Linda Wilkinson - Columbia Road: Of Blood and Belonging

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First published in 2017 by September Publishing

Copyright Linda Wilkinson 2017

The right of Linda Wilkinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Typeset by Ed Pickford

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

eISBN: 978-1-910463-43-7
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-910463-44-4

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org

For Bella and Harry

Mum and Nan, c. 1932

Clara and Alice

Me (right) outside the Garcias and Daltreys, Columbia Road, 1955

Mum Clara Diamond Lil Nan Alice
VE Day celebration, 8 May 1945

M emoirs, like plays, have a through line. They can be linear, or non-linear. Run from birth to death, or describe a brief three weeks that change a life. There is no one format, no one way, except that the work is your recollection of your truth.

I never really left Bethnal Green. I carried it inside of me. Even when I thought Id moved on to other spheres or inhabited different worlds it was there, even if I wasnt always aware of it.

Returning to Columbia Road after an absence of many years unleashed what can only be described as a tidal wave of emotions and recollections, and it is of no great surprise that I have spent the twenty-odd years since I became an author writing about the history of the place.

Coming home need not have been inevitable. I could have continued my life elsewhere, but I know now that there would always have been a part of me that was absent, empty of a richness that back then I barely understood.

I come from a family of storytellers and mythmakers; the sorters of reality who keep tales of the ordinary alive. Yarns that may be true, or have the merest soupon of truth embedded within them. Stories that give a relish to the belonging that we feel towards a person or a place.

I havent thought about this for years, yet as I sit next to the Man with a Van as we crawl towards the Old Street roundabout I find myself remembering. It seems the best way to blot out both the mindless chatter emanating from the drivers mouth and the radio which is set to full blast. In the back of the beaten-up vehicle is the furniture I have culled from the past few years of my life and with which I am now heading home.

I am not drowning in sentimentality about this. I know where I am going has little beauty. No landscape to take the breath away, no cultural highlights of note, just a street of Victorian shops and houses to which I now know I undoubtedly belong.

It is Friday, 16 May 1986, and the sun is shining as the van pulls up outside the house that Carol and I now own. It is quiet, so quiet, more so than I recall it being. Carol has beaten me here, the street door is open and she is unloading the final parts of her life from her old Datsun.

The Man with a Van luckily wants to return to north London, to climb up the A1000 towards the cheaper end of East Finchley from whence he came, so there is no delay in his desire to empty his vehicle and be gone. I give him a minor tip and he goes off in a belch of fumes and black smoke.

The sky is blue and small, intensely white, cotton ball clouds drift across it. Before I close the door I glance to my right. Less than twenty yards away I can see the sign with the name of the next street. An old sign proclaiming Columbia Road. I have, it has to be said, been less than truthful about my desire to return to my roots, having pushed the economic argument with Carol that we could afford a house here for what a flat would cost anywhere else. That much is true. The deceit I have peddled has been that nobody would remember me. Convincing her that our sexuality would be no problem to East Enders had fallen flat, so I had lied to close the deal. It never works.

Within five minutes of my arrival the doorbell rang and my cover is blown.

Carol is almost quaking with fear as she finds me in the garden, having just suffered her first onslaught of an East End stare followed by the demand of, Where is she?

Somebody wants you, she says, bewildered, as I head towards the open door.

She is older and her hair is no longer pure ginger, but shot through with white. Her teeth, long gone, are replaced by badly fitting dentures which she rattles around inside her mouth like some out of kilter washing machine. We had never been friends, her gossipy nature and the difference in age had set us far apart, but there she is, one of the constants. She crosses her arms across now flaccid breasts. She is Ginger Lil.

Youre back then, she says with a mixture of curiosity and self-satisfaction.

I am, I say, and smile.

Lil stands on slippered tiptoe in a mock attempt at looking over my shoulder towards where she thinks Carol hides.

She your friend? The friend is accented, weighted, full of Lils unsophisticated attempt at hidden meaning, yet also laced with humour.

I nod.

I had a friend like that during the war. She upped and died on me. Hope you have better luck.

And she is gone, walking towards Columbia Road. At the corner of Baxendale Street, a mere ten yards away, she stops, turns and grins toothlessly, her dentures by now residing in a pocket. The wave and wink are warm, and I return the greeting with a laugh.

* * *

Lil had been there when I was born, well, not technically there. Mother had gone into labour during a snowy cold snap and Lil had helped her walk up to the hospital. There was no thought of a taxi, bus or ambulance in weather like that and, as my mum was too old for home delivery, shed had to get there somehow, trailing her broken waters behind her.

It was 13 March 1952 and Mum was thirty-five years old. In those days anything over thirty was perceived as an ancient age to be producing a child. So acutely did she feel this shame that she had taken pills to try and prevent my arrival into the world. It was a secret that she had never shared with anyone else, and people look at me in horror when I voice it. She had described to me how distressed she had been when the early menopause she thought she was having turned out to be me. The repugnance with which her swelling figure was viewed had upset her profoundly. It was as if the sexual act was restricted only to the young, without any quarter given to the fact that her husband had been overseas during much of the war years thus interrupting her fecundity. What few knew was that during the late 1940s she had suffered a septic miscarriage of twins and had been told that she was probably infertile. In 1952, as she lay expecting the impending delivery of this late child, the irony of her pariah status was profound.