Noisy at the Wrong Times Read Free

batter. Mum’s culinary world trip didn’t stop there: soon, lunch and tea featured samosas, exotic curries and Jamaican fried chicken to go along with the lasagnes, cannelloni, baccala and bresaola.
    The job at the nursery was a major step forward because it was secure, offered a regular income and carried with it a pension. She would remain in the job for over 30 years until her retirement. But the slum in which we lived made sure life was never simple, even as things began to improve. A one-bedroom basement flat with no bathroom or toilet was home for the first five years of my life. Lino on the floor, baths in the kitchen sink and mice in the cupboards are enduring memories.
    Woodstock Grove, now inevitably gentrified, its large houses re-joined from top to bottom, was a community one rarely sees today. It was a dead end street (literally and socially), with a BBC complex at the closed end, and cars never travelled its length. Predictably, it had a pub on the corner at the openend, and women had only to step outside their front door to scream the name of their menfolk, who would wobble from the pub obediently. All doorsteps were painted in that dark burgundy stone paint. It was a place of poor, working class solidity and industriousness, where we could buy fresh eggs from Old Man Lacey, a home farmer with chickens in his back yard and only one arm with which to harvest their crop. Another family bred rabbits in the cupboard under the stairs that were either sold as pets to those with room for a hutch or sent to the pot for sustenance. No doubt those bought as pets would inevitably end up in a casserole too.
    The children of Woodstock Grove played in the street together in gangs that seemed to number dozens, all dressed shabbily in hand-me-down nylon and sockless in their tatty shoes. The games featured all of the street’s children, of every age. Standing with arms and legs spread in a star shape against a stolen sheet of plywood so that friends could hurl darts like a circus knife thrower was a popular entertainment. One boy lost an eye, and my eldest brother felt the sting of a dart sinking itself into his clavicle. For weeks, wood and flammable scrap would be collected as the kids built massive bonfires in the road on Guy Fawkes Night. Fireworks were a constant thrill and, unlike today, only seemed to go on sale a week or so before November 5 th , so there was a real sense of occasion as we pilfered pennies and pooled pocket money for
Bangers
. Ten in a box, these small cigarette-sized exploding tubes with a blue fuse were lobbed at cats, at each other or dropped into letterboxes. On the building sites, we could chuck old milk bottles stuffed with a lighted banger into the air, timing it so it exploded mid-flight, but Matt, my second eldest brother, for some inexplicable reason, lit a Jumping Jack (a special banger that does what it says) and put it in his pocket. Burns and injuries were a constant menace, some of them serious. Butabove all else, the bonfires stirred our souls. One was never enough; each section of the street had to have its own pyre so at least three would singe and buckle the tarmac, radiating a brutal heat that flaked everything in its path. Given that there was so much nylon in its path, it is a curiosity that more children didn’t spontaneously combust as they were pinned against the houses of the street by the ferocious glow. Every year the fire brigade – most of west London’s – had to be summoned. Our other playground was the electrified tube line that ran past the end of the garden, which also contained the outside loo. Holding onto tube trains waiting at red and seeing who could stay on longest as they accelerated away filled hours of time. Incredibly, nobody died.
    One summer we all caught ringworm from the neighbour’s dog, but Mum refused to let our curly hair be shaved off even though it offered the best chance of a cure. This refusal was completely at odds with the way in which