Mal Gilliam Of Golden Lane Estate
Contributing Writer & Resident of Golden Lane Estate, Novelist Sarah Winman recently interviewed one of the first occupants of her estate, Mal Gilliam, who grew up there in the fifties …
Mal Gilliam in front of her childhood home
With council housing and long tenancies under severe threat, it was with a mixture of emotion that Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I set out with my choir chum Mal Gilliam across the Golden Lane Estate, one of London’s most successful post-war council estates, to see where Mal spent her childhood. It struck me – as we wandered around – how these estates have provided the bedrock of community and continuity in London, and how – without them – we are heading towards a city solely for the rich and transient.
“I was born in 1949, named after Marilyn Monroe, a favourite of my dad’s. When I was six, my parents and older sister, moved from the Wenlock Rd Estate, off City Rd, to Golden Lane. We were one of ten families who initially moved into ‘Cuthbert Harrowing,’ into a modern three bedroom flat with central heating.
As a child I loved it here. I loved the freedom of it. Roller-skating down around Bowater House, and playing on the railings. The Estate discouraged ball games and noise even then, so the Community Centre was provided for the children. There was a youth club, and I took ballet classes there. A man called Joe Mitchell, he lived in Bayer House, he created a children’s variety show called ‘Joe Mitchell’s Follies.’ I was nine, I think, when I took part in a show that comprised of a medley of Gigi songs – and then the swimming pool was built, and it was luxury.
Whitecross Street had an actual market every day, and there was a butcher, a fishmonger and two bakers there, before the supermarket forced them out. And on Bonfire Night, a large fire was lit on the concourse in front of Great Arthur House, and we all brought fireworks and set them off and there was baked potatoes and sausages for everyone. A rogue firework ending up in a girl’s wellington eventually put paid to that, however.
Looking across the Barbican Centre and the towers now, it is hard to imagine that it was just a bomb site, stretching out as far as the eye can see. I used to climb over the wall and spend hours over there looking for caterpillars or playing hide-and-seek. It was incredibly dangerous really, unexploded bombs, shifting rubble which could fall away into deep cavities, and yet I never knew of anyone ever getting hurt.
Years later, I looked out of my mother’s window across that same stretch of land and watched the Barbican being built. It was a fractious build, they had so many strikes. They all lined up in Fann St. If a chippie picked up a piece of piping, they walked out. Demarcation of work, it was called, and the unions were very strict, and it went on for years. Continual noise and dust.
Golden Lane was an extremely successful estate and I think they selected families to be at the centre of it. People were happy to be there, they were proud of it. It was post-war. It was colourful. State of the Art. My aunt lived in ‘Great Arthur.’ My sister moved away but wanted to come back after her husband died. My mother knew the Housing Officer, who came and visited us and said that, as soon as a flat was available, she could have it. Lots of people brought their families over and many children of the original tenants still live on the Estate.
For someone like me, who was shy and nervous as a child, it was as if there was a wall around me and I was protected.
As a teenager, though, there was nothing around. The area was dead. Even the Aldersgate tube did not open on Sundays, so me and my friends went into Soho. I must have been sixteen, seventeen – I had left Parliament Hill school around that time – and we went to a coffee bar called ‘Le Macabre.’ It had tables shaped like coffins and we thought it was great, and we bought a coffee and sat there all night. When we wanted to dance, we went to the St Moritz club – where I met my husband Bill.
Bill had a group of friends who formed a soul band – ‘I’m a Soul Man,’ ‘Stand by Me,’ those kind of songs. Well, Bill had saxophone lessons, but as soon as anyone else played with him he lost time, so he had to become the manager instead. He was down the St Moritz with the band one night, and we danced together. We got married when we were nineteen.
Bill worked for a booking agent in the music business and I went to gigs with him. I saw Jimi Hendrix at the Saville. And one of the groups they managed was called Curved Air, and they opened for David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust phase. I was pregnant in my Laura Ashley dress while he was beautiful and so thin and in make-up, and I was fascinated.
In 1968, everyone was protesting Civil Rights, but Bill and I were saving to buy a house to give our kids something different from the Estate. I was working for the Conran design group and Bill was still in the music business and he did early morning cleaning jobs too.
We saved up £1,500 for our first deposit in the seventies and Pink Floyd roadies helped us move. We had a farm workers’ cottage near Oxted. It was stockbroker belt, all fences and no public land. Imagine coming from the middle of London and being stuck there. I missed the community. I felt isolated. I did eventually make friends but, every couple of weeks, me and the children got into Bill’s van and he brought us back into London, and I would come over the bridge and see the Thames and my heart started beating again.
Years later we did move back to London, got a house on the borders of Highbury and Hackney, and I got a job and learnt to drive. But I am a Londoner through and through – that is me. I have a fantasy of having a dog in the country but that is all it is. I need a destination when I walk. And a coffee at the end of it. I survived those five and a half years but I was not alive.
When my mother died, we did come back to live on the Estate for twelve years. Bill is interested in architecture, especially Corbusier, an interest that took us to stay in the Corbusier building in Marseille, so he loved living here. Eventually, though, the noise from the pub downstairs became overwhelming and we moved out.
I believe everybody, however poor, should have a decent home. They should have space, somewhere they feel proud of. Council housing is essential. I prefer the word ‘council’ to ‘social’ because Councils have a responsibility for people. I meet people who have always lived here in London and now their kids are being forced to move away, and they cannot see their grandchildren as much. It is not right. The city is changing and we are all finding it difficult.”
Mal Gilliam at Golden Lane Estate
Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You may also like to take a look at
EAST END by John Claridge
Thanks to the generous support and investment of you, the readers of Spitalfields Life, I am able to announce the forthcoming publication of John Claridge’s EAST END by Spitalfields Life Books – a handsome 270 page clothbound hardback for £25 – collecting together over 200 of John Claridge’s astonishing photographs of the old East End in print for the first time.
You are invited to raise a glass with John Claridge & me at any or all of the three launch celebrations we have planned in the first week of June, at Vout-O-Renees in Aldgate, at The French House in Soho and Waterstones Bookshop in Piccadilly.
Wednesday 1st June : EXHIBITION OPENING of John Claridge’s EAST END photography from 6pm at VOUT-O-RENEES, 30 Prescot St, Aldgate, E1 8BB. (Exhibition runs until 21st July)
Thursday 2nd June : BOOK LAUNCH PARTY for John Claridge’s EAST END from 6pm upstairs at THE FRENCH HOUSE, 49 Dean St, Soho, W1D 5BG.
Friday 3rd June : JOHN CLARIDGE IN CONVERSATION talking about his EAST END photography with Stefan Dickers at 7pm at WATERSTONES PICCADILLY, W1J 9HD. Email piccadilly@waterstones.com to reserve your free ticket.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY OF EAST END FOR £25
Len & Doll Claridge, 1964
Over lunch at The French House, John Claridge told his story to The Gentle Author
(Extract from introduction to EAST END)
“I was an only child so I asked my mum, ‘Will I have a sister or a brother?’ but she said ‘You’re enough.’ I was never quite sure if that was a compliment.
My father went to sea when he was thirteen. He could rig a ship – top to bottom – by hand and he was invited to go on the Scott expedition at thirteen. He was a bare-knuckle fighter in the East End and sold booze in the States in the thirties during Prohibition. But my mum, she stayed a machinist most of her life in the Roman Road, Bow. On school holidays I used to go in the van, delivering shirts around the East End. By the time I was growing up, my father had stopped going to sea and was working down the docks as a rigger, testing the cranes and that type of stuff. When he took me down there, it was sheer wonderment.
I used to get up with my dad, before he went down the docks at five o’clock in the morning and I did my paper round. We got up an hour early so we so could talk over a bit of toast and a cup of tea, and he would tell me stories about the sea. That was my education in wonderment. I really wanted to go to sea and see the world, but I did it through people sending me around the world to take photographs, so that ambition was fulfilled in another way.
I used to go to the shops with my mum every Saturday morning, and she would meet people she knew and they would be chatting for maybe an hour, while I went off and played on a bomb site. We would go into these shops and markets and they all smelled different. They each had their distinctive character, it was wonderful. People had a pride in what they were selling or what they were doing.
As a child, from my bedroom in Plaistow, I could see the lights of the docks at night and I used to go to sleep listening to the sound of the horns on the Thames whenever there was fog, which was quite often. You could smell the river if the wind was blowing in the right direction. A lot of the men in my family worked down the docks. When my father worked for the New Zealand Shipping Company, he took me down to the dock gate and onto the wharves – and I used to go out with my camera at weekends, or any spare time I had, to take pictures. I went out to see what was going on, I reacted to what was there and, if I saw something, I photographed it. It was instinctive, I never thought I was documenting. I had a need to take pictures, it was as natural as breathing.
Bomb sites were my playground and I was very aware of the war because a lot of my family were in it, and they showed me the medals they came back with. At that age, what you understand is limited but you are aware. We had rationing yet people had faith that things were going to get better. The only luxury would be something that was knocked off from the docks, be it a lump of liver or a bit of cake or whatever. I remember the end of food rationing, we got more bananas.
When I was eleven, I started boxing at school. South West Ham Tech in Canning Town was an all-boys school and it was mandatory for all the kids to get into the ring. It was a big old gym and they were big on sport, but my mum did not want me to do it because she did not want me to spoil my face. All the family were boxing, and they said, ‘You should do it because you have the ability to do it,’ and I quite enjoyed it actually. It was good fun. If you met someone you had been in a ring with, you always bought them a drink or they bought you a drink. I had reasonable success but I have small hands. I have got my mum’s hands not my dad’s hands.
One day when I was eight or nine, I was at at fair on Wanstead Flats and there was this stall, throwing rings for prizes, and I wanted this plastic camera. I did not know why I wanted it, except I wanted to capture everything and take the memories back with me. You know, I already understood that if you have a camera, you can take it all back with you. But I did not win it. Instead, I did a paper round, saved up and bought an Ilford Sportsman. I do not really know why I needed a camera and I needed to take pictures. Photography was a natural language to me. I developed them myself which I thought was pretty cool. I got a little catalogue that said put developer in there and this in there and wash it in there. We only had an outside toilet, so at night, that was where I developed all my film. It was not difficult. It was magic.
I left school at fifteen and I went down to the West Ham Labour Exchange. There was this lovely bloke, a nice man. He said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I’m going to be a photographer and take pictures’ and I expected him to say, ‘Yeah, that’s really good.’ Instead he said, ‘It’s not that easy,’ so I replied ‘Yes it is, you just take photographs.’ ‘Ok,’ he said, ‘there’s a job up the West End, but you won’t get it, let me tell you now – you won’t get it.’ This was for an assistant in a photographic department at an advertising agency. He said, ‘They’re interviewing people with qualifications from universities and colleges, and you’re too young but I’m going to send you anyway, so you can see how these things work.’ That sounded all right to me. I wore a black four-button herringbone suit, a tab-collar shirt, a knitted tie and winkle-pickers – I thought I looked the business. How could I possibly fail?
It was at McCann Erickson and when I walked into the reception, there were about four, five or six blokes sitting around waiting. Obviously they were lot older than I was, they had tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows. I said ‘All right?’ and they totally blanked me. They had never seen style before. The interview was with Eddie Brown who had been a Captain in the Scottish Highlanders and had come up the hard way. I was the last person to be interviewed and when I walked in, he did not say anything, he just looked at me. He did not know what to say, so he asked, ‘What film do you use?’
I said, ‘I won’t use anything else but HPS and FP3, I think it’s the best around’. And he said, ‘So do I – you can have the job.’ I said, ‘Oh, the other thing is I take pictures.’ I had brought with me some small prints of the Thames and views of the East End that I had made at home on an old enlarger. Those posh boys had qualifications and no pictures, but I had pictures and no qualifications, so I got the job – that was it. And I loved every moment of it.
First of all, I started by mixing up the chemicals and doing general stuff in the darkroom, but very quickly I was asked to do some printing. Before long, I was getting art directors coming down and asking me to do their prints. Later, I made prints for for Jeanloup Sieff, Don McCullin and Saul Leiter, when I was still only seventeen. I remember Saul Leiter asked, ‘Can you do something with this?’ The film looked like someone had processed it in tomato sauce, so I worked on it to see what I could get out of it and, when I had finished, he was very pleased with it.
At McCann Erickson, I met Robert Brownjohn – who everyone knew as ‘BJ.’ He had just come over from New York. He was a brilliant designer who had worked with Moholy-Nagy and became famous for doing the title sequences for ‘From Russia With Love’ and ‘Goldfinger.’ I always remember BJ in an Ivy League jacket and buttoned-down shirt. He would come to the Photographic Department and ask, ‘Hey kid, hey kid, can you experiment with this?’ BJ introduced me to a different way of looking. We would look at pieces of type and everyday objects together, considering them as design in their own right. He taught me to appreciate their abstract quality by having me look at a face or a hand as a piece of sculpture, and lighting it accordingly. BJ opened my eyes and then he said, ‘Kid, you’re gonna have an exhibition whether you like it or not.’ I was sixteen then.
The show was in McCann’s gallery and the subject was the East End. What surprised me was the response. People really thought a lot of the pictures. Dennis Bailey, Art Director of Town Magazine said, ‘There’s shades of Walker Evans.’ I did not know who the fuck Walker Evans was, so I thought, ‘Is this a compliment or is he taking the piss?’ But then I saw Walker Evans’ work and it is some of the most beautiful photography you are ever going to see – in my opinion – ever.”
The house in Plaistow where John Claridge grew up
Mr & Mrs Jones were the Claridges’ neighbours in Plaistow in 1968
John Claridge (right) with his mate Keith Horton (left), 1961
John Claridge takes a photograph in Spitalfields, 1964
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
Viscountess Boudica’s Drawings
Viscountess Boudica is the most creative person I know. Her phenomenal artwork never ceases to astonish me with its endless invention and today it is my pleasure to publish this small selection from hundreds of her recent drawings, illustrating something of her extraordinary range of iconography.
As an non-academic artist, I place the Viscountess somewhere between Alfred Wallis and Henry Darger – possessing the playful abstract sense of the former in her compositions, use of colour and line – and the distinctive visionary quality of the latter, in creating her own imaginative universe peopled by magical characters of her devising.
There are only a few tickets left now for my AUDIENCE WITH VISCOUNTESS BOUDICA this Monday 23rd May at 7pm at The Society Club, 3 Cheshire St, E1. Click here to book.
Viscountess Boudica’ s drawing of The Gentle Author at work
Drawings copyright © Viscountess Boudica
Be sure to follow Viscountess Boudica’s blog There’s More To Life Than Heaven & Earth
Take a look at
Viscountess Boudica’s Domestic Appliances
Viscountess Boudica’s Halloween
Viscountess Boudica’s Christmas
Viscountess Boudica’s Valentine’s Day
Read my original profile of Mark Petty, Trendsetter
and take a look at Mark Petty’s Multicoloured Coats
John Allin, Painter
Gun St, Spitalfields
John Allin (1934-1991) began painting while serving a six month prison sentence for minor theft, and achieved considerable success in the sixties and seventies with his vivid intricate pictures recalling the East End of his childhood. There is a dreamlike quality to these visions in sharp focus of an emotionalised cityscape, created at a time when the Jewish people were leaving to seek better housing in the suburbs and their culture was fading from those streets which had once been its home.
Returning from National Service in the Merchant Navy, Allin worked in the parks department planting trees, later as a swimming pool attendant and then as a long distance lorry driver – all before his conviction and imprisonment. After discovering his artistic talent, he devoted himself to painting and won attention with his first exhibition in 1969 at the Portal Gallery, specialising in primitive and outsider art. In 1974, he collaborated with Arnold Wesker on a book of reminiscence, “Say Goodbye: You may never see them again” in which he reveals an equivocation about the East End. “I saw it as a place where people lived, earned their living, grew up, moved on … they had dignity … I like painting the past with dignity…” he said in an interview with Wesker, “but what they’ve done to the East End is diabolical! They’ve scuppered it, built and built and torn down and torn out and took lots of identity away and made it into just a concrete nothing… But people go on, don’t they? Eating their eels and giving their custom where they’ve always given their custom … Funny how people can go on and take anything and everything.”
Like Joe Orton in the theatre, Allin’s reputation as an ex-con fuelled his reputation in newspapers and on television but he found there was a price to pay, as he revealed to Wesker, “You know how I started painting don’t you? In prison! Well, when I come out the kids at school give my kid a rough time … the silly bloody journalists didn’t help. ‘Jail-bird becomes painter!’ You’d’ve thought I’d done God knows what … I mean the neighbours used to say things like ‘Look at ‘im! Jail-bird and he’s on telly! Ought to be sent back inside the nick!’ I was the oddity in the district, the lazy fat bastard that paints. Give me a half a chance and I’d move mate.” In fact, Allin joined Gerry Cottle’s Circus, touring as a handyman to create another book, “John Allin’s Circus Life” in 1982.
Although he was the first British recipient of the international Prix Suisse de Peinture Naive award in 1979, the categorisation of Outsider or Primitive artist is no longer adequate to apply to John Allin. More than twenty years after his death, his charismatic paintings deserve to be recognised as sophisticated works which communicate an entire social world through an unapologetically personal and emotionally charged visual vocabulary.
Spitalfields Market, Brushfield St.
Great Synagogue, Brick Lane.
Jewish Soup Kitchen, Brune St.
Christ Church School, Brick Lane.
Heneage St and Brick Lane.
Rothschild Dwellings, Spitalfields.
Whitechapel Rd.
Christ Church Park, Commmercial St.
Wentworth St.
Fashion St with gramophone man in the foreground..
Churchill Walk.
Young Communist League rally, corner of Brick Lane and Old Montague St.
Hessel St.
Snow Scene.
Anti-Fascist Rally at Gardiners’ Corner, 1936.
Cole’s Chicken Shop, Cobb St.
Factory Workers
You may also like to look at
Edge Of The City
Although most of these locations are familiar to me, I did not recognise many of them when I first saw these pictures. Using large plate cameras and taking inspiration from nineteenth century photography, especially the Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London, Robert Moye & Peter Young have created photos of contemporary London that place a distance between the viewer and the subject – as if we were people in the future looking back upon a time gone by or even viewers from the past granted a vision of the London that is to come. Either way, the unfamiliar perspectives of these fascinating photographs have succeeded in rendering afresh the city I know best and it is a strange new world that I discover myself in.
Artillery Lane, E1
Chicksand St, E1
Greatorex St, E1
Ford Sq, E1
Baldwin St, EC1
Clerkenwell Close, EC1
Cranwood St, EC1
Golden Lane Estate, EC1
Leather Lane EC1
Newbury St, EC1
Roberts Place, EC1
Christopher St, EC2
Clere Place, EC2
Dysart St, EC2
Vandy St, EC2
Bream’s Buildings, EC4
Johnson’s Court, EC4
Argyle Walk, WC1
Argyle Walk, EC1
King’s Cross Rd, EC1
Phoenix Place, WC1
St Chad’s Place, WC1
Swinton St, WC1
Wicklow St, WC1
Lindsey St, EC1
Photographs copyright © Robert Moye & Peter Young
You might also like to take a look at
Garden Extracts
In celebration of the East End’s horticultural history and heritage, Townhouse Spitalfields, is staging ‘Garden Extracts,’ a series of events between May 21st & June 5th as part of the Chelsea Flower Show Fringe, including an exhibition of botanical prints from ‘The British Herbal’ published in parts by John Hill 1756 – 1757 and a series of talks and workshops.
POTTING SHED: FLIFF CARR & MATILDA MORETON are running workshops this Saturday 21st & Sunday 22nd May, giving you the opportunity to impress flowers into clay and make your own ceramics Click here to book
STEPHEN NELSON: PLANTSMAN & PERFUMER will be giving three talks on the history of scent on 31st May, 1st June & 2nd June at 2:30pm
TWENTIETH CENTURY PERFUME: LIZZIE OSTROM AKA ODETTE TOILETTE will be giving a talk on contemporary perfume Sunday June 5th
Stephen Nelson, Plantsman & Perfumer recreates perfumes from history
Learn more about Stephen Nelson’s work at www.darasina.co.uk
You may like to read these other horticultural stories
Nicholas Culpeper in Spitalfields
The Return Of Pat Nightingale
Contributing Writer Sarah Winman, author of When God Was a Rabbit & A Year of Marvellous Ways, interviewed Pat Nightgale last week on an especially showery day
“A little girl with long plaits on weekdays, ringlets on Sundays and baggy knickers most of the time. A shilling pocket money: sixpence to be saved, a penny for the Sunday school box, and five pennies for sweets.”
For many people, the memories laid down in childhood are vivid, often golden. They offer an unshifting narrative in an ever-changing world, a refuge to return to, a place that is simpler, kinder, and most of all, magical. And sitting with Pat Nightingale, overlooking Brushfield St, as heavy rain kept the promise of spring at bay, I had never felt this so keenly.
“Mum was in and out of hospital after my birth in 1946, so I ended up living with my grandparents in Harman St, Hoxton, for the first twelve years of my life. My grandfather was called Alfred Thomas Jenkins, but I called him Pop. Others called him ‘Oppy’ on account of his bad leg. My Nan was Susan Rose. She was lovely. She did everything for Pop. He wanted a cup of tea – she’d make him a cup of tea. He wanted the television channel changed – she’d change it. Rent needed paying at 9am every Monday – she’d do it. He was a bit of a bastard, really, a Victorian through and through, but a great storyteller.
They were market traders in Hoxton St where they had a vegetable stall. Nan’s parents were traders too, and my Great Grandmother, who was always known as Polly, was the Ladies Barrow Race Champion. The Barrow Race was held annually from 1918 to 1929, and the route was between Borough and Spitalfields, and any market trader could take part. And when Polly died, there were one hundred and forty wreaths at her funeral, all from the traders she raced against. She was a kind and charitable woman and if anyone came to her stall hungry, she’d send them back over to her house where Nan would be cooking dinner. Sometimes Nan had to cook for an extra twelve or fourteen people.
We had a whole townhouse to ourselves. Me, my grandparents and two aunts. An eight room house with an outside toilet. You’d go up the first flight of stairs to a half-landing where there was a small sink, then up another to the cooker. And looming over the whole of Hoxton was the workhouse, built on the Land of Promise. I never remember going without anything, but I had friends who did. Friends who had to sleep in the same bed with all their siblings. One wet the bed, they all smelt. And there was shame around poverty, real shame. I never liked walking past the workhouse, and I still don’t. People used to say it costs nothing to be clean but Nan would’ve said, ‘Then you’ve never had to choose between a bar of soap and a loaf of bread.’
End of day, the market traders dumped their rubbish in the gutter and me and my friends used to play there, searching for pennies and food. If my Nan had ever known, she would’ve murdered me. It just wasn’t done, see? Coal that had fallen on the streets, firewood, food, you left it for people who needed it. And if you could afford it, then you never needed it.
I remember oranges used to come in wooden crates that were nearly white and my friends used them for their furniture. And I wanted to too, instead of the mahogany stuff we had at home. Eventually, I got one to keep my books in and my Aunt Vera made a curtain to put around it.
On Mondays, I occasionally went to school but, when there was racing on, me, Nan and Pop went racing instead. We’d get the bus up to Stamford Hill and then get the coach. If the racing was at Brighton, we’d end up at the beach.
Every winter, I had a new coat, and a new coat meant Christmas was coming. We got it at Evada’s in Whitechapel. And there were all sorts of smells on the streets in winter, roasted chestnuts and baked potatoes and pigs’ trotters, and because Nan’s stall was on the corner of the street, we could smell the bread from Anderson’s too and the Pie and Mash at Fortunes, and it’s always the smells that take me back to that time.
But my favourite thing, though – and it only happened during school holidays – was to go to Spitalfields with Pop. I’d go to bed early and I could never sleep because I was so excited. I’d pile on the clothes, and we’d set out into the dark frosty winter morning, and you know, it was so lovely, so magical. And I can see my Nan watching me go, wondering if it was all right.
The stables were at the back of our street and that’s where we kept our pony called Mary, and the cart. I’d sit up front with Pop, and I’d look up at the sky, and there were dark blue skies then, with millions of stars that danced as we jolted across the streets and sparks shot out from the cobblestones as they clashed with the metal rim of the cart wheels. And, if we were early, we’d stop at the horse trough on the corner of Camwood St so Mary could drink.
Spitalfields was huge with baskets piled high and Pop knew exactly what he wanted at the right price, so we had to walk round and round. And he tipped the porters well because they let him know whose produce was good. And there were things there that we never had at home, like Sparrows Grass (asparagus) that people said made your wee green. I remember, when it was pea season, that’s all Pop bought for his stall. People talk about the smell of money, well, the money from Spitalfields had a greasy vegetable smell.
And it was on these trips that Pop liked to tell me his stories. He told me how he’d swum the English Channel. How he’d put grease all over himself to keep out the cold and a boat had followed him. He told me how he’d been a cowboy in America fighting the Indians, but he didn’t stay long because he didn’t like the food. And when Edmund Hillary climbed Everest, Pop said that he’d already done that but he didn’t like to brag.
And then he told me about the Rainbow Fairies. How when it rains and rainbows appear in greasy puddles, he said that it was really a sign that fairies were about, because when fairies’ wings get wet and heavy, they come down and land in puddles.
Pop was a clever man with little education, a man who told me I had to know my place in the world without telling me what my place was.
Later, in 1956 maybe, I asked what happened to Mary, and my Nan said, ‘She ran off to be a race horse.’ Pop said, ‘Don’t tell stories, she went off to the circus.’ To this day I never knew what happened.
It was a different time. All I know is that rain smelt different, street lights were fewer, and skies had more stars. I can never remember not feeling safe. I was a much-loved child, and I had the best of everything available. It was almost like magic. And I still look out for puddles, but I don’t tell everyone because everyone will come and look for them, and Pop said fairies are very private people.”
Pat’s grandparents, Susan Rose & Alfred Thomas Jenkins at their stall in Hoxton St
Pat Nightingale seeks rainbow fairies in Brushfield St
Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie
You might also like to read about
