Great Expectations became, a century later, the perfect setting for Kubrick’s vision of a dysfunctional future in A Clockwork Orange. Of course, it was the countryside to us, where, according to simple Pat McCormick (future graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art) reporting from a pioneer viewing, ‘horses roamed free’ (they did actually, wandering off from the gypsy camp to test the braking skills of shock-eyed motorists cresting the flyover). Supposedly a step forward into a new life, it was never to become our home.


The very names of our old streets: Crucifix Lane, Snowfields, Druid St, Tanner Street, Shand Street, Tower Bridge Road, the long roman road of Bermondsey Street itself resonate with the Victorian dockland filth accumulated year upon year and leeched indelibly to the brickwork. These were holy streets (Magdalen, Thomas), catacombs winding through the warren-dark beneath the weight of London Bridge station where the traveling click of trains snaking across the myriad rails overhead became an iambic pentameter so ingrained it sank from consciousness, as silent as a heartbeat.


Perhaps you just feel so much more as a child. Looking back through the distance of nostalgia can turn setting into stage set, yet although Bermondsey would be the place I’d spend the shortest time in my youth (it would be another ten years before I’d leave Abbey Wood for university), like the most poignant love affairs, the briefest encounter has a habit of becoming the most ingrained. 






The Cast 


The Family


Can we ever define the moment of satori when a mother and father emerge as separate individuals in a child’s conscious thought? Beginning as mere extensions of (or barriers to) our own self-obsessed life, it can take years to disentangle the umbilical threads, detach ourselves enough to finally see this couple no longer as mere bit players in our own drama but real people, actors at the centre of their own play. So bound up are we in the rebellion of breaking free or the fear of never breaking free or the fear of having broken free and finding them already inside us (my sister’s particular dread), we hardly ever see them as they really are, as they deserve to be seen. 


Our individual evolution must happen when we attain some higher level of maturity, a rebirth, a new perspective from which we finally understand these characters who have such penetrating influence on our lives (the focus of praise, blame, fierce love, passionate hate) are no more than ordinary people (like you and I) with hopes and fears and parents of their own, handed a baby and asked to look after it while living their lives in the best way they know.


The discovery is always a surprise, as we are often so easily deceived by the roles  parents have been all too willing to perform; for what would we know, we’re just children.


In patriarchal Bermondsey. my father, being mostly absent, logically became a persona upon which I could project whatever I wanted him to be. The brief, compressed impact of his presence, could pack fun and laughter into an hour of playtime, free of the pressure and responsibility of actually having to look after me.


In this way fathers become the celebrities, the fantasy figures, the poetry of our young lives (and thus have further to fall), while mothers, landed with the domestic duties are by definition prosaic and centre-stage, prime-time Soap drudges in charge of feeding, education and discipline, overfamiliar and all too real. 


I was born too early for physical affection, which seems to have been invented in the 1980s. I still look away as a girlfriend wraps her spontaneously loving arms around one of her children; although I can see it is quite a natural, tactile expression of affection, something within me finds it uncomfortably soft and indulgent. Physical contact with my Mum was the sting of a slap.


Dad was the benign partner, his ‘wrath’ held back as a remote, ultimate and unimaginable nuclear threat (‘Wait till your father hears about this. He’ll fackin kill you’). Unimaginable, as the image of brooding punishment was an impossibly dramatic contrast with his persona of smiling good humour; his contact, full of macho lifts and swings, turning me into his acrobatic sidekick. His rare attempts at discipline were, in fact, frightening because of their rarity but in retrospect laughably unconvincing and confusing. ‘But what were you tinkin?’ he’d demand, ‘What were you tinkin?’ (repeatedly, as no infant is likely to have an answer to such a question and he had no further questions) the words delivered in a strangely sorrowful voice, as if I’d somehow betrayed his trust, as if he really expected his child capable of rational thought.


So every Mum is served with a bad press, simply because she is there all the time with the sharp word or the quick slap. Her thankless role allowing Dad his brief, carefree cameo. Perhaps mine was at a particular disadvantage, having to maintain a regime of near silence during those periods in the day when Dad was asleep (just a wall away), having to control an infant’s natural capacity for excited, spontaneous expression with the threat of a look. For the duration of his working life, Dad’s mode of employment (shunter, security guard) ensured his days were spent, like vampires or cats, in a comfortably unconscious state, accommodated in our home through an internalised  hushed lifestyle of quiet voices and lowered volumes, always living, on Mum’s watch,  under nuclear threat (until, with Mum’s nodding glance at the clock, I had the privilege of opening the bedroom door to ‘wake him up’). Perhaps in reaction to these interminable slow hours of oppression, I once woke him less than gently by pouring water into his face. It wasn’t an ice bucket, just a sopping flannel squeezed from a reasonable height but, contrary to my expectations (probably derived from the Beano) of wide-eyed surprise dissolving into warm smiles and hair-tousling laughter, he shot up with an electric charge and a dramatic, blistering anger I’d never seen in his eyes before. It may have been only for an instant before he lay back, closing his eyes again (the Purple Monster slipping back into role) but the reaction disturbed me, distorting my world. I never attempted it again. 


Mum
Anger is the emotion I most readily associate with Mum. Occasionally, in the early days, I can recall a lightening of mood, even moments of enthusiastic joy, but only once did I see her sad. She’d acquired a childhood doll after my grandmother’s funeral, I’d sensed it to be something more than a toy (some impoverished inheritance) but with few places to pack it safely away, most days it was left sitting upright on the bed, an incongruous  relic from the past staring blankly at the enclosing walls; until my sister, discovering the tactile world for the first time, managed to topple it with some attempted cuddle, smashing the ancient and obviously frail china head on the floor.  We stared at the severed skull as we would the dismembered body of a bomb victim, half-recoiling from the broken shell, in which now lay the exposed ball of a naked blue eye on its wire stalk. Mum cleared the pieces in silence with her usual efficiency (who could she blame?). Perhaps she was remembering the mother or sister who had presented her with the doll, perhaps she was remembering her own childhood. In retrospect, I can picture a life in which she’d spent whole days on the doorstep of 39, recounting her oral diary to this passive confidant, rehearsing the confessional narrative which would become her standard mode of expression, and, perhaps, outlining the brightness of her imagined future.
 
In contrast to those around her, she had a future (or so she believed), she had ambition, aspiration and a ruthless determination (she’d somehow acquired Dad, who originally had been dating her older sister, Rose). Although in the early days she was print dresses, plastic clip-on earrings, 4711, a bright and breezy ‘Hello, love’ through the open door to anyone passing up or down the stairs, below the surface lay a hard, streetwise drive. Only later, ascending through those early years of adulthood myself, would I sense the burden of each annual return to Fingal Street to once more face her predicament; the youngest most aspirational sister, the only sister to move to London, the centre of everything, only to find herself mired, year after year, in a building so much worse than the poverty she’d hoped to leave behind. Here was the explanation to the developing tension before each journey, the sharp words, the burning of bridges; the rift that finally seemed to become irreparable; the self-imposed exile into isolation. 


There was a sense of injustice here which she seemed to carry through the rest of her life. She knew who she was and what should have been her life. She was a woman with charisma, offered only the opportunities of an office cleaner, a woman with a voice of theatrical expression, given only gossip to deliver, a woman with a disgust for loose morals, drink and drunks who found herself trapped in a dockland surrounded by them; a woman with the energy, drive and disposition of a modern professional, lacking education, class or circumstance for success; a woman offered only the role of wife and mother and lacking the maternal instinct of love. Born out of her time, having no conduit for release, the energy turned in upon itself, steadily imploding and corrupting until it destroyed that rudimental, positive drive, the essence of the woman.


She had been dead 15 years before I saw her again on the Catherine Tate show and my laughter was the head-shaking, open-mouthed laughter of recognition. Where had this Tate woman been all my life? How could she reproduce my own mother so exactly, even in the way she sat in a chair? This ‘Nan’ was Mum’s later, Abbey Wood Estate incarnation: the dominant, asexual, unrestrained body language, the assessing look, the nonchalant, cynical shift from public smile to private dismissal, head turning aside with dry insult (‘You’re looking well, love...Fackin dying crock. Looks like a fackin’ drug attic.’) uninhibited by any sense of irony (‘Look at the get up of dis one, common as fackin muck’) hypocrisy or guilt (‘That’s fine, love, you take that with you....bastard’d take the eyes out of yer fackin head’). Tate seemed to have revived everything but the Dublin accent. 


Mum in the flesh, however, was just a touch ‘more’ of everything, a touch less vaudeville, a touch more real; Tate had opted for a softer version. Whether the psychopathic ability to move from warm to ice-cold had travelled through the DNA of the Coombe or had been honed by the bitter disillusion of her Bermondsey Twenties, we will never know (no one would dare ask), but in the right mood she could always make ‘All right, sweetheart?’ sound like a threat, while her ‘What, love?’ promised serious violence. Hardened criminals would give her ‘a wide fackin berth.’ We were always safe in her presence.


When did I discover my mother had such a foul mouth? Difficult to say, as the argot and slang of her usual currency was merely the traditional vernacular of the Coombe (where in its heyday the Garda entered only with full back-up, if they felt lucky, so I’m told) and swearing is no more than the rhythmic punctuation of the Dublin accent (try impersonating any Dubliner without it, I can’t. Try Joyce: ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the fackin stairhead carrying a bowl of fackin lather...etc’). My Dad (when we were young) made laughable attempts to soften this instinct by substituting ‘Fizzin’ for ‘Fackin’ (never the “Feckin’ popularised by ‘culchie’ Father Ted, we’re talking Dublin here) but he was fooling no one. Mum, however, was a natural, so natural and instinctive, her character sailed beyond any Strasberg Method; in her later years on the ‘Estate’, the Method had become her, so completely she could play no one but the all consuming role of herself.


I can’t recall my mother ever sitting in silence. Ever. She would have to have been asleep (what she called ‘resting my eyes’). An expressive and entertaining speaker, she could invent whole stretches of narrative without a break, including the most faithfully transcribed dialogue, full of Said she to me’s and Said I to her’s, performing all the voices in seamless sketches of perceived social slight, imagined insult or simple one-upmanship, wherein she owned the part of the strong, dynamic and vigorously moral character (always in the right) while her interlocutors were uniformly weak, venal and spineless. Witnessing this performance, her audience was always captive, trapped if not by mere awe then perhaps fear, offering only polite assent in nods, pursed lips and drawn breath or drawn out ‘Ne-ver’s’. In the world of gossip, rumour and rant (just as, I later discovered, in the social world of the actor) there is no room for discussion, open conflict or any meeting of minds, each partner allows the other the space to tell their story, waiting (patiently or otherwise) to take their own turn. My mum however, never seemed to realise the other person needed a turn; smokers had worked their way through a full pack of Cadets by the time she took breath enough to allow the first syllable of a ‘Ne-ver’ (the evidence was audible two streets away, the patch of pavement littered with butts). Increasingly these endless audition pieces became rants so articulate, so detailed they relinquished any need for an audience at all. Possibly they were merely the audible version of the continuous rant playing out in her head when she wasn’t talking (when she was asleep; which she hardly ever was in later life, dozing to LBC into the early hours of the morning).


Despite the periodic and melodramatic cries of ‘You’ll put me in fackin Bexley’ (suggesting, not an upgrade to the one of the few middle class suburbs south of the river, but incarceration in the local sanatorium), a declaration we’d hear during her more harassed moments of stress (waiting in the hall for a taxi, for example, on the morning of a holiday...to Devon), we failed to see her failing grip on reality, our self-protective laughter turning what was probably a genuine appeal for help into a family catchphrase. Only after several weeks absence, at the end of my first term at Loughborough university, did I return with enough detachment to see the familiar front room scenario for the theatrical insanity we took in our stride: my sister simultaneously writing her homework and watching soap, my Dad comfortable in his corner chair sucking a dead pipe behind a raised newspaper, my mum centre stage on a hard chair, completely ignored as she ran through a record of the slurs, rebuttals and rebuffs of the day (every minute of the day), performing all the voices and recreating the facial expressions and body language, with no one listening or finding anything extraordinary in the one-woman show playing out in front of them. 


Only when, several minutes later, I turned over the channel of the forgotten TV news, did she stall in mid-sentence, ‘Wha?...Waddayadoin? I was watching dat.’ I switched back and the rant resumed until the doorbell rang. ‘Don’t open dat fackin door till I get me teeth in’ she’d say, her muppet mouth working overtime as she rushed in panic to retrieve the full set of dentures resting in their usual home on the kitchen window sill. ‘Has she tried analysis?’ asked my American girlfriend. The confrontation between well meaning psychiatrist and Mum is the sketch still missing from Tate’s repertoire. 


Dad


Tall, lean and athletically, proudly upright, his strong hands throwing me into the air or giving me the ‘ass’s bite’ (affectionately pinching either side of my knee), Dad was a warm smile and a naive desire for everyone to just ‘be happy’, sadly lacking the ability to make this happen. His past, as he told it, was a detached collection of tales veering between schooldays where he was ‘taught’ in classes of 60 students (the teacher educating an elite group of delegates who passed on instruction to the rest) from which he regularly ‘mitched’ (Irish for truancy) and his arrival at Victoria station at the age of 21 minus map, money, shelter or work. These half-honed, retold anecdotes were the highlights he seemed to have deliberately constructed for our benefit; though obviously true in themselves, they never gave us his authentic self, leaving the suspicion it was in the unspoken stories where his life truly lay.
 
Almost everything I discovered about his life, I’ve been told by aunts and cousins, usually in a lowered, serious voice as though imparting a secret. Events about which, when directly questioned (which we soon learned never to do), he would deflect with a defensive ‘Oh yes’ (as if about to be confronted by a manipulative interrogator) or a dismissive smile. The surrender of two (maybe three) infant brothers to malnutrition and pneumonia, his (and his mother’s) sadistic treatment at the hands of a martinet father, whose own associations with the British army influenced Dad’s lifelong sympathy for the IRA (and near-lifelong commitment through the oath of allegiance), His short career in amateur boxing, culminating in a bout at the National Stadium and atrophying rapidly after a lack of training and lost gumshield ensured he would be wearing a full set of dentures the rest of his life. His dating of aunt Rose before marrying her youngest sister, Angela. A sliding doors moment. We wondered at the life not lived had Rose (generosity, poise and the dry persona of a confident stand-up) been our mother (she remained unmarried, living with spinster sister Bridie in ‘39’ till death took one and then the other in quick succession). These were almost forgotten memories, seemingly buried by him in the past. 


What he was up to during his Bermondsey years, I could only guess from what I found periodically beneath my parents’ bed: a full set of gym weights, a leather bag of cricket whites and pads; the bicycle out on the landing seemed to complete the sporting life. He was rarely home, seemed to have no need to explain his absence and although whatever he was doing was mostly sports related, harboured no desire to introduce his son to this world. His longest absence, however, was a week in Amsterdam with workmates (unhindered by any obvious guilt in leaving a wife and child back home in the slums); midweek, under the influence of an old music hall song I’d recently learned to recite (‘The Boars have took my Dad...’) I suffered a nightmare in which he’d been taken by those Boars (whoever they were) and was never coming back. Although we laughed about my dreams on his return (laughter was usually his balm for all ills, the cover for all confrontation), the feeling never left and I had the suspicion that particular week became a watershed in his marriage and one of those memories used against him by my mother in later years (‘Peter fackin Pan’) when there was a shift in the balance of power. He seemed to have a number of ‘drinking pals’ in those Bermondsey days and was a happy drunk, easily intoxicated; one Christmas Eve he arrived home only to take me back out to the nearest book store where he bought armloads of comic annuals (holding them out to me, one after the other, like excavated discoveries) while the shop waited to close and I went on smiling politely, unable to tell him I’d already found and read the same editions in the bottom of the wardrobe where they’d been ‘hidden’ with the rest of my Christmas presents.
 
After Bermondsey something closed down for him. He left the railway (and perhaps his network of friends), joined the vans of Securicor, briefly before reassignment to the role of security guard; first in Lazards then in Woolwich, closer to home. We saw more of him now and his insular character grew in evidence, a silent presence behind a newspaper, pushed to the edge of the room by the overwhelming personality of my mother; the comfortable chair was where he’d now spend his days (living the life of an old man from his Forties) sipping creamed coffee, pulling on his pipe and reading about the world passing him by. Ironically, despite his reduction to this passive non-life, he remained staunchly political to the end; ending his Labour membership only in the face of the Blair regime. Ironically, for a union man, he was, in fact, an enduring example of the failure of integration. Ireland was always referred to as ‘home’ in our house; having lived and worked his entire adult life in this country, he retained both his accent and his ‘hatred’ of the English (such ‘hate’, however, detached and academic, was never evident in the intimate life of this warm, mild mannered man liked by everybody); if he had heroes they were union leaders or rebels, particularly those from Ireland who might disrespect authority (snooker champion Alex Higgins could do no wrong) and nothing would place him in a better mood than the headlines of some sporting triumph over England (by anyone). He was in many ways a good father, a kind man, lacking confidence and belief in himself to be any better.


We were most aware of him on Sunday afternoons as we scrabbled over the carpet for the tossed coins he’d won at cards in his regular three-hour pub games, or rainy days in a Devon caravan where he became the entertainer in more card games, his winning hands accompanied by renditions of ‘Granny Cackle’, as we called his lame impression of Bing Crosby. His fondness for the song (actually called ‘The Whistler’s mother-in-law’) and his corrupted memory of the lyrics would probably tell you more about the man than I could write. 


However, even within those severe patriarchal times of their young married life, more seemed to be unreasonably left to or consciously taken on by my mother than others, even during her pregnancy. The few days he was left to cope without her must have been a serious imposition on his lifestyle and a threat, if not to his manhood, then his illusion of independence. Somehow, however, for that tense week, he juggled the care of a child, a home and work and at the end of it my mum returned from Guys with a baby and salvation. As much a victim of his generation, of course, as my mother, he saw women in a subservient supporting role while his wife demanded centre stage, ensuring a life of relentless tension; the pair perhaps never had the chance to become a unit. In this context, his distress at her death (‘What am I going to do now?’) seemed, to my sister who witnessed it, more selfish than sorrowful.


Danny


The one pet we did own in Barnham Street, Danny (‘Danny Boy’, of course; what would you expect from Irish immigrants) was a budgie (green feathered, of course) who, far from offering the unconditional love expected of a pet, would peck opportunistically at any stray finger carelessly brushing the bars of his cage, or if offered no alternative, psychotically at his own image in the mirror hung temptingly above his perch (a spinning disc whose trailing bell became a familiar soundtrack to the room). His modest cage (a double percher) hung on a metal stand around which he’d scramble in sporadic bursts of athletic feet and beak until the cage cover silenced him. ‘Do you want to give him his trill’ might have sounded a pornographic expression in Mum’s Dublin accent (though perhaps not in her tone of voice) but she was referring, of course, to birdseed (Trill) which could be poured into a plastic container at one end of the cage, water at the other (if you were quick). Now and then Mum opened the spring door so he could fly around the room, ‘to give him an airing’, which at first meant a panicked explosion of wings in several directions before he’d settle on the pelmet, striding from one end to the other as Mum (satisfied he’d had enough airing) tried to coax him back down by holding the end of his perch up to him and prodding at his shuffling, skinny feet as though she knew what she was doing. Incredibly after perhaps one further failed flight across the room and back again, finding no escape, he’d eventually step onto the end of this stick and allow himself to be lowered magician-like back into his cage. ‘No, we can’t let him out the window’, she explained to me, ‘The wild birds would peck him to death. He’s domesticated.’ Once, perhaps feeling his loneliness, she paired him with a blue friend we found dead at the bottom of the cage the following morning. Her modest response of ‘ah look, the poor ting’s dead’ now seems lamely inappropriate for such a presentiment of the future.


 
Eve (Part 1)


I’ve no idea how mum coped with a baby in Barnham Street  (I’d been a trial run so she probably had the routines in place by the time Eve arrive). Few memories remain of the year or so in our now extended family before the move. Perhaps I’ve just blocked out the smells, the nappies, the illnesses, perhaps because little seemed to change in our lives, Sunday was still a visit to the Tower only now with a pram to wheel across the bridge, I knew nothing of the alleged threat ‘an only child’ is meant to experience with the arrival of a rival; there were no ‘accidental’ slaps or smacks, no slippery hands on downhill pram rides, no amnesia in the park (‘Whereja leave that fackin child?’). Perhaps I wasn’t in receipt of very much to miss. Perhaps, locked into my own world of self-obsession, friends already meant more than family and Eve was just another addition to the home. 
 
Without the memory of incident, I’m left with a sentimental and indelible image of her arrival from Guys at the start of another summer, taking my place in the queue to kneel in awe and adoration before the screwed up face peering back from the outsized cocoon of white woolen shawl, laid out on the sofa like a luxury gift. I felt only the paternal love a father must experience when his child is passed into his arms for the first time (or perhaps a distant ghost of that experience).


Saddled with my mother’s aspirations in the name ‘Yvonne’ (perhaps a vintage ‘Chardonnay’) she carried the moniker through the slums and housing estates of her childhood where the emphasis in pronunciation was invariably thrown onto the first syllable (birthday cards from friends were always addressed to ‘Evon’). Of course, she became ‘Eve’ or ‘Evie’ to me, and the rest of us after a while, although still ‘Yvonne’ to a cross mother. 


From that blinding first sight of her face to the day I stood holding her hand, guiding still uncertain steps across the road to the wall where we waited for the removal men and a final goodbye to friends, few images remain; we were, however, a unit more bonded than those who had given us life and a future of packed memories waited beyond the boundaries of SE1.
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​DG  2016