The first 6 months are the worst

I had been in regular correspondence with a boy who had moved to Old London Town after singling me out in a nightclub for the slow set , where he held a large bottle of Macardles in the small of my back as we danced, and would collect me from the house in a Datsun Sunny 120Y that he had souped up. 

 I was reduced to calling the Country Boy from a payphone to break it off with him.

 He took it hard, much harder than I thought and embarrassed the pair of us by turning up at work with flowers and chocolates and begging for another chance. I was glib and uncaring and had not been battered by the winds of life and love and behaved in a cavalier fashion that I was to rue, and remember with irony when the situation was reversed.

 The London Boy took me to the Red Bar in Whites and made me sing while he played his guitar, and brought home random musicians and cans to his front room for sessions, while his parents remonstrated from the bedroom by banging on the floor. But for now I was too busy making trysts and rendezvous with him  and pretending to Siobhan and Little Thomasina that I was going on a girls shopping trip to London for 2 days, as God forbid I should be hanging around with another unsavoury  character.

 I booked the time off work despite getting the hairy eyeball from my boss and stared and stared into my suitcase wondering what on earth I could put in it to sleep in. My entire wardrobe was black as were my heels, and I had at least 2 bottles of Harmony hairspray stuffed in the side pocket with my purple lipstick and shoulder pads. 

 It was the 80’s after all.

 I went to Shaw’s almost nationwide store and spent a sizeable amount on a huge flannelette nightdress with demure collars and buttoned sleeves. I imagined myself lazing about in a loft apartment with a view of  St Pauls and Big Ben, nursing a cappuccino as I listened to the theme song from Eastenders coming live from down the street.

I was sick as a horse the whole way over on the ferry which was delayed by storms for hours, and could not get in the swing of the party atmosphere with the girls who were actually going shopping in London, and spent the bus journey into the city for hours red eyed and sleepless as I tried to remember the instructions. The girls were all staying together and I was to make my way from the bus stop at Gloucester Road in Kensington across the city to Charlton where I would be collected by a woman called Molly. Despite the myriad lists of buses and underground timetables which I had been inundated with, I hailed a black cab and did the journey in style. I engaged the driver with a succession of anecdotes and queries and wanted to know all the details of his day from his moment of conscious awakening to the moment he picked me up. I have always been like this and while people may remark  - that one would ask you what you had for your dinner –  I respond no, start at the breakfast.  I just like to store it in my brain for possible future reference and roll the words around to see how they sound.

 On my first trip across London, I listened to the accent and dialect of the cockney cabbie and stored the inflections and phrases as if they were nuggets of gold.  He deposited me at a roadside bench in Charlton and waved me goodluck and goodbye while I dragged my case over to the seat, staring at the ominous grey high rise flats. After just enough time had elapsed to start to panic, a large woman with long black hair, a black dress, and white shoes walked across the road to me, clutching a black cardigan to her ample chest.

Are you Mee Shell ? she enquired.

I nearly fell on her neck with relief. We walked off down the road together, her negotiating her way through traffic with a combination of Savoir Faire and hips. I wanted to get indoors and have a hot shower and backcomb my hair for at least an hour and empty one of the Harmony hairspray cans, while applying black eyeliner. 

Molly was having none of it. I was to be taken to The Swan and introduced to the locals. I nearly jumped up and down with temper and so resorted to giving way ungracefully and agreeing to go for one.

The Swan was the kind of pub that was packed all day, and there was always something dodgy going on, somebody fiddling a raffle or running off with the spot prize.   It was filled with old Irish men in wrinkled suits and stained collars. I was paraded as someone from the old country and bought round after round while they told me they had been 40 odd years in England and could not go home.

“Sure, there’s  nothin’  left  for me now, all my people are dead and gone” said the Mayo man with the Charlton Athletic Baseball Cap as he drank a bottle of Gold Label to steady his calloused hands.

-I’d only go home now to ask the time and come back  - said he wiping the sides of his mouth.

I thought how sad that the men who re-built the city after the war, hefting blocks on sites and constructing railways, were now designated to live in the horrendous high rises, alone amidst their rubbish and memories, making a daily trek to a pub to hear Irish voices and join in the camaraderie as long as their pension allowed. Most couldn’t boil an egg and survived on Red Cross or British Legion lunches and drinking on tick. 

I prevailed upon Molly to take me indoors and she relented. She needed a lie down after the brandy anyway and so we crossed the road to the high rise and I had my first inkling of how things operated in the big smoke. Firstly, the door was always open and a steady stream of children, teenagers and adults came in and out all day. I did not know whose children belonged to who, as from what I could glean, Molly had been married more than once and had a live-in lover named Hank, and it was a case of yours, mine and ours.  There was a motley crew lying about in front of the tv wearing their pyjamas, All the neighbours came in for a squint at the real live Irish girl, one on hearing that I was a gynaecologist asked me to remove her coil. It did not appear to cross their minds that I was  a tad young to be qualified as anything at 20 years old.  I think I made an appointment to see her in her flat upstairs that night, knowing that I would be safely esconsed in the pub. When my boy arrived in from work in Canary Wharf   that evening, he found me battened down in the room I had been assigned, and judging by the surly faces ranged around the living room,  from which a number of them had just been ousted. Of course we went to The Swan again that night and I fell into the easy way they had with each other and became like part of the furniture, collecting glasses and ashtrays for the harried landlord and noticing that everyone had a special tankard that hung on nails above the bar.

 Hank came as well and sat like Dapper Dan with his shiny suit and oiled hair in the corner under the dartboard, from which spot he refused to move even though he had dart marks in his forehead which he displayed to hilarity. He disgraced himself that night when having been caught short in the middle of the night opened one of the many louvred  doors in the bedroom and pissed in the wardrobe. He apologized to himself in the full length mirror as he thought his reflection was another bursting bladder. Molly told the whole pub the next day, but I was in Greenwich ogling the Cutty Sark and standing on a meridian. I had been warned not to engage with Londoners who would bite the head off me if they had to remove their faces from the FT, or worse run away with me and murder me and I would never be heard of again. I was lost at London Bridge and wandered aimlessly around the streets trying to find my bearings or something that would say the name of the Borough.

 I ended up on a train to Woolwich, where to relieve my own bursting bladder, I stopped a tall black man with a gigantic afro outside a kebab shop and asked him could I use the toilet. He led me down 3 or 4 flights of stairs past the kitchen where 2 young Chinese boys were listlessly slicing skewered meat of indeterminate origin.  The radio was blasting – I just called to say I love you by Stevie Wonder and I eventually found my way back to my destination in time to take a call from Aggie, who was ringing to confirm my presence at the bus depot in Kensington the following day. She was exhausted from laughing and shopping in the West End, while I was exhausted from nervous tension and alcohol and hoping that I would not get caught. It was as surprising to me when I slept through the alarm and the banging door and arrived out to a roomful of people at lunchtime with a hairstyle like Patti Smith, looking like I had been dragged through a ditch backwards. There were vague memories of dancing on tables and being told to get down by the landlord when the first pile of glasses shattered. I held my head in my hands. It would be an actual impossibility to get all the way across to the girls in my current state, and so, I decided I would have to live in London from now on.

The first 6 months are the worst- said the old men in The Swan that night as the girls sailed home without me. I watched the hands of the bar clock ticking inexorably towards anchors aweigh and pondered the reaction in the quiet kitchen at home when there would be no daughter to collect from the early ferry.