Kids

As I was growing up in Pinner, I had a sense that we lived on an edge. It was a borderland with green space to one side and the great unknowable city on the other. Green led to the Chilterns: hills, woods, walking in sensible shoes. The city led to bus stations, mansion flats, Kensington museums and grandparents.

The way into London was through Pinner station and brown, Victorian Met Line trains, with their compartments, velvety seats, brass handles mounted on brass plates, each one engraved with ‘Live in Metroland’ written in curly letters. This edge territory we lived in lasted till Wembley Park. You could see that Pinner-style houses lasted till then. The moment we moved through Kilburn, my friend Harrybo would point out the old four-storey school where his grandmother went; I would point to a place further off to what I know now was the old Kilburn State cinema and wonder what it was for. But it was the rows of terrace houses that gave the game away. That was real London.
Feature continues

Somewhere in the tunnel between Finchley Road and Baker Street my brother said there was a ghost station. The train would burst into the open for no more than six seconds and if you were looking out the right side, you could catch sight of an old station called York Road where we never stopped. But Baker Street was modernity with its cartoon cinema within the station itself, its banks of illuminated notice boards, interior shop and café.

In my mind, this trip is taking me to where I live now, Dalston, because it’s also where my grandparents lived. The 30 bus stop outside Baker Street station would place us in a spot where I would wonder what it would be like to live in a block of London flats. We lived in a flat over a shop but these cliffs of apartments down the Marylebone Road looked so different, so like the pictures in my books of New York or Paris. I knew of no one else in my group of friends who made this 30 bus trip. I imagined that I was the only one who even knew what old sooty terrace houses looked like.

Then, just two or three hundred yards from where I live now, we would arrive at my grandparents house on Sandringham Road to be hugged by my grandmother talking half in Yiddish, half in English: ‘Tattele, come to Bubbe!’ (Little chap, come to your grandmother!) They lived in the bottom half of an old house with no bathroom, an outside toilet and a chicken in the garden. On the mantelpiece was a ship in a bottle, on one giant brown chair sat Zeyde (my grandfather) and on the other my mother’s brother. Zeyde worked in a cap factory that was tiring him out, Uncle Ronnie worked for a place that made radios and one day, he said, there would be colour television. He’d seen it. He’d helped make it.

The flat smelled of moth balls and pickled herring and it was the only place I knew where you could get bagels (pronounced with a ‘bye’ not a ‘bay’ in those days) and chopped herring. There were walks out to the bagel bakery on Ridley Road market, the ‘bagwash’ on Shacklewell Lane, or a great green field surrounded by houses and a railway line, called, I thought, ‘Acknee Dans’ where men in dark suits stood about talking in Yiddish and always, always, always saying to Zeyde as we arrived, ‘So? This is your grandson, Frank? Nice looking boy.’

I knew my parents were uneasy in this place. There had been rows in the past. I didn’t know then what they had been about. Politics, religion and sex, I think. My father came from a poorer but more political background. In a matter of months after meeting, they were collecting for the Spanish Civil War and hitchhiking round France.

On the trip to the bagwash on Shacklewell Lane, Bubbe would monologue about the bad ways of the world, how little she saw of us, and how heavy the wash was. Then she would hand over a pile of washing to an old woman in the laundry and who would hand her back a load of clean wet washing to take back. Even heavier.

These are the streets I live in now. I moved to Hackney from an art deco flat in Cricklewood in 1978. My grandparents had died in the German Hospital in the early ’60s and my only contact with Hackney had been the occasional visit to the cultural experiment of Centerprise, a community bookshop, meeting place, café… Wouldn’t this be one of the ways in which social change would happen?

First stop in Hackney living was Homerton, on the edge of Hackney Marshes. Another edge. One teacher in my children’s school explained to me that it was very hard teaching in this place because it felt as if they were on the very edge of London. Edge? With Leyton, Walthamstow, Newham wrapped round us? Wasn’t there something strangely northern about the way the Marshes, the River Lea and the river banks abutted onto railway yards and derelict Victorian buildings with men and boys standing on tow paths fishing?

The word ‘diversity’ is too abstract to describe how Hackney feels. Put it this way: when I sit on the 30 bus today, I can never predict what language, what accent will be in the air around me. The world has come to Hackney. And the moment you think it’s a place that has settled down with this or that community, you meet people from somewhere else.

In the heart of it all, sits the large white building of Hackney Borough Council. It’s from here that we were told that a mysterious debt of many millions of pounds had appeared. It followed from this that great swathes of property in public ownership: schools, houses, open spaces would have to be sold off. Suddenly, Hackney became a magnet for Developer Man. A demographic dream grew in the heart of the large white building: they could change the way Hackney is… families out, young professionals in. Migrants’ shops out, chain stores in. Blink and you’ll miss the rising of another block of loft-style apartments… Manhattan… studio… modern living etc… At the auctions of Hackney-owned property, millionaires arrive and clean up. Planning permission to mow down Victorian terraces and historic buildings gets pushed through by tiny committees.

A train linking Hackney to Croydon is on its way, reminding us that the great white building will preside over the Croydonisation of Dalston and no one really knows what the Olympics will bring. The derelict terrace of Victorian shops and flats near us in Dalston, (sold to the offshore millionaire at one of those auctions) could yet prove to be an embarrassing eyesore. He’s waiting for the price to rise – that mystical process whereby land changes in value simply by being where it is.