The N Word

I’ve certainly known Melissa for a long time. In fact when I first met her she was Miriam rather than Melissa which was the name her parents gave her, mostly on the insistence of her mother who was keen on Biblical names and had already named her first child Isaac. These days Melissa likes to Skype maintaining it’s more intimate than old fashioned telephoning because you can see the person you speak with. She likes to move with the times but there are definitely times when I would rather just be heard rather than seen and heard.

A day or so ago when she and I were discussing my undeniably tardy attitude towards total acceptance of a certain strata of social change on which sits gay marriage, third party reproduction for same sex couples and gender choice for six year olds she actually described me as blinkered and indulging in affectation. I will admit to being a bit hurt – blinkered? affected? – moi? I had been simply mentioning that I was sick to death of settling down with morning coffee and the paper only to have the mundane lives of joyfully cohabiting same sex couples regularly shoved in my face and the woes of parents whose sons had become daughters thrust upon me on a regular basis all before 8am. It was tedious I said and furthermore why was it those in same sex relationships were free to comment upon their Husbands or their Wives in media interviews, fearlessly describing them as such whilst other decent citizens/ratepayers such as myself for example were expected to just have a Partner? Where was the fairness in that?

Melissa said it was because the media was doing a sterling job of educating we who did not fall into the category of those about whom they wrote and I said that I objected to being educated and what’s more it would have to be a very dense individual who did not actually realise what they were supposed to believe. How many of us really need all this media direction? It was as if, I pontificated, the fortunate few who were strangely free to have Husbands and Wives must be placed on a more elevated level than the rest of us and we left floundering below should strive to be like them. As for myself, I had no wish to be like them because I rather liked being what my quaintly old fashioned Husband described as Normal. There it was - the N word, used unashamedly. I knew she was just a tinsy bit shocked because there was a little silence.

But you have to hand it to Melissa. After a sharp intake of breath and a second or two she simply said well that was Life and I should make an effort to get my head around it and I retorted that thrusting such matters into my face on a daily basis was responsible for any lethargy of approval I might feel. It looked as if we would shortly agree to disagree but then she drew my attention back to what we generally call the Good Old Days when we both worked for Danny la Rue in his club in Hanover Square. In those days, she said, I wasn’t nearly as judgmental and there was some truth in that. But it was me who reminded her that back in those days we lived a far more simple life and in any case it was not possible to be hypercritical about Danny who was an employer quite unparalleled in that shady nightclub world as well as a supreme entertainer. We were all a little bit in love with him.

The difference between then and now I told her was that somehow or other situations that once happily occupied the fringes of society have been hurtled into near vision and alongside all the associated Education is a great deal of virtue signaling. Melissa said neither of us knew whether those back then in the situations felt all that comfortable and happy in the place they occupied. We reminded each other of the cigarette girl Jody who was desperately trying to be noticed by Danny’s dresser Toni who seemed oblivious of the heartache she was causing. We laughed a bit about the Cloakroom woman Roza who tried to sit firmly on the fence in all matters concerning sex and viewed Jody’s fixation with horror commenting lamely from time to time that when she was young such love affairs simply were not fashionable – at least not in her Spanish village.

Melissa said again that I’d been much less of a red-neck in those days and I wished I hadn’t told her that I would like to see hanging re-established. Later when repeating some of the conversation with my Partner (can’t bring myself to say Husband yet again) he said that perhaps over the years I had become more Normal. There it was again – the N word!

The Coming of the Postcodes

To my knowledge our corner of North Kent was postcode-less during all the time it took me to grow old enough to triumphantly leave at last and make my way up-river to London. My very first encounter with postal codes was when I moved importantly into the bed-sitter lands of South Kensington and Bayswater conscious of being very grown up indeed. To me these strangely disconnected and incomprehensible letters and numbers were simply part of the mood and character of a city I had longed to be a part of and added to the thrill of at last living there. London postal areas were established as long ago as the 1850s and the system was gradually adopted by other major cities, the process considered to be completed by 1934. It wasn’t until 1959 that the then Postmaster General first trialled the plan throughout England starting with Norwich and apparently a gradual nationwide rollout followed and was at last concluded in 1974.

At some stage during those years Gravesend and Northfleet received their very own postal codes with DA12 bestowed upon Gravesend East, including Chalk, Shorne and Cobham and the now familiar DA11 awarded to Gravesend West which included Northfleet. It’s perhaps surprising that the Thameside community that had grown so rapidly during the nineteenth century had to wait so long to be elevated into the ranks of a Place with a Postcode. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the area had been a centre of industry for centuries with the Romans giving commerce a kick start when they first began to dig chalk from the area. Cement making followed without too much delay and by 1796 one James Parker a former clergyman had set up kilns on Northfleet creek in order to make what he called Roman Cement. The cement industry went from strength to strength with nine plants eventually operating along the riverside, providing a great deal of employment for the locals, one of whom was my father. It had taken some time for Bernard Joseph Hendy to shake off the glamour of foreign travel that the war had afforded him and for several years he regularly reduced both my mother and myself to boredom with his tales of the sunshine, dates and olives of North Africa and the music and food of Italy. Often these reminiscences ended in tears for my mother who would later mutter to her sisters that he didn’t say much about the Fancy Women with the foreign names and that there was no mistake that the war had definitely been the Ruin of him.

To be fair he didn’t always talk about life in far-away places and how superior it had been to that he was now forced to live and after a few months back in North Kent he seemed to develop a keen interest in the social and industrial history of the area. It was he who told me that there had once been a number of dockyards in Northfleet that had over time produced many impressive vessels. One, laid out in the late 1700s was owned by a shipwright called Thomas Pitcher. A list of ships he built included at least two dozen for the East and West Indies services along with many a vessel for the Navy. Pitcher’s yard finally closed in 1860 and more recently I have learned that a local group of enthusiasts as fascinated as my father had been in the late 1940s are now involved in investigations to reveal more about it. Sadly back in the time when my well-meaning father sought to interest me in the topic I couldn’t have been less attentive to details of Mr Pitcher’s shipyard.

Information concerning the nearby paper industry possibly would have absorbed me more because I loved to draw pictures and as I got older to write stories and I was destined to grow up one of the few extremely fortunate children provided with a seemingly limitless amount of suitable paper at a time when it was in very short supply. The paper industry had sprung up during the first decades of the twentieth century in the form of Bowaters then Bowater Scott where my Uncle Walter reigned supreme for many years as a foreman and eventually a union representative. He clearly also had a habit of methodically helping himself to a wide variety of paper products which he concealed in a sack on the back of his bike and delivered to our house at least once a week on his way home to Waterdales. I don’t know how many of his own large family of children were similarly supplied although his youngest daughter Connie always seemed to be able to locate paper on which to draw patterns for dolls’ clothes, but I was able to create endless towns, villages, flower gardens, intricate maps of imaginary islands, short stories and plays for stage and radio, etc year after year. It has only recently occurred to me that this purloining of paper was in fact a very serious matter, particularly so at a time when it was a most valuable commodity. Clearly these thefts were never brought to the attention of anyone in a position of seniority at Bowaters because Uncle Walter seemed to go from strength to strength on the factory floor.

The cable works originally called Henleys and later AEI were yet another noteworthy employer and occupied part of the former infamous Rosherville Gardens. It is proudly claimed that the PLUTO pipeline (PipeLines Under The Ocean) invaluable during WW2, was built there. Uncle Walter’s daughter Connie chose them as her first employer when she left Wombwell Hall School, and became an office girl for Henleys. This was a definite affront to her formidable father who had specifically directed that she should do the Domestic Course at Wombwell Hall in order that she learn to cook and sew for her future family. He was alarmed at the thought of her joining the ranks of more modern thinking schoolgirls like myself who had chosen to take up shorthand and typing and were in danger of having their heads turned as a result. At sixteen years of age Connie’s head had finally turned and she struck out for independence and began to take evening classes in typing and talk loudly about her father’s views being stuck in the Dark Ages. This was in some measure due to the influence of her first boyfriend, Mick the apprentice builder, who had definite plans for their future together and was unafraid of her dictatorial father.
None of us knew a great deal about the one time notorious Gardens at Rosherville that had been the brain child of George Jones and certainly proved a splendid use for the motley and dispirited group of abandoned chalk pits. Although from time to time Old Nan made mention of what a Grand Day Out it had been to go by steamboat to Rosherville and that at Easter time the hats had to be seen to be believed and what a black day it was when the gates closed for ever. They had apparently been one of the largest and most popular of the Victorian pleasure gardens and survived from the accession of Queen Victoria for more than seventy years into the reign of George V. At the time there were a number of extensive pleasure gardens in the London area including Vauxhall near Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames and Cremorne on the river at Chelsea. Smaller gardens also proliferated such as those in Marylebone and Islington both of which had been frequented by Samuel Pepys as long ago as the mid1660s. On one occasion Pepys had gone to Islington in great excitement to drink China Tea only to complain bitterly later about the price of the rather indifferent roast chicken he was forced to order for his hungry female companions. And more than two and a half centuries later my young grandparents, as yet unburdened by the many children they were later to have and celebrating a win at the races, made a very similar complaint regarding the cost of the boiled chicken available at Rosherville. Old Nan maintained that she reckoned it was Daylight Bleeding Robbery and no mistake and in any case the remodelling of the Bijou Theatre into a modern refreshment room had been a gross blunder on the part of the organisers and only served to increase the already exorbitant prices. Except she didn’t actually put it like that.

Although the gardens in the chalk pits declined in popularity over time, for a glorious epoch they towered above similar possibilities for entertainment in the marshy region that sat alongside the Thames and was ultimately to become part of a future postal code. The sectioning of that corner of North Kent into easily distinguishable alphanumeric cyphers would take place long after the little Greek temples and statuary in the cliffs, the archery lawn, the bear pit, the maze, the visit of the American Sousa band and the performance of the great Blondin, Trapeze Artist Extraordinaire had been completely forgotten.
Jeremiah Rosher and his son Joseph who had given their names to the building scheme that saw the advent of a clutch of smart new houses appearing in the area in1830 were great enthusiasts of the Gardens and would undoubtedly have approved of their estate eventually becoming absorbed into the coding system that was to develop many years later. It was evident even as the freshly drawn plans for Rosherville New Town were presented and displayed to all in the neighbourhood who might be interested that the pair had great hopes for the development. Their first prospectus states confidently that it was predicted the area would become to Gravesend what St Leonards and Broadstairs had already become to Hastings and Margate. For a time the homes attracted at least a percentage of those the Roshers had envisaged but over time they would slowly but surely plummet in popularity and by August 1939 when my newly-wed parents inspected a top floor flat in Burch Road the rot had definitely set in. The road had been named in honour of Jeremiah’s father-in-law Benjamin Burch and a hundred years previously had been the smartest place in the district to live. On the eve of WW2 it was what my mother termed a Pig Sty, a slum with no laid on water and a lavatory shared by all and sundry in the house and as the front door seemed permanently open, no doubt by half the street as well. Having been born in a hop garden and brought up variously under tarpaulins in fields and condemned Victorian terraces her assessment was significant. The fact that the famous Rosherville Hotel still stood nearby in all its architectural glory did nothing to alter her opinion. My grandmother said she remembered the hotel in its Glory Days when it was full of mirrors and plush settees and red velvet drapes but added that it had been a hospital during The Great War and in her opinion it was them wounded troops that ruined the place.

During the next war, impatiently waiting to begin, German aircraft were to fly regularly through the Kentish skies above DA11 and according to the residents of York Road, Northfleet where my parents eventually decided to take up the rental of number 28, would deal the worst blows to daily life experienced for centuries. For a time it seemed little might remain of the age-old Thameside communities, little left to be sectioned into alphanumeric districts at the behest of some future Postmaster General.
On the other hand misfortune and catastrophe ebbs and flows and good sense dictates that any situation on a busy waterway would always offer an obvious place for a potential phoenix to arise from hypothetical ashes. The river would of necessity provide a reliable water supply and the means for transporting raw materials and products. The local woodland might at all times be called upon to offer the timber needed for industrious endeavour. And amid the ever-abundant supply of chalk was also flint that at various stages of community development would be found expedient as a building material.

That segment of DA11 now called Northfleet derives its name from its situation on the most Northern reach of Ebbsfleet once simply called the River Fleet. Few who pass through the international railway station of that name that emerged so rapidly a few years ago in Ebbsfleet Valley would know or care that in 600 AD the river was known as Fleote by the Saxons. Neither would they have much interest in the fact that by the time the Domesday Book was completed the little town was known as Norfluet or even that the settlement on the other end of the Fleet is called Southfleet and these days recorded as being in postcode DA13. There might be some transitory interest in the fact that the Bluewater Shopping Centre that I have so far never visited, lies nearby and that the station is part of the Thames Gateway Urban Regeneration, a project of national priority and that it is a mere hop, skip and a jump from the M25 motorway.

Flashing through Ebbsfleet aboard the Eurostar a few years ago I was astonished to catch a glimpse of St Botolph’s Church standing proudly atop of the cliffs that border the long ago chalk excavations and fall as they always did, abruptly into bramble pits. And just for a moment enduring memories of times past surfaced and demanded to be examined. Long ago summer evenings with my mother and Molly, our younger brothers lagging behind and complaining of hunger, thirst and tiredness, foraging for mushrooms among the brambles as the shadows grew longer. Sunday mornings with my grandmother at nearby Springhead, past the pig farm and the abandoned fever hospital, intent upon gathering the wild watercress that had first been cultivated there by Mr William Bradbery in the early 1800s for supply to London.

And because it was Sunday being ever aware of the bells of St Botolph’s loud and clear that must be ignored and those of Our Lady of the Assumption, more indistinct and muffled, but nevertheless to be heeded because they were calling us to Mass. If we had time we would go we said one to another but knew that it was unlikely that we would do so. The gathering of watercress to go with shrimps and whelks for tea was infinitely more engrossing.