Netherley

NG: Waiting at the bus stop, a teenage boy recognizes Paul. He attends Paul’s old school, and has been given a collection of his poetry to read by his teacher, who also taught Paul. The boy is excited and exuberant; his enthusiasm is touching. Minutes earlier, Paul had told me how the flat landscape of the fields and barns over the brook had always evoked for him, when young, the works of the Dutch masters, an observation that he could never, then, share with his peers, for fear of indifference at best or some kind of punitive consequence at worst. Go from that to this boy, here, thrilled to meet a living, published poet, telling us about the millennium centre his school has built. Behind him, on a free-standing brick wall, reads the word SHEP. I remember that wall and that painted word. They’ve been there for more than three decades.

PF: The subway has been filled in. Half of the shops have not only closed but have been obliterated. Only the main parade survives, and there are two places open for business today. One is a general store on the site where the chandler’s used to be.

I ask the woman serving, and she remembers names, places. We’re about the same age, and so we’re able to meet halfway by revisiting each shop in turn. Mr Walker died years ago, she says. His shop was being ransacked repeatedly, and he lived above, in a flat. One time the thieves smeared the steps with margarine so he couldn’t get downstairs. He closed soon after, and she explains how, one by one, all the others pulled down their metal shutters for good. Whatever was fiery and vital about the place in memory seems long gone. It’s like returning to an extinct volcano.

NG: The row of shops is now mostly a row of metal grilles. There’s a small general store, surprisingly free of the shatterproof perspex shuttering around the counter so often seen in shops on these outlying estates, a hairdresser’s and beautician’s where the cake shop used to be, and the supermarket is now the Woodlands Christian Revival Centre.

The chandler’s (not surprising that, even this far from the sea, there would be a chandler’s in a city where the main road is the ocean, as one of its sons, Malcolm Lowry, said) is no more. The fish and chip shop is gone – flattened, obliterated, no trace of it, some scrubby grass in its place. A portion of chips from there used to cost five pence.

Sometimes, if we were persistent enough in our harassment, Mr Lau would chase us away shouting as he held a meat cleaver. The underpass which ran beneath it to the other half of the estate has been filled in. The off-licence too is closed. The Community Centre is still there, but its bingo nights have long gone; they died with Audrey, the organizer and caller, the sweet lady in the shop will tell us when we ask.

PF: A whole hidden economy flourished around here for a while. Mobile shops – essentially, the immobile shell of an old Luton or a caravan, even a shipping container would do – sprang up in every street, selling loose ciggies, milk, sweets: you could pay through the nose for the essentials. DO NOT ASK FOR TICK AS A PUNCH IN THE GOB OFTEN OFFENDS. Things came to your door: ciggies, booze, clothes.

Clothes were suddenly important. When I became a teenager in the summer of 1978, everybody was wearing tight Levi’s; mohair jumpers were giving way to Slazenger and Pringle pullovers, Polyveldts or Kickers shoes, or their knock-off versions, bought from Great Homer Street market. Dunlop Green Flash plimsolls were re-whitened with house emulsion once they’d started to fade; fake Kickers leaf tags were cut from bus seats. The first silky synthetic sportswear was coming in – Le Coq Sportif, Sergio Tacchini – but the style hadn’t settled into what was to become known much later as ‘casual’. We were supremely faddy, and we were tribal. Clothes conferred insiderdom and belonging, and could mark you out from the kids off other estates. One winter there was a short-lived craze for wearing neoprene and Velcro windsurfing boots. I see myself, for the first time in decades, as one of a gang wearing windsurfing boots and deerstalker hats, walking through a concrete subway that isn’t there any more.