Myths & Melancholy

There are people and proceedings apparently assembled entirely from hearsay.

Biographies that persist through whispered myth, spun from wide-eyed playground hyperbole, promoted via bar-room boasting.

Infamous exploits that thrive within a loosely-tangled hairball of fact and fable.

Around North End Road, history pits the brickwork; it impregnates yellowing ceilings. There, through common conversation alone, people may be rendered real enough to rub shoulders with. And although no-one you know has seen them, everyone claims to know someone that has.

Is, for example, the existence of Munster Road’s elusive peek-a-boo dandy mere conjecture, or does he occupy a realm in the here and now? Many say they have seen him swing a gay parasol in the dusky twilight. Several attest to spying him saunter past Olive’s on the corner of Wardo Avenue, pausing momentarily to finger the leaves of the box ball tree that stands there.

Consider Mr. Dave, notorious brick-built barman of The Goose. Has he only ever pulled pints in the unrequited dreams of dry-mouthed drunkards, or did he really force-feed a 20 x 22 gram card of Mr. Porky pork scratchings (packaging ‘n’ all) to a hapless punter for “looking at him funny”, as market folklore decrees?

And what of ‘Easy’ Elsie Blow? Have you ever accelerated her sputtering pulse, or smudged her clumsy rouge with the heel of your hand? Perhaps her history solely resides in lines written on walls: grotesque slogans proclaiming her to be dirtiest puzzle in SW6; alleged invites to underage lads scratched in the bubbling cream emulsion of unheated, busted-seated, public conveniences.

She could be nothing more than an ongoing narrative of Chinese whispers, dictated via the urgent imaginings of deprived youth, but through the years she has been depicted in a litany so vivid that anyone would know her the moment she appeared.

Mooning around the kitchen once, I pressed Ma on the veracity of Elsie’s existence, but she didn’t answer. Instead she fixed me with her flinty eyes, and with grim vigour continued chopping the courgette she held pinned to the kitchen table. She clearly felt such topics to be forbidden fig for a freshly-weaned whelp like me so, sadly, my blinkers remained.

And yet, like a mercurial striker penetrating a well-drilled back four, the truth will ultimately wheedle its way though the most densely-woven deception. Like dogged chickweed winding through hairline concrete cracks to sprout into the light.

Last week, I was loping along towards the river to take in the tides. Hard sunshine kicked off corroding fenders and the market roar gradually decayed as I drifted further away. Generally looking like I couldn’t help it, I was struggling within my brain to evaluate the difference between a chamfer and a bevel when a tiny bulb of light burst in the corner of my vision.

I looked down the alleyway I was passing by, and there, through the opened doors of someone’s garage was, unmistakably, Elsie. Elsie. Unmistakably. At once, that multitude of after-hours murmurs found itself reconstituted into an irrefutable, copper-bottomed fact.

Frozen in mid-pucker, she was modelling hourglass corsetry for the readers of some rank magazine. She had spilled herself over the bonnet of a burnt-out Hillman Imp, like a marshmallow congealing on a hot stove.

I was dimly hypnotised. There she actually was, like some queasy conflation of a blowsy brothel madam and a dinner lady on Viagra.

The director of this squalid scene, weaselly in his soiled gabardine, flashgun primed, was evidently aspiring to some kind of Ballardian tableau. Framed as it was by the garage doorway, it looked more to me like a road safety poster targeting mature nymphomaniacs.

Where is the allure, I wondered, of exposing one’s chassis and gaskets to the world? Why divulge one’s vitals in the centre spreads of catchpenny publications that are doomed to curl and bleach in wire carousels standing off-kilter on suburban station forecourts? What fate for one’s flesh to be fondled only in facsimile by the grubby thumbs of bored salesmen with gout?

Collecting copper’s a diminishing trade right now, but are a few photographer’s farthings slipped into the willing gusset going to put sufficient steam on the table to justify such bruising indignity?

As I slipped away I sensed a rare melancholy consuming me. That uncomplicated optimism that springs, some say, from a robust dim-wittedness, felt punctured.

It got me thinking about the dead-ends and disappointments that might be awaiting me one day. It was like a future memory of a life unlived.

But how could I feel things I hadn’t encountered yet?

Had I acquired this awareness via the eye peeping through the door crack, the ear straining at the keyhole? Had half-remembered conversations and splinters of market chatter been absorbed subliminally, just like the tall stories spawned in these here streets?

Or perhaps it had been learned through actual experiences elsewhere, from recurrent episodes where the chafe of failure is felt first-hand. Speaking of which – I’ll see you at the school of hard knocks on Sunday!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Horns & Hand-Washing

I was in the scullery rinsing linen for a shilling.

She was in the study playing scales on her flugelhorn.

Miss Wetherby (next-door-but-one) is a valued family friend, and often supplies vital subsidy when the pockets of the Maurice breeches become barren.

She’s also a liberal source of solace when the Mighty Whites are stymied. On the many occasions that they’ve reneged on the ‘mighty’ part of the deal, she’s entered her parlour to find me prostrate over the decaying Bakelite on which she allows me to listen to away games. Without hesitation she gathers me up and absorbs me into her bosom. Whilst not necessarily assuaging the pain of defeat, it does readily spawn other feelings that strive to compete with it.

As well as paying me to knead her smalls, she had promised that later on she would be serving me her ‘Cherry Delight’. I would be the first to savour her special recipe. It was already cooking she had confirmed with a wink.

There was a tidy pile of underwear resting on the draining board. Sunlight shimmered through the cobwebs criss-crossing the skylight and dappled the terracotta tiles underfoot. A sour smell leeched from the small iron drain cover in the centre of the floor.

With my hands plunged deep within her pants, it occurred to me that the benefit of conducting simple repetitive manual tasks is that the unrelenting rhythm often lulls one into a kind of meditative state. Untaxed, the mind is clear to pursue whims and fancies at will. And so it was that I, sluicing merrily away, allowed myself to indulge in a pleasant reverie involving the flower-seller’s daughter, and an alluring Banana Inbetween - a speciality of the renowned Well Bread bakery.

The stack was slowly diminishing, and the daydream’s denouement growing closer, when a small knot of suds liberated itself from the sink and floated up to settle on my nose. Unfortunately, being up to my elbows in borax, I was unable to attend to the irritation. I began twitching and puffing, trying to dislodge the offending bubbles when, unannounced, a pair of hands appeared before my face and gently wiped them away. I had been so embroiled in my imaginary escapade that I hadn’t noticed that the music drifting in from the study had stopped. The arms lingered there, encircling me from behind.

Suddenly my collar felt a little tight, my braces rather constricting. A prickly heat flickered up and down my legs. The aroma of Miss Wetherby’s signature dish baking slowly nearby became overwhelming.

She invited me into the study. She said she wanted to reveal her special piece. It was time for me to enjoy her “Così fan tutte”. The Maurice noggin began pulsating and reverberating like a boneshaker rattling along a cobbled street. What was she talking about? For a cork-brained upstart like me it was like to trying to crack a cryptic clue written in a foreign language. Confounded, I padded after her like a soppy-eyed spaniel.

Tripping dimly through to the study, I struggled to rescue a few shards of sense, tossed asunder in the mental turbulence. I lashed them together into a cogent thought and reassured myself that, as the woman before me was honorary treasurer of the highly-respected North Fulham Purity League, I was in safe hands.

And after that I remember nothing.

When I came to I was slumped in a voluptuous leather Chesterfield. The lady of the house was sitting opposite me, pert on a straight-backed chair, pressing a freshly-plucked stem between the pages of Flugelhorn For Beginners. Her face was fixed with a queer, beatific smile.

I managed to haul myself up from the depths of the armchair. I stood there wavering like a drunken captain on the prow of a storm-tossed ship, blearily scanning the horizon. It felt like all the strength had sapped from my little legs. She glided towards me serenely and, pressing a coin into my palm, leaned over and whispered a fragile “thank you” in my ear.

I turned to leave and, glancing at my reflection in the hallway mirror, noticed that my braces were twisted, and my hair was parted on the opposite side from usual.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around the market trying to resolve my confusion, struggling to give things a name. Eventually I conceded that perhaps some of life’s little mysteries are just a little too far out of
reach for a young ‘un.

For the time being, anyway.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Peas & Philosophies

Flimsy conceits rarely endure, do they.

I was concentrating keenly, for concentration is required to perfect the art of wearing a hat in a built-up area.

As I moodled along Racton Road, the sharp winter sunshine sprung the colours from my schmutter, the air was cold and precise, and the wind rattled ‘round my ears.

I felt pristine, like a pea freshly-popped from its pod, and my braces were vibrating at some kind of mystically harmonious frequency that created an aura of serene wellbeing.

I imagined I was a demobbed squaddie recently recognised for acts of uncommon bravery on the front line, strutting past a line of court-marshalled malingerers loitering at lamp posts.

Increasingly spry, I felt my momentum smoothing out my congenital limp, and the fleeting grace it afforded allowed me to swivel crisply on my newly-cobbled heels into Tamworth Street.

Soon, however, my lofty reveries were fractured by the raucous approach of a gaggle of local girls. A giddy riot of jelly rolls, rouge, and rudeness, they were bawling in each others’ ears and collapsing against each other with laughter. Indeed, they seemed to find their very existence hysterical.

They were brash enough, blurting schwas all over the place, but I was so taken with the vision I’d spun of myself that I prepared to indulge in a slither of dangleation with them.

As they approached, I fancied I was filling out me tufnells nicely.

Alas, it was the bait that hides the hook. Drawing level, and about to give them the trusty wink and hat-tip combination, my fragile imaginings shattered:

“Does your grandad know you’ve nicked his trousers?” one of them shrieked, sending my eardrum into spasm.

“What a shockin’ bad hat,” yelled another.

“Are you minding those legs for someone else?”

It had become clear that there was fat chance of a tupenny fumble today, let alone taking one of ‘em up the Trocadero.

Now, I align with the axiom that apparel maketh the man, but just look at the trouble a silk handkerchief, a whistle of herringbone, and a wayward gait can get you in. In fact it tempts one to disappear into the drab parade, to make every day a ‘dress-down Friday’, just for a quiet life.

Still, there’s a salve for every sore.

See, Ma’s forever instructing me to disregard goading and leg-pulling. She advises employing philosophy as my ally. The insight of the wise will defend me ably, whatever the situation, she insists.

She’s always arming me with gnomic and knowing epithets from the Greek and Latin eggheads; regularly serving me a snippet of Socrates or a Sun Tzu strategy to suck on, and then recall whenever I find myself the object of opprobrium.

So, while these frenzied harpies were spinning me around, fingering my lapels, and tossing my hat like a Harris tweed frisbee onto a nearby rose bush, I recalled the maxim that she whispers in my little ear‘ole most often. I don't know if it issued forth from the noggin of Mr. Aristotle, or if it was coined by his mentor Mr. Plato, but she always dispenses it immediately before turfing me out into the world:

"Ridicule is nothing to be scared of," she says, and “don’t you ever…” - but I’m out the door before she can finish, enlightened and emboldened.

And so, as these mouthy frippets skitted off into the distance, still intoxicated with their own cleverness, I managed to still my quivering bottom lip by reciting that line. It’s true my delusions took a bruising, but it demonstrated that when the outlook is Lanesborough-grey, and life’s put the kibosh on your adolescent esteem, it’s not events what’s important, but how you look at ‘em.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!