Noisy at the Wrong Times Read Free Page A

she maintained our much-valued locks, for which she used one of those ferocious combs with an embedded razor, taking regularly to our heads with abandon, turning our hair into feathered mats with a coiled fringe. With mounds of hair at her feet, she would then smother what was left on our heads with
Vitapoint
, a nourishing cream that smelled like cat’s piss and had the effect of turning the mat into a greasy brown mesh. Pictures of me as a youngster are an exhibition of wonderfully quirky hairdos and I half-expect to see a small rodent poking out from behind my ear.
    Even as small boys, our pride suffered from having to attend school looking like scarecrows, but Matteo was always at the hospital with real injuries requiring stitches. In fact, we all risked life and limb playing in the local building sites, but Matt would remove all risk of grievance by willingly replacing it with certainty. He once turned his feet and ankles into beefjerky by leaping onto a carefully stacked pile of plate glass. My early recollections of Matt include watching him gently pick the stitches from his latest laceration – because he was always getting wounded, early signs of the fearless abandon that would have found better expression had he developed an interest in high finance rather than shoplifting.

 
     
     
     
    DISCOVERING WHERE IT BEGAN ...
    N o doubt the local council was taking notes, recognising the dangers that four young children with a single mother were in, but more likely they realised the peril our neighbours faced as we grew. Social services were probably less sensitive than they are today, and in the late sixties and early seventies I suppose many of the social workers would have been war children, when deprivation was genuinely life-threatening. With a world war fresh in the memory, most social workers probably needed the delinquent behaviour of children to mimic the invasion of Poland, or at the very least, the worst excesses of a Panzer division before alarm bells began to ring. They had the power, these social workers, to confer real privilege upon us. Warsaw felt no threat from us, but Woodstock Grove probably did; and when I was five years old, we were offered the unimaginable luxury of a flat in Fulham Court, a flat I should add, that had an inside bathroom.
    We all decamped to our new duplex three-bedroom flat in June of 1970. Central heating wouldn’t be installed for another twenty years, but there was always paraffin. Fulham Court was on the Fulham Road, closer to the fashionable enclave of Chelsea, and Matt no doubt had his own Blitzkrieg in mind; but I was so unspeakably excited by the concept of a bath that I insisted on sitting in it when we all went to view the flat before moving in.
    If this leap in social status was significant to us, it was like winning the pools for Mum. Two bedrooms to share between us children was officially palatial, but in reality, Mum had even seen Woodstock Grove as a vast improvement over what she had lived in before coming to England. Her hometown was the mountain top village of Montecorvino Pugliano in Campania, southern Italy. Poverty there in the thirties and forties had a smell and danger all its own, with malaria and cholera haunting the narrow, steep streets of her village. Her younger brother contracted meningitis as a baby and was essentially condemned to death by his doctor, but an old woman, having heard the wails and moans of the family, came to the door with a jar of leeches, offering the last and only hope to my mother’s parents. Placing several of the creatures around his head, the old woman’s intervention was absurd and illogical, but it was a hope of cure where sophisticated antibiotics never existed, and, miraculously, the child survived the illness. Mum’s home was a lethal environment that sent its inhabitants into the arms of such quackery, but if
Il Dio
ignored your prayers, he’d always send a surrogate with an old wives’ tale instead.
    If it