Extra Ordinary

While enjoying the comfort of a largeish creaky old house, I am also attracted to the mundane but edgy cosiness of some small terraces, their originally cobbled streets dimly illuminated in the fog of memory and imagination. I visited them when young, and recall similar urban images from 1960s television in the likes of Callan, Maigret or even Sherlock Holmes. London and Paris, both beloved of psychogeographers. A different era, and a different context, but the song “Ghost Town” (The Specials, 1981) evokes just the right the ambience for me. 

Today, in a sanitised view through a train window, passing above straight rows of little suburban houses, their rear yards separated by back lanes, it's not immediately obvious if I’m seeing neglect or regeneration, neighbourliness or nameless gentrification. With a sense of dislocation, I wonder whether this is London, Portsmouth or somewhere else, just as I did as a child. There are plenty of other cues to confirm that this time it is Caerdydd (Cardiff). Writing while staying in nearby Caerffili, I am also randomly watching an old television travelogue in which Trevor McDonald views the poorest parts of India through the windows of the Maharaja's Express, with similar dislocation. 

During the 1930s, my grandmother (“Grandma Nellie”) had split from her husband in Weymouth, and moved with her three children to Portsmouth. I have early memories (c1960) of visiting her and her landlord in "digs" in Delhi Street, Landport, and seem to recall locals calling it  “Dell-Aye” Street. Regardless of pronunciation the name stayed with me until I was able to visit Delhi itself half a century later. The street had, according to my unreliable memory, the aura of those subject to postwar slum clearances.  I was told that at one time the family couldn't afford shoes. Nellie, as a single parent, worked for a while in a bakery. Once she took home some faux iced cakes made of paper from the window-display, to amuse the children. One of them, Jim, my father, never forgave her. 

At fourteen Jim became an apprentice draughtsman in the Naval Dockyard, where he progressed through a variety of jobs over the next forty years. Rather self-conscious, he tried in his teens to “better” himself through attending classical concerts in the Guildhall, and later by listening to the BBC Home Service. But in respectful acknowledgement of his poor background, he often told the story of the founder of the Portsmouth Ragged Schools, John Pounds (1766-1839) who reputedly attracted hungry children to his classes with baked potatoes. There was a tough side to Portsea that I rarely saw, but emerged in my father’s exhortations before an evening out: “If there’s any trouble son, come straight home”. 

Jim and his cousin had both at one time been members of the Communist Party, my father also a close friend and colleague of Harry Houghton of the Portland Spy Ring. There is a long suppressed history of dissent and Communism in the Royal Dockyards, the Navy and in the coal mines of South Wales. I tried to find out more about this, and found myself banned from a social media group about bygone Portsmouth, on the grounds that my questions were political, while I had been looking for a local perspective in pursuit of my interest in social history. I had been brought up in the suburb of Drayton, in the north of Portsmouth, whose current MP just happens to be one Penny Mordaunt [born the year I left the city for good; perhaps I knew]. Maybe the rather jingoistic group's moderator would have rescinded had they known I came from such a middle-class Tory constituency.

I revisit the side streets and back streets with a mixture of nostalgia, imagination and rose-tinted varifocals. A trawl through the internet reveals others’ wildly contrasting experiences, good and bad. I look back warmly to the times when I lived in a terrace, and later an end of terrace house. In my early twenties I also lived in a caravan for a couple of years, which in many ways would have felt like a holiday if it weren’t for the cockroaches. Full circle, and my recent experiences of “cosy living” have been in holiday lets. Cosy for holidays, but not for those who are unable to afford to actually live there, I try to only book premises that are otherwise unsuitable for “normal” housing, such as extensions, agricultural conversions or shepherds’ huts. 

He died almost thirty years ago, but something of Jim’s sensibilities live on.  

LINKS

Ghost Town (The Specials song) - Wikipedia

John Pounds - Wikipedia

I will probably never visit Tasmania (cambriancrumbs.blogspot.com)

Tales of espionage in four ports: Portsmouth, Portland, Porthmadog, Portmeirion. Part 1. (cambriancrumbs.blogspot.com)

Period romance: why do the British love old properties? (ft.com)

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