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wrecks and the city.

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Home for me is a 15ft by 15ft room in a 1950’s garden estate in a back street of Camberwell, which is in South London. I’ve been here for around four years now and in this time I have come used to the noises that surround me, there are plenty of them. I thought, seeing as how I’ve a spare couple of weeks on my hands, to go through the typical day in the life of a single woman living in a box in the capital city.

Morning time. The dawn chorus around here is surprisingly loud for a place where you would think that there is little or no wildlife. OK, so mostly it’s not the delicate sound of songbirds, it’s more the raucous sound of crows fighting over whatever takeaway has been vomited on the pavement outside, but it’s birdsong and I take heart from that. At 5am sharp every morning the man who works for a poultry and game bird distribution company starts his van up and goes to work. It’s one of those things that you sort of wait for, I sometimes lay in my bed waiting to hear it. If I don’t I wonder whether he’s sick or something. I have no idea what he looks like, I’m even assuming it’s a man, could be a woman, this are times of sexual equality after all. I’ve only ever seen the van, so I mentally picture him as a middle aged man with a greying Elvis quiff and bad tattoos. His departure signals the start of the daily rush of traffic and being situated on a one way road with very few passing points means that the school run is generally a noisy affair. We have a nursery and primary school across the road which draws a convoy of mothers in their highly impractical and environment killing four by fours. I wonder why it is that they all go crazy over the high levels of childhood asthma in the area, yet still see fit to drive the five minute journey in a massive vehicle meant for rough terrain. And they all have bull bars, because , let’s face it, we are so likely to come across a rhino in the road in London that you have to be prepared, right? Anyway, as they snake their way through the parked cars they inevitably reach an impasse, someone coming in the opposite direction who refuses to give way… Their children all look entirely humiliated as mum makes rude hand gestures at the driver and shouts obscenities; usually these involve doing anatomically impossible things to themselves and then the same thing to their mothers. You hear car doors slamming, confrontations and language that would make a sailor blush most mornings. Sometimes I cheer them on, curtains are a wonderful device and camouflage the onlooker as you hurl words of encouragement. Sooner or later one of them will back up the five or six feet necessary to diffuse the situation.

Mid morning  and things calm down. Just as you are settling down to the first cup of tea and maybe a little daytime chat show action the old girl downstairs decides to mow her lawn. She does this with frightening regularity, the fact that she has any grass at all is something I haven’t managed to work out. She is unable to let it grow a millimetre and will unwind the several metres of bright orange cable into the house carefully and then let loose with the worlds noisiest mower. It rattles the china in the kitchen and drowns out even your own thoughts, so sometimes I’ll go out to the local shop just to escape it.

Walking out of my house is a game of roulette, there is a balcony and then a staircase and the trick is to avoid the neighbours at all costs. Don’t get me wrong, they are nice people, it’s just that the small talk is not something I relish particularly; there is a lady at 31 who has been asking me the same question every time I’ve seen her for four whole years. I say hello, she says hello and then she asks “So, have you managed to settle in OK?” and I always reply “Yes, thank you, I’m settling in fine”. Of course, what I mean to say is “I settled in about three years and six months ago and am already bored of living here and am desperate to move out”. I don’t know if she has no sense of time, but she seems to always think that I have only just got here. She was also the person who came nosing about in my first week and actually said to me “You want to get some curtains up at that front window, when you look in you can see everything”. And you would know this how?

My other neighbours are a curious family who all look strangely identical, the only way to tell the women from the men is the facial hair and even then you have to look twice. There are five people living in a three bed roomed house and I always feel like there is something going on in that family that no one wants to talk about. The mother is the spokesman and will keep you talking for hours about some of the most depressing things imaginable, she knows who has got which disease, which members of the local community has suffered any physical injury and the prognosis as to whether they will live or die. Mother is also afflicted with body odour that could knock out an elephant and eyes that water constantly, her missing teeth are almost ignorable because of this. Almost. The daughter goes out with a Muslim man and has taken to wearing incredibly tight woolly hats in all weathers. The son is a sandwich short of a picnic and follows his mother about like a puppy, usually pulling the shopping trolley along behind him. Dad has a baseball cap, a floating eye and smokes constantly. The only other resident is a grandchild who surprisingly outranks the rest of them in intellect and so I can only assume is like her father.

So, with a little luck you can get out without any bother and then it’s out into the street. Out there you usually encounter large amounts of dumped household items, fridges, beds, sofas, all kinds of twisted metal. I live in a place where people leave things, run away and hope they’ll disappear. Sometimes this works, I myself left a crappy sofa bed in the street and five minutes later it was gone. It’s like a sort of bizarre urban recycling scheme, every one else is furnishing their homes with your unwanted items. Generally though the mess is cleared by a team of local council workers whose job it is to maintain the street. And this is where I have to mention the flat faced grey haired man who has been working here since I moved in. Now, I’m a friendly enough sort, don’t really like bad manners, so when I encountered him a few times in my early days here I smiled and said hello, just out of politeness. Every time I go past this man now he says ‘alright’ but he refuses to say anything else, will not and can not say another word to me. I’ve tried; I came out of my flat once to find him mopping the stairwell, he said ‘alright’ and I said ‘hello’ and then I broke the rules. I dared to add ‘How are you doing?’ and he looked at me as if I had just propositioned him. So I don’t try anymore and will follow the unspoken law that no conversation must take place between us. If he is on the estate anywhere I try to get past him without having to acknowledge him, this has turned into a game which I play on a regular basis, so far I’m losing. It can get quite tense and it’s all I can do not to scream when he notices me.

Camberwell is a strange place and there are some ‘characters’ who you see wandering around most days. There is a man in a pink glittery cowboy hat, a man who wears more sober cowboy gear and a very bizarrely shaped man in a wheelchair who is compelled to speak to every woman that goes past. I think he believes that if he says something to all of them eventually he’ll hit on one who’ll actually give him the time of day. So far he’s still single and looking. There is an old lady with a bandaged leg who looks like the queen and then there is the family who wanders up and down all day. There are three of them, parents and a daughter, the daughter pushes the wheelchair with her mum in it. She wears thick black jogging bottoms with tights and busted shoes, a red threadbare cardigan and a black and gold top, she always wears a headscarf and she seems to be padded all over, like she has several layers on all the time. You barely notice her parents as the daughter takes up most of your attention. They shuffle along, head down, sitting outside the local supermarket and falling asleep on benches. You wonder what their story is, how they got to this point, where they go at night. In fact the everywhere you look there are people like this, people for whom life has taken a significant downturn and has left them to carve a life out of whatever they can. People round here have to gain pleasure and comfort from the very little they have.

Anyway, purchases made I will wander back to the house and pass by the garage at the end of the street that always seems like a cover for more nefarious activities and the adventure playground that teems with children all summer and goes into silent hibernation all winter.

Afternoon sees the morning happening in reverse, the mothers return to pick up their little angels, there is noise outside for an hour or so as the road rage soap operas continue. Back from school the children play on the green outside the flats and the noise of several games of football reverberate off the blocks all around me. Around five the kids are called in for dinner by their mothers. My immediate next door neighbour, a Spanish man and the other people who are in and out of the house all the time, have a habit of spending their afternoons cleaning in a frenzy. They open all the windows and doors, put the houseplants outside and play Whitney Houston’s greatest hits as loudly as possible as they mop. It might be inspiring to them, to me it’s nails down a blackboard. I don’t mind my Spanish neighbour too much, we have had one run in when he played ‘The Gypsy Kings’ at 2am and I threw my boot at the wall.

It’s on a Friday and Saturday night that the real action happens, although this is a back street it is often a cut through for the late night revellers who frequent some of the very dangerous looking bars and pubs on the main road. As the sun goes down the less delightful people put on their ‘bingo bling’ and head out to get half cut during one of the many karaoke evenings dotted about the locale. You are always guaranteed the same things and can look forward to the late night entertainment of fights, fall outs and drunken to-dos. At around 1am you can always count on a boyfriend and girlfriend screaming at one another. The best one I’ve seen was a couple having a fight about flirting in a club, he sat on a wall and she pushed him off backwards. Classy.

And so a new day arrives in Camberwell and the crows return to wake me up.
Written out of a sense of nothing better to do.
© 2005 - 2024 littlefishey
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beauvoirian's avatar
This is a very amusing and endearing piece of writing, my favourite of yours so far. :)