Mount Pleasant Road

‘We’re even thinking we might have to consider Hither Green,’ I said to a friend who lives atop Telegraph Hill.

‘Blimey,’ she replied.  ‘You must be getting desperate.’

It wasn’t our fault though.  The edges of Hither Green were being picked up by the parameters of our Rightmove searches.  We’d set it for SE4 plus one mile in the optimistic hope of picking up a bargain in the opposite direction towards Peckham and East Dulwich, but it was really keen for us to consider further east.  I’ve written about how well I know this area, but truth be told I don’t know much east of the Catford Road except for Blackheath because, well, I mean there’s nothing there.

A friend of ours, however, was quite evangelical about Hither Green.  Not that they lived there, mind, but their brother did and he loved it. 

‘It could have the next property explosion,’ my girlfriend said, unconvinced.

My main experience of it was the driving test centre where my girlfriend periodically goes to have another crack and we, in the run up, practice parallel parking along its narrow streets.  It wasn’t somewhere I’d ever even bothered to consider.  I hadn’t even worked up myself to being rude about it.  It simply wasn’t on my radar and yet Rightmove kept throwing up eminently affordable, big, attractive Victorian terrace houses.

‘Okay,’ I said to the internet one afternoon after it presented a particularly fine looking place.  ‘I give in.  We’ll go and have a look.’

Immediately beforehand we had a bit of a sneak preview as we made our way through Hither Green’s streets to Manor Park merrily protesting against Lewisham Hospital’s A&E downgrading.  Thousands of people from all ages and walks of life strode, chanted and sang their way through the quiet suburban streets.  We stole off almost as soon as the march itself ended, leaving our friends to the speeches, tub-thumping Joan Ruddock and a man dressed as a lion in Millwall’s football strip to try and get a better flavour for the place.

And some lunch.

Lunch, unfortunately, proved to be a bit of a failure.  Hither Green’s two cafes were both packed, although that was presumably due to the hundreds of people like us who wouldn’t normally be there and had tired of the cause for want of a sandwich.  We got something to take away and shivered a little as we ate on the street, outside the station, looking in the window of the cutesy baby accessory shop.

We wandered around a bit more, but quickly became short of things to do.  Arriving at the house too early to simply hover we walked off for a bit more, reaching back to the main road and the tyre workshop on the corner.  Ambling back up the road we found ourselves back at the house and knocked anyway.

1999:  Jimmy had done all right for himself, in the end.  It was like a light had been switched on in his head.  He remembered clearly that hot afternoon when Ali gave him a talking to.  Told him to use his brains for once, to not get dragged down by the world.  To not make the same mistakes he had done.

Jimmy had suddenly knuckled down, working hard for the final year at school.  He ignored the taunts of his mates, of Mark and Nige and Toby, and somehow he scraped into the Sixth Form College on the Lewisham Way.  There, he was surprised to find that when he actually got to choose the learning he undertook he quite liked it.  Knowledge wasn’t dull after all.

It was late or early, Jimmy wasn’t sure which anymore.  Somewhere around six in the morning.  Everyone else had gone home a while ago.  The baby was in bed just after midnight, just after the end of the century.  In the streets around, Jimmy could hear the rumble of celebrations rolling onwards, like the new millennium would change everyone’s lives.  The table in front of him was still covered with the remains of the dinner party.  Sauce smeared plates through which paper party poppers had strewn, not quite finished glasses of wine, some spillage of the good table cloth.  Jimmy sat with his glass of whisky, his eyes closed and listened to the sounds of London abound.

University had followed.  The first one in his family, helped by a full grant, of course.  His Dad had almost burst with pride when he’d driven him up to Leeds. 

‘Politics,’ he kept saying over and over, ‘he’ll be bloody pm before I’m dead.’

He wasn’t of course.  He hadn’t even finished his second year before the bus ripped his Dad’s car in half, the old man still inside.  If only he hadn’t had one more pint, if only he hadn’t thought he could cut the junction.  If only, life was full of if onlys.  They’d even dedicated a race to him at the dog track.  Sentimental buggers drinkers can be.

Jimmy had wanted to cut and run then, but he made himself finish the course.  He felt he owned it.

The whisky burned in his chest.  The past always hurt one way or another, either with regret or with nostalgia.

After he graduated he’d disappeared for a while.  A long trip around the world.  Europe, India, Thailand, Australia, back up through South America.  Never did make it to Africa, shame.  He had a hitherto undiscovered knack for languages and managed to pick up some bar work and other bits and pieces on the way round, but most of the money had come from Dad.  No-one had known the old man’d had such a massive life insurance policy.  They’d have considered doing in him years before.  Jimmy snorted at the grimness of his humour.  His Mum had insisted though.  It was more than she or Gemma needed. 

‘Go on, see something of the world.’

Jimmy met Francesca in Mexico on a beach packed with drunken American teenagers trying to surf.  She laughed at his disparagingly snide remark and they’d gone for a drink somewhere quieter.  He wished he could remember what he said, what that killer line had been.  Not that it really mattered seeing as she’d come home with him, halfway across the world home.

London, after five years it hadn’t seemed any different.  Still a bit dangerous, still a bit full of itself, still overpriced, but it was where the work was.  He went through the civil service faststream and ended up working for the Department of Health.  They’d lived in Highbury at first, but Francesca had longed for more space, for a place of their own and so he’d come home south and the city had shifted slightly.  He’d that felt a love for it that had been missing north of the river.  It was as though he’d just needed his internal compass resetting. 

Before long he’d been a junior civil servant for six years, slowly working his way up the ladder, slowly being accepted as part of the system.  Every day he cycled to work and sat at the same desk with the same empty view of the loading bay, churning numbers, running risk assessments, paper work, endless, endless paper work.  There were days that he ached to wake and not know what the world would bring, where he would go, what the hell he was going to do next. 

But they had this house.  They had Victoria.  So tiny and pretty.  Named, not after Francesca’s great aunt, but after that woman who used to hang around outside the Chandos.  A bit of a state, but still, underneath all the smears, a stunner.  Jimmy had fallen for her when he was thirteen when she bought him and his mates cans of lager from the shop.  He’d fallen and, sometimes, it felt like he still fell, but maybe that was just life.  Up you went and downwards always took longer.

Whatever happened to Nige and Toby and Mark and, Christ, everyone he’d met in Leeds and on beaches and in cafes strewn across the world?  Jimmy was twenty-nine and his life behind him felt like a scattering of friends.  Real friends who would save your life, not like those muppets from work who’d come for dinner tonight.  Dinner, on millennium eve.  Five years ago Francesca and he would have looked for the world to change on a night like that, now they just hoped the meringue would rise properly.

Sometimes he worried that he woke up in the morning and knew how every day for the rest of his life would pan out.  But, then again, there was only one person in the world who could fix that.

‘Just need an idea,’ he said to himself and drained his whisky.  ‘Better go to bed.  Always for the best when you’re getting melancholy.’

He stumbled slightly, bumping into the chair Morris had left in the middle of the room.  Feeling slightly embarrassed by his drunkenness he switched the lights off.

‘Good night,’ he said to London and in the distance an exploding firework wished him the same.    

The agent let us in as they showed another couple out and it was indeed very nice.  Big rooms, three reception rooms, three massive bedrooms, a slightly odd rose and heart and motif running throughout that would need to be expunged in the name of good taste.  A good sized kitchen.  A nice bathroom.  The garden was a bit on the small side, but at least it had grass.

‘We’ve mainly been looking in Brockley,’ my girlfriend explained to the agent who, politely at least, appeared to be paying attention.  ‘But there’s so little on the market.  There’s not much we can afford, and what there is descends into an undignified scrap for it.’  

‘Yeah,’ he nodded, ‘we get loads of people coming here when they can’t get into Brockley.’

Hither Green, I thought, a refugee camp for failed Brockleyites.

As we walked back home, down the busy Catford Road, up through Ladywell and onto Hilly Fields, we talked about our options.  In many ways, the house made perfect sense.  It was a great size, in good condition, on an attractive street and we could comfortably afford it (within the context of everything being ridiculously overpriced).  And yet...

‘There aren’t any pubs,’ I complained, even though it wasn’t strictly true.  ‘We’d have to go to Lewisham centre or Lee for a drink.’

‘How often do we go for a drink locally?’ she countered.

‘Often enough,’ I sulked, avoiding mentioning my occasional solitary pint when she was away.  ‘More often than never.’

The thing was, it’d be a great place to have a family.  It made sense if you had kids and maybe one day we would, but what on earth were we going to do in the meantime?

‘Hither Green?’  A friend of mine who lives in Sevenoaks was aghast.  ‘I’ve been there.  Once.’  He took another swig of his beer.  ‘By mistake.  It was when the snow was down.  I’d had a couple of ales and, I don’t know, misread the departure board somehow.  I only looked up when we flew through New Cross.  First stop Hither Green.  None of the trains I need go that way.  I got off thinking I could make my way back into town.  It was a bit after eleven, I guess, and the next train to London Bridge wasn’t for half an hour.  I only had a suit jacket on.  It was bloody freezing.  I went outside, contemplating a very expensive taxi journey, but there was nothing there.  Not a soul around.  Just a light dusting of snow over some parked cars and the fuzzy light from the fried chicken shop.  I went back up onto the platform and sat there while the icy wind ripped through me, waiting for the sodding train and desperate to get the hell out of there.’