Dunoon Gardens (1)

I’ve lived around here for twelve years now and I spent a lot of that time walking the streets, a little lost inside my head.  I thought I knew every road in the area, at least by vague recollection, but I’d never heard of Dunoon Gardens before.

Which is because it kind of doesn’t exist.

Dunoon Gardens is a small run of Victorian purpose built maisonettes about halfway along Devonshire Road.  For about a dozen front doors, spanning across a side road, Devonshire Road is suspended and Dunoon Gardens exists in its place, like some sort of deposition.  On the opposite side of the road Devonshire still reigns, but for that short run a cuckoo has made its nest. 

This, as the agent was keen to point out several times, makes it exclusive.

The flat was beautiful.  It was immaculate with sash windows, original fire places, heavy wooden floorboards, meticulous coving along the ceilings.  It was very pretty, but had it had a fairly major drawback:  Space. 

The second bedroom was tiny, unsuitable for much more than a temporary home for a small child or a junk room.   The kitchen was equally weenie.  The work surfaces’ area was comparable to what I had in my studio flat.  Cooking for the two of us or entertaining people with dinner is what we do.  I’d dreamt of a big kitchen, of space to store random exotic ingredients, to not be caught out by pretentious recipes in the Guardian’s Saturday supplement.  I didn’t want to fuss around myself in a corridor to the garden getting frustrated and slapdash. 

The flat made me guilty.  Complain about lack of space felt utterly self-centred, for what did I want space for?  Just to write.  I don’t need a dedicated study – I could share with a spare bedroom or, as I currently do, occupy a corner of a kitchen-diner.  The latter works since in theory I’ll be writing, cooking or eating so I’m unlikely to be disturbed.  But still, it’s just so indulgent.  My writing, while important to me, brings in no money.  It has no real purpose – other than, arguably, stopping my mind eating itself.  Why does it warrant a space, a life, of its own?  Why is it more important that any of my girlfriend’s interests?  And yet the flat riled me because it didn’t offer anywhere obvious.

Outside, it was hard to be certain because of the dark, but the garden seemed very small too.  High fences added to the claustrophobia.  There was little room for bike storage let alone inquisitive cats.

1992:  Martin walked through the door of his flat and let the door close on the world he’d left behind.  Home, it was where he came at the end of the day to forget about everything else.

‘Hello,’ he called out.  Years ago he used to bundle through the door, all cheers and smiles knowing he’d be greeted with enthusiasm, affection even.  From the kitchen Janey grunted what he took to be an acknowledgement, but could even have been muted belittlement.  Five seconds back home and he was in trouble.

In the kitchen Janey was busy rescuing dinner.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said.

‘Do you need to be so loud when you come in?  I’ve only just got him off to sleep.’

‘Sorry, I just like you to know it’s me.’

‘Who else would it be?  Coming through the door with a bloody key?’

Martin didn’t have the strength to argue.  It was gone seven o’clock and he felt drained by the two bus journeys and a ten minute walk to travel barely four miles; sometimes he thought he may as well live on the moon.  ‘Meeting over ran. Sorry.  We just...  There never seems to be enough time.’

‘Jesus, Martin,’ Janey began to serve the food.  ‘You don’t work for the UN.  You’re not trying to establish world peace.  It’s just the local council.  In refuse management.’  She handed him his plate.  Sausages and mash again.  Greasy, thin sort of meat wrapped in a rubbery sleeve.  Lumpy potatoes and too much of them. Broccoli that was breaking apart, boiled to long, dissolving in the congealed salty gravy, dried and mixed with lukewarm water. 

They walked from the kitchen to the front room and turned the television on.  They sat on the sofa and ate while watching A Question of Sport.  Martin balanced his plate on the curve of his belly to stop the gravy sloping onto his shirt.  The programme was meaningless.  Happy chirpy washed out people answered trivial questions in a jocular buddy fashion.  It wasn’t even funny, more like mildly amusing.  They made the sort of inane comments people trapped on a six hour coach journey made to pass the time.  Life was nice like that, Martin thought.

After he’d choked down the last mouthful, he said:  ‘Can I go and take a look at him?’

‘No,’ Janey didn’t break her gaze from the television.  It was the Good Life now.  A show repeated from fifteen years previously when the world hadn’t been any better no matter how much fluff they stuck on it.  ‘He’s been a nightmare all day.  Let him sleep.’

‘I’ll just pop my head round,’ he stood up.  ‘I won’t make a sound.’

‘No.’

He sat back down again.

They spent the rest of the evening watching television.  Janey got up to wash up.  Martin got up to get a can of Skol.  He drank it even when it didn’t taste nice because it was cheap.  Janey didn’t like watching the news – ‘if I want to know what’s going on, I’ll look out the window, thanks very much’ – so after a while they went to bed.  Martin lay there in the darkness and willed sleep to come.  His dreams, at least, were in colour even if nothing else was.     

My girlfriend liked it, though.  She was seduced by its prettiness and ceded to my vague, ill-defined objections, perhaps recognising that I wouldn’t bring myself to verbally lament a room for a desk of my own.  It also carried what felt like a hefty price tag too.  We’d have to buy into its exclusivity, to become a member of a select club of residents rebelling against the rest of the world.  Or Forest Hill at any rate. 

Still, we didn’t make an offer and I was relieved because there was more at work in my head han just a concern about space.

I have an irrational dislike of Devonshire Road.  I always have and Dunoon Gardens may pretend to not be part of it they are, really.  It forms a link between Honor Oak Park and Forest Hill full of scuttling traffic bouncing over sharp humps in the road; a deceptively long, mish-mash of a street that frequently feels bleaker than its neighbours. 

Honor Oak Park, the nearest station, is in zone three while Brockley and St John’s are the last stops in zone two on different lines.  It’s a psychological thing, but the further in you are the more public transport choices you have.  Out there, it’s one route or the bus.  Engineering works could leave you stuck at home for a weekend, scratching at the pristine walls.  Catford is just about reachable by foot, but the unpleasantness of the South Circular means that you’d have to be absolutely desperate to try.  The chances are you’d sulk it out at home, getting rankled at each other.  This isn’t just theory; I’ve lived around the corner before.  I liked that flat on Whatman Road, but I did feel out on a limb, at the edges of the city despite the ten miles plus of suburbia still to go before you hit the M25.

The Evening Standard loves Honor Oak Park – to the extent that it makes you suspicious about whether a member of the editorial team lives there.  It’s been talking it up at the new East Dulwich for years, full of yummy mummies and gastro pubs, delis and boutiques, except it isn’t really.  The parade of shops is too short to match Lordship Lane and they keep changing.  Except the Estate Agents, the newsagents and Gogi’s wines the whole parade has changed in the eight years since I last lived there.  In many ways that’s not surprising, but a high level of churn implies business optimism rather than a sustainable model.  Good pubs, in particular, are in short supply.  The Honor Oak Tavern over towards Blythe Hill is a great pub, if a long walk from Devonshire Road and the other two leave a lot to be desired.  When I lived there the Tavern had yet to be rescued from boarded up windows guaranteed fight hell and so I used to frequent the General Napier even though it too was terrible just mildly less threatening.  Its main positives were that I could see it out the back window from my flat and the single quirk of being a meeting point for a VW Camper van club meant occasionally bizarre conversations by beardy types, before beards were cool, could be overheard.  The Scottish landlord, whose face was a mix of burst blood vessels and too short a fuse, so I heard, disappeared one night with the meagre takings and was never heard of again.  It’s that sort of place.  Even those supposed to be charge bugger off the moment they get a better idea.

Besides, I mean, yummy mummies?  Spare me.  I didn’t say any of this at the time though, which turned out to be a bit of a mistake.  

Tyrwhitt Road

Walking back from our first visit to St John’s Vale we saw a cluster of three small and pink balloons outside the new build block of flats at the end of our road.  On the site of a former stone masons’ yard, opposite the Talbot, we’d watched the building go up from the safety of the boozer, casting our suspicious glances over the tops of pint glasses for the previous eighteen months.  The exterior was a mildly offensive faux Victoriana that attempted to yet failed to pay homage to the buildings surrounding it.

Despite already being confused and on edge with each other by where we’d been ten minutes previously, we decide to blag our way in to their sales launch.  Since we were the only people without an appointment, buggering up their system, they show us around but only grudgingly.  Why did we even bother given that we had no real intention of buying one of the flats?  Mainly it was out of innate nosiness.  

We weren’t interested for a variety of reasons, not least the advice from our mortgage advisor who warned that the glut of new flats being thrown up in Lewisham, mainly in the massive Loampit Vale redevelopment, meant that lenders were wary.  They were worried that the market was being over saturated, that not enough of the single and young couple professionals working along the DLR at Canary Wharf who the flats are marketed at, want to live on the main road in Lewisham.   And they’re probably right.

Inside, the flats were almost as irritating as they are from the exterior.  Despite some clever storage solutions, it just grated.  Hyper modern decor:  all recessed lighting, LED bulbs at ankle height in the kitchen, electric points in the middle of the wall for your dominating TV screen giving a cinema experience in a room where you won’t get that L shaped leather corner sofa in.  All that battleship grey paint was at odds with our g-plan wooden furniture and the free sofa which, I think, originally came from Laura Ashley.  That sort of design, it was meant for someone else.

The flats themselves were narrow.  The corridors were so restrictive that we couldn’t even pass the agent easily.  She pressed her clipboard to her chest and her glasses slipped down her heavily made-up nose as I edged past.  The second bedroom felt too tight to get a double bed in.  She reassured me otherwise, but even if one did fit there’d be no room for anything else.  Outside the communal hall lighting never switched off counterbalancing its green double glazing credentials.  The garden had been sacrificed for bins and a bike rack.  There was no greenery at all, leaving it as sterile as the beige and grey bathrooms, like something from a dystopian sci-fi film.  Christ, even the plastic and steel bike shed held less than one bike per flat.

2028:  Florence padded bare foot across her living room and bounced the Google engine to her favourite gossip site.  The woman who appeared on the wall screen was dressed in the latest Chinese fashions, sharp angles to her tiny dress and lip stick that went beyond the edges of her mouth.  Florence thought that she looked mildly ridiculous, but that was part of her job.  After all, who could take someone seriously when their career was solely around recounting which of the nu-Eastern rich fell out of a nightclub that morning and in which fake-reality star’s arms we were draped?  Florence turned down the volume, the woman’s nasal voice was irritatingly high pitched, and messaged her sister on her palmtop with the pictures that told their own story filling up the room’s background.

Still, Florence thought, at least the woman (whatever her name was) had a career to be mocked.  Florence hadn’t worked in almost six months.  Two degrees, four internships and what had the last two years of paid employment given her?  Redundancy the day before the company had to actually pay her off.  Just when winter was coming too, when it was about to get cold and she couldn’t afford to run the heating after the dismal summer had meant that the panels on her roof hadn’t given their share back to the grid.  She shouldn’t really be running the Google engine; electricity was just as expensive, but she had to have some stimulus, didn’t she?  There had to be something.

She glanced out the window.  It wasn’t as though she could even go out.  Eight thirty and already deeply dark already.  They’d stopped running the street lighting earlier in the year.  The dark made her nervous.  All sorts of people roamed the streets amongst the gloom, or so MailViews told her.  People who had never paid for school, never looked for a job, the feral underclass.  Uninterested in anything other than watching PremierBall and drinking super-strong cider by the bottle, they were waiting to catch nice girls like Florence to turn into baby machines.  Even if she was brave enough to go out, there was nothing to do.  The Norwegian guy who lived downstairs was interested in the area’s history and he said the flats opposite used to a drinking house, somewhere people would go to be with their friends and enjoy their evening free time.  Imagine that!  Now it was just flats, like the run of buildings near the station which the exteriors of which looked a bit like the shops she remembered from her childhood.  Yeah, there was nothing but flats and empty offices in the city of London.

Her sister hadn’t replied.  She’d probably run out of credit again and would have to get a new palmtop from another supplier, someone who’d give her a premium contract without checking her history.  It felt like nothing worked anymore, like there was nothing to hope for, nothing to dream you could change.  They just tweeted about doing nothing and watching nothing on the Google engine.  They were nothing people living nothing lives; every day it felt like there was nothing more worthwhile to do other than go to bed.

This isn’t for us.  It’s for the girl in her early twenties going round with her Dad.  It’s a stepping stone not a home.  He’s going to buy it for her while she settles into her first job and trudges in and out of Docklands on the East London Line out of Brockley (rather than walking down to Lewisham, I mean she’s just not that sort of girl).  She’ll join the thrusting crowd, panicking to get through Canada Water fast enough to reach the Jubilee Line, gnashing their teeth at the single escalator congestion.  Eventually she’ll tire of never having space, of not having anywhere other than somewhere to put her head down alone.  Maybe she’ll meet someone, pool resources and move out to Bromley. 

We want somewhere to live in long-term.  We’re too old for one-bed tininess and too poor for what we really want.  It’s frustrating, but not as much as the split level flat on the top floor where half the second bedroom is sacrificed to a gratuitous en suite bathroom.  A room full of dark browns and more grey tiles.  It has a rainstorm showerhead and bulbs positioned to flatter around the circumference of the mirror, but no windows.  Its inclusion left the actual bedroom an unsatisfying shape.  The corners were cut out; the sloping roof limited where you could put wardrobes or book shelves or, hell, even stand up. 

‘I don’t get it,’ my girlfriend said looking out at the world passing by, at the late morning drinkers congregating in the winter morning sunshine outside the Talbot, pints in hand, cigarette trails lisping around their heads.  ‘Why are the windows so small?  One of the nice things about the houses on this street is all the tall windows bringing in the light.’

‘Ah, I dunno,’ said the agent unhelpfully and before I could interject with some hastily invented theory about the cost of glass and the greater strain it places on the supporting brickwork, or even to get an higher energy efficiency rating, she had a go at answering anyway:  ‘I think it’s ‘cos it’s a conservation zone.  Yeah, that must be it.  Conservation zone.  Strict rules.’  Which like the rest of the building - where there had been an opportunity to do something interesting, to be something unique and is instead a poor imitation of something else - doesn’t really make sense.

St John's Vale

This was our first non-Brockley viewing, the first place outside of SE4.  St John’s is, however, actually our closest railway station, living as we currently do on the Lewisham borders of Brockley.  That part of SE8 is another Victorian conservation zone, less grand than the tall houses along Brockley’s wide avenues yet more ostentatious that the two up-two down terraces of Crofton Park.  St John’s was some sort of late nineteenth century island now isolated by the encircling seas of the Lewisham Way, Brookbank Road, the light industry estate and the Deptford Highway.  Pretty is as pretty does though and while the area boasts some lovely looking houses it lacks any amenities aside from one, not particularly tempting pub.  The station might be convenient, but the infrequent service means that it’s only useful when you’re heading for a specific train.

All generally slightly anonymous then, but, for reasons which can’t really be explained, I had a gut feeling, a nagging from the inside that it felt right.  It was almost as though I wanted it to be right before I’d even gone through the door.  I wanted it to be easy.

It was our first experience of an open day.  So poplar did the agents rate the property that they expected it to sell in one hour on one morning.  Like I said, we were still getting to grips with how all this worked and hadn’t yet clocked that this was just another trick to increase the impression of demand.

It was yet another rental being sold up.  A two bedroom house sitting atop a basement flat, with a narrow thin strip of a garden where you could stand, throw a stone and it’d, maybe, land on the station.  It was also our first disagreement.  I liked it.  My girlfriend thought it was disgusting.  I thought it had potential – although I hated myself for using that phrase.  She couldn’t see past the scuzz, the battered kitchen, the deeply aggressive turquoise of the bathroom, the blackened sheets which looked as though they hadn’t been washed in months on sagging beds, grease patches on the walls above crumpled and limo pillows.  We knew we weren’t buying any of this stuff, but the grime made her skin crawl as though it was contagious.

Just as we were leaving the garden I noticed a crack in the wall.  A trench that ran up the exterior, nestled in the crutch of the L between the main building and the entrance porch sticking out the side.  I took a picture of it with my phone and emailed it to my Dad.  He’s a surveyor so I wanted his opinion on whether it was a problem or not.  The bigger, more immediate problem, though, was our disagreement.  The conversation spiralled out of control until we said things we regret and, inevitably like all arguments go, suggested that the whole enterprise was a mistake.

I mopped for a while, upset at upsetting her, irritated by the whole thing, the needlessness of the falling out.  Even after we’d apologised and made up, it was still there, dragging on for a few days, a point of contention neither of us was willing to entirely cede.  Eventually the following Friday we sat upstairs in the Talbot and agreed to wander down past the house.  In the still of the early winter evening there was a tranquillity to the quiet streets that belayed their relative centralness; an oasis of calm under the shadows the bare branches forming a canopy over the road opposite the house.  The silence gave us a resoluteness, a willingness to find a way through - provided the structure was sound.

1957.  Hutchinson shivered despite the roaring fire.  He sat in the stiff backed armchair he’d dragged closer to the licking flames in the hearth and shivered.  His tea sat on the incidental table to his right, the spoon still flecked with tiny grains of sugar that hadn’t dissolved.  It was too was stone cold.

That feeling of gnawing dread had been with him for over a week.  He’d been unable to shake it, like it would be with him until his deathbed.  He should have just ignored it, stayed inside with Meg and the dinner, but how is one supposed to react when it sounds like the world is collapsing. 

During the war he’d been in intelligence, a backroom boy.  He’d not been bloodied by field work and so nothing had prepared him for what he saw that evening.  With the sound of steel bending, a creaking groan that wrapped itself around his brain, in the air Hutchinson had walked out of the house and up the hill to the railway bridge.  It was foggy, a deep densely damp fog that made your lungs wet.  His breath came in soggy splurges.  In the distance there was shouting and the flickering of lamp lights down on the tracks.    

The fog shifted, just for a moment, as though it had yawned, and through the gap he saw the crumpled train mess; the split tender, the burning carriage.  Shapes seemed to have been thrown clear, split out of the carriage and scattered across the sleepers.  Quickening his pace he caught up with another man heading down to the railway.  It was that chap Chadwick he’d met in the pub a couple of times saying something about going to help.

  As he got closer the carnage became less clear not more.  The shapes on the ground looked as though they should have been people, but they were incomplete; twisted at impossible angles.  The train was not just one train, but two.  A steam engine spun from the track, an electric unit in front compacted too small.  The steam locomotive lay amongst the wreckage of the pillars that supported bridge for the other line into Lewisham.  The aching steel creased moan continued in a soaring crescendo, rising and dipping again, soaring and then stretching out into silence coupled with the regular chugging of the train coming towards it.  Finally, the bridge collapsed, tearing itself down on top of the stumbling survivors and the groaning was replaced by the screaming of brakes as the train above careered towards the open maw and all Hutchinson could do was stare.

Hutchinson’s shiver bought him back to his parlour and the fire.  He looked into the flames and wished he’d never gone outside.  He wanted life to wash away the memory of the unmoving bodies and worse those that had writhed in agony.  He wanted to forget the dark red stains on his hands.  He wanted the wind to blow away the musty smell of death that still hung around his house.  He wanted to not see the train heading straight for the drop every time he closed his eyes.  He’d never felt so helpless, he’d never felt so cold.

My Dad said that the crack might be something, it might be nothing, but given that work was being undertaken on the railway bridge not a hundred metres away it needed looking at.  He suggested I return and take more pictures.

The agents weren’t so keen even when I told them why.  ‘It’s nothing, just the plaster.’

‘It’s on the exterior of the building.’

‘The vendor hasn’t informed us of any structural problems.  It wouldn’t be in his interest to cover it up,’ he said offering far too many reasons at once to be believable.  ‘My boss lives around the corner and he hasn’t suffered any subsidence.’

‘This isn’t a negotiating position.  If there’s a problem, I can’t afford to fix it so I’ll be out.  If it’s nothing, I’m interested in making an offer.  I just want to take some more photos and get an indicative opinion.’

‘You want to see it again?  No-one sees anywhere more than once these days.’

Eventually, almost a fortnight later, they let me back in.  My girlfriend didn’t come.  I went in and took my pictures, including of the interior where I noted that the crack was reflected on the inside.  The agent went to move his car from where he’d illegally parked, leaving me alone in the empty house.  I took the opportunity for a bit more of nose around.  The tenants had clearly tidied up before our previous visit and their normal living state was even grimmer.  Several days’ worth of dirty dishes were across the kitchen surfaces.  The bedrooms were filled with scattered underwear.  In every corner, in every room was a set mouse trap.  On the way out, I noticed the state of the flat below.  Bars on the windows.  The letter box hanging off the door.  Stacked torn rubbish bags just outside the entrance, their contents spilling out onto the steps up to street level.

‘Don’t bother,’ my Dad said.  ‘Maybe it’s nothing and you’d need a structural engineer’s report to be sure, but it looks like the entrance hall is coming away from the main building.  It might need underpinning.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with it,’ protested the agent when I passed this on.  Shortly afterwards we noticed the asking price being lowered.  The morning of the day when I write this, I saw a to let sign outside.  The photos on the agent’s website were the same ones used to tempt us.  No-one had bought the bluff.  The railway works have almost finished, but the house still sits at an awkward angle.

Montague Avenue

This flat was expensive, but the experience with Marnock Road persuaded us that we just needed to start seeing places to understand what money could buy.  We’d been looking on the internet, but the stories those pictures told wasn’t necessarily an honest one. 
Case in point:  Montague Road, commanded a higher sale price than its size suggested due its prime location overlooking Hilly Fields.  It appealed because the road where our rented flat sat sprang off the same park.  We were happy there. Minimal change was good. 
It was another place currently being rented, although this time just two bedrooms sharing and in significantly better state.  The tenants had gone out for morning, no doubt irritated at being evicted by a landlord cashing in their chips for who knew what reason.  They left behind a neat and tidy flat, but with some odd signs.  A phenomenal amount of IT equipment, as though they were running a dotcom business, servers and multiple laptops, PCs and Macs, and, in the kitchen, seventy two cans of Strongbow.
It was nice enough, with a phenomenal view across the park which even in the early winter morning grey had an appealing hue to it.  Out the back was a nice garden.  So much green space one almost felt in the countryside and on the slope of a hill.  However, what the pictures had disguised was the strange shape of the bedrooms.  Double beds had been shoe-horned in, stuffed into ill fitting corners with pits of unusable space around them.  It’s not like I really believe in such things, but if I did then the feng-shui was definitely out of kilter.  I could see us living there, always compromising with the space’s restrictions.
1890:  Leonard looked out across the perfect spring vista settling on the morning.  The area had changed so much in such a short space of time.  He remembered, as a boy, passing through Brockley on his way to Sevenoaks with his parents to see Great Aunt Maud.  Back then it had been nothing but a few farms.  The houses had gone up so quickly, filling in the fields of summer strawberries; the brickworks which should have been visible just over the hummock his parlour look across had been demolished to make way the sculptured grass. 
The farm hands were all gone, replaced by the new moneyed middle classes, people like
Leonard, who worked for shipping magnates or in the city and wanted to live amongst space and clear air, away from the warrens of London.
Elsa was upstairs resting and, as it was a Sunday, Leonard had given the maids their leave.  Young Arthur, the pride of Leonard’s heart, was desperate to go outside and, curiously he thought, Leonard deemed to accompany him.  Arthur was only three years old, but already his endless energy, his growing determination of right meant that Leonard knew he’d someday make his country proud too. 
Leonard followed the tyke as he toddled straight across the road and out onto the public lawn.  The sun was strong and made the air artificially warm.  Two ladies, the widow of that fool who never came back from Argentina and her sister, sat underneath a parasol and watching the changing straggles of cloud hang in the still sky.
Arthur tripped and bounced on the ground.  Leonard looked down, but didn’t move.  His hands remained clasped in the small of his back.  Arthur’s lip wobbled, but then he clambered, silently, to his feet.
‘Good,’ Leonard said, to himself.  His boy, his Arthur, would come home.    
Remembering my antagonism towards estate agents when we’d been looking to rent, my girlfriend briefed me as we walked across Hilly Fields:  ‘Be friendly, don’t be aggressive.  We need these people on our side. They’ve got to think that we’re a nice couple.  They have to want to help us.’
‘Bollocks,’ I may well have replied.  ‘All they want is whoever can offer the most money for the place.’
The estate agent looked about twelve. 
As we emerged from the cellar which spanned the entirety of the double fronted house he said, obviously:  ‘Plenty of storage, as you can see.’ 
Another two couples were also sniffing around the flat; competition for his affections.  We were like the last few men in the student nightclub after the lights had come up and he was the only girl left, waiting for someone who promised they could get one more drink. 
Remember, be friendly, I thought.
‘Yeah, great.’  What’s the most impractical thing you could want to keep there?  ‘Ideal for surf gear.’
‘Are you sure we don’t like it?’ my girlfriend asked as we headed to our next appointment.  ‘I mean,’ she snorted ‘it’s perfect for all your surf gear.  All those wetsuits and the couple of boards you don’t have.  It’d just be great.’  I didn’t say anything as we continued our way. 
‘Dude.’

Marnock Road

It was a bit silly, to be honest.  It was never going to work out for us, but my girlfriend had been exploring alternatives to buying a flat we could just move into.  These included property auctions and repossessions as well as wrecks that needed extensive renovation.  My complete absence of DIY skills any more sophisticated than those required to put up pictures (and even that’s been known to go wrong) didn’t seem to put her off.  She likes a bargain and what were the reality's limitations to stand in her way?

Marnock Road was two of those things.  It was a repossession and a wreck, but it was a four bedroom house for under £300 grand which seemed ridiculously cheap.  It was right next to Crofton Park station and a couple of hundred metres away from Mr Lawrence’s wine bar and Jam Circus, a bar with occasional pretentions but generally a good vibe, as well as the parts of the high street that don’t sell alcohol. 

The agent offered to be ‘completely honest’ and pointed out that it had Japanese Knotweed growing in the garden.   That didn’t sound too promising.  In my former life as a sales rep for construction media I had several clients who cleared brownfield sites.  The best solution for Japanese Knotweed seemed to napalm.  We went to see it anyway, that we knew it was too early, we weren’t done planning, but something had to be first and it might as well be something too good to be true.

It was early November and already getting dark by the time we arrived.  The plastic front door to the tall old Victorian house had a hole where the window used to be.  There were no electrics inside, nor water, nor gas which was something of a surprise.  In hindsight, if your property has been repossessed then obviously you’ll stop paying the utility bills sometime before they come to drag you out into the street, but the sight of red and white hazard tape strapped to the boiler, the cooker, the taps, the toilet made it feel sinister, as though a crime had taken place there.  I’d arrived on my bike so we used its lights to try and peer through the gloom, like detectives looking for fragments of bone amongst the dust.  She took the front, white light, I the rear, red which added to the things I saw out the corner of my eye, casting devilish shadows.

2006:  Piotr lay on his bed and smoked.  In the small room the fug clustered around the lampshade hanging from the ceiling.  The shade covered a light which no longer worked.  The only light he had came from a small bedside lamp scavenged from Deptford market and the fuzz that eked through the window from the street outside and the station opposite. 

‘The next training approaching platform one will be the...’ the electrified woman’s voice paused for effect and Piotr joined in, ‘...delayed eighteen-thirty-six to Ramsgate.’  It was dusky out as people shuffled around their lives.  He liked to watch the trains drift in and out, onwards to their destinations.  Places like Ramsgate, places in the countryside that he’d never have time to see, but that he liked to imagine.  Ramsgate, it sounded like an old market town, atop a hill, renowned for its cattle.  He couldn’t think what it would be like in the twenty-first century.  Down below the passengers disembarked and some fluttered down his street, their umbrellas bearing the mist of the early autumn rain.

Next door a stereo kicked in.  Screeching guitars of the sort favoured by teenage boys.  A brief bark of guttural vocals and Piotr’s room shuddered.  He used to bang the wall, but had stopped once the plaster felt as though it would fold under his fist.

‘Michael!’ something almost unrecognisable as human squawked from lower in the house and the music dropped to a faintly menacing growl.  Eighteen seconds, he thought.  Quicker than usual.

Soon it would be time to go for a drink.  The three of them, united by country and circumstance, would go to the local bar where most ignored them, but some gave distrustful glances for no other reason than their accent and the paint splatters on their clothes.  Sometimes it made him want speak to them, to try and understand how he threatened them, but usually he was just glad they had a table, alone in the corner.

A car pulled up outside.  Heavy bass throbbed so much that the very tyres struggled to grip the tarmac.  Inside were three boys shovelling greasy food into their mouths.  The windows were lowered and the music’s intensity grew.  The boy from next door went out, the door slamming behind him, his music still rumbling away in the bedroom.  The boy in the passenger seat dropped his foil food container out of the window.

‘No,’ came the screech from inside and out she bustled, the Mother brimming with righteous indignation.  ‘You’re takin’ a liberty.’  She picked the foil up and then tried to stuff it back through the window.  There was much shouting from inside the car as they tried to resist before the driver could get the vehicle into gear and away.  She stood in the street, foil at her feet, arms folded in triumph of having tried.

Piotr sat down on the bed again and lit another cigarette.

The knotweed was, apparently, more or less under control, thanks to the plastic netting traipsed across the front garden.  More problematic was the sagging joist in the roof, the unfortunate bounce to the lounge floor, the cracks in the plaster skipping through the floors, the missing slates from the lower roof, visible from the upper stories, the damp seeping through the walls and the fact that the dining room had been converted into a bedroom with an ensuite.  Over the months we would become more used to trying to wrap your head around something’s potential, but as a first look it was terrifying.

‘It’s a shame,’ the agent said.  ‘It’s a really handsome road, but for some reason many of the houses are really run down.’  That particular place was a classic example of a greedy landlord.  Divide the property into bedsits, each with a lockable door and limited shared facilities, rents run relatively cheaply on an individual basis, but still cumulatively more than could be got for a family in the house.   The profits margin increased further by letting it run to rack and ruin.  Every time a tenant moves out, leaving their room a state, the deposit is kept and then the next one moves in with no repair done.  Cracked windows, peeling paint, missing panels in doors.  It was a house that had missed being owned, thrown from temporary resident to the drifter passing through.  It had been pimped out and it showed all the wear, the dead-glow behind the eyes, the track marks on the wrists, of never being cared for.

A builder had already made a cash offer which was being considered by the vendor.  We hadn’t got to grips with how repossessions worked, but, it was obvious that they’d sweep in, renovate it again into separate bedsits, sell it back to a landlord and the whole mess would begin again.  That sort of thing never ends, like an addiction it just keeps gnawing for more until there’s nothing left to give.

Home (a prologue)

‘I really want a place of my own, our own,’ my girlfriend declared around the time we were hunting for our current, rented, flat.  ‘Not somewhere rented, but somewhere that’s actually ours.  As soon as possible.’

Ah, property ownership.  So bourgeois, so desperate, so futile, so fundamental to the greed fuelled mess Western society finds itself in where the expectation of a hell of a lot for absolutely nothing caused a rupture.  Five years later we’re still, at best, bailing out the blood from the sinking vessel.  All these somewhat confrontational and overly righteous opinions I’ve spouted before and, indeed, they were easy to say, especially when it wasn’t an option.  After being financially burnt down in 2008, although for different reasons, I spent the next three years clawing my way back into solvency and reasonably well-paid employment.  Did I really want to throw away that sudden security, the freedom I’d only just regained of not questioning the purchase of every packet of crisps, every cup of coffee, every pint by flushing all my money into bricks and mortar?

Was I prepared to take the risk?

So we argued.  I called them conversations with differing opinions, but she was right.  They were arguments mainly because my ideals don’t always reflect reality.  It became clear pretty quickly that this wasn’t conditional.  If I wanted to be with her, then I needed to adhere to the plan and I wanted to be with her more than I wanted to be right.

‘I’m going to be in trouble when the revolution comes,’ I said.  ‘They take the traitors first.  Where do I sign-up?’

We had a saving schedule.  X amount every month, a third or so of take home pay, away it went.  I went back to debating every purchase.  I kept a countdown of my expenditure for each month in a pad of paper helping me stick to budget.  We expected to be ready sometime in mid-2013.  In the meantime, she began to obsess over Rightmove, poring over properties trying to picture us moving between the photographs.  Some were outright fantasies, some were realistic targets, but her research showed that the East London Line extension, which placed Brockley for the first time on the tube map, had not only seen too many film crews shooting programmes for Channel 4 about how it was the last secret of centralish London and a return of the Evening Standard’s intermittent campaigns for Honor Oak Park to be the new East Dulwich and Deptford the new Shoreditch, but it also meant that prices were actually rising faster than we could save.

‘Don’t worry,’ I cooed, not least because I wasn’t fully paying attention, blindly assuming that:  ‘It’ll be fine.’

She couldn’t help it though.  Part of her reasoning for departing West London and then (seemingly successfully) petitioning all her friends to join us was its affordability.  I’d tempted her with flats about £250K, houses within touching distance and suddenly every bastard was migrating from their Islingtons, their Claphams, their Willesden Greens and heading to SE4 and its lovely Victorian avenues, open park land which makes it feel both on the edge and close to the centre of the city and sense of community. 

My resistance, or feet dragging at any rate, was useless, though.  It was either have no idea what we were talking about over dinner or start indulging in lunchtime Rightmove searches too.  What, I began to wonder, would it be like to live in a flat like that?  

Too late, I’d followed her in and from November through to February we were to become dull, property bores, obsessives who couldn’t find within their personalities anything else to talk about, bemoaning our first world problems, sellers’ greed and the eyeball gouging panic to be first through the door to anyone with the misfortune to be in earshot.  But, and here’s the reason why: it was hard work.  It took up almost all our free time, both the doing and the thinking, the discussions and the falling for places.  It was heart-breaking.  There were tears and harsh words too late at night.  There were moments when we thought we had it and too many when it felt like nothing would ever work out.  There were times when we just wanted our lives back. 

Yes, buying a property is a privileged position to be in and it is a process that billions of people around the world will never even start to worry about because there are far more important things to keep ahead of first.  Sure, even when you’ve fought your way to the front of the queue and someone deems to sell you a place, you’re still no better off, just switching a landlord for the bank only with more maintenance responsibilities.   But there are also real people behind every house, every flat.  From the moment it was built to when we wandered around and were dismissive of someone’s decisions to mount moulds taken of them while pregnant on the wall.  Somewhere, buried underneath the hype and the panic and the abstract notions of ladders and security, there are stories to be told. 

These are some of them.

Ziggy and all his friends.

‘You’ve got pretty good music taste,’ said the girl rummaging through the sixteen year old me’s music collection.  She wasn’t quite a girlfriend, but she would be, sort of, before too long, for a while.  ‘But I don’t really get the whole David Bowie thing.’

In fairness, maybe the industrial growl of the Black TieWhite Noise cassette she was holding wasn’t the easiest way to understand Bowie, but the idea of being able to dismiss someone whose music was crucial to the way my teenage hormones were interpreting the world was incomprehensible.  ‘Don’t really get the whole David Bowie thing?  But Bowie just is; he’s everything,’ I could have replied, but didn’t, mainly because I was too interested in doing other things with her than arguing.

It feels as though Bowie has always been a part of my cultural landscape.  I probably first heard him through someone’s older brother, but I’d have been aware of who he was.  He was a name, a concept.  Oh, yeah, David Bowie. 

The late eighties and early nineties were not a great time to be into music.  In retrospect there were pioneering albums like Soul2Soul, Massive Attack and Sceamdelica, but for most early teenage boys the charts were dominated by rave-fail dross the Shamen, baggy shoegazing landfill and endless Stock Aiken and Waterman pap machines.  On the horizon were Blur and Suede, but with no internet the best we could really do was Bon Jovi whose bombastic faux cowboy bravado already sounded false.  Or we could go back in time.  I’d already been muddling around with AC/DC, Talking Heads and Madness, much to the confusion of my school friends, who couldn’t understand my derision of Terrorvision, but then someone played me David Bowie and my thirteen year old brain was immediately convinced that he was all that pop music could be.

Being of little money and not much more savvy, I probably asked my parents for ‘some David Bowie’ for an upcoming birthday.  They dutifully obliged, buying me his latest release, the aforementioned Black Tie White Noise.  Neither they nor I would have realised that Bowie was following the same rules as Bob Dylan, Neil Young and anyone else trying to sustain an extended career in pop music, namely that the majority of the eighties and early nineties output was either dreadful or wildly experimental to try and avoid being bland beyond belief.  Black Tie White Noise is, strangely, somehow both. 

‘Hmmm,’ I thought to myself, in my bedroom with my little black tape deck, ‘this isn’t quite what I’d been expecting.’  But I persevered and from somewhere I acquired a second hand copy of one the numerous Bowie compilations, Changesbowie I think, and the hits of the seventies made it all make sense again, somehow driving straight into a timeless teenage sense of uselessness and triumph all bound up.

By the time I was fifteen I was wearing out a cassette of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars whilst completing the half-dozen paper rounds I did to earn money to buy music and comics.  On I would stride,  my walkman rolling with the sway of my hip and in my head the grand scope of the coming apocalypse, bands who could change the world all wrapped up in a furious rhythm and nonsensical lyrics distracted from the suburban tedium of the free Solihull Journal.  Even now, Rock and Roll Suicide makes me think of one bright Sunday morning, shortly after I’d discovered beer, crossing the road and blinking in the haze, thinking that it, if it could be about anyone, then it could also be about me, there, stuck in that moment.

Bowie’s sudden return, almost as though from the dead, earlier this year shouldn’t really have surprised anyone.  Yes, there was something dignified in his apparent retirement and there wasn’t any shock that a man who once solely sustained himself on milk, red peppers and cocaine, eventually found his body giving up and suffering an on-stage heart attack, but the ability to do the unexpected has been Bowie’s stock-in-trade for his entire career.  Indeed, nor is it a surprise that at a still relatively youthful sixty-six Bowie would want to give up the career he had to fight so hard to get started.

Indeed, Bowie wouldn’t be a pop star in the twenty-first century.  He’d have gone mad and blown it.  Or madder and blown it more permanently, I should say given his occasional lapse into Nazi fuelled megalomania.  Before the ego rocketed, though, he floundered for years, going through different incarnations of himself and novelty singles with various versions of his band until eventually scoring a hit single with Space Oddity and then, promptly, messing up the subsequent album.  Even the magnificent Changes from the, with hindsight, brilliant yet ignored album Hunky Dory failed to chart in the UK.  These days, Bowie’s twitter feed and YouTube hype would have seen him implode with self-imposed expectation.  Instead, back when there was privacy and memories weren’t supported by Wikipedia, through a Nietzsche superman style self will and stomping tunes he rebirthed himself as an alien rock-god.  Two albums of phenomenal cultural zeitgeist success and, bored already, Bowie killed off Ziggy and the Spiders, live at the end of a documented concert, and transformed himself into a plastic soul prince.  Fame’s fame nearly broke him, though, and he retreated into dystopian weariness to create the Berlin trilogy of albums that defined music for the remainder of the twentieth century (and somehow ended up being the soundtrack to last year euphoria fuelled Olympics).

‘You obsess over misery,’ a girl once said to me.  ‘It’s like you’re desperate for it all to end badly.’  I think she probably meant melancholy or being morose rather than misery.  I was rather depressed when I knew her, run down by a life that hadn’t met the dreams of my youth, but, still, it’s a handy bit of dialogue to borrow.  I was going to write that Bowie kind of obsesses over misery too, but I’ve just realised that he doesn’t.  Bowie obsesses over chaos and disorder.  Rebel-Rebel and Suffragette City may be packed full of rock n roll exuberance, but the former is on a 1984 coming into existence concept album. Cheery and ordered it ain’t.

I think we forget how much of a mess the seventies were.  Political terrorism in Western Europe, opposite ends of the left-right spectrum blowing each other up in capital cities, the rest of the world joining us in Armageddon fear as East and West kept their finger on the launch button, the oil crisis, monetary implosion, the three day week, intense industrial unrest, the mourning of the sixties social revolution’s death when everyone needed to grow up and get a job but there weren’t any left.  Bowie’s music thrilled off the back of all this, dragging us wailing and singing into the glorious disastrous end.  The world was checking out, but its finale would be a wonderful extravaganza of light and music.

Christ, when all that stopped no wonder he didn’t know how to tackle decades which weren’t supposed to exist.

Then it all went a bit wrong, didn’t it?  Let’s Dance’s unashamed pop may be unjustly scorned, but what followed, stadium filling chart fluster, ill-advised MickJagger collaborations, the garage rock boredom of Tin Machine, forays into drum and bass (Battle of Britain is a good, if not great, single, but no-one needs to listen to the whole of Earthling) and then finally, the light shines on old age and a respectability as a narrator of life and times with aging albums. 

He found some sort of centre, but, maybe, as the twenty-first century has marched on that centre has rocked.  Maybe we’re not out of the apocalypse woods yet.  The Next Day may, sort of, suggest that Bowie thinks he’s only entering his second phase, but that judgement needs more hindsight than the hysteria that’s gathering around it now, still, really, who’d have it any other way?  Fuck it.  If it’s going to fail, better to do so in splendour than never to even try, right?

‘I have an idea for a novel,’ I remember telling a fellow Bowie fan, aged fifteen, on the way home from school.  ‘Well a vague idea. I want to write something based around Ziggy Stardust, but a more literal interpretation of the songs.  Five Years.  Moonage Daydream.  Lady Stardust.  All woven together.  The end of the world.  A teenage boy and girl, no-one’s too sure which is which.  Guitars.  Aliens.  Sex.  Death.’

‘That’s my idea,’ he shouted indignantly and, truthfully, I wasn’t even surprised.

Bowie’s Ziggy albums speak to the excited teenage in all of us.  If you let it, the rest of his work follows you through your life.  Just remember to skip Never Let Me Down.

A couple of years later, I saw the girl again at a party, one of those teenage parties where the air of someone’s parents’ lounge is fogged with cigarette smoke drifting back in through the open windows and the last drizzle from upturned cans of beer trails onto the carpet already muddied by the overturned pot plant.  All far from true chaos yet also a long way from politely sitting around the dinner table with red wine - the sort of party I’ve become used to these days.  The music was always more important when you’re young.  It was grunge’s last days, Britpop’s peak and the coming of ubiquitous house-techno-rock fusion, so I was mildly surprised to note that someone had put Bowie on.  As Starman reached its arms around the shoulder possible allusion to casual sex with inter-galactic visitors zenith, the girl from my bedroom turned to me and said: ‘Oh, maybe I do get it after all.’  But by then it was already far too late.

Six not necessarily obvious Bowie songs for you to enjoy:

1)  All the Young Dudes. Seriously at one point Bowie had so much creativity oozing out of him he gave this song to Mott and the Hopple.  Mott and the fricking Hopple for God’s sake.  Best bit?  The way he layers up the images of devastation around him and his voice kind hits a squealing desperation.

 

 

2)      Somebody Up There Likes Me.  Young Americans is one of my favourite Bowie albums – this squawling mania is a perfect example of its brilliance.  Best bit?  The way the whole song builds into a huge crescendo and you just know he doesn’t even believe it himself

 

     

3)      Always Crashing In The same Car.  ‘Heroes?’ is the most famous Berlin single, but I love the melancholy of this, about Bowie dinking his rented Mercedes in a German car-park.  Best bit?  The way it all sounds so terrible and yet, hell, it could be a lot worse couldn’t it?  There’s a surprisingly, underlying cheer there too.

 

     

4)      Modern Love.  For pure pop this is near on perfect.  Best bit?  Right at beginning: ‘I know when to go out, I know when to stay in.’  No, David, you definitely didn’t.  (Truly dreadful video, mind).

 

     

5)      Absolute Beginners.  Not all of the eighties and nineties were bad for Bowie, this genius song is one of my all time favourites but it’s hidden away on a soundtrack; sublime.  Best bit?  The whole futility of the age of despair laced through the whole song, even the soaring vocal.  Bo-bah-doom, indeed.  (And a surprisingly good video, for the eighties, where private-eye Bowie seems to be perused by a strange cat lady as he tries to buy some fags, and then a giant typewriter turns up.  Awesome.)

 

    

6)      Everyone Says Hi, many fans dislike Bowie’s later life phase wishing he was still their teenage idol.  This, however, I think, is both charmingly optimistic for life whilst realising the doom and gloom which are always on the edge of everything we do.   Best bit?  It’s mawkishness.  Which is also its worst bit, but everyone’s allowed some weary sentimentality sometimes, aren’t they?  Especially when the tune as well synched to your emotions as this is.