Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (10 page)

The fantasy:
‘Oh
yes, just the other day the Gryphon flew down into my garden and carried off ten rabbits. I thought at the time it was some sort of advert for the Midland
Bank!’

The Reality: Silent, sour glances interspersed with the occasional,
‘Don’t
talk daft, son, I’m
busy!’

Of course, it was also extremely common to walk up to people with a playful grin on your face only to be told to
‘Fuck
off out of
it’
before you had the chance to utter a single word. This is the true voice of the people.

On that day in Brentford High Street we were getting nowhere. Unless we managed to drum up a few independent voices confirming the local legend as advertised (by us), the whole piece was going to look thin and flimsy. Imagine that! Then I had a brainwave. Instead of one or two lunatics saying they’d seen it, how about if
everyone
had seen it? So here’s what we did. Keeping out of camera on one side of the busy thoroughfare, I hailed passers-by on the other side of the road and, though we didn’t record the sound, asked them where Brentford Football Ground was, where the nearest Tesco’s might be, and from what direction did planes from nearby Heathrow Airport fly over. What we captured then were scores of shots of people pointing wildly in all sorts of directions. Cutting these together back at LWT, all that remained was for me to record a voice-over that said,
‘It
seems everyone in Brentford has spotted the Gryphon at some time or another, and locals were only too keen to let us know where it was
 . . .’

Absolutely outrageous, admittedly, but this wasn’t exactly
World In Action
we were making here. Later on in the piece we went even further. Pretending that one resident, who did not wish to appear on camera, had actually recorded the sound of the Gryphon flying overhead, we held our boom mic next to an old umbrella that I then opened and closed swiftly and repeatedly. You would be surprised how that noise, when played back over a black screen emblazoned with the phrase
‘Actual
Recording’
can sound exactly like a mythical creature in full flight. All in all, it was a terrific item that is still mentioned on many of the websites now devoted to Brentford’s fabled beast, and I’m happy to report that it wasn’t even the most preposterous thing we ever concocted on the
SOCS
.

The reason I draw particular attention to that little film above all others is because it was directly after I had returned from filming
it and barrelled in the front door of 113 Maydew House full of bubbling brio and insisting that we go out and spend a lot of money on a magnificent dinner, that Wendy suddenly cut through my frothing.

‘Dan,
I’m having a
baby,’
she said.

I immediately stopped my babbling and felt an intense surging wave of impossible jubilation rise from my feet to crescendo in my head. I can still see the both us staring transfixed into each other’s wide eyes, just a few yards apart and yet entirely as one, exchanging between us the overpowering force that this moment would for ever hold. Then we held each other tightly, before starting to dance slowly, in small circles, to an invisible heavenly music.

Now all we needed was a beautiful old house to live in. And, as happened so often in my life, almost instantly wonderful old drum fell right into place, bang on cue.

Growing up, nobody in my family had either owned or expressed any interest in owning their own property. None of my friends lived in a house either, except Tommy Hodges and his was above his parent’s sweet shop on Rotherhithe New Road, so that didn’t really count. True, both my brother and sister had married and moved out of Bermondsey to live in small homes of their own, but I hadn’t a clue how this had come about and frankly the day I find myself so lost for conversation that I talk about such rot is the day you can screw the brass plate on the lid of my box. However, something had to be done. I was going to have to address the dreaded world of conformity for the first time in my life.

My first stop was my dad – a bizarre choice, given that he had even less experience of sensible money management than anyone since Sergeant Bilko.

‘Dad,’
I said over a soothing half in the Jolly Gardeners,
‘I’m
thinking about getting a
house.’

Arms folded, he threw his head to one side and straight away went into a sort of lament.
‘A
nouse!?
 . . . 
fuuckin ’ell – what ya wanna lumber y’self with one of them for? You’re having a baby, aintcha? Where’s all this a-pence gonna come
from?’

All monies to Spud were either
‘a
-
pence’
or
‘wedge’
in the same way individual coins were
‘sprarzis’
and
‘tosheroons’.

‘Well,
that’s the
point,’
I soldiered on.
‘We
can’t have a baby up on the nineteenth floor of
Maydew.’

‘Well,
get a transfer to a flat with a garden. Blimey, I can sort that
out.’

He could have too. The only reason we had the high rise on the park in the first place – where I’d always wanted to live – was because, following the offer of a couple of dreadful dumps near Peckham, he’d
‘straightened’
a bloke at the rent office.

‘No,
me and Wend really want to buy somewhere. I’m earning a nice few quid, it makes
sense.’

‘Yeah,
well, that nice few quid will suddenly become fuck all with an ’ouse – you watch. Besides, you can’t move out like Sharon and Michael. Your work’s here, smack on top of
ya.’

He had a point there. In the whole of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe there were so few private houses they bordered on non-existent. And, kids, I know this sounds like absolute science fiction, but I cannot think of a single estate agent with an office anywhere in our corner of the capital.

‘There’s
some houses up the top of Southwark Park
Road,’
I said weakly.
‘And
a few near Tower
Bridge.’

‘Yeah,
and fucking people living in ’em, Danny! What you gonna do – go and turf ’em out because you’re earning a few quid? For
now.’

Those last two words were said with a timely raise of his Guinness and a glance from the corner of his eye as if to shed doubt on the longevity of my
‘stardom’.

Ignoring the implication, I got to the real point of my raising the matter in the first place.

‘Anyway,
if we do find a place
 . . . 
what do you do then, Dad? Say you see somewhere for sale when you’re out – how do you go about buying it off
them?’

My old man did not hesitate to impart the full sum of his knowledge of the subject.

‘Fucked
if I
know,’
he said.

Wendy and I took to walking the streets looking for
‘For
Sale’
signs. Surprisingly, there were quite a few more dwellings that had been spared by the Blitz and urban planners than I had previously
thought. Not a glut, by any means, and none that could be classed as
‘well
appointed’, but it was odd how I had totally filtered these places from my map of the area. As I say, I knew nobody who lived in them. Besides, not a single one was on what passed for the Bermondsey market. One day we walked to the far end of the Silwood Estate to where the flats suddenly stopped and gave way to a no-man’s land of abandoned railway sidings, long-vacated businesses that had once occupied the archways and general open ground. On the other side of the railway lines that bordered this wasteland was Cold Blow Lane, the notorious home of Millwall Football Club.

Wendy, not from the area, was unimpressed.
‘Blimey
, Dan, where are
we?’
she said.
‘Hope
you’re not thinking of somewhere around
here.’

I wasn’t, but we were heading in the direction of an old row of houses I dimly recalled alongside a tiny park right on the border where SE16, Rotherhithe, met SE8, Deptford. Leading my disbelieving, pregnant wife across the kind of shrubby, deserted, broken-bottle terrain that would have brought a location scout for
The Bill
to orgasm, we eventually emerged into civilization again via a small alley that ran behind the Rose of Kent pub.

‘What
are those trees over
there?’
she enquired hopefully.

Scawen Road, Deptford, looked like a mirage as we wandered into it that bright summer’s day. Built around the minuscule Deptford Park, it was the sort of pretty late-Victorian square that Mary Poppins might have been blown to directly after all her good work with the Banks family in the film. We didn’t speak much as we ambled past the proud bay windows set behind gates and privet hedges, but we both knew this was it. This was the perfect, hidden little Eden we had imagined. The houses looked inviting enough, but to be facing on to a park was almost too idyllic to be true.

‘Did
you know this was
here?’
she asked me eventually, and I think I said yes, but the truth is I hadn’t been in Deptford Park since I played a five-a-side football tournament there in 1968 when I was eleven. I now realized what an idiot I had been back then. Instead of loafing about on the grass between matches, sucking on frozen lemon ice-poles, I should have been busy leafleting all these
beautiful homes asking if they were considering selling up in fifteen
years’
time. As it was, there was not a single sign to suggest any resident had the slightest desire to move out of, what appeared to us, a glorious oasis. The consequence of our extended walks up and down the road was that now we just didn’t want to look anywhere else – but what to do?

A week later, the phone rang in our flat on the nineteenth floor. It was my sister, Sharon. Sharon worked in Lewisham Hospital and told me that earlier in the day she had been taking down details from an outpatient who gave their address as Scawen Road, Deptford, SE8.

‘I
told them that was strange because you were going on about it last weekend, weren’t you? How lovely it is, how you wanted to live
there.’

I said yes very quickly, hoping against hope that this coincidence wasn’t the entire conversation. It wasn’t.

‘Any
rate, she said houses NEVER come up down there, but just by chance
 . . .’

‘Yes
 . . . 
yes
 . . .’
I urged her on with a dry mouth.

‘. . . 
she reckoned that one was going to come on the market. An old boy who’d lived down there for ever has passed away or something. She didn’t know who’s handling the sale, but I’ve got the number of the house from her. Do you want
it?’

I wrote it down, stared at it and wondered what the hell to do next.

When Wendy came in that day I couldn’t wait to show her my piece of paper.

‘There’s
a house. In that street. They’re selling
it!’

‘Oh!
Incredible!’
she beamed, then, just as I feared, got straight to the practical:
‘Who’s
selling
it?’

‘I
don’t
know,’
I admitted, as brightly as I could, but even so I could sense the air was being let out of the moment.

‘So
what do we do
now?’
my wife pressed.

Again, I said I didn’t know. It was beginning to sink in that simply having a bit of paper with the number 46 written on it would not be considered a firm offer by most vendors.

What we eventually decided to do was walk down there the following morning and put a note through the letter box asking whoever
found it to give us a call. When we arrived at the address, we were thrilled to see it stood almost exactly in the middle of the terrace, virtually opposite the park gates. Opening the small metal gate and walking up the short black-and-white tiled path, I took our note and slipped it through the letter box.

We were just turning to go when we heard a voice from inside say,
‘Hello?’
Wendy and I looked at each other. We felt like we had been caught doing something wrong. What if my sister had made a mistake and this house wasn’t for sale? What were we thinking, bothering total strangers who had probably just bought a new sofa and bedroom suite and asking them to
‘give
us a call’? Maybe we should just stick with the council rent book after all. A moment later a white-haired man of about eighty opened the door and said,
‘Can
I help
you?’

I shook hands and explained about the note and the old gentlemen asked us in. Once in the hallway it was clear that, despite the net curtains at the windows, the house was completely vacant. Our steps echoing across the floorboards, the three of us walked into the two front parlours that were separated by a large set of Victorian pine doors, currently folded back. In both rooms were open fires surrounded by grey carved marbling and large decorative tiles. It was clear this sturdy old place hadn’t changed in a hundred years; the atmosphere that enveloped us was one of overwhelming peace. The old fellow introduced himself as Mr Reynolds and began to explain why he was there. As he did, Wend and I touched hands as the extraordinary inevitably of
things meant to be
made itself abundantly clear.

‘This
was Mum and Dad’s
house,’
he began.
‘I
was always going to have this place. At least, that was the plan. I didn’t know Dad would live to be a hundred and one and I’d be eighty before I got it! I live down at Worthing now and none of my lot want to live up in London, so we’re selling. Do you know Deptford at
all?’