Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 59

As I moved through my childhood and teenage bits, Ealing began to change. As the old soldiers died one by one, their houses were converted into flats and bedsitters. But it was still genteeI and quiet.

We knew our place.

It was middle-class veering slightly towards upper-middle-class with a desperate desire to be upper-upper-middle-class, and maybe even drop the ‘middle’. We had accounts at the grocer’s and a little woman my grandmother called ‘the daily’ who came in and did twice a week. My mother and aunts were brought up by nannies who wore uniforms and pushed their prams around Ealing Common in a convoy with an accuracy you could set your watch by. We had a button in every room that rang a bell in the kitchen.

We were very sure of our place. No man may be an island but a suburb certainly could be. Ealing had a moat around it to keep it safe from West Ealing, South Ealing and all the other common places beyond. Our blood was blue, which was strange because our necks were red.

Yet, no one would have had it any other way.

Familiarity breeds contentment.

Each morning, the milk floats radiated out from United Dairies on the edge of the Common. The horses I remember as child were replaced by the hum of electric motors as the floats stopped and started, stopped and started along our peaceful streets.

The price of all this security was a wet blanket that lay over Ealing, smothering laughter, dampening down rash decisions, muffling raised voices, but it kept us safe and warm.

As I grew up, the only music I heard in our house were ancient 78s of Caruso singing opera which my mother adored. Like her, it was cold and mechanical, an overbearing photocopy of real feelings – not from the heart, but from an inflexible book of rules.

But then, in the mid-fifties, we discovered Eel Pie Island. We’d take the bus or go on our motorbikes out to Twickenham where the enchanted island sat in the Thames.

We’d cross the footbridge with an old lady in a cupboard at the far end that you gave sixpence to and enter another world. And it was enchanted, with a small group of eccentric cottages of artists and inventors – including Trevor Baylis, who created the clockwork radio.