Streets of Stoke Newington

 

Streets of Stoke Newington

 

I thought Mrs Landau's ten children were all ten years old. With their endearing friendly smiles, confident but polite manners and NHS spectacles they were almost identical. The boys wore yarmulkes to cover the crowns of their shaven heads and had wispy side curls of hair while their sisters were all dressed in light grey woollen cardigans and dark grey calf-length skirts. But apart from those barely distinguishing features they were clones of each other, and most likely of their cousins and their neighbours’ kids.

We were always made welcome with tea and biscuits on our Friday visits to pay the rent. 'Don't bring the money if the sun's low in the sky,' Mrs Landau would say, 'because our Sabbath will have commenced. Just bring double the following week.' Sometimes when we were a bit short we'd invent a sunset, but we had to be careful as two consecutive early Friday sunsets were frowned upon. I think that was something that Moses had decreed on a scroll.

 

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In the café that shook violently every time a train went over the heavy iron railway bridge at Finsbury Park Station, Jamil served great plates of rashers and eggs with hot buttered toast like paving slabs, and steaming great mugs of terracotta tea.

'How do you like your bacon done Paddy?' he'd ask all his customers, including the few that weren't Irish. Faded photographs of Colonel Gaddafi and Liam Brady smiled down from the wall behind where he stood from dawn to dusk, frying up anything he could lay his hands on. Crispy brown Sellotape from a different decade had all but abandoned its duties but thankfully the layers of chip fat that had built up gradually over the passage of time, like mineral formations in a limestone cave, held Jamil’s heroes in place.

 

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On a still day in our attic flat, with the window open and the television’s volume turned right down, we could hear the groans of the Arsenal supporters a mile or two away at their Highbury football stadium. I went there once. It was an uncomfortable experience. The game was too dull for staying awake and the wind was so cold that sleeping was not at all possible. The opposition on that occasion were local rivals, Tottenham Hotspur, so there was a large police presence. I couldn’t understand why so many of them, clad in riot gear, had piled out of their armoured Ford Transit vans because by the time the referee had blown the half-time whistle they too seemed to be struggling to stay awake, as were their dogs.

The Argentine World Cup winner, Ossie Ardiles, was playing for Tottenham in those days. I saw him once in the car park at Safeway’s supermarket at Stamford Hill. That brief exchange of hellos was infinitely more exciting than the match had been.

 

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At the corner shop, pint bottles of milk with crown caps were sold at five times the going rate, and a glass display cabinet was always filled with freshly baked bread buns with holes in the middle. It was there that Eli explained to me the concepts of kosher milk and bagels. His bagels were delicious but I went to the Spar shop up the road to buy the cut price gentile milk. In true grocer’s style he wore a light brown overall coat buttoned up at the front, but beneath it he had on the black clothes required by his religion, and his black fedora never lost contact with his head. 

 

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Beecher's was a cosy little place, recently refurbished in a horse racing theme with bits of old saddles, sheepskin nosebands and stable boys fixed to every wall. The doors of the ladies’ and the gents’ facilities were marked ‘mares’ and ‘stallions’ respectively, which some customers found amusing and others found a little intimidating. During the 1980s it was essential that pubs wishing to attract new customers each had their own theme. I thought an Hasidic Judaism theme pub would have gone down well in the area but Mrs Landau’s section of the community would never have frequented, or even condoned it.

The clientele were friendly but the beer was rough. We wondered if it was a by-product of a race horse but the pump handles behind the bar had ‘Ben Truman’ written on them, so he must have been the culprit. Phil Collins and Madonna dominated the juke box but nevertheless it was a decent place for a rare night out.

 

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Moira was two and loved to push her own pushchair back and forth from one end of the laundrette to the other as if she'd been forced to take part in some sort of sponsored endurance test. Meanwhile her mammy, who ran the joint, would sort out the service washes left in black plastic bin bags by those who rushed through life. In her soft Connemara accent she’d remark upon clothes she wouldn't be seen dead in herself as she held them up for all to see.

Moira loved cheese and onion crisps and showed no fear when asking if she could have one from the packet poking out of my coat pocket as it hung on a peg by the big driers which were labelled as such in case people new to the laundrette world didn’t know what they were.

On Monday evenings I'd always be in there with a book to pass the time while I kept one eye on our washing as it frothed and spun and tumbled. Walking home, I'd call at the Chinese chippy for something for our tea. Shanghai Tam was proud of the high standard of the freshly cooked fish and chips he sold but not of his noodles. He’d never been to Shanghai, or even China. His father had settled in England in 1942, having fled the Philippines as a Japanese invasion threatened.

 

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Poor old Alice would shout in the street. She'd always lost something. Would we help her to find her husband, her daughter, her mother, her dog, her shopping bag, her dentures? A different missing item on each appearance. And could we find a few coins in our pocket to help her out until pension day? Her weekly pension day was often as many as six and a half days away. I suspected that she was a terribly thirsty lady, but we never saw her in Beecher’s. All she’d really lost was her marbles. People treated her kindly but I still couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.

 

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On sunnier, work-free days we'd step out to nearby Clissold Park. On tube trains and buses we could travel for a couple of hours to escape the city and find a rural spot that would turn out to not really be any better than what we had on our doorstep, so we didn’t.

Hip hop, ghetto blasters and hoodies were new back then; an interesting innovation for us to observe from the bench where we ate our egg and cress sandwiches. We always sat in a spot where there were no discarded cider cans or hypodermic syringes so that the bad-tempered, authoritarian park keeper couldn’t accuse us of breaking his rules or contravening the local by-laws that he could recite by heart. We quite liked Push It! by Salt-N-Pepa but the parky was more of a Merle Haggard / Waylon Jennings sort of a fella, which probably explained his constant aura of wrath and his cowboy boots that didn’t go at all well with his Hackney Borough Council uniform.

 

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Close to the pub and the laundrette there were two reservoirs, imaginatively named East Reservoir and West Reservoir, probably by a senior manager in the planning department of the Metropolitan Water Board, where we were sure water boarding must have gone on.

On summer evenings it was mesmerising to stand on the bridge that carried Lordship Lane across the equally imaginatively named New River to watch hundreds of starlings take to the sky in dark murmurations that could be mistaken for billowing clouds of smoke. There may have even been thousands but counting them was a bit tricky. From late afternoon until the sun went down they would soar and swoop to catch the midges that hovered above the water. Strange, I thought, to see such a miracle of nature only four miles from the centre of London.

 

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The streets, perhaps more accurately described as leafy avenues of plane trees, were busy with people from early morning until long after darkness had fallen. Some were doing their shopping or dashing to work while others would leisurely pass the time of day with friends.  Children played, usually under the watchful eye of their mothers or older sisters, but sometimes not. Skipping ropes and dreidels (four sided spinning tops painted with Hebrew letters) were very popular.

Every corner had its small gathering of men in black. Garbed in long jackets and even longer overcoats, wide-legged trousers and large circular fur hats; their white shirts were their only non-black garments. They spoke Yiddish, a strange tongue for us, so we couldn’t tell their business haggling from their social chitchat. Eavesdropping was futile. Sometimes we’d see Mr Landau and he’d throw in a few English words about the weather, or the Arsenal, or our colourful clothes (which weren’t really) while his friends looked on, smiling from side curl to side curl.

With so many people about we always felt safe. The area wasn’t typical of the inner city.

 

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For four months in 1986, after work on Thursdays we’d travel on the bus to Hackney for our antenatal classes at the Mother’s Hospital of the Salvation Army. At first we were excited at the possibility of a brass band playing Oh for the Wings of a Dove as our child came into the world, but then a little disappointed on discovering that ownership had been taken over by the National Health Service in 1948 and that a cassette tape of Now That’s What I Call Music Two was the best that we could hope for.

This red brick maternity hospital had been declared open in October 1913 by Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll; a woman named after two of the area’s pubs. Its outer walls were smog-blackened and it could have done with a lick of paint, but otherwise it seemed perfect. The brand new, enormous and flashy Homerton Hospital under construction a mile away was due to open soon, taking on the responsibility and work of a number of small local hospitals and clinics that would immediately be closed. It was anticipated that the redundant buildings would be converted into convenience shops, wine bars or unofficial shelters for the homeless.

Our cosy little place that we had become accustomed to and were completely happy with would cease birthing, most likely on the very day that our baby was due. Everything went smoothly with the pregnancy apart from the fact that nobody could confirm the location of the labour ward we would eventually be going to for the final act of the gestation process. It all depended upon Health Ministry approval being granted, without which the handover between medical establishments couldn’t take place. This caused heightened levels of stress amongst the hormonally unbalanced and their pregnant wives and girlfriends.

Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station disaster struck during this time so parents-in-waiting would ask questions about the possible effects of airborne radioactive materials on the wellbeing of unborn children to which midwives who didn’t really know the answer would reply with conviction, ‘It’ll be grand!’ A lady who was thirty-eight weeks into her pregnancy announced that she wanted a termination because she had read in the Sun newspaper that her baby might be born with two heads.

 

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I only ever spent two nights alone in our flat, they being the two nights after our daughter was born. I was too euphoric to sleep but soon realised that I should have made better use of the silence as, following the arrival home of mother and infant, the nights were disturbed way beyond what we’d imagined and during every night for the following six weeks only limited sleep was possible. For half of each night we couldn’t sleep because the gorgeous wee one wouldn’t sleep and for the other half of the night we couldn’t sleep because she was sleeping so peacefully that we were worried there was something wrong with her. She slept the most soundly when we pushed her round Clissold Park in her pram (not buggy) but Hackney Borough’s by-law number 27, section 15, sub-paragraph 3 forbade the pedestrian cossetting of the newly born after 8:00 p.m.

The most difficult part of those early days of her life was accepting that she had met all the criteria required for her to be officially labelled a Cockney. Being simple northern folk, we wondered what had we created?

 

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We were sad to leave Stoke Newington but we too wanted to have ten children and our flat in Fairholt Road was already too small for us and our new baby girl. Mrs Landau said she could find us a larger one but the higher weekly rent would have meant us going cold and hungry and having to use Shanghai Tam’s chip wrappers for nappies. She really wanted us to stay, and we wanted to stay, but we couldn’t and we didn’t and we never saw her again.

So here’s to you Mrs Landau. We all loved you more than you will know.

 

 

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Image:

My own photograph of some of our neighbours in our street in Stoke Newington in 1986.