tomobrien2004@yahoo.co.uk                                    http://www.gorgeousgael.com

LIVIN’ IT UP IN KILBURN & CRICKLEWOOD etc

By

Tom O’Brien

When I first came to Kilburn in the mid 1960’s my residence was a less than salubrious double room in house that had seen better days, run by a certain Mrs McGinty in Iverson Road. It was the sort of place where you wiped your feet on the way out.

I was sharing the room with Vince Power – later of Mean Fiddler fame – with whom I had gone to school with in rural Waterford in a place called Newtown. Newtown comprised of a couple houses, the church, the school, two pubs, and a sweet shop, so the culture shock of walking down Kilburn High Road for the first time was quite something! 

Within a few hundred yards I had seen two cinemas, The State and The Grange – monoliths of stone from a bygone era – an Irish dance hall, The Banba – and numerous pubs with names like The North London, The Black Lion, Biddy Mulligan’s, and so on.

There was also a Wimpey Burger Bar on the High Road, with a notice board just outside on the pavement which advertised rooms to let. It was here that I first read the legend ‘NO BLACKS, NO DOGS, NO IRISH’ It was also the first time I had seen black people in reality. I began to wonder what I was letting myself in for.

Vince was soon working as a floorwalker in Whiteley’s department store in Queensway, while I had got a job in the accounts department of Smiths Radiomobile factory in Cricklewood. In between times we listened to music from Vince’s collection of Buddy Holly and Patsy Cline records.

Cricklewood, too, had an Irish dance hall, called The Galtymore, and it was smack in the middle of the Broadway.  Big and bawdy It had two dance floors, one for modern music and one for Irish dancing, and was nearly always filled to capacity. And just a stones’ throw away was The Crown, even bigger and bawdier, and full of thirsty Irishmen washing the dust down after a hard day digging holes or pulling cables all over London and outlying areas.

            Oh the crack was good in Cricklewood, but t’was better in the Crown

            There were bottles flying and Biddies cryiing, and Paddies goin’ to town

            Oh mother dear I’m over here, I never will go back

            What keeps me here is the rake of beer, the women and the crack

The words of ‘McAlpines Fuseliers’, Dominic Behan’s homage to the expat shovel brigade, were regularly ringing in our ears as Vince and I danced our nights away at The Banba or the Galtymore. And sometimes our afternoons too; for there was a Sunday afternoon tea dance at the Banba, where hung-over Irishmen could sober up for the night ahead!

This was also the era of The Sunshine Gang, a group of expat thugs that plagued the area at the time. Said to have originated from the Longford/Westmeath region, they were into protection and other criminal activities. If bar and shop owners didn’t pay up they basically came in and smashed the place up.

The Banba, which was up an alley off Kilburn High Road was attacked during one tea dance while we were present; they wedged a Mini in the entrance, beat up the doorman, then started smashing up the hall inside. They were looking for Michael Gannon, the owner, who had presumably forgotten to pay his ‘subscription’.  They left after a few minutes, having no doubt been paid! They occasionally put in an appearance at the Galtymore as well!

We weren’t long getting to know the pubs in the area. Biddy Mulligan’s was a favourite of ours, as was The Admiral Nelson in Carlton Vale, owned by  Butty Sugrue. Butty originated from Kilorglin in County Kerry and was a Circus Performer cum-wrestler-strongman-publican-entrepreneur. He had toured Ireland with Duffy’s Circus, billed as Ireland’s strongest man and in Kilburn he had pulled red London buses up the High Road with the rope held between his teeth! A couple of years after we arrived, he had his barman, Mick Meaney, buried alive in a yard adjacent to the pub, where he remained for 61 days – a Guinness Book of Records world record. ‘Resurrection day’ saw thousands line the High Road as Mick was proudly paraded through Kilburn in the back of a truck.

There was always plenty of singing and dancing at The Admiral Nelson, and Jack Doyle was frequently seen at the venue singing for his supper. Jack had slipped a long way down since his heydays when he had fought for the British Heavyweight boxing title, or when he had been feted in Hollywood before marrying Mexican actress Movita, the couple moving to London, where they toured the country singing and performing to delirious audiences, and becoming the 1940’s  equivalent of Posh and Becks.

The bigger they are the harder they fall is a well known saying, and Jack eventually fell further than most. Whenever anyone asked him what caused his downfall he always replied ‘fast women and slow horses’. Some years later he would be found dead in a park in West London, penniless and shoeless. Listening to Jack and Movita singing together would send shivers down your spine.  Listen on the link below

Eventually Vince and I moved on to Harlesden where the 32 Cub in Harlesden High Street was the Mecca for the Irish population. Situated next to the Elm Tree pub on the High Street, in the building that was formerly the Picardy cinema, it was heaving every weekend.

By now Vince had met his first wife, Theresa, and before too long they got married and had a  child. Somehow, I managed to miss the wedding!

A few years later I was married myself (1971) and Vince was my best man wearing a suit borrowed from his brother-in-law! Yes, he was that poor!

In between times a lot had changed in our lives; Vince was now working in demolition, knocking down rows of terraced houses in the Willesden area, I had been a guest at Her Majesty’s pleasure for eighteen months, been deported back to Ireland and come back again, and had won a tidy sum of money with my regular Saturday bet on the ITV7 at my local William Hill’s betting shop!

We put it to good use; opening a second-hand furniture shop on the Harrow Road in Kensal Rise, calling it the Bargain Store. We could only afford an old beat-up Morris van, but it was good enough for the house clearances and deliveries that we now had to deal with. And more importantly we were working for ourselves; much more enjoyable than clocking on and clocking off at some anonymous factory in Park Royal or Acton. Things were looking up!

Video attached. If asked for a password it’s Shane

Poem for my father.

THE NIGHT THE MUSIC DIED

He lay in the box quite comfortably

His waxen face staring into infinity

Looking much better in death

Than he ever had in life.

It was all that I could do to peer

At him through slatted fingers

From the back of the room;

The ever-present smell of tanning

And leather aprons absent now;

More than forty seeping years of it

Scrubbed away one last time

His moped – a natural progression from pedal power

When his legs gave out –

Lay discarded in the coal shed

At the back of the house.

(No driver you see, and mother still had the shopping to do)

He dug turf, cut down young Sally trees,

And turned over his bit of stony ground endlessly.

In summer he clipped sheep slowly

With a machine bought by post from Clerys,

Carefully stowing it away in its box

When the shearing was done.

The clay pipes he sucked on – their broken stems

Held together with blood pricked from his thumb –

Were redundant now

And his three bottles of Sunday-night Guinness

Would stand corked under the counter evermore.

Who would dance half-sets with her now?

My mother enquired of no one in particular,

The smoky saloon bar stunned that the music had felled him

Knocked him to the floor in the middle of the tune.

He lay there with a smile on his face

Knowing it was over

And I never got to know what was on his mind.

We put him in the ground

And sadness trickled through me

Like a handful of sand through my fingers.

Later, everyone stood around

Eating sparse ham sandwiches

While I stood there, dry-eyed;

He was a great man they all said

Slapping the back of my overcoat;

Sure he gave forty years to that tannery

And what did it give him?

I wanted to shout to the throng;

A gold watch and a tin tray

And both had his name spelled wrong

All reactions:

2Mick Daniels and Anthony Cable

Pogues musical back at The Stables

THE HOMECOMING

Did you ever see a hill shrink?  I mean get physically smaller bit by bit until there was nothing left.  To an occasional observer like myself it was probably more of a culture shock than if I had been present throughout its gradual disintegration.  But then, I only saw it every few years or so – when I came home on holidays from New York.  And every time there was another big chunk of it gone.  Things like that tend to stick in your mind.

It’s hard to describe how I felt about that hill.  It was like one of the family.  I grew up with it.  In the morning when I woke it would be there, looking down into our haggard.  A Jekyl and Hyde character; in the winter dark and foreboding, the mists clinging to its girth; in the summer smiling down on us children, beckoning us up into its warm embrace.

It never had a name, just The Hill. Mornings, before we left for school, mother would  shout at one of us to  run  to the Hill and fetch some milk from Nellie.  Nellie was our goat, and I think she liked The Hill better than our haggard.  The grazing wasn’t any sweeter up there, she just like the view.

She wasn’t the only one.  In summer we couldn’t wait to get home from school, divest ourselves of our school clothes, and climb up there.  There were five of us; my brother Seamus and myself, Frances and her two brothers, Billy and Josie.  We called our gang the Red Devils, which had Fr Dunphy sucking on his teeth when he first heard mention of the name. Frances was always kissing me,  which I didn’t care much for at the time.

The Hill was our territory.  Nobody could play there unless we invited them.  Once, we fought a running battle with some other kids who tried to muscle in.  We soon scattered them with a hail of stones.  That battle established it as our kingdom.  My father said we almost owned it anyway; the big farmer to whom it really belonged letting him have the use of it for ten shillings a year.

Clustered round its bottom were whitewashed cottages, the occasional bungalow, the pub, the creamery, and a galvanised shack occupied by a witch.  Behind the hill ran the railway line, and the level crossing,  which was manned by Frances’ father. Their house was part of the railway, and their front room was a mass of levers and cables.

We had a secret place on the Hill, a cave beneath an outcrop near its top.  You had to crawl on your belly to gain entrance because its mouth was guarded by several scraggy furze bushes.  We could have cut them down of course, but then we could have hidden inside and watched the goings-on below us.

The pub was the centre of the social activity.  On summers evenings there was open-air dancing on a makeshift stage in the field adjacent to the pub.  Old time waltzes and set dances  were the favourites.  The accordion player sat on a chair  playing his tunes, polishing off large bottles of porter as fast as they were put in front of him.  If playing was thirsty work then dancing was thirstier, and there was a constant stream of revellers shunting between pub and dance area.  From our vantage point we watched the dancers fling back their heads and swing their partners round and round, their shoes pounding on the timber, their shouts of joys ripping through the warm summer’s evening.

In the winter, the travelling shows came and pitched their tents in the same field, and entertained us for a few weeks with a mixture of comedy, drama and music.  Badly-acted plays and out-of-key singers warmed us up on many a cold night at the foot of the Hill.

My cousin, Nora,  took a fancy to one of the travelling showmen and began taking him up to our hiding place when the show was over.  We didn’t think much of that.  One summer’s evening we heard her screaming up on the Hill.  We found her in the cave, surrounded by a pool of blood.  When the doctor came he took away something in a bag, and later on I saw my father heading across the fields with a shovel on his shoulder.  The show never came by again.

As we grew older I began returning Francis’s kisses.  Now it was our turn to use the cave late at night!

I had just turned seventeen when the bulldozers moved in.  Shortly afterwards explosive experts began blowing up bits of the Hill, and the quarrying began in earnest. Soon there was a sprawling complex of dust-shrouded buildings, machines eating away at the Hill, and convoys of trucks bumping across the stony ground. Before long, the trees had turned grey, and the trains had stopped running.

My father cried as he watched the Hill disappear before his eyes.  The big farmer was sympathetic, but merely shrugged his shoulders; times were hard, and anyway, what use was a lump of rock to a farmer?  Father sold his smallholding, his sheep and his goats, and took a job in the quarry.  Very soon Seamus and myself followed.  Seamus was installed at the weighbridge, assisting with the dockets because he had a head for figures. Somebody must have reckoned I had a head for heights – because I was given the task of carrying the equipment for the men who set the charges. Every evening, just before six, the birds rose from the Hill like dust from a carpet, and shortly afterwards the silence was shattered by a series of thunderclaps.  Another bit of the Hill gone west.

It was shortly after my eighteenth birthday that Frances and Seamus died.  To the jaws of New York I ran; my solitary suitcase filled with the rags of my youth, a bottle of holy water, and a pile of Kit Carson and Johnny Mac Brown comics.  Away from the grief choking my lungs, and the red staining the grey rocks brown.  Away from the haunted thing staring at me from every reflective surface, and from the silent screams riding every breeze that tugged at the Hill’s battered face. Away to Uncle Willie.

          I saw many sights in New York, dreamed a thousand dreams, and knew real loneliness for a time.  The icy mistrals that periodically sweep down the great canyons of Broadway and the Bronx were warm compared to me.  I was a rock.  I was an island.  My days were spent constructing fashionable patios around  stucco-ed buildings with ornate entrances and moneyed owners, my nights in Uncle Willie’s counting house. In time, his small building firm became my large construction company.  Occasionally, when time permitted, I would come and watch the Hill grow smaller.

                                           ………………

All quiet here now.  The bulldozers and bedlam-makers have gone.  And so too has the Hill.  Erased from the skyline in thirty short years. A covering of topsoil hides some of the scars; here and there conifers and shrubs attempt to breathe new life into the pock-marked, lunar-like surroundings.  In the centre  a square of green, vivid against the drab background, seems strangely out of  place.  Even more incongruous is the white building, rising like a Phoenix from the embers, its five fluted columns standing like sentinels beneath its awning, its flanks guarded by a colonnade of progressively-sloping evergreens.

The pub still stands at the crossroads, grown larger and more prosperous over the years, and the creamery has expanded to become a cheese-making factory.  Of the level crossing and the railway there is no visible sign, although a cursory search would reveal the tracks still intact beneath the undergrowth. Most of the cottages have gone; replaced by new houses – many more of them – and the city, once more than five miles away, is now within spitting distance.

I look around me and shiver suddenly.  The ghosts of yesterday clamouring for attention once more.  The Red Devils scampering up that ungainly lump of granite. Voices drifting in the wind; “look what I found, look what I found!”.  Dogs, rabbits, burrows, names etched in flint.  Soft hair, silky thighs, music and laughter aloft on the breeze.  Then another excursion.  This time two people heading for the secret place, and another figure – hidden – watching.  An explosion.  The evening turning crimson. Two coffins submerged beneath a garden of flowers. A funeral cortege stretching further than the eye could see…Oh Frances, why? You and Seamus…Oh God!  I never meant for it to end like that…

A voice at my elbow brings me back to the present. 

“I found the keys in my briefcase.  Everything alright?”

I look at the man wearing the thick horn-rimmed glasses.  Was this tubby little estate agent really the boy I had played cowboys and indians with all those years ago?  Staked out on a warm rock as the rest of us chanted and danced around him?

“Yes”, I smile, “Everything is fine now Josie”.

He hands me the bunch of jangling keys.  “The keys to the Hill, Bernie. Welcome home”

end (c) Tom O’Brien

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