31 Postcodes - Poem 8

Just off the South Circular

A tube of a flat,

all London light,

a long train away

from the big time.

A bedspread door 

between me and the world,

my single bed,

my noisy heart.

A squeeze of a kitchen,

a bathroom fight,

Mum’s room was barely

a room at all.

There was a patch of grass

down spiral stairs,

neighbours hiding

wherever you looked. 

We wheeled our meals

on a wobbly trolley

to the room at the front,

telly mostly on – 

brother 1 liked to keep

an eye on ‘armageddon’,

brother 2 liked a laugh,

Moonlighting, Cheers.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

 

We moved again in 1984 (I was 17). This home was a first floor flat in a different part of south London. Mum was thrilled to call it Dulwich, the nearest station was Herne Hill, nearest tube Brixton, I became very well acquainted with the number 3 bus route. The flat was in a smaller building than the last place (Edwardian maybe? I’m not great at building-spotting) and I don’t think it had all those nice velux windows you see in the Google photo when we were there. It was on quite a busy road and one winter day when it was icy we heard one car crash after another as they sped round the corner just outside. 

It was just slightly further in towards central London than the last flat and my Mum and one of my brothers stayed here for a few years (my brother having a mammoth drive to work every day because he worked miles away). My other brother was also living in London at the time so he came by a lot too. I only lived here full time for one year but it was somewhere I visited on and off after that. Mum was happy here – she had an interesting job working for Laura Hershey (writer and disability rights activist), she liked the area, she loved access to a wide range of theatres and all that jazz (and she was a senior here so she got all her culture at very reduced prices). Plus I suppose my siblings and I were all old enough by this point to give her a bit more time for her own interests. When I was at home at this address I was listening to music (Capital Radio – pretty crap but somehow I still liked it) and vinyl LPs (Bowie, Smiths, still Mum’s musicals LPs as my room and the kitchen were really just one room and she liked music as she made Sunday dinners). I was also studying (languages and English lit mainly) and writing sad diary entries about some love affair or other. I had a Saturday job at Barratts shoe shop on Oxford Street and it got held up for all the takings on my first day (the culprits escaped by bus but not a number 3 – wrong part of town). 

I received my ‘you are accepted to Cambridge University’ letter whilst living here so that’s quite a strong memory because my Mum was SO happy when it came she practically sang from the top of those spiral steps. I was pleased of course – it always feels good to be accepted rather than rejected – but my mind was much more on my next move and I think this is maybe when I stopped feeling competitive. I had been driven by that to a degree – it’s at the heart of so much of our education systems (“show you are better, then show it again”) but all that was over for a while because I was heading off for a year in Madrid (teaching English and other adventures). At 18 I wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else (particularly in another country, speaking another language, perhaps becoming another person). 

So next time, España… 

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.