Camberwell musings

Last week I joined a  group  which concentrates on the history of the  Camberwell and Peckham area. Some of the posts are  quite mundane ( school reunion requests/ people looking for family  etc) but mostly its completely riveting. Obviously being extremely nosey gives me an immediate head start, and I have become quite obsessed with it, so much so that I reach for my ipad every morning in eager anticipation of more photos of  long gone grocery shops, of street parties and local gossip.

Up the road, at the end of the  park is a large church, imposing, severe with pillars, stone steps and a statue of Mary at the entrance. In the 1970’s it  became derelict  and for a while lay empty. At one point around then our Housing co op was  in tentative discussions with Southwark Council about converting it into flats,  but this never came to fruition ( though it did in fact happen with another developer,  and the well appointed apartments were built  within the listed skeleton of the church and are still there).  I now know that the last vicar of the church was called Father Vile and that generations of  kids ( now adults ) used to scuttle past this  statue in terror as ” its eyes watched you wherever you went”. I walked up there this morning and indeed, it is rather creepy. It reminded me of a holiday house we went to in Cornwall where they had rather an imposing dining room with some less than imposing ( ie very bad) portraits. One of  them was of a crow like gentleman and indeed , wherever you sat  ..his eyes followed you. Anyway, the other snippet, (and very juicy one)  was that while the church lay empty, the crypt got broken into on several occasions and in one incident ” a coffin lid was removed, only to reveal the preserved body of a young man, complete with full red beard. On contact with the air his body immediately started to deteriorate”. I wonder if the residents  have any idea of these unsavoury activities,  as I doubt it was much publicised down at the local Estate Agents at the time

Another discovery  is  that around here ( and presumably everywhere else) pretty much every single street had a pub  on the corner, some to this day remain unscathed and unchanged , some standing though primped and preened beyond recognition, a few converted into churches of enlightenment and worship, but most long flattened and replaced by  the obligatory blocks of flats or Sainsburys local. Back in the days when a pub was a pub without Sky sports or wasabi flavoured peanuts.  And when “having one for the road” was actively encouraged

Even when I first came here there were still some good characters who frequented these establishments. The  large hairy man who sat in The Hermits with his equally large and hairy pet tarantula on his shoulder, bunch of grapes nose man   (named for obvious reasons),  Mr Warty  who ran the dry cleaners and used to sing country and western songs in a weird high pitched falsetto voice, the place  up the hill where rather than stand around  at the bar  the locals  cleared away the tables and played cricket. And courtesy of the group,  a fabulous story about a landlord who kept an owl in his cellar, wore a selection of whistles around  his neck which he frequently blew, and who used to fire a starter pistol at last order shouting “let’s be having you”. Mind you, last orders in those days were strictly 10.45pm on a weekday , 10.15pm  on a Sunday, though some pubs didn’t open at all on Sundays

It’s easy to become all misty eyed about the past, to imagine  everything was fine and dandy, with freshly baked pies in the larder and starched washing on the lines,  children playing safely in the streets, when nobody locked their doors. I  also imagine life was hard, cold and unforgiving, a time of uncertainty and change, of overcrowding and squalor, of making ends meet, scrimping and saving.

However the overwhelming emotion that comes through in all these posts is that there was  such a strong sense of community, a feeling  of belonging, a sense of place, of being part of a family, a school, a class, a gang, having a laugh, hanging around. I cannot help but think that today, in 2017 , with technology and the whole world at our fingertips, we have lost some of this along the way.