EFFING AND BLINDING

A day out in sylvan

Hackney proved less pleasant than expected for Roy Kerridge

On a hot summer day, I set out from the Angel to walk to Hackney along the banks of the Regent's Canal. Soon I had left the towering chestnut trees and happy families of Islington behind, and both towpath and people began to look poor. My last glimpse of the fashionable quarter was of a young couple sitting side by side on a lock-gate, above a white foaming waterfall that be- longed in romantic Wales or the Lake District. He was a jacketless City gent of the new young breed, she a secretary of West Indian origin with long combed-out Tahitian hair. A Mills and Boon photo- grapher ought to have been there.

'I see they're living together as man and wife.' After ducking under several black bridges, I came to a long stretch of towpath separated by iron railings from tower block wastelands. On the opposite shore, in a cluttered factory yard, a white pony poked its head out of a horsebox. I came across a big man throwing crumbs into the canal. Peering into the water, I saw a large shoal of rudd, long olive-green fish with red fins.

'I'm spying out the best spots for fishing,' the man told me in an Irish accent. He was stripped to the waist, his torso a mass of tattoos. As he spoke, I found it hard to resist reading his chest and arms, where his love for one Elaine was pub- lished to the world. 'Mind you, I've gone off coarse fishing now, and do a bit of game fishing. There's trout in the reservoir at Hammersmith. Most of the fish you see in this canal are diseased. See that fungus that's on them? There's some perch there, diseased as well. Quite a few pike in the canal, and a fierce fish they call a zander. Now in the old days, anyone couldn't fish for zander, it was reserved for the nobility. They do terrible destruction among the other fish, and if you catch one, you're supposed to kill it. Me, I'm too soft- hearted, I always throw them back. If they kill, it's nature after all.

'A Japanese friend who makes fish tanks built one in my house from floor to ceiling, taking up half a room. My friends all come and see it, 'cos it's a wonder, lit up and full of tropical fish, with a filter system at the base to keep it clean.'

Leaving the fish behind, I crossed Vic- toria Park, which adjoins the towpath. A yellow-crested Mohawk punk, followed by two punkettes in tall scarlet crests, walked by in Indian file, the sun behind them illuminating their hair in brilliant colours. Rabbits, guinea-pigs and a spiral-horned goat all share a large enclosure in the park. On a previous visit, I had seen guinea fowl, baldheaded game birds which a Scottish visitor mistook for vultures. 'Look at the birds of death in the company of innocent rabbits,' he told me in sepulchral tones. 'In the midst of life, we are in death. I'm an alcoholic, by the way.'

`You alcoholics ought to eat more,' I chided him, offering a bun, which he gratefully accepted.

On this visit I found that hurricane-felled trees had damaged the fences of the deer enclosure. A group of cheerful shouting workmen were banging in an iron corner- post and welding wire netting onto it. Outside the park, the ice-cream-van- haunted streets had a rural market-town atmosphere. I turned left at the crossroads near the pottery and reached a long grey stretch of linking council blocks.

Near the base of Marlene's tall block of flats, a group of middle-aged women and a young crop-haired coloured boy were con- versing in deep East End roars. I was surprised to hear such a slim boy with such a booming voice. Suddenly I recognised Marlene — I had forgotten how slight and boyish she had become since growing up. She turned, and her face split into a broad smile.

`I thought you were a boy at first,' I confessed, as she introduced her two Jack Russell terriers, secured on a single forked lead of thick rope.

We trotted round the shops, where I held the dogs while she bought the groceries. Her little boy Jason was playing in Victoria Park, and would go back to his friend's house for tea. Marlene exchanged loud greetings with everyone she met, in the shops and on doorsteps. A Jamaican, busily painting the door frame of his large corner house, shouted out to her in `patois'.

`It's marvellous how he's improved his house and garden,' Marlene said. 'Look, 'e's cemented in a huge pond with a fountain for 'is prize carp.'

Back at the flats, Marlene pointed out her two cars. 'That's my new car, and that's my old car, that smashed piece of junk. The kids round here went joyriding in it. By the time they'd finished, it was a write-off.'

Her voice bore no rancour. Kids will be kids. Down my way, in another part of London, somebody abandoned a stolen car in the park at the bottom of the road. All the local children, who play out on summer evenings, had piled into it through the windows and had tried to get it started. The mischievous Rasta tots from round the corner, eyes gleaming below huge grey bonnets, sat inside, while older boys of 12 and 13 pushed. In the driver's seat sat a local ringleader, 13-year-old Hip Hop Har- ry, famed for his graffiti painting, break dancing and 'toasting' (a Jamaican style of rapid improvised rhyming).

`Do you like my new car?' he asked me nonchalantly, one arm crooked over the open window. Suddenly the engine started, to loud cheers. At that moment, four policewomen and two policemen rushed into the park, one of the men vaulting over a gate. Like mice running from an opened pantry, the boys scrambled out of windows and fled across the park with the police in pursuit. An eight-year-old Rasta nick- named Two-Cute was the nimblest, his eyes open so wide that he looked like a startled bush-baby.

When everyone, police and boys, had disappeared out of sight, I strolled over to have a look at the car, whose doors were locked. To my mild surprise Hip Hop Harry was lying flat on the floor. He gave me a brief nod, scrambled to his feet and succeeded in squeezing his way out of the window. Then he fled the way the police had come.

Soon the police returned, each one holding a youngster, including the violently protesting Two-Cute. Everyone gathered round the car, and as always when there is an 'incident', black youth sprang up like dragon's teeth, most of them the older brothers of the joyriders. As the children had not stolen the car in the first place, they only received a ticking off. Hip Hop Harry returned by a different way, and with an expression of exaggerated curios- ity, pushed his way to the forefront of the crowd.

`Get back, get back, all you lot, or we'll arrest you for nothing,' a policeman snap- ped.

`You can't arrest me, I didn't do fluffing, I'm just looking, aren't I?' Hip Hop Harry shouted in outrage. I noticed that he was only wearing one shoe.

Next day the car was still there, with Hip Hop Harry's trainer shoe inside. I won- dered if I should have sent a copy of Cinderella to the local police station. The last stolen car left in the park had been full of expensive contents, looted bit by bit over the course of weeks, with no police intervention. So the police would be un- likely to grow excited over a slipper.

By the time I had told this story to Marlene, the lift had creaked and swayed itself up to her flat on the 18th floor. Over a cup of tea, I admired the many silver cups and shields she had won for sprinting in the London Transport sports. She worked on the old-fashioned little-known Shadwell line that runs from Whitechapel to New Cross below the Thames, using big ungain- ly trains never seen anywhere else. Mar- lene was proud of her overseer job, which she had held for many years. `Wow wow wow wow wow!' a police siren interrupted us. Marlene ran to the window, but couldn't make out what was happening. 'Some funny things happen in these flats, you know,' she said. 'This place is full of Nigerian students enrolled at a bogus college where you don't have to study, as it's just a way of getting into England. A man from the Home Office came here to look for them, followed by a secretary holding a bunch of files as thick as a docker's sandwich. Since then I've only seen the Nigerians at night, skulking nervously. The one who organises them is a long streak of Nigerian, and he's very wary. He finds them jobs, and he's un- boarded all the flats here what the council boarded up, putting the students in them and saying he's the landlord.

`Did you hear about the head of our day nursery here? She called my Jason a "black" and wanted to teach "black cul- ture" to the children of one year old upwards! I ask you! She was hounded out; people made her resign, as we don't want that sort round here. There's no such thing as "black culture"! Rice an' peas and steel bands don't make a culture, and apart from that, everyone lives in an English way. That's why I don't like the Voice newspap- er, it's all "black" this and "black" that, and saying black and white shouldn't mar- ry. Half the people I know wouldn't exist if white and coloured didn't marry.'

The doorbell rang, and Marlene's Scot- tish sister-in-law came in, clutching cata- logues. More tea was poured, as the two women discussed children, compared cata- logues and gossiped about a friend who had got a job dealing cards in the Sports- man's Club. Not long afterwards, Mar- lene's husband Dougie returned from work. He sat down heavily in a chair and began washing his grimy hands in a tin of petroleum jelly.

`That was Dougie you saw over at the deer park, welding on the fence,' Marlene told me.

`Aye, that was me,' confirmed Dougie. `Did you hear a lot of effing and blinding? These Londoners always call their swear- ing "effing and blinding". They eff, but they don't blind. Did you hear all those police sirens? Some character was driving a stolen car all over the park, chased by a gang of police on motor-cycles.'

We all laughed, for most illegal goings- on in Hackney and similar parts of London do not reduce law-abiding citizens to ter- ror, but give them something juicy to gossip about. Finally Marlene offered to run me back to the YMCA at Whitecross Street Market, where I was staying.

Halfway down the tower, the lift stopped at a floor, the door opened and four tousle-haired blond Scots burst in, fighting, punching and hair-pulling. I rather fancy that one of them held a knife, but things were happening too quickly for me to be sure. For a moment I thought that they were launching an attack on Marlene and myself. However, it proved to be a private fight among two couples. One young man held a girl by the hair and punched her, his friend helping, while a second girl screamed, let her go!' Big brutish barba- rian faces gave me an instant glimpse of the first Dark Ages.

`Get out quick!' Marlene shouted, and I jumped past the Scots onto the landing. Looking back, I saw Marlene flattened against the rear of the lift, unable to pass the screaming, punching foursome. At that moment, a huge 40-year-old Scot in a vest, with a swag belly rushed roaring towards the lift, waving an iron bar.

One never knows how cowardly one is until there's an emergency. I flew down the stairs, glancing back to see the roaring giant belabouring the lift door with his bar. Was the door open or shut? As my feet carried me earthward, my mind flashed Confused messages: police in park — run and search — above all, run! Hackney was not proving so pleasant after all.

Scottish roars now echoed from the floor below me. Was I caught between Scots? Marlene's voice called my name, and I found I was safely out of doors in a ground-floor courtyard, surrounded by fighting Scots who ignored Marlene and myself. Kind-hearted Marlene wondered if she should help the beaten girl, but as we spoke, the Scots chased each other off, effing and blinding in Glaswegian. So we climbed into Marlene's car.

`We went down after you'd gone, leaving the man with the bar behind,' Marlene told me humorously. 'I kept asking them to let me out, but they evidently wanted me to ride with them. At the bottom, they rolled out of the lift still fighting. A lot of these sort of Scots have moved into the flats.'

She seemed so unruffled and cheerful that I quite recovered my spirits, and told her of an African family I knew in a north London block of flats who had been terrorised by some rough Scots living upstairs. Finally the Council had evicted the Scots and boarded up their flat. Hear- ing guttural oaths outside one night, and then a loud bang on their fourth-storey windowpanes, the Africans looked out- side. To their amazement they saw one of the Scots climbing up to his former room by means of a knotted sheet let down from the window ledge. As the climber swayed precariously, he was kicking at the win- dows beneath him, knocking down flower- Pots.

Before I knew it, businesslike Marlene had set me down jet-lagged in Whitecross Street and sped back to Hackney to pick up Jason. He seemed a bright lad, judging by the photograph she had given me. Prob- ably the Hackney crime statistics are more or less truthful, but Hackney-dwellers with a strong nerve and a sense of humour would never live anywhere else. After all:

With a ladder and some glasses You could see to Hackney Marshes, If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between.