Publication Excerpts

The Legend That Was Clapham

Our Room Over Keelings'

Bill and Gladys Keeling occupied a paper-shop on the corner of Alvin Street and Sherbourne Street. My people rented an upstairs room from them and it was there, on Barton Fair Day in the dawning ‘Thirties that I first saw the light of day.

With my coming they aspired to a place of their own, my people, and eventually they found a tiny cottage nearby. Time came to move there, and they piled their bits onto a borrowed handcart, put me in my old mahogany drawer (they hadn’t yet run to a cot or ‘pram), put that on the handcart, and carted me there too. And it was there, in the very Bowl of Gloucester that my yesterdays faded and my dawning came to me

Fanny Thesp

Sometimes a girl from the neighbouring Knapp - if Fanny Thesp could be called a girl - would slope over to intrude into the girls’ games. Fanny was a maiden of qualities - of a sort. She seemed a perpetual and childish seventeen, though not a very sweet seventeen, being huge, slow and slothful, and none too refined or respectful. She wore white ankle socks and flat shoes and her discordant nasal speech knew no niceties. She belched publicly for pleasure, always needed a hanky but never had one, and was publicly and joyfully flatulent.

She nursed a compulsion for conversational intrusion and an affinity for personal trivia, and could devastate an objector with a single foul word. She nurtured a love of pavement hopscotch, too, and entered every game she saw as of right.

Her intrusions brought confusions, delays and difficulties, but they were tolerated by those who knew her, and those who didn’t soon found why, for at the first sign of their distaste Fanny would bestow them a basic descriptive noun and up and cuff them. It would be a clumsy swing. Just one. It was enough.

Robinswood Hill & Wainlodes

On Sunday afternoons in summer many of Clapham’s young pulled a sandwich or two together, scooped up a bottle of water or pop, and somehow collared pushbikes for getting out of Clapham. They travelled the highway in their droves, and an arbitrary picture they made, for the bikes they rode rarely fitted them. There’d be tall ones on small bikes, peddling on their heels with their toes askew, short ones on tall bikes, unable to reach the saddles, girls on mens’ bikes with one leg pedalling through the frame, and boys upright and ajerk on their mothers’ sit-up-and-beg bikes with the saddles stabbing at their backs...

Often they’d make for Robinswood Hill, but when the weather ran really warm most would court the river; and off they’d straggle, along the Tewkesbury Road and into the narrow, winding and leafy lanes of Norton, to climb themselves to the brow of Wainlodes Hill with its still delightful panoramic view of the wide pastoral green beside the Severn and its vales.

And there, having all but arrived, they’d stop, as I so often did, to find their breath, to savour the view, and to joyfully anticipate the dangerous thrill that was to come. Then they’d loosen their brakes and allow the pitch, the steepest they knew, to sail them down the slope at speed, past the Red Lion at the bottom and to the spacious and grassy banks where the slow and lazy brown river curved and fattened and sidled past the inn and round the sunken barges and on towards the cliffs.

And there they’d stop, that happy and contented clan, to sit with the sun and while away their time with their sandwiches and drinks, whilst some plied a willow stick and line to the river, others paddled in the shallows and the more daring ignored the river-planted warning signs and swam.

And there they’d nestle to while away their bliss until, all too soon, the sun slipped large and low and red over the meadows with their peacefully grazing cows. And with their faces glowing in its gold they’d struggle and coax their bikes back up the hill, climb aboard them at its brow, and sail off to their roots again.

Mr and Mrs Rogers

It was different with Mrs Rogers’ general store. Her husband, a friendly and bluff milkman, clopped his milk around the streets by pony and trap, and ladled it to his customers’ jugs from its open churns, whilst his wife, a short and round woman, served in the shop.

We harboured strange prejudices, we children. We didn’t much like taking our ha’pennies to Mrs Rogers’. It wasn’t so much the crop of beady little cysts that adorned her shiny face like a scattering of pinkish pearls; it was, I think, more the way she stopped and narrowed her tiny blue eyes as we entered, and (we thought) stared at us suspiciously and coldly and endlessly, as though we were heinous public enemies...

I daresay she had us rumbled...

The Co-Op

Alvin Street’s Co-Op, known to Clapham as ‘The Stores’ was a plain, sawdust-floored place of wide wooden counters, butter pats, cheese wires, staff who’d been there for ages, and non-stop homely banter. The shop radiated an air of relaxed congeniality, due in no small part to the cheerfully loquacious George of the fats counter, who could pare half a pound of butter off his block with one swipe and pat it to its oblong, Wheatsheaf patterned perfection in no time. George was never still. Nor did he ever stop talking, but to go there and find him missing was to enter a duller shop strangely devoid of its life. He was entirely without edge, too, and every evening, as closing time loomed, he’d chatter his way to the back of the shop, slip on his pair of gumboots, and water the sawdust floor with a giant watering can before sweeping it clean for the morning.

Collecting Our Coal

It was a paradox that when we were snowed-up and needed coal most, it came harder to get, for the horses and carts couldn’t get the coal from the wharves. I remember the first time I was sent to the railway sidings in Great Western Road to fetch some.

I wasn’t very old. It was snowing a blizzard on top of thick and rutted frozen snow, and our mother wrapped me up, gave me a hot drink, pulled my jersey sleeves down over my hands, and sent me on my way. I pushed and juggled the old ‘pram through the mounds of snow and over the frozen roadside ridges to the railway sidings along the line, and eventually arrived to find Alf dispensing his coal from a wagon.

Getting the ’pram there had been a trial, and it was worse bringing it back, laden with half a hundredweight of coal. It took me a couple of hours, and by the time I reached home again in the falling dusk I had forgotten the biting cold that had generated my journey, for I was hot and glowing, and moist with sweat.

Sambo Lane

Some local characters, of course, made their money by peddling their charm and roguery. Sambo Lane was a charismatic street entertainer with both a barrel-organ and an attractive singing voice. He was also a shameless and unrepentant burglar, and prominently painted on the side of his music machine was the legend ‘Sambo Lane, the singing convict’.

He lived along the Sandhurst Lane on the left, just past the fork, at Ablodes’ Cottages, with his companion, a smart, attractive and volatile lady known locally as ‘Dirty Gertie’. She had a temper, Gertie, and during their frequent end-of-day rows at the cottage, she would loudly rebuke him over his latest exploits and the way he’d handled them. The police got to know of it and took to crouching beneath their roadside window with their hands cupped round their ears, and as soon as they’d heard enough they’d bang their way in and charge him. And down he’d go again.

Johnny's Smell

The spices of the Empire sailed through Johnnys’ gates. And as they mixed and simmered in its silver bowls, the magic of their mingling laced the air, and flew Clapham heady in its scents.

The smell that rose from Johnnys’ was unique. It was sweet and bitter and sour and fresh, and root-rank and stark, and blossom-touched. It was as spry as a mayfly, heavy as fermenting wine, as gentle as whimsy, and as capricious as a fleeting thought. On balmy days it came near tangible, almost a meal, a piquant plot of essences that teased the tongue and watered the throat. It grew us our mid-morning pangs, pulled us to our dinner as the sun slid by, and drew us to our supper as our passage grew its shapes. And when we went to bed we breathed it from our sheets.

It floated its seasoning through Clapham, the Johnny’s smell, and sowed a flavour foreign, yet its own. It hung in our hair, flavoured our furnishings, and hid in the clothes we wore. It was the scent of a lifetime, a chest of sensuous treasure, an aromatic compendium that once tasted, would lie in the blood forever, never to stray or to fade. It was a friend, that smell, and it is with me now.

I Meet Algie

About this time I met Algie. He had a new old bike, and we were taking it in turns to pedal it around the Knapp when we noticed the Knapp Cafe’s cat dozing on its paves. Its tail was outstretched, and the devil slipped to us... It was Algie’s turn, and after we’d whispered together he rode energetically towards the cat and pounced on his saddle as his wheel hit its tail. The result surpassed our hopes. The cat issued a scream that hit the houses, threw itself up the wall as though possessed, and bounced around the Knapp like a shell.

Our delight was intense. We sank in our wicked laughter and flew lost in our joy. And as our tears cleared we looked about and saw Wadley’s tom. It was my turn. I aimed the bike, drove it like a rocket, and caught its tail well, leaping and thudding on the saddle as I scored. That cat gave us a good show, too, and shot away forever.

We had found a new game, and we played it out. Cats sat everywhere, and fell readily to us, but after a while those that remained tended to sit with their tales wrapped close. But we found an answer. Whilst Algie hung ready on the bike, I would befriend the victim-to-be, and stroke and pamper it until it trusted me. Then I’d gently stretch out its tail, give Algie the nod, and jump back as he thundered up. And next time, I’d ride the bike. It always worked.

We had caught just about every cat in the district - some more than once - when we were spotted by the passing Reverend Harwood, of St. Mark’s, who gently extracted our promises to stop it. And even then, we got a few more, during the early evenings, when his church organ swelled.

Pub Fights

They’d fight off the outsiders, these merry men, then fight amongst themselves for recreation. Then they’d come tired, patch up their grievances, buy each other drinks and swap their yarns until the pubs disgorged them. And clinging and swaying together they’d sing themselves off homewards, their trailing voices cracked, their timing gone and the words of their songs all awry. And Clapham’s moderate folks of temperance, tucked in their snug and cosy beds, would lift their heads and smile, and drink in their conviviality, and slip to their sleep well cheered with the flavours of the Clapham that they loved.

Demolition of Clapham

But all good things come to an end, and so it was to be with the haven that was Clapham. To destroy a culture, runs the adage, you first destroy its habitat. And that’s precisely what happened in the ‘Fifties, in the name of Progress.

The council’s faceless men didn’t see Clapham as it was - a golden community of kindred folk, a city of plucky and interdependent souls with their own civilisation with its simple and spontaneous welfare scheme, a parish that had thrived for well over a century, not on pretensions but on the joyful living of its lives; a magical culture within a culture.

They saw only a stretching huddle of wayward dens that knew no order and begged no rules of symmetry, a mess of dwellings far removed from their modern concept of neat and orderly and sterile rows of pale brick boxes on concrete roads... And they fell disturbed.

“Something must be done!” they cried, and their bright and brand new protégées came measuring the buildings and counting their scars, and testing their goodness against their modern lists. Then they sadly shook their heads, and deemed Clapham bad.

“These people need our help,” they said, and they set about destroying them. Nobody asked them whether they wanted their ancient culture ravaged, whether they wanted its sturdy humanity uprooted and dispersed to unknown and rootless localities with which they knew no affinity. They blithely insisted - as do-gooders do - that they knew best. That the folks of Clapham would be better off living in cold and distant boxes in churned and lumpy fields remote from anywhere.