Transcription
Lewisham was the first place I could call home in London. Or more precisely, 25 Clarendon Rise. Or more precisely, the steps at the front of the House.
Number 25 is a Victorian build, with four stories divided into flats on each floor. The facade has been perpetually in need of a paint job, the plumbing was a disaster waiting to happen, which it did, and the landlord was typically nowhere to be found. Yet the building had an elegance that was so different from the neat and cozy suburban houses I’d grown up in the Midlands.
Nothing encapsulated this more than the front of the house. The garden had grown into a jungle of colourful wildflowers interspersed with take-away boxes and empty lager cans merged with weeds that encircled a drooping tree.
This sprawling biosphere was divided by a path that led from the busy street up into a staircase of stone. Sitting on the summit, perched on the alabaster floor at the portico, buttressed by pillars giving a vaguely ionic flourish, one felt like a spectator to the distant thrum of urban life. My London, my Lewisham, my steps.
Before I knew it as the steps, it was the front of Sarah’s house. Sarah, a friend from University, first moved to Clarendon Rise in 2012. At the time I was living in a chaotic house share in East London and found myself drifting southwards on an almost daily basis. But it was Bill who introduced me to the ontological status of the six gradients that made-up the Moss encrusted steps.
Bill was, in his words, the longest surviving tenant of Clarendon Rise. Naturally cheerful, Bill was at his most bulliant on a Friday evening, with a cigarette in one hand and a lager in the other, basking in the last rays of the sun at the entrance to the house. It was in this manner that I first encountered Bill, with a grin that seemed to stretch wider than his squat face.
In a conversation eased by the immediate sharing of beer and tobacco, I learned everything there was to know about Bill before I even buzzed Sarah’s flat to tell her I’d arrived. He was a South Londoner through and through and would swear by this part of town being the best in London whilst also saying it was the pits.
He produced a bottle of whiskey, ‘time for a tipple?’. As the stereo began to blast out The Clash and we both stumbled through the lyrics of London Calling, a Friday tradition was inaugurated and a new fringe friendship forged.
I soon quit Mile End and moved in with Sarah. The Friday steps became a dedicated fixture. A high point of a week taken up by a stressful job. One that looking back I can see was not for me. I would arrive at the steps and find Bill and sometimes a friend already on their second six pack. Together we would March down the road to the bigger off-licence to procure further provisions from the local boss man.
My friends soon knew where I would be on such evenings. Some were baffled why I’d want to spend the Friday nights of my mid-twenties on a terrace in South London. But the ones that mattered got it and joined for the party.
On our own respective ledges of the steps, basking in the last light of the day we would opine on all manners of subjects. Bill, the consummate dreamer, indulged in his vision for someday entering the restaurant trade, ‘monster sandwiches, it’s the way forward’.
We planned to make a film like Tarantino but on the steps. We would go to Amsterdam to sample some of the finest herbs and what the missus don’t know, don’t hurt her. We would some someday be mayors of the city and get and get to ban things that really annoyed us, like sweetcorn sellers in the marketplace and traffic restrictions. We never did any of these, but they were real to us then.
(G61)
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