The day my father died was just like any other. I was walking along my road in Lambeth where a row of tall early nineteenth-century houses stood set slightly back from the main road. Back then most of these old houses had been condemned by the council and a lot of them were boarded up with sheets of galvanized metal. Most of the front gardens were scruffy and full of rubbish, old furniture, bits of bikes and prams, and any old junk.
I was heading back from the corner shop. An old bloke had seen me sneaking out from my safe place, the dump yard at the back of the condemned houses, and had asked me to run round and get him a loaf of bread. I’d done it because I never minded doing an errand like that. It was something to do, something with a purpose to it, and there was always a chance that I’d get a few pennies for doing it.
I’d delivered the loaf and got my tip, and as I turned back into my road I saw a little crowd gathered a bit further up where an ambulance was standing at the bus stop right outside my house. These were still the days when Sundays were deathly quiet in London, with most of the shops shut, not much traffic and very few people about, so there was obviously a bit of an event going on. I wandered up and had a look for myself.
My house didn’t have it's windows boarded up, even though it looked completely derelict. It was filthy from top to bottom and there was no glass in a lot of the windows, no paint on the woodwork. From inside the house I could hear screams and all kinds of commotion and the ambulancemen were just coming out of the front door carrying a man laid out on a stretcher. It was hard to tell whether he was alive or dead. He had thinning, greying hair and his skin was much the same colour. He looked rough, unshaven and half-pissed, a man who wasn’t in the best of health even when he wasn’t on his way into the back of an ambulance. His head was lolling back and his mouth was slack, hanging open, and although he was covered by a blanket you could see he was only wearing a vest. A boy standing next to me suddenly looked straight at me. He thought he recognized me but he wasn’t sure. He was puzzled because I was standing with him, as if I was just another rubber-necking local kid like him who’d happened to come along to see what all the fuss was about.
Hew stared at me for a moment and then asked: ‘Isn’t that your dad?’
‘No,’ I said. I put my hands in my pockets and walked off in the opposite direction. I was almost nine years old and that was the last time I saw my father alive.
2. Family Ties
There can’t be too many Londoners who grew up south of the Thames and have fond memories of police stations, but the one I visited in Lambeth holds a special place in my heart. I had one of the best days of my life with my best friend John-John. We were both little more than toddlers when we ended up spending an afternoon at the station, being fed and made a fuss of by the officers on duty.
It was quite a new building and it seemed really posh. The staff there gave us sweets and, better still, took us to their swanky, shiny cafeteria with its clean, modern Marley-tiled floor and Formica-topped tables and gave us a hot dinner. They dug out a few toys from somewhere and played with us from time to time through the day. It was warm, everyone was friendly, the police station was great. I didn’t want to leave. In fact, I didn’t have single thought about my mother or the rest of my family until Mum turned up with John-John’s mother to take us home. We’d been there hours by then and it was already dark outside.
That was when I got upset. I asked the police officers whether I could come back to see them sometime, half hoping that one of them might say: ‘Don’t go home at all, stay here with us.’
All you know when you’re that young is that life is as it is. The police seemed to find me easy to have around, so why wouldn’t it be simpler for everyone if I lived there with them? In every possible way I could think of, the police station was a lot nicer than home.
On that wonderful day I spent at the police station, my friend and I had been found playing in the rubbish-strewn garden of a derelict house, a good half a mile away from our homes, which were in part of a complex of low-rise flats. It was a gloomy red-brick warren of flats, each block four floors high, with tiled concrete stairwells leading to the balconies that each front door opened onto. The three-bedroom flat we had there is the first home I can recall.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about wandering the streets to me. I was more comfortable in the alleys and walkways around flats where I lived than I ever was in my home, and I wasn’t afraid to go further afield. I was pushed out of the flat every day for hours on end by my mother and left to go where I wanted, and I was quite proud of knowing my way around. I quite often found myself crossing busy main routes into central London, but although I had never been taken there by my parents, I had at an early age worked out that traffic would stop if I stood at the zebra crossing between our flats and the park entrance. There was a playground there with swings and a roundabout, and there were ponds near to it that I could walk round and throw stones into. It was interesting and peaceful. I had no idea that it was also a place that could have been deadly for a toddler on his own and that no child that young should have been left wandering it. No normal person would have done that to such a small child, of course. My mother and father wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but they weren’t normal. And, in any case, even at that age I didn’t want to go home.
By the time Mum arrived, brought there with John-John’s mother by an officer, it was dark outside. They put Mum and me in one car and John-John and his mum in another to take us home and I knew she wasn’t happy. She didn’t say much, just held my arm so tightly that it hurt. I should think the police officers probably said to themselves: ‘Poor lad, he’s going to get it when he gets home.’ What they couldn’t have known was exactly what I was going to get.