So, as I said last time, I was thinking about little old Ealing. Little old Little Ealing. My place, where I've only been once in a long time.
Steve McQueen's series of 'Small Axe' films, which were the best thing on television in a great year for television, were produced by "Lammas Park Productions", which twanged at my heart. (I can do no justice to Small Axe, but I will probably write a little about it in another blog).
I knew McQueen grew up in Ealing, that he'd gone to Drayton Manor Secondary School, where my siblings and I, with varying degrees of willing, went for Ealing Junior Music School on a Saturday morning. I'd even heard him incongruously mentioning "Ealing, Queen of the Suburbs" on a platform he shared with Cornel West to talk about Paul Robeson.
Still, Lammas Park, eh ... my little park, figure of eight shaped, between Northfields and South Ealing, playground, line of horse chestnuts where we'd gather conkers, bowling greens, perimeter paths I'd run round in 7 minutes flat, tennis courts we'd spend our summers in, grass we'd run Trampy on till we realised she was less likely to get in a fight with other dogs if we took her across the road via Blondin Road (where Charles Blondin lived) to Blondin Park, by the tube hangar, and, on a good day, on to Boston Manor Park, down by the path under the M4 overpass to the Grand Union Canal.
I found an old interview with McQueen, when he was just an artist with a growing reputation, not an Oscar-winning director, where he talked about the merits of Ealing and the pleasure of hanging out with his group of friends in Lammas Park after school, where he found belonging.
He talked of Ealing as an open, diverse place, which is exactly what it was. He's nine years older than me, but I always feel lucky, for my own part, that I grew up in a place where different cultures were already a given, completely ingrained. Irish, Japanese, Caribbean, African, Polish, Jewish, of course and most notably Indian, Pakistani, Ealing had loads of all of them since before I was born. I have studied at and lived in lots of places since where that is not the case. Just the benefit, inherently, that not seeing Britain as a country for white English people gives you ...
Ealing's not a place to be idealised, mind you. McQueen had a very negative experience at Drayton, and the school I went to, briefly, in Ealing has had more than enough abhorrent and bad headlines to mention here ...
McQueen has had an exhibition at the Tate recently where he's collected pictures of every Year 3 Primary Class in London. He himself went to Little Ealing Primary, the noise of which, as I mentioned in my last blog about Denis the drunk, we could hear from our house (Little Ealing was next to Mount Carmel Catholic Primary, so I'm sure it was the noise of both we could hear ...)
I miss Ealing, that little Ealing I moved to from the bigger Ealing with my mother and three siblings when I was 5, where I lived for most of the next 20 years or so, and have only been to once since my mother moved in 2008.
The sounds: the aforementioned Primary Schools, the planes heading into Heathrow, constant, not quite overhead, not quite unbearable, but enough to mute the TV on a summer's day when the window was open, the tube trains, 100 metres away or so, all day, pulling into and pulling away from the almost contiguous Northfields and South Ealing stations. Our cats, mewing and purring, owning the neighbourhood.
The streets - the grid of old-fashioned suburbia, houses terraced and compact where we were but increasing in size as you zig-zagged towards the park, the corner near the 12th century St Mary's Church, just along from Ealing Green and the Studios, there was the largest of the houses with its red door, on the corner of Clovelly Road, just before the parks, where Neil Kinnock lived, where I stuck my tongue out at him when he gave me a cheery thumbs up, where his driver pulled out his car door into my mum's red Renault 4 as she drove my sister to her first A-Level.
The parks, Lammas, and, right next to it, Walpole, with its own dusty tennis courts which we'd go to if the better ones at Lammas were full, Walpole which held Ealing's Jazz and Comedy festivals - the roads by there, the party in the house near the park we'd go to on Christmas Eve, year after year, after watching Box of Delights or The Chronicles of Narnia, fancy dress, party games, carol singing, the boy, my brother's friend, who died, we heard one Saturday, the first Saturday I played sport at school rather than going to music school. I saw a magpie that day, I remember.
Yes to this. Beautifully written.
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