The Barrows Of Spitalfields
When I saw the wooden carts and barrows in Mark Jackson & Huw Davies’ pictures of the Spitalfields Fruit & Vegetable Market, I realised that some of these old-style barrows have been sitting around in Sclater St for the past couple of years, used in the Sunday market and quietly rotting for the rest of the week. My eye was drawn to the wooden wheels, every spoke individually chamfered, an attention to detail that recalls those magnificent gipsy caravans of a century ago. There are still plenty of these barrows in use around London, from Portobello, Berwick St, Seven Dials, Leather Lane, Chapel Market to Roman Rd, though now they are relics of another age.
I asked Paul Gardner whose family have been trading as market sundriesman from the same building in Commercial St since 1870, if he could tell me anything about these carts. He recalled there was a company called Hiller Brothers that manufactured barrows in Bethnal Green and a wheelwright who repaired them in a workshop under the Bishopsgate Arches. And he had some phone numbers, which he called to seek further information but both numbers were discontinued.
You find these barrows and carts in museums and sometimes in gardens with Lobelia and Geraniums trailing out of them but I prefer to see them in use, though without wheelwrights to mend them their days are numbered as the makeshift repairs to the wheels of the Sclater St examples testify. These wheels are a smaller version of cartwheels that were once standard when all street transport was horsedrawn, sustaining the attendant wheelwrights’ and cartwrights’ trades.
That afternoon, I was walking through the empty Leather Lane Market where I came upon a couple of these barrows. Trading had ceased for the day, so I was able to squat down and take a closer look. I discovered incised lettering in an elegant italic hand that ran along all sides of the barrow and in some cases around the wheels too. The name and location of the market “Leather Lane, Holborn” plus the manufacturer and the status “On Hire.” To my surprise I came across the name “Hiller Bros” and an address in Bethnal Green, “64 Squirries St,” just as Paul Gardner told me.
I photographed a fine market porter’s hand cart in the Bethnal Green Rd Market, loaded with fruit and vegetables for sale. Paul Gardner remembered that all the local greengrocers had these to wheel down to the Spitalfields Market and collect their fresh stock daily. Years ago, he traded a trolley from his shop with an old man from the market in exchange for a huge handbarrow with heavy iron wheels that now sits in his back garden. Examining my photo of the hand barrow in Bethnal Green, I saw it was also incised with the name “Hiller Bros” and when I did a google search I even got a phone number though, to my disappointment, it no longer functioned.
So I decided to take a walk up to Squirries St, but first I took a detour to Hoxton where a friend lives in the former Lambert timber warehouse in Hoxton St and here I was able to photograph the cart which has been disassembled but stored safely under a lean-to in the yard. This one is remarkable for remaining in its premises and for its beautiful signwriting – and again I saw the incised italic script that is the standard means of identification for these carts. The script resembles the handwriting of a century ago and I wonder if once someone simply wrote in chalk along the side of each barrow and someone else followed along to carve it out. Returning to Sclater St and squatting down to read the inscriptions on these carts, I learnt one was a stray from London Fields, eternally “On Hire” from Leach Bros.
Arriving at 64 Squirries St, just off the Bethnal Green Rd, I found an unremarkable locked-up building without any signeage beyond its street number. It was padlocked from the outside, so there was no point in knocking and I could not discern any sign of recent activity. Like some frustrated detective, I was deliberating my next move when I noticed there was a small glass panel (no bigger than a postcard) in the tall steel shutter closing off the yard and I peeked through the dirty pane to discover the picture you can see at the end of this feature. I wiped the glass on the outside with my handkerchief and took a hazy photograph, filtered by grime, of broken carts in the abandoned workshop that was once the centre of a thriving trade. Please do not tell anyone about this glass panel in the steel shutter, because no-one wants lines forming on Squirries St to ogle the charnel house of carts and barrows.
Let us not collect all these carts and put them on display. It can be our secret. As long as they are around we can be gratified to see them disregarded on the street, demonstrating stubborn longevity. Injecting a little arcane poetry into any unremarkable cityscape, they are vestiges of when the world was driven by horse power.
Now I have made my discovery, I will take a closer look at each specimen I find and read the inscription to discover who constructed it and for which market – as a mark of respect to those craftsmen who were so skillful in making elegant functional things with their bare hands, still in use today when they are long gone.
Jimmy Cuba, music dealer
For months I had been hoping for a conversation with Jimmy Cuba, the renowned music dealer in the Spitalfields Market but the snow and ice had driven him away. There is no doubt that sunshine and Latin music go together, so yesterday when I heard a Cuban melody drifting on the Spring breeze, as I was coming through Puma Court on my way to buy a loaf of bread, I knew he was back.
Jimmy Cuba has been selling music in the Spitalfields Market since 1992, but he first came here many years before, “I always worked in markets since I was eleven.” he explained, cocking his porkpie hat and assuming the squinty grin that is indicative of his good-humoured perspective on life, “We used to drive up to the Spitalfields Market in the early morning and I would guard the van while the governor bought his stock. We sold fruit, vegetables and flowers in Romford, and although I hated it I was good – by the age of fifteen, I was running three or four stalls. But the people I grew up with were pretty wild. Everybody was on the fiddle. Everybody had a sideline. It was an hypocrisy of many layers between how you should be and how you were. That was just the way it was.”
Seeking wider horizons, Jimmy left to become a roadie and worked with bands for nearly ten years, developing his taste for music along the way. “Latin tunes were the tunes I liked and the first record I bought was Carlos Santana. I was living in the Latin quarter of San Francisco at the time and getting into the music and the musicians. Anyone I liked, I did research and I listened to what they liked. When I came back to London, I had to sell my record collection in Leather Lane Market to pay the rent and it was all Latin music, but I found I was pretty good at selling it. So I went out and bought a load of Latin music and people started calling me “Cuban Jim” – I said you’re going to have to make it “Jimmy Cuba” and it stuck.”
As Jimmy speaks, he is always bopping and rocking, gyrating and grooving to the Latin rhythms that comprise the soundtrack to his life, “On Sunday I used to go to sell in Cheshire St but I got sick of working in the rain, so when the Spitalfields Market reopened in 1992 I took a stall. It was still derelict then, there were just a few craft stalls and an organic vegetable stand. I had a little diary and on my first day’s trading I wrote ‘takings £30, rent £5, lunch £4.'”
It was a small beginning, but Jimmy had a stroke of luck when a rare melody by Perez Prado was used in a commercial and he was the only dealer with copies of the tune, selling thousands and putting him on the map. Before long, Jimmy had the good fortune to meet the Fania All Stars (who are as big as The Beatles in the world of Latin music), interviewing them when they played at the Barbican. One day, Hose Alberto, the Dominican singer and Celia Cruz’ producer, honoured Jimmy saying, “You know more about my music than my people.” Over the years Jimmy has met many of the stars of Latin music who are his heroes, when they have come through our capital and now they make a point of taking a trip to his stall in the Spitalfields Market in turn. Larry Harlow, the celebrated jazz piano player from New York dropped by recently, “He started talking to me but I didn’t recognise him until he took his hat off!” admitted Jimmy sheepishly, adding fondly, “He sent me a lovely letter when he got back to New York.”
Today, Jimmy sells Latin, African, Arabic and Reggae in the Spitalfields Market on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays. He has travelled all over to visit the origins of the music, especially Cuba and New York, source of the Latin Jazz of the nineteen fifties that his personal favourite. Although Jimmy likes to play the market clown, making comic signs and enjoying boisterous horseplay with Matthew from Dino’s Cafe when he comes to deliver the bacon sandwich each day, a very different personality emerges once Jimmy begins to talk about music. A lyrical intensity overcomes him and his eyes light up in response to the soulful quality of the music he loves. Jimmy manages to give the benefit of his expertise without ever making you feel the weight of his experience. “It’s the knowledge I have got in here,” Jimmy confided quietly, pointing to his hat in self-satire,“I view myself as an educator in world music. It’s a passion for me. More than a business, even though it pays the rent, to me it is the whole world.”
The crowning glory of Jimmy Cuba’s achievement is that Soul Jazz Records, who release many of the world music recordings that he sells, now credit him on every CD. Jimmy opened a case and carefully took out the booklet to show me, “You don’t have to prove it to me,” I said, relenting when he opened the booklet up and showed me his name at the end of the list of thankyous.“It’s something I’m very proud of, it’s an achievement for me, coming from a rough background – where I grew up and how I grew up, on an estate. I never went to school really, my teachers said I would come to no good. All my education has been through music and this is an acknowledgement of the respect I have won.” he said, folding the booklet and returning it modestly, as if he was folding up all his care and affection into that humble CD case. It was a reminder of how culture can bring significance and value to life, because Jimmy’s existence has truly been elevated by music, it his given him his livelihood, his passion and his self-respect.
We shook hands in celebration of a cultural journey that no-one could have been predicted, taking Jimmy Cuba from the Spitalfields Market off around the world, through San Francisco, and delivering him back to the Spitalfields Market under the auspicious circumstances that he enjoys today.
Bentley & Bramble, Spitalfields' twin goats
With the Spitalfields City Farm still reeling from the break-in and nocturnal abduction of a ferret last week, I think Helen Galland, the animals’ manager, was relieved to take a break and enjoy a relaxed chat about the psychological dynamic between Bentley & Bramble, the twin goats that are such popular personalities at the farm. Bentley, of the shaggy locks and extravagant goatee pictured below, and his sister Bramble, the model of inscrutable charm pictured above, were born here in 2005 into the Shoreditch pedigree herd. Living off surplus vegetables from Sainsburys in Whitechapel and stale beigels from Mr Sammy’s Beigel Shop in Brick Lane, the lucky siblings enjoy a fine life down on the farm, constantly surrounded by young admirers.
“Even when they were kids, you could tell that Bentley was going to be the friendly one because he would always jump up for a cuddle, whereas Bramble was more reserved, and that’s carried through into their adult years because Bentley will always come up to strangers, but Bramble likes to get to know people a little first.” revealed Helen, introducing the disparity of character in broad terms.
Widening her eyes in amusement, she added,“Bentley has been castrated which makes him gentler and less testosterone-charged, although he sometimes gets a bit carried away during the Autumn breeding season and thinks he’s a Billy Goat, so then we separate him from the girls to give them a break. He wees on his beard and rubs it against them, visitors are not immune from his attentions either.”
“Bramble has a little face that makes her look suspicious of everyone but she does enjoy being stroked once you have made friends with her,” Helen continued with an empathetic grin,” She’s very fat since giving birth to her two kids, Clover & Camomile, who have gone to live at the Hackney City Family, and now she shares a pen with Ursula her mother and Demeter her younger sister from a different father, a very modern family really.”
The premise for my curiousity was the annual Goat Race to be held at the farm on Saturday 3rd April, scheduled to coincide with that famous Boat Race down on the Thames, and this year it will be between Bentley & Bramble. Bets are already being placed and I was eager to gather a little background to the competitors’ long-held sibling rivalry, a compelling psychodrama that will be played out in front of spectators on the running track this Easter.
“We keep Bentley in a separate pen,” Helen told me, explaining the living arrangements necessary to maintain domestic harmony at the farm,“because when he’s with the girls he needs to prove that he’s the top man but Bramble will always challenge him, she’s the alpha female. They tease each other, Bramble will chase him from the food bowl, and she’ll always be on the top of the climbing frame because he’s not as good at climbing as she is. Bentley will try to climb up after her and collapse in a heap. Bramble always wins the upper hand.”
Helen confided two revealing anecdotes about Bentley. When she tried to steer him backwards recently, Bentley simply pushed forward using the powerful muscular plates in his neck, causing Helen to get tossed over his head – not an isolated event apparently. Also recently, Bentley gorged on a pile of green apples that made him sick with an acidic stomach, a dangerous condition for a ruminant animal, but this would not stop him eating them all over again such is his lack of mental retention, Helen confirmed. Meanwhile, Bramble got a taste for competition last year at the Rare & Traditional Breeds Show at the Weald & Downland Museum where she won second prize in the Best Goat (compact breeds) category, and now she has the appetite for it Bramble will be disappointed with anything less than first prize in this contest.
I was beginning to get a handle on the precise nature of the complex rivalry, intensified because the competitors are twins. Although the extroverted Bentley has greater physical confidence (in spite of his diminished testosterone levels), he has not always shown he has the wit to rival his more introverted sister, the overweight yet nimble and shrewdly competitive Bramble. He needs to assert his status as flamboyant solo male now, but Bramble has ambition to prove she is every bit as good as her show-off brother and cannot disappoint her loyal cheerleaders, Ursula and Demeter.
Polarising spectators, between those who want Bentley to show he has still got what it takes and those who expect Bramble to deliver a decisive win for the sisterhood on Easter Saturday, this is going to be a thrilling race. Personally, I cannot decide which creature has the more powerful motivation to seek victory. But, just between you and me, in photographing the goats yesterday, I spent a pleasant half an hour chasing the fleet-footed Bramble round her large grassy pen and, on the basis of what I observed, if you push me to make a choice, I know which I would pick as my favourite to win.
Which one are you backing?
Des & Lorraine’s collection
On Saturday morning I went round to visit Des and Lorraine’s junk shop in Bacon St – sandwiched between a second-hand catering equipment dealer and a tattoo parlour, you might not even notice the discreet entrance if you did not know it. Although I had admired the crow painted upon the double doors by the street artist Roa, I was unaware of the wonders that are contained behind this unassuming frontage.
Des led me through the low-ceilinged narrow passage lined with old wardrobes into the shop itself. At first, as you enter a shadowy antechamber, you realise the ceiling is higher and hung with things that give the feeling of being in a deep forest with heavy branches overhead. Then you find yourself in an old stable with a cobbled floor, a corrugated iron roof and spaces opening up on all sides, each crowded with furniture accumulated in the gloom, giving way to indeterminate darkness.
This is where Des and Lorraine have dealt in junk for the last thirty years. Without windows, the chill is tangible, and I understood why Lorraine is commonly seen wrapped in a hat and scarf, and whenever possible sits in the car outside during the Winter months. They are busy people, constantly coming and going, collecting and delivering, and it took me several days to get this opportunity to speak to Des when he had a moment, yet even now he was hovering, as customers came and went throughout our conversation.
I was touched that Des describes himself as dealing in junk because, while antique dealers consider themselves superior within the hierarchy of professionals, for the inquisitive customer junk possesses the greater romance. With antiques there is an implication of higher monetary value but with junk it is all about the intrinsic poetic quality. So, to my mind, it is greatly to his credit that Des is unapologetically a junk dealer.
Wherever you look in Des and Lorraine’s magnificent junk shop, the detail is overwhelming and you must be sure to look upwards because there is a panoply of old stuff hung above, creating the impression of an eccentric galaxy of objects in a frozen moment. Like his friend Brian in Shadwell who I wrote about last year, Des likes to collect, but where Brian likes effigies and life-size model animals, Des collects old toys and other curios that look good hanging in the roof. The airplanes and vehicles create the sense of motion in Des’ universe, while the other items, like the signs and musical instruments, the gas mask and the giant potato peeler – just visible at the top of the photo above – give it a surreal poetry that is all its own. Gazing up into this thicket is like looking into a dream, yet Des appears to be a down-to-earth fellow. “Certain things I like to keep. Most of this stuff here is from childhood. A lot of people ask to buy these things but they are not for sale. It’s all stuff that’s become collectible. It’s stuff I bought, except the horse which belonged to my kids and they left it out in the rain.” he explained to me, surveying his marvellous collection with proprietorial satisfaction.
Seized by an idea, “Let me show you one of the strangest things I ever found,” Des said and, visibly excited, began burrowing through a stack of old boxes. Pulling out an old holdall, he produced a slim booklet and held it open to show me a photograph of a mermaid. I scrutinised his mild features for any hint of irony that might reveal he was pulling my leg, but his brown-eyed gaze was without any concealment. I was baffled. “You’re kidding me?” I said, but he shook his head. “Where did you get it?” I asked. “I found it, in the course of my work.” he explained dispassionately, “This was while ago, but it cost me quite a lot of money at the time.” I was disarmed. Des continued, “It has a spine running the length of its body and some scientists from Cambridge University verified it by carbon dating as over two hundred years old.”
As the conversation spun into the unknown territory, towards a weird place familiar only to Des, I asked, “Where is it?” Pre-occupied with sorting rusty old spanners, he indicated a dusty corner casually,“I used to have it set up there but now it’s at home,” he said, “I’ll send you picture from my phone this evening.”
Willingly consenting to the notion of a mermaid photographed by a mobile phone, I gave Des my number and said goodbye. The picture which you can see below arrived that evening, Des’ mummified mermaid in a glass tank sitting upon his dining table. Not wishing to be a killjoy, I shall leave you to draw your own conclusion upon its authenticity as a mermaid, but from this picture I do believe it is an authentic specimen of some kind from a nineteenth century display, a cabinet of curiosities or a freak show, and that itself is good enough for me.
Be assured, Des and Lorraine are happy to allow customers to rummage in their shop, as long as they ask permission first. You really need to go round for yourself to this last outpost of the mysterious kingdom of junk, because who knows what you might find there.
Columbia Road Market 27
The market was busy again this morning by eight, with eager gardeners who have been persuaded that it is time to commence Spring planting. Although the crowd was sufficient to encourage me to get up earlier next week, it was not long before these honest Forget-me-nots (Myosotis) caught my eye and I bought six for just £4, enough to to give me a few clumps this Summer and to naturalise in future years. The very name Forget-me-not defines a certain summery blue and as the months wear on the flowers develop subtle mixed tones of blue and pink. One of the first flower names I learnt, Forget-me-nots are one of those humble plants that have been cultivated in England since medieval times and of which you can truly say no garden should be without.
A Spring shirt from Liberty of London
I pulled this old Liberty shirt out of my cupboard in Spitalfields to celebrate a sequence of bright days that convincingly proposed the notion of Spring this week. If you look closely, you can see the collar is wearing through but this does not diminish my affection for this favoured garment that I have worn for years now, bringing it out just for these early months when the temperature starts to rise. Though I am not a flowery person and most of the few clothes I own are of undecorated design, there is a gentle lyrical quality about this pattern that appeals to me strongly.
When I wear this shirt with a dark grey or blue jacket, the colours really sing and I feel am doing my bit to participate in the seasonal change. For both men and women, the contrast of formal wear with a Liberty shirt can express dignified restraint while at the same time revealing a romantic attachment to flowers, plants, gardens and nature. A contrast that I recognise in my own personality. I love the conceit of having violets on my shirt when the violets in my garden are in flower and I enjoy the subtle tones of all the flowers portrayed, that remain as recognisable species while artfully stylised to make an elegant pattern. The evocation of the natural world in this simple design touches a chord for me and, as with so many things that trigger a powerful emotional response, I discovered that my passion for these floral patterns from Liberty goes back a long way.
When I came across the familiar photograph of my mother Valerie as a child which you can see below, I did a double-take when I recognised the pattern on the dress. It was a Liberty print, very similar to my Spring shirt which I hold in such affection. In that moment, I recalled that my grandmother Katherine once bought fabric at Liberty in London and had it made up into dresses for my mother. This was a gesture which made such an unforgettable impression on my mother that for her whole life she carried her delight in these cotton dresses, which were so magical to her as a little girl in Somerset in the nineteen thirties. Floral prints fed her innocent imagination, nurtured on the Songs of the Flower Fairies and in performing as one of Titania’s attendants in a school play.
A generation later, I grew up with the received emotion of this memory, a story my mother must have told me when I was a child. I thought I had forgotten, but I realised it was through an unconscious recollection of the photograph of my mother in the Liberty dress that I was attracted to this beautiful flowery shirt, without completely understanding the origin of my desire at the time.
The story was confirmed when my uncle Richard moved out of the house where he and my mother grew up, and in my grandmother’s dressing table, I found a small leather pocket diary from the nineteen thirties recording her London trip with the entry, “Stayed at Claridges. Ordered carpet and sideboard at Harvey Nichols and bought materials at Liberty.” My grandmother was the daughter of a diminished aristocratic family who married my grandfather Leslie, a bank manager, and adopted an autocratic manner to ameliorate her loss of status. Consequently, my mother, with admirable resourcefulness, ran away from home at nineteen to escape my bossy grandmother and married my father Peter, who was a professional footballer – an act of social rebellion that my grandmother never forgave.
Nevertheless, the taste I acquired for these elegant old-fashioned designs reflects the fondness my mother carried for that special moment in her childhood which she never forgot, when my grandmother showed maternal kindness to her little daughter in the gift of flowery cotton dresses. An act which came to represent everything about my grandmother that my mother could embrace with unqualified affection, and she encouraged me to remember the best of people too, a prerogative I claim in this instance as the sole living representative of these characters.
Today, I wear my Liberty shirt as the sympathetic illustration of a narrative which extends over three generations, culminating in my own existence upon this earth, and as I button my Spring shirt, before walking out to celebrate sunshine and a new beginning, I am reminded that I alone carry these emotional stories now, clothing me in the humble affections of my forebears.
Linda Carney, Machinist
This is the lovely Linda Carney working at her machine in Spitalfields in 1963 and looking glamorous in the same way Lynn Redgrave, Julie Christie, Rita Tushingham, Judy Geeson and Barbara Windsor did playing happy-go-lucky girls in all those films of London in the nineteen sixties, that are currently enjoying a big revival in popularity today. There is something about the combination of the kooky glasses, the stylish outfit and the optimistic humorous attitude in a mundane workplace that is so attractive, becoming an act of youthful defiance in itself.
Linda worked in factories making clothes all over Spitalfields, in Brune St above the Jewish soup kitchen, in Fournier St in what is now Gilbert & George’s studio and in Fleur de Lys St. It was at the latter address, she once spotted the long-haired seventeen-year-old Dan Cruickshank giving an interview to reporters on the doorstep, explaining why he was squatting an old building there, “I’m saving our heritage.” he declared. But Linda, with irrepressible ebullience, pointed her finger and called out, “You just don’t want to pay rent!” It was a scene worthy of the opening sequence of one of those sixties comedies and I can imagine Linda, tottering off down Fleur de Lys St, arm in arm with her girlfriends, all laughing like drains.
I met Linda at the raucous party in Shadwell, so this week she kindly walked over from her home in Cable St to meet outside the Jewish soup kitchen on Brune St and give me a picture of the neighbourhood in her time. “It still is busy here, but it was much more busy then because people started out earlier and worked longer hours.” said Linda, excited to return to her former workplace,“If you worked all night, you never felt on your own because you had all-night cafes servicing the market.”
Looking up and down Brune St, Linda got carried away describing the characters among the Jewish paupers coming to the soup kitchen from the surrounding streets of derelict tenements, while bales of cotton were carried in and our of the warehouse next door, supplies were delivered to the food warehouses in Tenterground, trucks caused chaos in the streets around Spitalfields Market night and day, hatters and buttonmakers and purveyors of ribbons and trimmings all worked frantically, pubs opened at dawn, furriers in Whites Row compared pelts by daylight, Coles’ poulterers in Leyden St slaughtered fowls to order, and further afield, the shoemakers of Hoxton and the furnituremakers of Bethnal Green were all at work too. Obviously this was only a fraction of the activity, but I think you can understand what Linda meant by saying Spitalfields was busier then.
Linda earned three pounds a week doing piecework for companies in Cutler St, who provided the cut pieces of cloth ready to sew. She and her co-workers made a hundred pairs of trousers in a day in the factory on the top floor of the soup kitchen. Assembling the clothes, one girl would sew the seams, another the buttonholes, another the buttons, the zipper and so on. “You couldn’t let anybody down. You couldn’t even go to the toilet” admitted Linda with a frown, showing me the scar where she caught her finger in a machine once and recalling in wry amusement that, in spite of her injury, the others were reluctant to stop the belt that drove all the machines, crying out, “Don’t turn it off! I haven’t finished my piecework yet!” “And that’s what made you a machinist” said Linda, in robust summary of her occupation.
“My mother was a seamstress for Savile Row, a tailoress from home, collecting her work from the West End. My grandmother rolled cigars at home, there was a big industry. It was a skill. Those skills are coming back, I think, because you see the girls today that are making their own clothes and selling them in the market. We used to make our own clothes too, because you need to have something a little different.”
Although Linda’s father worked in the Truman Brewery, his family were all dockers. She told me about the two floors of vaults beneath Wapping High St that stretch as far as Tobacco Dock, built by French prisoners of war imprisoned at the Tower of London. Apparently, these cellars were sealed up just as they were when the docks closed and remain untouched to this day, full of a vast stock of the best wine and champagne waiting to be discovered. “We’d go down to the lock-ups,” said Linda with a rapturous grin,“All the best stuff was there, cinnamon, paprika, saffron, rum, ivory, tea and champagne. I’ve drunk all the best teas in the world. If some spilt from a broken chest, you could get a handful for yourself.”
At this point in our pavement chat upon this sunny morning, Kweku, an African-American who lives in the ground floor flat of the converted soup kitchen, came outside for a cigarette and joined the conversation – which prompted Linda to turn to the subject of race, much to Kweku’s amusement. “We always had mixed race here because it was a port,” she declared, producing a photo of her multiracial school netball team from 1959 to show Kweku. “So we all got brought up together. I used to go to clubs to listen to ska and reggae, where coloured groups like the Stylistics were playing to a mixed audience, which the musicians liked because they couldn’t do it in America. We mixed a lot more than our parents thought, because we were enjoying life and we didn’t have any money. We had stop-overs, and a lot of us married Afro-Carribeans, Asians and Chinese. We were a melting pot.” I could see Kweku’s eyes widening at Linda’s open-hearted enthusiasm. With her exuberant humanity and brave liberal nature, Linda is the real life manifestation of the free-thinking fictional heroines of those nineteen sixties movies, incarnating the best of that remarkable era when youth found its voice in this country.
Touched by Linda’s monologue, Kweku generously invited us into his flat to take a look. We entered the central door that once led to the factory floors up above, rented out to support the soup kitchen. This was the door Linda passed through when she came to work every day. She was entranced, “It feels strange but homely, because it is so familiar” she said. Clasping her hands in delight and raising her eyes to explore the space, Linda explained to Kweku that, when it was the soup kitchen, one side of his flat was used for distributing clothes and the other side for food.
To my surprise, Linda recalled the familiar smell of bacon here in the early mornings, as the Jewish workers in the kitchen used to enjoy making themselves illicit bacon sandwiches, she confided. Then before we left, completing the sentimental pilgrimage, Linda revealed that she last walked through this hallway in 1968, causing Kweku to blush, because I suspect this was long before he was born. Mesmerised by each other, as Linda and Kweku shook hands in farewell, two worlds met for a moment, distant by birth yet united in natural sympathy and mutual curiousity.
Linda Carney in Brune St
Colour photographs by Sarah Ainslie ©
