Chapman - The Goalkeepers History of Britain (text only)

A t the top of the street was a stretch of waste ground, a memorial in bumps and ruts to where the barrage balloon had flown. There hadnt been another one for miles. Attached by cable to an air force lorry, it was lowered during the day, my mum told me, to be checked for signs of damage and deflation by the two airmen in charge of it. They sent it up again at night, its job to deflect any bombers that had overshot their main targets of the City and the docks. It had played its part in what all reports said had been a determined and heroic defence.

Ten years after the end of the conflict, signs of it were all around. Numbers 8 and 10, which stood next to each other on the canal side of the street opposite us, were a half shell of their original selves. From a padlocked gate in the railings, steps ran down into a basement area virtually covered with rubble to the pavement level. The weed-and tree-strewn interiors were home to a colony of cats, large enough in size and number to scare off the packs of stray dogs that wandered the street and surrounding area. The cats were fed by Mrs Clements, the elderly lady who lived on the top floor of our house. Three times a day she would rattle down four flights of stairs and across the road with tins of sour-smelling liver and fish relayed to her on their bikes by the competing catsmeat men of Frome Street and Camden Passage. In anticipation of her first delivery of the day, the cats would yowl through the pre-dawn hours.

A few doors down from us, all that remained of number 25 was a gap in the terrace. The 8 foot drop into what had been its basement was barred only by a few lengths of scaffold board and pole. The blind man on his way back home from work had no problem tapping his way past, but you wondered about the various male members of the Bray family who lived further down. On Saturday nights, they reeled and stumbled on their way home from post-licensing hours sessions in the York public house at the top of Duncan Street near the Angel. They shouted abuse at their wives, who attempted to remain a discreet distance in front of them.

Our street ran down from Colebrooke Row, which curved the quarter mile between City Road and Islington Green. Some Colebrooke Row houses had no railings around them, only stubs of iron a couple of inches long. My mum said they had been removed as soon as the war began, to be made into guns and ammunition. Both corners of Colebrooke Row and the street at our back, Gerrard Road, were wartime bombsites, used for bonfires on Guy Fawkes night. The stretch of waste ground where the barrage balloon had flown was right opposite the bombsites but never used for the occasion. This was possibly out of respect for the priest and nuns of St Johns, the red-brick Catholic church behind it, though no one openly made the religious connection. Irish and Italian families in the area threw rubbish and bits of unwanted furniture on the bonfires like everyone else.

Otherwise the Gerrard Road bombsites had no great use. They were certainly too rough for football or any other ball game. Encouraged by a fall of snow and reports that ice hockey was the fastest game in the world, I tried to emulate the Harringay Racers with two bits of wood knocked together by my grandad into a flat-bottomed stick. After two minutes trying to assert control over a few stones, I fell over and took a piece out of my right calf on some glass. I filled it with Germolene, a treatment my dad had applied after he had been bitten in the stomach one night by a large centipede when he was with the army in Sicily. A pink skin had formed over the hole in my leg by the morning. Harringay Racers disappeared no less miraculously soon after.

Playing with a ball in the street was largely confined to the walls of the houses at the very top. Both were used as factories and, for some reason long preceding the war, their windows had been bricked up. One belonged to Lowes the printers. My mum, who had been trained as a bookbinder, worked there on and off for some years. Mr Lowe had the shape of the Michelin man and the public demeanour of the Laughing Policeman. In slimmer yet grimmer times he had been a soldier with the Czechoslovakian army. After the Germans had taken over his country in 1938, his unit underwent a stage-by-stage retreat to England. He, his wife and two young daughters lived on the floor above his factory. They were Jewish. Other than sensing that no one else in the street was, I had little idea what this meant.

Mr Lowe spoke several foreign languages, including Czechoslovakian and Hungarian, all of which strangely failed him when it came to swearing at his clients. Despite the fact they were often his fellow central Europeans, he did this very loudly in English. One of his better customers sold holidays under the name and advertising banner of See Spain, an exotic destination unknown to anyone in the area. Few who sought his services to print their brochures and baggage labels paid unless he went physically to shake the money out of them. He had to go through this process on most Fridays to get enough money in the bank to pay the staffs wages.

He also swore at his staff but my mum and two or three other women who worked there none of whom would have classified themselves as liberal on the subject of industrially colourful language seemed only mildly offended. Should he cast doubt on their parentage or liken them to parts of the anatomy rarely mentioned at the time, he could be a horrible man. But to a degree he was excused the scorn which would be poured on locals who acted like this (the Saturday-night Brays, for example). It was assumed he could not have grasped the seriousness of what he was saying. It was the same if the people working for him were in his factory-come-house toilet at a time he wanted to use it. Mr Lowe would not retreat tactfully, as if relieving himself was the last thing on his mind, but wait outside and rattle on the door handle, shouting How lonk vill you be in dere? He did not quite understand how we did things, which was to say, how they should be properly done.

This was entirely to the advantage of local kids when it came to playing up against his wall. He raised no objection. By contrast, the wall on the opposite corner we usually avoided. It belonged to a small engineering factory, populated by men in blue overalls who wore collars and ties beneath them as a symbol of the nations industrial standing. The foreman, in his white overall, was vigilant about the noise of ball on brickwork and would come out to complain that his workers concentration on their clanking machinery was being impaired. One day he caught me down the factorys basement area after Id climbed the railings to retrieve a ball. He threatened to call the police. I had no doubt he would or, for such a crime, that Scotland Yard would turn up in force.

We lived with my grandparents. My grandad was from the Exmouth Market, near Saffron Hill and the Italian area, where his mother had leased a shop and sold roast meals. The vicar at the Holy Redeemer church opposite High Anglican, with nuns, mass and sense of mission among the toiling poor challenged her on why she opened on Sundays. Because its my best day, vicar, she said, like yours, which chased him off She had the same effect on my great-grandfather when he drank or gambled, and hed flee for weeks at a time to a sister in Bedfordshire.