This is where it all started, my life, my earliest memories. A playing field overlooking the River Thames, I can remember clearly when the circus came to town and would pitch up on the grass or my dad would try to fly my fabric kite on the field. It was always a bit shit as I could not get my head around when to let it go. Sometimes walks when family came to visit the 14th floor of the tower block we lived in.
I remember one afternoon my mum put her foot down a rabbit hole and twisted her ankle. Its funny what we can remember from a early age, we moved out in 1974 when I was just under 4 years old.
“I would spend endless hours looking out of the window at the boatyard and the river beyond the flood banks.” I can’t remember too much about my parents’ relationship, only what my parents, mainly my mother, had told me. I have some very mixed and unclear images in my head about that time. As a child, I feel it was a happy time. I remember my mum taking me out in my little red car with pedals I could never master, I’m sure I had two left feet. It had Womble stickers on the front and sides, and I had a teddy bear called Rock head who had a bell in his ear. I know my dad had his issues, mainly drug and alcohol abuse. I never discussed it with him. I did not feel we could have talked about that in any detail; I’m sure he was in denial about it. It’s funny I don’t feel I can ask my mother as she still loved him until the day he died. He had left her 25 years before he passed away, leaving her in debt and a mortgage hanging around her neck. She still loved him until the end.
It was the early 70s in a deprived part of the south east of England. Three-day weeks, strikes, and it’s no fun having no power when you live on the 14th floor and the lifts are not working. My mum had been a window dresser in a women’s fashion shop in Grays before I came along, and my father worked for a construction company called John Howard, who specialized in oil rigs, grain silos, and flood defences. I think it was during the construction of the silos at Tilbury docks that he started to work for them in their offices. I remember I would go to work with him on a Saturday morning to an office block in Victoria. This was at the start of a bombing campaign by the IRA and one Saturday morning there was a loud rumble, I remember saying “Do you think it she cards at Buckingham Palace shooting their guns” he replied “Its probably the rumble of the tube train below the building” it was in fact a bomb going off. I remember leaving the building and all hell breaking loose and my father throwing my into the back of a black cab. I did not know what the hell was happening just us rushing back to Fenchurch street station and heading back to Essex. During the 90s I ended up coming close to a lot more of the bombings, but it was the same for anyone living or working in London.
The tower blocks where my first permanent home. It was a large flat with great views right across the river to Kent. You had the saying club on the banks of the river beyond the sea wall “well river wall”. You could look out to the east and see the docks in all they’re glory. The mud of the river and the footprint of a time gone by.
Richmond Road.
My mum’s parents, Douglas and Beatrice Blake, they lived in a three-up, three-down house in Richmond Road in Grays. If I remember correctly, my nan rented the house just after the war up to 1982. I have fond memories of the house from my childhood. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents there when I was young. The house had not been updated since my grandparents moved in during the 1940s. I don’t think they updated it either. It still had two-pin plugs and a gas meter that you had to put 50 pence in and turn a little handle. There was no heating or hot water until you lit the coke boiler. My nan was in charge of that sort of thing. It’s only now that I can see her chopping wood in the kitchen to get the coke boiler going and fetching coal for the fire in the sitting room. The front room had a gas fire, but it was never used unless it was a family event. When my parents first got married, they lived there until I came along, then they got their council flat on the 14th floor with river views. It’s also the house I was conceived in. It was a typical house of its time, originally the toilet was outside in the garden with a dirty dusty back ally. It might have been dusty and dirty but it was my playground, there was also the coal bunkers to climb on and build camps between them and the old wooden shed that was used for a wood store. Not nicely cut logs but any old shit that could be chopped up and burnt. God knows where it all came from bits of window frames old doors anything made of wood. It was even used as a monkey house at one point but that is another story. There was a Indian family living in the house to the left known as the Indians, Mr & Mrs Sigh and their three children Sonny, Jess and Subrage “I think that’s how its spelt” myself and Sonny would become great childhood friends. Then on the right you had the Bluers and my grandad used their garage to park his 3 wheel Relent Robin in bright yellow.
It’s funny when I went back to take a look around in 2015, there was a child’s bike parked up where I used to play, right outside the gate to number 23. The alley had not changed at all: still dirty, and you could still see the slight tint in the dirt, from years and years of fire ash being dumped over the back walls into the alley. It was not as well-kept as back in the 70s; back then the residents of both Richmond Road on the left and Bridge Road on the right still had pride in where they lived. It was never rich but tidy. A bit of pride: the high fence was not there when my grand parents lived there but a wall built of yellow brick, but black with age, capped to a point with concrete on the top. There would be flowers in the borders and a small veg patch with mint and rhubarb growing at the end of the garden new potatoes ready to dig up for lunch if the season was right.
When you look at the area today it’s not aways poverty that turns an area into a shit hole its pride or the lack of it. Back then you would never think of dumping a fridge and make it someone else’s problem, so why now.
The back alley was like a one-way street in 2015, the way in was blocked by an abandoned car with only 3 wheels. A local resident came out of number 27 and thought I was a photographer for the local paper, as the car had been there for weeks and had not been removed. To the right of the car was an old school, Park School Grays, where my mum and her brothers went. They only had to walk 30m to school. Looking on Google Maps looks like it’s been long since demolished.
My friend Sonny and all the other kids who lived on both sides of the alley would be out from morning to night playing football, cowboys and Indians, runouts, and riding bikes through the mud and puddles. It was what being a child of the 70s was all about. If it was raining, he would come around to my grandparents’ or I would go around his, and this is where I got my first taste of Indian food. We used to head to Jim’s corner shop two streets over in Salisbury Road. It was always confusing paying because I was a little slow in understanding money and counting it out, and to make it more confusing, they would talk in old money! Two bob, half a crown, and threepenny bit, what the heck. Sorry, but old money went out in ’71…. Jim’s had been there since before the war. You could buy anything in there from sweets to cigarettes and potatoes.
On visiting Jims one day with my 20p to buy sweets I must have only been 5 years old, yes and we used to go alone myself and Sunny. It was the first time I become aware of racism “Lets turn back” Sunny said. “Why” looking forward to see two older boys standing on the corner of the street. “They are National Front” they must have only been 10 years old with their skinheads. We did turn back that day only to return a little later.
It was a great time without a care in the world, void of any responsibility unlike now. Also times change kids don’t have the freedom I was once blessed with. No social media, no mobile phones just your imagination. In a way it’s sad how times have changed. Kids just can’t be kids anymore.
This is the first post on my website in a few years, I’ve not felt like doing much since I moved on from photographing Jazz. Ive a lot more to add. My next post on the site will be very close to home its a story about love and how sometimes that feeling can’t be broken.
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