Noisy at the Wrong Times (2 page)

Lidia Perillo and Francesco Volpe came to England from Italy in the mid-fifties. Romantically, there was an elopement of sorts, but they were actually invited to the UK along with thousands of others from around Europe and the Commonwealth. They took their opportunity, I suppose, but my mother wasn’t to know that embarking on such an adventure with a man of my father’s disposition was like trusting a blind archer to split the apple on your head; most of his efforts might fly harmlessly by, but one might be catastrophic. I never asked her if she ever wished Cupid’s arrow of destiny had missed.

Post-war Britain was in desperate need of the skill and toil immigrants could provide but no less suspicious of their motives for being here in the first place, and that schizophrenic approach remains today. My parents were issued with
Register of Alien
cards and told to report to the local police station of wherever it was they were living. Foreigners, at a time when the second war was still fresh and raw in the memory, were
largely viewed with disdain and mistrust by Londoners. Well into the seventies I recall shopping with Mum in the North End Road, where barrow boys, irked at her desire to pick up fruit and check its freshness, would snarl at her.

“In ENGLAND,” they would bark, speaking slowly, “we don’t touch until we buy, understand?” A stern look from Mum and a “FUGGOFF!” would do the trick. It was a theme that I too would encounter right through to adulthood.

My parents took up residence in various large houses, Mum as the cook and my father as the butler. Early fifties London still had about it the last remnants of the Edwardian age – although few would admit it – but it wasn’t exactly
Upstairs Downstairs
. Foreign domestic personnel were no doubt cheaper and easier to dismiss, but Mum learned to cook roast beef and Yorkshire pudding because there was little desire for gnocchi and pesto. The idea of Dad as a house servant is unimaginable. This is the man who, when taking his London bus driving test, stopped the vehicle in the middle of the road, told the examiner (who he judged was asking too many questions and giving too many instructions) to “fuck off”, terminated the test and left the bus in the middle of Uxbridge Road. This impetuous, compulsive streak is a feature of the Volpe clan, and Dad’s ability to stay in one place was forever being tested (he always failed, coming and going like malaria). Their careers as domestic staff ended, Mum and Dad took various jobs wherever they could find them, their family growing at the rate of one child every two years.

With three children, they were living in a basement flat in Woodstock Grove in Shepherd’s Bush. Dad, using the organ that did most of the thinking for him, left Mum to take up with another Italian woman, who had come to London and had been living with them whilst finding a place of her own. A trusting and good heart such as Mum’s is often abused; she
used to confide tearfully to this woman that she was convinced Dad was having an affair, unaware that her confidant was in fact planning to trust her own life to him, as Mum had herself once done. It would be no consolation to Mum that the woman was actually about to begin the long purgatory of life with Dad, but she eventually believed for certain that she had dodged the most toxic of bullets. Whilst away, Dad and his new girlfriend had a son, but Dad eventually came back again, stopping long enough to get my mother pregnant with me and I was born in May 1965.

On Christmas Day of that year, seven months after my birth, Dad departed for one final time, leaving Mum to fend for herself, which wasn’t easy, even without the complication of four children, three of them under five. My uncle, who had himself come to England to pursue a better life and who had engineered their reconciliation, came to our home for Christmas lunch to find my distraught mother, alone with her children. Mum demanded to be taken to the house where she knew Dad would be and on arrival began to scream abuse at the window above, behaviour that brought my father to the street in truculent, righteously punitive mood. My uncle ensured, with equal aggression, that he didn’t get the chance to express himself and thereafter remained, for nearly fifty years, virtually entirely estranged from his brother.

One can only imagine the emotional turmoil of recurring rejection and loss she must have suffered during this early period, before her mind and heart were cleared and she saw what she had escaped. In a strange country, her family all back in Italy, living in a two-roomed slum with very little to sustain her financially, Mum’s is a story of stoicism and a relentless battle for survival. If you had seen the conditions she had to contend with, that statement wouldn’t appear as melodramatic as it sounds. But soon, fortune smiled on her when she got a
job as a cook in the local day nursery in Brook Green. They had a baby room, and, at a tender, still-pink and crinkled age, I was cared for as she cooked in the adjacent kitchen. My brother Serge was also given a place, and our early childhood was full of the pleasures of a well-run council establishment. Council nurseries had lots of staff in uniforms and obeyed strict rules. For the entire five years I spent there, after every lunch, we were force-fed a spoonful of cod liver oil, without fail, no exceptions. We all slept in the afternoon on put-down camp beds, there was a proper pre-school curriculum and the food, on account of our mother cooking it, was the best in the borough – nobody else had the variety we enjoyed. The staff loved the lunches, too, with Mum delivering the full spectrum of southern Italian cuisine. Later, her kitchen assistant, Miriam, who had come to England from the Caribbean, taught Mum how to cook salt fish and patties and gave her the recipe for a spicy crispy batter. Mum’s culinary world trip didn’t stop there: soon, lunch and tea featured samosas, exotic curries and Jamaican fried chicken to go along with the lasagnes, cannelloni, baccala and bresaola.

The job at the nursery was a major step forward because it was secure, offered a regular income and carried with it a pension. She would remain in the job for over 30 years until her retirement. But the slum in which we lived made sure life was never simple, even as things began to improve. A one-bedroom basement flat with no bathroom or toilet was home for the first five years of my life. Lino on the floor, baths in the kitchen sink and mice in the cupboards are enduring memories.

Woodstock Grove, now inevitably gentrified, its large houses re-joined from top to bottom, was a community one rarely sees today. It was a dead end street (literally and socially), with a BBC complex at the closed end, and cars never travelled its length. Predictably, it had a pub on the corner at the open
end, and women had only to step outside their front door to scream the name of their menfolk, who would wobble from the pub obediently. All doorsteps were painted in that dark burgundy stone paint. It was a place of poor, working class solidity and industriousness, where we could buy fresh eggs from Old Man Lacey, a home farmer with chickens in his back yard and only one arm with which to harvest their crop. Another family bred rabbits in the cupboard under the stairs that were either sold as pets to those with room for a hutch or sent to the pot for sustenance. No doubt those bought as pets would inevitably end up in a casserole too.

The children of Woodstock Grove played in the street together in gangs that seemed to number dozens, all dressed shabbily in hand-me-down nylon and sockless in their tatty shoes. The games featured all of the street’s children, of every age. Standing with arms and legs spread in a star shape against a stolen sheet of plywood so that friends could hurl darts like a circus knife thrower was a popular entertainment. One boy lost an eye, and my eldest brother felt the sting of a dart sinking itself into his clavicle. For weeks, wood and flammable scrap would be collected as the kids built massive bonfires in the road on Guy Fawkes Night. Fireworks were a constant thrill and, unlike today, only seemed to go on sale a week or so before November 5
^th
, so there was a real sense of occasion as we pilfered pennies and pooled pocket money for
Bangers
. Ten in a box, these small cigarette-sized exploding tubes with a blue fuse were lobbed at cats, at each other or dropped into letterboxes. On the building sites, we could chuck old milk bottles stuffed with a lighted banger into the air, timing it so it exploded mid-flight, but Matt, my second eldest brother, for some inexplicable reason, lit a Jumping Jack (a special banger that does what it says) and put it in his pocket. Burns and injuries were a constant menace, some of them serious. But
above all else, the bonfires stirred our souls. One was never enough; each section of the street had to have its own pyre so at least three would singe and buckle the tarmac, radiating a brutal heat that flaked everything in its path. Given that there was so much nylon in its path, it is a curiosity that more children didn’t spontaneously combust as they were pinned against the houses of the street by the ferocious glow. Every year the fire brigade – most of west London’s – had to be summoned. Our other playground was the electrified tube line that ran past the end of the garden, which also contained the outside loo. Holding onto tube trains waiting at red and seeing who could stay on longest as they accelerated away filled hours of time. Incredibly, nobody died.

One summer we all caught ringworm from the neighbour’s dog, but Mum refused to let our curly hair be shaved off even though it offered the best chance of a cure. This refusal was completely at odds with the way in which she maintained our much-valued locks, for which she used one of those ferocious combs with an embedded razor, taking regularly to our heads with abandon, turning our hair into feathered mats with a coiled fringe. With mounds of hair at her feet, she would then smother what was left on our heads with
Vitapoint
, a nourishing cream that smelled like cat’s piss and had the effect of turning the mat into a greasy brown mesh. Pictures of me as a youngster are an exhibition of wonderfully quirky hairdos and I half-expect to see a small rodent poking out from behind my ear.

Even as small boys, our pride suffered from having to attend school looking like scarecrows, but Matteo was always at the hospital with real injuries requiring stitches. In fact, we all risked life and limb playing in the local building sites, but Matt would remove all risk of grievance by willingly replacing it with certainty. He once turned his feet and ankles into beef
jerky by leaping onto a carefully stacked pile of plate glass. My early recollections of Matt include watching him gently pick the stitches from his latest laceration – because he was always getting wounded, early signs of the fearless abandon that would have found better expression had he developed an interest in high finance rather than shoplifting.

DISCOVERING WHERE IT BEGAN ...

N
o doubt the local council was taking notes, recognising the dangers that four young children with a single mother were in, but more likely they realised the peril our neighbours faced as we grew. Social services were probably less sensitive than they are today, and in the late sixties and early seventies I suppose many of the social workers would have been war children, when deprivation was genuinely life-threatening. With a world war fresh in the memory, most social workers probably needed the delinquent behaviour of children to mimic the invasion of Poland, or at the very least, the worst excesses of a Panzer division before alarm bells began to ring. They had the power, these social workers, to confer real privilege upon us. Warsaw felt no threat from us, but Woodstock Grove probably did; and when I was five years old, we were offered the unimaginable luxury of a flat in Fulham Court, a flat I should add, that had an inside bathroom.

We all decamped to our new duplex three-bedroom flat in June of 1970. Central heating wouldn’t be installed for another twenty years, but there was always paraffin. Fulham Court was on the Fulham Road, closer to the fashionable enclave of Chelsea, and Matt no doubt had his own Blitzkrieg in mind; but I was so unspeakably excited by the concept of a bath that I insisted on sitting in it when we all went to view the flat before moving in.

If this leap in social status was significant to us, it was like winning the pools for Mum. Two bedrooms to share between us children was officially palatial, but in reality, Mum had even seen Woodstock Grove as a vast improvement over what she had lived in before coming to England. Her hometown was the mountain top village of Montecorvino Pugliano in Campania, southern Italy. Poverty there in the thirties and forties had a smell and danger all its own, with malaria and cholera haunting the narrow, steep streets of her village. Her younger brother contracted meningitis as a baby and was essentially condemned to death by his doctor, but an old woman, having heard the wails and moans of the family, came to the door with a jar of leeches, offering the last and only hope to my mother’s parents. Placing several of the creatures around his head, the old woman’s intervention was absurd and illogical, but it was a hope of cure where sophisticated antibiotics never existed, and, miraculously, the child survived the illness. Mum’s home was a lethal environment that sent its inhabitants into the arms of such quackery, but if
Il Dio
ignored your prayers, he’d always send a surrogate with an old wives’ tale instead.

If it wasn’t bacteria that threatened to wipe out the population, it was earthquakes. In 1980, one
terremoto
had a good go, shaking the region to smithereens: thousands of people perished. In her early teens, war and the presence of the Nazis became the biggest threat once Mussolini had been kicked out. The formerly chummy Germans were an instant occupier when Benito, hanging by his feet, met his gruesome end at an Esso station in Milan. By then the Nazis were undoubtedly on their last legs in Italy, but the continuing resistance action provoked terrible reprisals. Eventually, liberation came, but even that almost cost Mum her life. She, my brothers and I have cause to be thankful for the failures of British munitions workers as a stray Allied shell failed to
explode after it crashed through the roof of the bread shop Mum was in, killing the baker as he handed her a loaf. Actually, I don’t know the nationality of the shell, but the British were engaged in all sorts of activity in the area as the Allies pushed northwards. The fighting in the region was substantial, and in Mum’s municipality, a legend was born when a small platoon of Germans held out for two weeks in a church, fighting the surrounding Allied forces to a standstill. Why they didn’t just flatten the church I don’t know – perhaps even then there was sensitivity towards religion. Maybe they did try to flatten the church but the shells kept failing to go off. That munitions factory probably became British Leyland.