Characters
By tale catcher
- 407 reads
The Story of Camden
The people
Alan
Alan has lived in Camden for five years but he is originally from
Scotland as his accent reveals. He drinks in the Good Mixer every day
and knows just about every one in there. After visiting Camden once, he
fell in love with it and has lived there ever since. What really
attracts him to it, he says, are the characters - especially the
drunks. He's about 5'10'' with messy brown hair and a cheeky, toothless
grin. His countenance is mild and his conversation witty. He was
pleased to tell me about some of the friends he's made since moving to
the area.
If I was going to use an adjective to describe this area I'd just say
'hilarious'. I sit here and watch the old guys walk past the window
going aarrrghh ha haarrhh - it's just brilliant.
There's one old guy who used to come in here, Harry, and he didn't know
if he was in the house or in the toilet. He came in one day so drunk
that he pulled his pants down and sat there with nothing on! We said
for god's sake Harry, put the unemployed away - you know. But he just
sat there.
There's another guy, his name's Terry. He was pissed out of his head
and he ran up to a stall and stole a pair of trainers. Well, he hadn't
looked closely enough at them before he ran and we saw him the next day
walking around in two left-footed trainers. He didn't seem to mind. One
day he came walking by with a full-length corduroy dress on, a drunk in
a dress, he looked like a Buddhist monk!
It's not all drunks though. There was a kiwi who worked behind the bar
and he was leaving to go back home so we got him a big stripper-gram,
well, she was a fat-a-gram really. She comes in with the leather and
all the whips and starts whipping this guys arse something rotten. We
had a good time, that was it. But when he got back to New Zealand his
mum found the photographs and phoned us up;"What do you think you're
doing teaching my boy these things, my boy is innocent". Well this guy
was 23 years old, six foot two, 16 stone and he used to play for the
All Blacks under 21s - he wasn't innocent. We just howled.
Joe, Paul, Mike and A Man Who Couldn't Speak.
On Alan's recommendation, we went outside the Good Mixer to an
old-fashioned bus shelter where four of the Irish drunks of the kind
Alan had described were hanging out. Joe was the main talker although
Mike seemed reasonably eloquent (considering how drunk they all were),
but he refused to be included because he was signing on and didn't want
to get caught. Paul was the oldest - although the drink had probably
aged them all - and he was wearing a flat cap and had no teeth. Joe, on
the other hand, had no hair and the fourth man, whose name I didn't
get, had lost the power of speech and almost the ability to walk. He
had a very red face and grunted and gasped like a child. During the
course of the interview he was continually prodding a cigarette in my
direction, indicating, I realised, that he needed a light.
Interviewer: There used to be a lot of Irish round here, didn't
there?
Joe: The Irish made their money and moved on.
Interviewer: To the suburbs?
Joe: (mocking me) The suburbs? Really. (indicating to the fourth man)
Well he's just come in from the suburbs. (They laugh at the man who has
his eyes practically closed and is falling around us with a cigarette
in his mouth)
Man: Hav ya go'a matsh? ( He falls out of my eyeline)
Interviewer: Yeah, here's one (I give him a lighter)
Mike: He's a star.
Joe: Look, some days it's good but there's a hell of a lot of
unemployment here and they'll always wonder about people being on the
sick. A couple of friends of mine -
Paul: He's been sick for years, God help him.
Joe: Look at the way my hair fell out, it wasn't going to the dentist.
(They all laugh)
We're comical people - you know, Belfast people, Glasgow
people&;#8230;
Interviewer: (To the fourth man) You can keep that lighter.
Man: Na, Fack, It doesn't wok.
Paul: Don't be begging.
Interviewer: How long have you been in Camden?
Joe: 19 years me.
Paul: Thirty years.
Mike: This is our corner.
Joe: My corner.
Mike: Joe's corner.
Paul: (to Mike) He needs to get a job! (Laugh)
Joe: He's gonna end up nicked! (Laugh) No, you're not getting the
truth.
You got the big house up there - the Arlington Hilton (he is referring
to the hostel) and they put us into places like that and they want us
to survive.
Interviewer: Have you seen Camden change at all in the last 19
years?
Joe: Oh yeah. You see that market there, that used to come right up and
now there's only two or three stall-holders. Yeah, it's really
changed.
Interviewer: For the worst?
Joe: I can't make up my mind but there's too many caf?-bars. Real good
pubs are now wine bars. You do a days work, you're putting it in,
you're getting out the van and your boots are dirty. You've come off a
building site and they're not letting you in cos your boots are dirty.
And we're the spenders, we're the ones who spend the money.
Yorkie
Yorkie has been a regular visitor to Camden Town for the last six
years. On his first trip he stumbled into the Elephant's Head, a
biker's pub just off the main street and never looked back. A small,
thin man, Yorkie also has a few teeth missing and is covered with a
number of elaborate tattoos. The most prominent one was on his neck and
spelt 'Yorkie'. As he had a deep Bradford accent, I assumed this was a
nick-name, but despite his fearful appearance; his army jacket, big Dr
Martin boots and numerous tattoos, Yorkie was extremely pleasant and
polite. I have tried to capture his accent in the writing because it
was one of the deepest Yorkshire lilts I've ever encountered. The rest
I must trust to your own imagination.
I were walking round Camden looking for a boozer and went into The
Elephant's Head. Bein' a northerner, I like my northern soul see, and I
saw in there that it was full of rock and rollers, rock-a-billies and
teddy-boys - it were fantastic. It were the 'Happy Go Lucky' disco
night - no, that's on a Saturday. It were an Elvis night. All't people
dressed up as Elvis. There was a woman in there that night looked the
spitting image of Marilyn Monroe, spitting image of her. Then there
were a few teddy-boys wearing their traditional suits - nice and smart,
bikers wiv the leather jackets and the jeans and the boots, the
skin-heads and the punk rocks - everyone goes in togeva and has a
party.
I was not long in there when I saw an old mate from ten or twelve year
back, an old Teddy-boy from Bradford who lives in Colindale. He just
walked in. It were a coincidence that. Well we had to make up for a lot
of lost time and so we started drinking.
Then a guy come in there, I won't say how old he was cos he were
under-age but he did drink. He came in with a nice white pair of pants
on and an Elvis sort of jacket and as soon as they played a record -
Joe Clay - he started to throw his self all round the dance floor,
crawling like a crab or a snail or sommat. Well we stood back and
watched him while all the girls went over and gave him a kiss. But by
the time he went home he needed two baths. All that dirt over his nice
white suit. Well to me that were funny.
Nino Macaroni
Niall McInerney aka Nino Macaroni has lived in Camden Town since the
1960's when he bought a house on the canal because his girlfriend and
future wife lived at Number 8. Nino is Irish with a soft southern
accent and a wry sense of humour. He takes photographs for a living and
has worked on the collections of both Jean-Paul Gaultier and Vivian
Westwood. I met him in his terrace house which doubles up as a studio
and stayed there talking for most of the afternoon. These are just some
excerpts.
There's a great man - I must get a picture - and he's fantastic. I saw
him on Monday and he's got this fallace - it's like a plunger that
you'd use to clean the lavatory - and he's got this thing strapped to
him, you know,(motions to his groin). And he walks like this (imitating
a sexy strut). And he walks so slowly, you know. And when he crosses
here on the bridge he saunters up the parapet.
He's watched these models on TV and he's completely oblivious to
everyone.
There's also a brilliant guy who collects scrap metal in a Sainsbury's
trolley, he's fabulous. And of course one day - I didn't get it but it
would have made a fabuolous picture - we had one sunny day last summer
and this total pillock was coming up Royal College Street in a brand
new BMW convertible - 25 grands worth of motorcar - this was the
biz.
You can go quite fast coming up because usually there's not a lot of
traffic but there's a little bit before the junction and this guy was
there with his trolley . You know these things, as you push them they
tend to go in the wrong direction. I was on my bike and this guy passed
me by and I thought, oh f**k you, and then he got a bit further and
this guy with the trolley had just got out into the road. The guy in
the car had to slow down and he's beeping his horn and he's going
aarrgghh aarrggh, pushing this thing and he's just got all the way over
to the other side when it starts again, going back into the road.
And this guy in the BMW is really angry. It's ruined his whole day.
This guy with his bits of lead.
I remember years ago there was Margaret, she lived in Royal College
Street and Dotty who was as batty as an old bean and about a hundred
and ten but she was a jolly old soul - you know. But Camden had a
really good system then. They gave Margaret - you know - six pounds a
week to look in on Dotty. So instead of dragging her off to a home,
which she didn't want, Margaret would come round every day and say,
"Come on Dotty, come on, we've got to go shopping now", and shake her
up and give her a cup of tea. Then they'd go round the shops, Dotty in
her slippers, and everyone would say "Hello Dotty", "Hey there Dotty",
and she did a sort of Royal Tour. It kept her going, got her out of the
house.
She got blown over by the wind one day. My God it was funny. Because
she wore those long skirts, like that, and she was at the corner there
and the wind just got right underneath her skirt and blew her over. All
those petticoats, it was like a parachute.
Margaret adopted a donkey. That was her big thing. Her big annual
outing was to go down and see her donkey. You know - it was some
charity where she paid five pounds a year - and it was her donkey.
She'd go down once a year, all excited, with a bunch of carrots.
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