naylor road

memories of an imperfect community

A 3-story red-brick building lines one side of a small section of Naylor Road. Flats of various configurations, maisonettes and terraced houses line the other. That’s how I remember it. Peckham in the late 90s, before the New Millenium came in and much before the “yuppies” swooped in en-masse. I joke that Naylor Road will be the last street to be gentrified. The last bastion of pre-Bussey-building-Peckham-Levels “Narm”.

We were on the top floor. 3 kids, 2 bedrooms and 1 revolving door of older cousins, uncles and aunties from back home.

At the time, the block didn’t have an intercom, or a locked door, and the council hadn’t fully rolled out double glazed windows. That was home and the backdrop for where I formed my earliest memories. Naylor Road was the first place that I felt part of a community.

third floor

Mary* and her husband lived in the flat directly opposite. They chain-smoked cigarettes and spoke with a regional accent that I still can’t put my finger on. 

Their adult son had since moved out and with that left a Nintendo 64 and a plastic bag full of game cartridges out of use and ready to be loved by a consoleless pair of brothers next door.

She’d rarely ever turn us away when we knocked on the door. Her husband, Fred would often be bare chested in bed, lit cigarette in hand surrounded by a cloud of smoke. He’d poke his head out to smile when we greeted him, before we excitedly slipped away into the living room, pressed up as closely as we could to the screen, playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Often I’d be content just watching my brother play and offering strategic advice on how to complete missions. It was a collective enterprise of epic proportions. 

After hours, Mary would gently hint that we should head home or my mum or younger sister would knock on the door to call us in.

Sometimes we had to leave abruptly. From our flat, we could occasionally hear yelling, sometimes crying, seeping out across the corridor. 

One night, whilst getting ready for bed, we received a terror-filled knock on the door. Scratches formed a swollen, purple mass of flesh under Mary’s eye as she stood in the doorway. My parents let her in and we looked on in horror. I remember police coming round - my child-like mind grappling with the idea that her husband, who always seemed so nice had done this to her.

ground floor

I learned to ride a bike on Henry’s one in the communal garden. I say garden, it was more like a rugged patchwork of grass and unlevel concrete at the rear end of our block. It was enclosed on three sides. On the right by a low fence, where next door neighbour, Carol, lived with her barking chihuahuas. We’d often trespass to retrieve a football when knocking on her frontdoor to ask was too daunting a task or we were in the heat of a good game. More than once she’d catch us in the act from her window and scream at us for intruding. Other times she’d share sweets and ice creams with us from over the fence.

A huge tree sat in the far end of our garden with a shabby wooden structure we called “the tree house”. This was an extremely charitable description of it or maybe our imaginations, unhindered by “reality” saw it in its potential. Whatever the case, you couldn’t actually sit in it, but it made a good launching pad for mounting the black car tyre that hung off the light blue rope tied to the thickest branch. When I finally gathered the courage to do so myself, I’d swing back and forth freely, feeling the wind hit my legs.

Henry & Josh were snotty-nosed and adventurous. They climbed, flipped and pulled off all kinds of wild stunts on whatever makeshift structure the garden produced. Henry was my age and Josh was my brother’s.

On one or two occasions, when both my parents were either working night shifts or had a function to attend, we spent the evening around Henry & Josh’s, snuggled on the sofa watching some of the classic Disney movies on video or playing Sonic the Hedgehog on their Sega Mega Drive.

They had a big black glossy-coated dog called Sheba. We loved Sheba. I used to get really bad motion sickness in cars and often threw up on long journeys. My parents would carry plastic bags for when uncles or cab drivers would pick us up and I’d inevitably call out from the backseat that I wasn’t feeling well. 

One time I threw up on a ride back home from an outing. I had on a black bomber with the classic orange lining. Vomit covered a decent portion of the front and arm. As I sat on the foot of the stairs feeling sorry for myself, Clare went to grab me a glass of water as she chatted to my parents in the hallway. Sheba scurried over almost sheepishly, and with kind eyes licked the remnants of sick clean off my jacket. Foul. But for whatever reason that memory has stayed. It felt tender and accepting of something that I had by that time – having done so many times before – long become embarrassed about.

balcony

Bruno lived on the top floor like us but in a flat on the left side of the balcony, overlooking the garden. You’d often hear him before you see him - a bellowing “oy-oy!” in his distinctive south London geezer twang echoing through the hallway, before a shortish man sporting a buzz cut appears. He stood with a slanted gait and walked with a heavy limp dragging his leg after him like an appendage.

When the mood carried him, Bruno would thump out music from his flat. The sound reverberated around the building and bled out into the garden too. On one of these sunny days, with a beer in close proximity, one-by-one he began chucking his vinyl records off the balcony, much to our amusement as kids. We spent that day jumping and laughing, playing frisbees with these 12-inch records. I wonder if he was just moving with the times – marking the transition into the new era of CDs – or if something in his life was moving him to discard these treasures in the dramatic way he did.

As kids do, one of us asked why Bruno walked with a limp. I think Clare, or one of the other adults, obliged us with the story. Years prior, he had allegedly jumped off the balcony running away from some people who were after him. I can’t remember if it was the police or another group of men who meant him harm – but whenever I looked up at the balcony after that day I’d imagine the scene playing out in my head.

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Memories seem to be a recurring theme in much of my writing. There are chunks of my life that I have trouble recollecting and others that are vivid in detail and pregnant with emotion. I’ve learnt to pay more attention to the memories that have stuck, stubbornly taking up space despite decades of activity vying for room.

When I was getting to know my now-wife, then work colleague, I took her on a walk through my old neighbourhoods. It felt like she’d have a better understanding of me by seeing the environments that shaped me. I think I was right. With each landmark, a memory would flood back and remind me of the person I was at that time, and how much of him still remains. For someone that was quiet, a lot of my energy was spent observing, making sense of what surrounded me.

Feelings of belonging feature heavily, which is why community – the invisible framework that cultivates ease of being – demands my acknowledgement so often. It felt fleeting as I progressed through life, attending new schools and experiencing being othered. 

As a father, the idea of forming and contributing to a community rests more heavily on my shoulders. Today it seems to require such active intentionality that the nostalgia of a community built on proximity, as imperfect as it was, living on top of each other, brings a sense of warmth; a time before I really understood class or race or the many other entrenched illusions that divide us.

I still look fondly on my little village, perhaps rose-tinted by the red brick blocks on Naylor Road.