Furthermore, neither my mum nor my dad ever embarrassed me in front of friends or did anything to make me wish I’d been adopted by Frank Zappa. My children have never gone through this generally accepted phase either, so perhaps this whole tired teenage imagery – along with the tipsy deaf ‘gran’ and the strait-laced, easily offended maiden aunt we’re all supposed to instantly recognize – is simply a creation of middle-class comedy writers hoping to piggyback on what they suppose is real life. It may be a related fact that none of my crowd ever wound up as bong-hogging college students either. Indeed, out of an eventual crowd of about thirty close friends, only two went on to further education.
As our teens dawned, and in breaks between playing Joe Cocker, Deep Purple and Santana albums, the other boys from the boat and myself still used to go out across the estate looking for ways to fill up the long splendid days. Usually we’d gravitate to the Surrey Canal or Southwark Park, but sometimes to a weird decrepit area we called Mud Island. This solidly landlocked region had been given island status by the locals because it was an out-of-the-way gaggle of abandoned houses wedged between the back of the railway arches and the street leading to Millwall football ground. The ‘Mud’ part was a clue to the reason the dwellings were abandoned in the first place. They were all sinking on poor foundations and several of them teetered forward or sideways at crazy angles as though Tim Burton himself had drawn up the plans.
You arrived at this Twilight Zone of a place via creepy Zampa Road, the same location where my father and I had seen the badly beaten man. A stubby, always damp turning, Zampa Road appeared as a low concrete tunnel encased by the high windowless walls of a pickling factory on the right, the Kia-Ora orange squash bottling plant on the left and ceilinged by three low railway lines above. There were no street lights and little colour. It was known locally as the Stink Hole.
‘Do you know where Tommy and Pete are, Mr Hodges?’
‘I do, son. They said they were going up the Stink Hole to look for grasshoppers.’
Thus the Stink Hole was the conduit to Mud Island. (I’m starting to think I grew up in Tom Sawyer .) Once ashore at the isle, you would just find things to do – usually by poking around the collapsing ruins. Some of the houses in Mud Island still retained things like iron bedsteads and marble fireplaces, there being little worth in such things forty-odd years ago. Apart from chancing across an obviously human bowel movement in some quietly chosen corner, there was no evidence that anyone had ever squatted in any of the less dilapidated homes because nobody squatted in Bermondsey, full stop. I didn’t even know what the word meant until later, when I fell in with the punk rock crowd, and I still find it a totally alien concept.
Desiccated shit aside, there were other odd personal items left behind in some of the sinking buildings. A wallpaper sample book. Mangles. Wall-mounted Ascot water heaters. Broken mirrors in ornate frames, and tin baths. One day I found a marvellous toy among all the debris. It was a plastic scale replica of the moped-like vehicle that Steve Zodiac used whenever he left the mother ship in Fireball XL5 – at one time my favourite show on TV.
I put it on the shelf in my bedroom, but within a week my mother had thrown it out. ‘Pissing old thing, full of germs – no wonder they left it, it’s rotten. I told ya, don’t go round Mud Island, it’s falling down. Somebody’ll get killed there one of these days.’
And somebody did.
Martin Connor, a boy about my age who I knew quite well, had got up on the roof of one of the old houses when it suddenly gave way, sending him plummeting straight through to the ground floor, hitting his head on a beam as he fell. An absolute tragedy, and one that shocked the whole of the Silwood Estate. Even more tragically, I can only
As our teens dawned, and in breaks between playing Joe Cocker, Deep Purple and Santana albums, the other boys from the boat and myself still used to go out across the estate looking for ways to fill up the long splendid days. Usually we’d gravitate to the Surrey Canal or Southwark Park, but sometimes to a weird decrepit area we called Mud Island. This solidly landlocked region had been given island status by the locals because it was an out-of-the-way gaggle of abandoned houses wedged between the back of the railway arches and the street leading to Millwall football ground. The ‘Mud’ part was a clue to the reason the dwellings were abandoned in the first place. They were all sinking on poor foundations and several of them teetered forward or sideways at crazy angles as though Tim Burton himself had drawn up the plans.
You arrived at this Twilight Zone of a place via creepy Zampa Road, the same location where my father and I had seen the badly beaten man. A stubby, always damp turning, Zampa Road appeared as a low concrete tunnel encased by the high windowless walls of a pickling factory on the right, the Kia-Ora orange squash bottling plant on the left and ceilinged by three low railway lines above. There were no street lights and little colour. It was known locally as the Stink Hole.
‘Do you know where Tommy and Pete are, Mr Hodges?’
‘I do, son. They said they were going up the Stink Hole to look for grasshoppers.’
Thus the Stink Hole was the conduit to Mud Island. (I’m starting to think I grew up in Tom Sawyer .) Once ashore at the isle, you would just find things to do – usually by poking around the collapsing ruins. Some of the houses in Mud Island still retained things like iron bedsteads and marble fireplaces, there being little worth in such things forty-odd years ago. Apart from chancing across an obviously human bowel movement in some quietly chosen corner, there was no evidence that anyone had ever squatted in any of the less dilapidated homes because nobody squatted in Bermondsey, full stop. I didn’t even know what the word meant until later, when I fell in with the punk rock crowd, and I still find it a totally alien concept.
Desiccated shit aside, there were other odd personal items left behind in some of the sinking buildings. A wallpaper sample book. Mangles. Wall-mounted Ascot water heaters. Broken mirrors in ornate frames, and tin baths. One day I found a marvellous toy among all the debris. It was a plastic scale replica of the moped-like vehicle that Steve Zodiac used whenever he left the mother ship in Fireball XL5 – at one time my favourite show on TV.
I put it on the shelf in my bedroom, but within a week my mother had thrown it out. ‘Pissing old thing, full of germs – no wonder they left it, it’s rotten. I told ya, don’t go round Mud Island, it’s falling down. Somebody’ll get killed there one of these days.’
And somebody did.
Martin Connor, a boy about my age who I knew quite well, had got up on the roof of one of the old houses when it suddenly gave way, sending him plummeting straight through to the ground floor, hitting his head on a beam as he fell. An absolute tragedy, and one that shocked the whole of the Silwood Estate. Even more tragically, I can only
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