It was Bert who wove my life into secret Catford. Bert is a retired photographer who lives up the road from me in a grove of early-nineteenth-century houses off the South Circular. I first saw my potential flat in May 1982, forget-me-nots running up to the french windows. After years of peregrination from room to room in London I hoped it would be my flat. As it turned out I was lucky and on a dank day that autumn I carried my belongings through those french windows. Outside, in the mornings, a ninety-year-old woman would merrily sweep leaves, string upon string of jewels around her neck. My landlady would scurry down the steps in black, off to conduct an atheist funeral. She is a kind of atheist prelate. But the road beyond the grove seemed grey and drab and depleted of life save for the oddity of a woman crossing it in wartime padded shoulders, save for the shop at the corner where two old ladies in blue overalls would preside in the semi-dark behind wartime corsets, waiting for customers to enter this oblique scene. My cat, Eamon, started visiting Bert and I followed him. On my first visit Bert showed me the Rye jug which was made for him on his birth, vines climbing the jug. I began going for walks with Bert. From the top of Blythe Hill behind the grove he pointed out One Tree Hill where Elizabeth I picnicked: in the same spot, with a wave of his hand, he indicated a Roman road where it was suddenly manifest on Blythe Hill against the dramatics of the sky, a road which leads from New Cross to Lewes. Cap on his head he led me to a point on Catford Hill where you can slip through a gap in the wall and immediately the scene is uplifting and you can take an idyllic walk by the river Ravensbourne to Bellingham. Long Meadow Walk it is called. Bert has lots of ancient books and in my presence he opened one on a page about Thomas Dermody. Thomas Dermody was an Irish poet who fought in the Napoleonic wars, lived in Perry Slough on the opposite side of the South Circular, and drank himself to death at an early age. The verses Lady Byron composed in his memory were her introduction to Lord Byron.
Degraded genius! o’er the untimely grave
In which the tumults of thy breast were stilled.
On my bicycle I cycled to Dermody’s stately tomb in the grounds of St Mary’s in Lewisham. The bicycle became of paramount importance in Catford and its environs. On it I made a few trips to a travellers’ encampment on the outskirts of Catford. In one of the caravans I was shown books of recent wedding photographs, matchstick barrel-caravans. A travelling lady told me how she’d won a beauty competition at the Puck Fair in Killorglin in 1955. Many of the children were born in England but they make frequent visits to Ireland, for the erection of a headstone on a grandmother’s grave for instance, and they have pony races on disused patches of motorway beyond Woolwich. One little boy sang a Joe Dolan song for me, ‘Julie’, in such a way that it sounded like a ballad from the Napoleonic wars.
History seemed to come into everything. The barber at the top of Stanstead Road who has recently retired would talk as he cut your hair of his apprentice days in a barber’s shop by the sea in Ramsgate. A boy clipping the whiskers of old men. Occasionally a punk girl entered while he reminisced. No, she had to come back on Saturday. His Polish partner was the one who cut the hair of punk girls. The Horniman Museum with its esoteric exhibitions, its flotsam of stuffed chimpanzees, has a patch of ground opposite which is still considered scourged, once the burial ground for plague victims.
To free myself of history I cycle through the flocks of gulls, of starlings in Ladywell Fields.
Talk in Catford can be savage and subterranean. The effigy of a black cat over the entrance to Catford shopping centre distracts you from the fact that Catford is called after a medieval burgher, John de Cateforde. A grey place, the old will always lament the beauty of buildings like the Eros or Gaumont cinemas long turned into office blocks. Anecdote abounds in the streets. As I passed a garage in Brockley once an old lady told me that when she was a child it was a slaughterhouse called Wellbeloved’s and one day she saw a goose fly out if it and hide under a tram so that the tram was halted for the day because they couldn’t get the goose out from underneath. Pubs are cited because they had Dick Turpin to visit – the Two Brewers on Catford Hill, the Brockley Jack. The Fox and Firkin where I drink scrumpy has a notice banning kissograms and makes its own beer in the back. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays the best talk goes to Catford Greyhound Stadium where, among the cries of ‘Come on, Number Six’, you hear the conversations of Irish travellers, the interchanges of modern highwaymen.
I followed Bert one night down Carholme Road to St George’s Hall where we watched a performance of A Letter to the General by the St George’s Players, the tableau of an old nun at the end who sits by lamplight, everybody in the mission safely departed with her help, and she waiting for the hordes. The audience that night was one of ladies in raffish-looking tea-cosy hats, of men in impeccable suits, very often tie pins on the sculpted curvature of their bellies. They are the kind of people who these days eagerly anticipate the opening of the Mander-Mitchenson theatrical collection at Place House in Beckenham Place Park, the most interesting collection of theatrical memorabilia in the country which has moved from the Mitchenson-Mander home in Sydenham. The applause at the end of the play was tumultuous, especially for the old nun. I’d seen A Letter to the General once before. In the town hall, Ballinasloe, County Galway, when I was a child.
It’s for reasons like this that the grey of Catford and its outreaches has been illumined for me in the last six years, a carefully orchestrated ikon at the end of an amateur performance: on Deptford High Street, suddenly among the goatfish and the jackfish, as you pass on your bicycle, the face of an Irish travelling woman who won the beauty competition at the Puck Fair in Killorglin in 1955.