You Could Leave Your Door Open…
My nan and I, plus optics. 1987.
I was born in the early hours of the morning at QEQM Hospital in Margate, an odd baby with a shock of ginger hair and a tiny mole on the knuckle of my left index finger. I was a bit of a miracle birth as my mother had been told she couldn’t have children (although this might have been spot on as I’ve never been officially classified as human). The date was 25th January 1978: I do know that.
My dad was the foreman for a local building contractor. He’d originated from Ireland but spent a lot of time in Thanet for his work. He was tall, dark and charismatic if not actually handsome. The comedian Dave Allen once said ‘The Irish are good at populating other countries, in more ways than one...so for all you know you might be laughing at your brother.’ In my dad’s case, this was almost literally true, as it soon emerged that he had a wife and three children in Portsmouth, the place he’d lived when he’dfirst arrived in the UK. My mum quickly decided that he wouldn’t be a good influence and sensibly made the decision to sever ties with him....so I grew up as the only child of a one-parent family on the Westcliffof Ramsgate before we moved across town to live with my nan.
Growing up on Bellevue Road in Ramsgate during the 80s was a complete education because the street still had that old-school mentality where you could leave your front door wide open (as long as you didn’t mind being burgled). This one time (not at band camp), I actually heard of a thief leaving a ‘Thank You’ note in place of a microwave: you can’t BUY criminals like that these days. Everybody knew everybody else...even if they hated them. It was that sort of place.
My closest friends included my next-door neighbour and a boy from up the road who had a slight speech impediment and pronounced every word with a ‘St’ in front of it (my name was ‘Stavid’ for example). Then there was a girl with a very slight accent that was almost impossible to identify, but she was a tomboy in the sense that she always wore dungarees and sported a short, spiky haircut. There was another girl who we all considered to be very posh because she could pronounce long words and wore dierent clothes every day), Ginger John with all the Freckles (I was Ginger Dave with no Freckles), Big Wayne (there was no small Wayne), Hot Kim (there was no Cold Kim) and the Ghost Twins, Peter and Paul (who lived in the haunted - and eventually demolished - Sycamore Hotel where they found the crashed train carriage in the tunnels beneath the basement).
Half of these kids didn’t actually LIVE on Bellevue Road but they did live on Albion Road, which led down from my house to the back of the Granville Theatre, a partially dilapidated entertainment venue where one of my cousins regularly headlined Christmas pantomimes as either Peter Pan or Robin Hood (she was a phenomenal dancer, so regularly managed to get in a few pirouettes even if the role was a one-legged pirate chief). I get very nostalgic about my childhood and often wonder what happened to most of these kids and what sort of adults they turned into. After all, if you think about it, the people who surround us as we grow up are usually witnesses to those little characteristics we have that end up becoming big parts of who we turn out to be.
My friend Simon was with me when I saw myfirst Commodore 64 computer game: it was a completely rubbish one about off-road biking, but it was still my initial experience of a truly life-changing piece of equipment. Big Wayne introduced me to WWF wrestling when he handed me the VHS tape of the 1990 Royal Rumble, to my impressionable mind the single greatest event in the sports entertainment industry. Dianne was the first person to show me around a four-storey house, which really scared me at the time because I was convinced that any house with more than three floors would eventually fall over. Helena was the first girl I remember genuinely fancy‐ ing. Peter and Paul were the first boys I ever fought with, and I can recall being in the middle of celebrating a win over Peter when I was suddenly beaten up by Paul. Ah... great days.
The adults were even better: there was Mad Irish Paddy, who I always felt a bit sorry for because he only became Mad Irish Paddy due to a single incident. He was a lovely, friendly guy with a traditional dwarven beard and round, rosy cheeks who always said hello to everyone and just generally got on with his life until the one night he went and stood outside his house and didn’t move. He just stood there, staring straight ahead of him and pretty much turned into a rock as various neighbours tried to gently coax him back inside his house. Alcohol was suspected but never confirmed.
There was Charlie, who always walked his dog with a stick and the sort of expression that suggested he was either planning to throw it or use it as a weapon (whether that would have been against the dog or other people remains a matter for the jury). There was Helena’s dad, a prison warden with the perfect demeanour for the job: I was so scared of him that I would always retreat to the gate whenever I rang the door to see if Helena could come out to play. He once glanced at me, winked and said ‘I know, you know,’ and I honestly never found out what it was he knew that I knew.
Further up the hill there was Jack, who insisted that I call him ‘Mate’ and then confusingly called me ‘Mate’ back (for some reason, I just didn’t understand this as we all had other names) and Old Beardy George, who lived with his sister Eva and would regularly greet everyone with ‘Nice Day’ even when it was bucketing down and lightning was ripping the sky apart. George was my next- door neighbour and a constant delight: he would walk out of his front door at the stroke of midnight every New Year’s Eve and ring in the new year quite literally with a massive brass bell. It was borderline deafening, and he would be out there come hell or high water. In a popularity contest, George wouldn’t necessarily have been a front-runner.
Then there was Herbie, who I found out many years later was actually called ‘Urbie’ because he was Polish and his true surname was Urbanski. I’m pretty sure that he was
a cigarette smuggler, but he always smelled fantastic and looked like he’d been directly teleported straight from a seventeenth-century pirate ship.
Most of all, though, I remember the kids: Gem was always my sort of sister and we’ve kept in touch even though our lives have diverged somewhat: she worked with my wife for a while before her photographic memory and insanely acute attention to detail landed her a job in the NHS: she has since moved to start a new life in Seattle. The others, however, are a continuing mystery to me, all living lives of their own in a future we could never have foreseen when we were young.
I wonder what jobs they’re doing now or how many of them are parents. I wonder if they’re happy and healthy and if they ever think back to the days of Garbage Pail Kids collectable cards, Knightmare on CITV and doing jumble sales outside my house so we could all buy the board game ‘Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs’ from Carousel Toys on Harbour Street. More than anything, I guess I hope they’re all still here...and that they occasionally remember Ginger Dave (with No Freckles).
