Things I Did On My Day Off

Cherry

By HarryC

Tue, 18 Jan 2022
  • 2676 reads
16 comments
 

Drinking cheap wine,

I sit streaming old episodes

of 'The Sweeney', filmed in

the same London streets

I grew up in.

 

I check the locations and

find them on Google Maps,

 

still recognisable, just -

geographically-speaking.

 

But like that scene in

'The Time Machine', where

Rod Taylor watches the shop

across the street change with

the fashions of the time as he

travels ahead to the hell

of the Morlocks...

 

Boozers and bookies, now

bistros and boutiques.

 

Corner stores and tott-shops

displaced by estate agencies

and exclusive antique emporia.

 

Mrs Collar's, where I got my

Jamboree Bags and Lucky

Dips - an art gallery.

 

The gentrified streets, the

developments, the lost

schools.  The neighbourhoods

long gone.  Swept away, like

those voices and faces -

the fag smoke and smell

of beer.  The smiles and

cackles, and cats on

windowsills, and Saturday

afternoons, and Christmas

trees, and three-penny bits.

The early Beatles songs on

the wireless, and Tom Jones,

and Patrick McGoohan in

'The Prisoner' on our

rented TV, and mum standing

by the window holding

the aerial. The milkman

and paperman, and the

rag-and-bone man, and the

gipsy woman who came every

week with her golden-tooth smile

and basket of heather, and

the butcher on the corner.

 

And a bath in the scullery

sink - hot water from the Ascot.

 

And a pint of winkles for Sunday

tea.  And night frights - but with

mum and dad always there.

 

The songs from

'The Half Moon' over

the back in Bemish Row.

'Yippie I oh oh oh
Yippie I aye ye ye
Ghost riders in the sky...'

 

Keeping me awake, but

keeping me imagining.

 

Gone now.  Sanitised.

Monetised.

Rinsed from  existence,

if not from memory.

 

I shouldn't feel sad.  Time changes

all things, as I know.

 

Like my face in the mirror now.

Like my recollections, maybe.

 

Anno Domini.

 

Yet they were good times.

 

I know.  Because I lived them.

 

And now I can only re-live them

in old cop-show re-runs,

and photographs

 

and drunken dreams.

 

Image: me, my scooter, Weiss Road, Putney, 1963

Certificate 12
Poem
Autobiography

Comments

Submitted by Turlough on

I get this!

For decades, possibly even a century or so, places like little shops and pubs hardly changed. I know that some change is necessary but it seems like in the last twenty years everything has changed and it can never change back. And it's all changed to something plastic, sterile and corporate.

My memories are preserved in music. It takes me to the extremes of joy and melancholy. The song Roll On Babe by Ronnie Lane is a very strong candidate for this. You probably recognise some of the places in the video.

https://youtu.be/L-rbfl1ZhAE

I loved The Sweeney. It was my all-time favourite fly-on-the-wall documentary.

The words of your poem describe perfectly my feelings for the lost past.

Turlough

Submitted by HarryC on

Oh yes, mate.  And stuff like this....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmFg9xANLfk

My dad drank in a pub which was frequented by coves who drank in pubs frequented by coves who drank in pubs the Krays drank in! wink  Every Londoner of the times has a Krays story!

 

Honestly, though - my dad drank with Gordon Goody - one of the Great Train Robbers - in The Spotted Horse in Putney High Street.  He lived with his mum in the Lower Richmond Road at the time - just up from where we lived. 

AND... I was in the crowd in this video, as a 12-year-old.  My dad's local was the pub the film crew used.  Oliver's reputation was well-earned. Anyone who could drink my dad under the table and still go to work was the real thing!  The block of flats behind Ollie at 3:36 was where I lived.  I still have his and Edward Woodward's autographs on sheets of Babycham notepaper somewhere...

The train station at the beginning is Clapham Junction - where I used to catch either a train to Putney High Street, or a 255 bus to Fulham for school.  No school run in mum's and dad's SUV then!  Cars were for the rich!  The block of flats where Ollie threatens to push Jill St John over the balcony was Sporle Court - the biggest block on the Winstanley Estate.  I like to add a bit of local colour and detail!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euOo8Kvg5lw

Submitted by Turlough on

You’d need a big piece of paper to make a list of all the things that have disappeared or no longer happen in the first clip. Probably only the daffodils remain.

In the early eighties I lived in Ilford and worked on the cusp of Barking and Dagenham. Some weekends I’d go out with my workmates from the real East End. Back then there were some cracking little pubs round Stepney, Mile End and Bethnal Green. I remember early one Saturday evening being locked inside the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel by the police because there was so much football violence going on outside. Ironic that it was seen as a safe place.

Oliver’s video made me smile. I used to use my paper bag to jam the doors of lifts in blocks of flats when I was a paperboy in Leeds in the early seventies. Another reason for being shouted at!   

Turlough

Submitted by HarryC on

Ah, The Blind Beggar.  Oh, the times...

Great memories, mate.

 

That scene where Ollie runs out in front of the fire engine and jumps in the back of the van - I watched that being filmed.  It took six takes over about 40 minutes - and still they included the duff one where he trips over the low wall!

Submitted by Insertponceyfre... on

Have I given you a nudge towards our upcoming virtual reading event yet Harry?

 

Submitted by HarryC on

Thanks, mate.  Thinking about it - but not sure.  I'll see how I feel and be in touch. wink

Submitted by donignacio on

GREAT POEM. I liked what your sentiment was, even though I grew up in a place that's hardly changed at all. I think I understand fully how you feel. I did notice my childhood home was remodeled to oblivion by home flippers, and the same thing happened to my grandparents' house. It's really kind of an odd feeling looking through those pictures and thinking about all the memories that happened in places you barely recognize.

 

Submitted by HarryC on

Thanks, donignacio...

My childhood home in Putney was 4 rooms upstairs above my nan's.  It was rented - everyone in the road rented.  It was a lively neighbourhood, too, with lots of Irish, Asian and Carribbean immigrants around.  A few Italians, too.  Everyone got on fine.  Two doors along were a Romany couple who kept a horse in their back yard and walked it through the house to the cart when they went out.  It sounds like hundreds of years ago, but it was early to mid '60s!  Dad could have bought that house in 1966 for, as I remember, £600 - the equivalent of £9,500 today accounting for inflation.  Not property price inflation, though.  The last time I looked, about 5 years ago, it had sold for just over £1 million.  It was still just a small terraced house, though it probably had an iceberg cellar or something by then.  All open-plan inside.  And our road is now a leafy avenue, lined with expensive motors.  Plus ca change... plus ca change!  Dad was a bus driver then on about £18 a week - so it wasn't really possible with four mouths to feed, rent to pay and the rest.

Submitted by celticman on

yeh, cars were for the rich. That's a time switch. 

 

Submitted by HarryC on

Yeah.  I think about 5 people in our road had cars - but all bangers!  My dad had a friend from the pub with a bit of money.  He was a businessman and Freemason.  He taught me to tell the time.  He used to come over some evenings to take mum and dad to Masonic dos in the West End.  He had a shiny black 1940s Citroen, like the ones you see Nazi officers driving in WW2 movies - bug-eye headlights, running boards, the lot!  Turned some heads, that car, when he drove it up outside.  Mum and dad felt like Royalty, I'd guess.  Dad wasn't a Mason and would never have wanted to be, but he had a gift for getting in with some good people.  In the army, he was chauffeur to his officer, the Marquis of Blandford.  When he came out of the army, he was offered the job of his personal chauffeur on the country estate - but turned it down because he didn't want to leave London.  There you go...

Submitted by Di_Hard on

enjoyed this very much! Your memories described so vividly, and also 

The milkman

and paperman, and the

rag-and-bone man, and the

butcher on the corner. 

 

How you describe your memories so vividly, mixed with film of the past, which was a fiction but is still here. And all the lives, the threads which wove that place, its sounds and sights and smells, all gone, you make it sound like it is the present which is not real, full of estate agents and boutiques

 

Submitted by HarryC on

Thanks Di,

I've written a lot of stuff about my childhood - but basically just vignettes, no real stories.  Not enough to hang a book together with.

Submitted by marandina on

Lots of familiar themes from times gone by and my own childhood. It's good to reminisce from time to time. Nicely done. Paul

 

Submitted by HarryC on

Thanks, Paul.  I think I do a bit too much of it lately, though. smiley

Submitted by airyfairy on

Marvellous scene setting and atmosphere. It's like those photos on websites where you can slide a marker from one side to another and see a scene from decades ago, and the same place now. (There must be a technical term for those, but I'm an ignoramus.)

I echo insert's comment - please do come to the reading event! 

Submitted by Mark Say on

Feels like you tapped into my childhood.