Paperboy (18 page)

Number 35, Westerdale Road was to be compulsorily purchased and knocked flat, along with the whole end of the street. This meant destroying the furniture shop, the bakery, the grocery, the newsagent and the launderette, and chopping the town into two halves, separated by a roaring, stinking channel that would be impossible to cross. It meant wiping a London village off the map and covering it with a very wide bit of Tarmac.

Incredibly, nobody complained. Not so much as a leaflet was produced arguing against the plan. There wasn’t even a meeting held in Farmdale church hall entitled ‘Town To Be Demolished For Six Lane Motorway – Good Or Bad Thing?’ Did everyone hate living here that much?

Of course, at a time when everyone was smashing up every last bit of the past and either replacing it with hardboard or shovelling it through a letterbox on
It’s A Knockout
, the motorway was perceived as progress. So what if it didn’t lead anywhere and killed a community in a manner that everyone would be complaining about thirty years later? A rallying cry for the future had been raised:
What do we want? A road to nowhere! When do we want it? Just as soon as we can get out of the way of the bulldozers!

The future was coming and the car was king. Beeching
¹
had closed all the railway branch lines that merely served annoying little villages, supermarkets needed supplies and motorways were to be built everywhere, especially pseudo-American freeway-type roads on stilts that looked stylish when carved out of balsa wood, painted white and put in a Perspex box in the mayor’s office, but which proved to be less ideal when they were constructed in concrete next to your bedroom window, and became covered with soot overnight from the exhaust of passing trucks delivering Vesta Chow Mein to the Co-op.

If you had asked any of the architects whether they thought kids might start stabbing each other or doing drugs in the ominous shadow of the underpasses, or whether lives would be destroyed in quieter, more desperate ways than ever before, they would have raised their eyebrows incredulously and waved you from their presence, reciting mantras of progress. Everyone wanted a car, didn’t they? Everybody wanted fabric softener and tinned cocktail sausages? Well, there was a price to pay for status. Westerdale Road, Farmdale Road and Ormiston Crescent
could
boast just four cars between them, and one of those had been on blocks since the days of petrol rationing. Just imagine a world where everyone had a car!

The instruction to move came from the government in the form of a terse two-paragraph letter, so the residents of East Greenwich went into cap-doffing mode and did what they were told, assuming that those in charge knew better than they. A very thin man in a black astrakhan coat came around and peered into the rooms of Number 35, marking ticks and crosses in his book.

‘Oh dear,’ he said, peering gingerly into the garden. ‘We really must get rid of these outdoor lavatories.’

‘That’s the only place where I get a bit of peace and quiet,’ said Bill indignantly.

‘How would you like a nice bath?’ said the thin man from Greenwich Council.

‘How would you like a punch in the mouth?’ said Bill, who was usually never brave enough to say anything rude. Kath shot him an embarrassed look. ‘Well, he’s saying we’re not clean.’

To smooth things over, the man from the Council went into the front room and admired it. ‘Oh yes, very nice,’ he complimented Kath. ‘Do you collect art deco?’

‘No,’ Kath replied. ‘This is our furniture.’

The man noted the cream-tiled fireplace with disapproval. ‘You’re in a smokeless zone now, you know.’

‘Oh, we know,’ said Kath. ‘We don’t use it. My husband just keeps brazil nuts in the coal scuttle.’

Just two weeks after he went away, we received another letter with an offer for the house, only it was not really an offer because my parents could not refuse it. Kath had a little cry in the kitchen. Bill stood in the rubbish-strewn garden, looking out towards the railway embankment as if taking his last sight of England’s shores.

I sat on the end of the sofa, trying to console my mother.
‘Look
at it this way,’ I offered, ‘we can finally get away from Mrs Fowler. We can move further into London, the other side of Greenwich, the nice side. There’ll be bookshops and cinemas and libraries and things for us to do. We can make new friends and start afresh in a nice brand-new house that doesn’t need anything doing to it. Dad will enjoy himself so much that he won’t feel the need to saw up sheets of asbestos in the kitchen while you’re trying to lay the table.’

‘Your father already has an idea about where he wants to move,’ said Kath glumly. ‘Further out, to a run-down place called Abbey Wood. He’s seen a great big old house in the middle of nowhere, away from anyone. It still has gas lamps fitted on the top floor. I haven’t seen it yet, but apparently it needs an awful lot of work. It’s cheap because it’s virtually falling down.’

If there had been a basement in our little house, my heart would have tumbled into it.

We were to be refugees. The Council was tying little tags on our raincoats and packing us off to the hinterland.

I had to say goodbye to Pauline.

She was sitting on the low wall at the end of the street, waiting for the express to pass by. Her summer eyes and bobbed hair made her look French, or what I imagined French girls to look like.

‘Have you finished with the Ark?’ I asked casually.

‘Oh, I’ve outgrown that,’ Pauline explained, tugging her dress over her knees. ‘I’ve moved on to a Junior Miss Make-up Kit.’

‘We’re going away,’ I said. ‘I’ll probably never see you again.’

‘Yes, we’re moving too, up to Derbyshire. They’re knocking down our house as well. My mother says the Council is full of Philistines.’

Trust her to bring up the Bible at a time like this
, I thought.
I’m better off without her
.

‘Do you want me to kiss you goodbye?’ I asked.

‘It’s a bit late now, isn’t it?’ she said, obviously misinterpreting the concept of a goodbye kiss.

‘Do you want my new address then?’

‘I suppose so.’ She didn’t sound too bothered either way.

‘Can I have yours?’

‘I’ve no idea what it is. I’ll write to you once I get it.’

I had already scrawled out my new address on the back of one of my mother’s cigarette coupons. I handed it to her. ‘You won’t forget, will you?’

‘I’ll try not to, although I’ll be making a lot of new friends soon. Girls reach puberty earlier than boys.’

I had no idea what she was talking about. My sex education had consisted of my father coming into the kitchen one day and asking, ‘Do you know about the birds and the bees?’ When I had nodded, Bill said, ‘Thank God for that,’ and went outside for a fag.

‘I’m going to miss sitting here waiting for the five eleven to pass,’ she said wistfully. ‘Look, there are bluebells all the way up to the track.’

‘I’m going to miss you,’ I decided.

‘Don’t be soft,’ she told me, heading off to pick flowers on the embankment. I watched Pauline in her yellow cotton summer dress, intently uprooting stalks as clouds of dandelion seeds drifted past her into blueness. On that afternoon she was the archetypal fifties little girl in white socks, sandals and plaits. Soon she would grow tall and become aware of herself and what she meant to others. But for this brief moment she was still a child, intent and dismissive. The sunlight was so strong that perhaps she would leave behind an after-image of herself at this spot, untroubled, self-absorbed, picking flowers forever against an infinite azure sky.

I knew that I would never see her again. Five years later, she wrote to tell me that her mother had died, but her letter had the stiff formality of a stranger’s.

The next Saturday, we all went to take a look at the property. It was infinitely worse than my mother and I had feared, perched on a hill that managed to be in permanent shadow because it was surrounded by tall trees with dripping, sticky leaves. The house was vast, damp and rambling, half-buried beneath cobwebby undergrowth that would ensure it never saw light even in midsummer. It hadn’t rained for a while, but everything was wet. The peeling red iron gate stood beneath leering, broken gargoyles. Broken chequered tiles tripped us up. Fat dark spiders sat in the dripping eaves, waiting to drop on our heads. Cracked, filthy windows peered blindly down. Furry green stuff had formed on most of the brickwork and the window frames nearest the woods were covered in cankerous toadstools. It was as if the house had died about twenty years ago and was slowly rotting away. I looked up at the attic window, half expecting to see Norman Bates peering down.

We knew that Bill would never be able to afford to renovate the place. My heart had flattened to a pancake. My father would try to do it all by himself – or worse still, would get me to help him, which spelled certain doom. He would do this by making me put away my notebooks and forcing me to hold things covered in Bostik and G-clamps, and the house would never be finished as long as we lived, and we would be wretchedly miserable and it would spell a long, slow, damp, creeping death for us all.

So I decided not to go there.

On the Saturday morning that the Bishops removal van
²
arrived,
I packed a bag of books and some jam sandwiches, and ran away. In retrospect, I should probably have thought the whole thing through and picked somewhere less obvious to hide than in the Granada cinema, but the library was now off-limits. I watched a double bill of
The Bulldog Breed
and
Carry On Regardless
go around three times before the usherette grew suspicious and called the police. She knew that no one could survive such repetition unless they had an ulterior reason for doing so.

The new house was called Cyril Villa, which was about the most embarrassing name you could give to a human being, let alone a house. The woods at its edge were not beautiful, but filled with rotting ferns, reeking orange fungus, stinging stuff and dog shit. The other side was overlooked by an incredibly ugly council estate, where the residents kept bikes and laundry on their balconies, and shouted ‘Oi, d’you wanna punch in the faghole?’ if I caught their eye. The people who lived there instantly hated us because they thought we must be posh. Obviously, they had no idea who they were dealing with.

My mother made me stay away from the council-flat children as they swore and smoked and stared too hard at passers-by, as if thinking about robbing them. I imagined that as they too were broke and bored they couldn’t be all that different from me, except that they never seemed to carry books about, not even comics, and I couldn’t think of a way of talking to them that wouldn’t make me sound like Prince Philip, visiting their estate on a fact-finding tour.

My brother loved the new house and its secret back door into nettle-swamped woodlands, into which he could toddle out and fall down, to be lost beneath tendrils of bindweed. There were millions of places for him to get trapped in, including a dangerous derelict building with a collapsing roof and penises drawn all over it. As a
little
boy, Steven was blonder, bluer-eyed and even more adorable than he had been as a baby, while I remained a knobbly, lumpy pile of bones arranged in a roughly upright stack.

The house was awful. Its aura of melancholy pervaded the very air, reducing my mother to tears. Bill failed to notice this as he set up his Black & Decker rotary saw and wondered if he could get Steven to hold a plank steady.

In order to protect the family in this remote spot, he bought a dog from a man at work which had supposedly been trained to attack burglars on sight, a hypertensive Dobermann pinscher with insane eyes and an uncontrollable drooling problem. It spent the whole time in the hall, staring at things that were either just out of sight or didn’t exist, and would periodically explode into fits of apoplectic barking for no apparent reason, before over-exerting itself and passing out. Apparently something had gone wrong during its training, and it now suspected everyone.

The dog and the house hated me. Even the woods hated me. I half suspected that the trees might start throwing things at me, like the ones in
The Wizard of Oz
. At the first available opportunity, I caught the bus back to Westerdale Road, and to my horror arrived just as the workmen were smashing down the front wall of our house with bulldozers.

A small crowd had gathered to watch as the wrecking ball swung and our interiors came into view. There was our kitchen, and now our outside toilet was being revealed in all its utilitarian shame.

Mortified by the sight of the silky, wanton Japanese wallpaper in my parents’ bedroom being exposed to the people on the street, I lowered my gaze and beetled off to the Roxy to fill my head with ludicrous stories.

1
Dr Richard Beeching, hated politician, who pruned back a railway system that had existed since Edwardian times. Made a Baron, of course. (It has been suggested that Beeching was unfairly scapegoated by other, more culpable politicians.)

2
Venerable removal service. Motto (over picture of chessboard): ‘It’s Your Move!’

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