Lea View

In 1939 Lea View was hailed as 'Heaven in Hackney' ... The very last thing in housing for the poor, a paradise, which in fact, it was. We had qualified to move into this brick entity because of our atrocious housing in Brady Street Mansions which to this day exist ... even down to the odd gas jet remaining, hanging on the filthy walls, they were 'slums' before the word was thought of.

When Henry Ford built his 'T' model, he stated that anyone could have any colour, as long as it was black. Hackney Borough, when they built Lea View, decided everything had to be drab canary yellow. Each bedroom having one narrow brown cupboard from floor to ceiling, each brown door had a green knob matching the letter box. A bathroom, this, a new innovation, the few people I knew who possessed one, kept coal in the tub, my father insisting ... only to be used to wash in, much to the dismay of my mother, who bathed very infrequently, the Irish in her dying hard.

The decor to our flat had never been touched since we moved in. The furniture in my room consisting of a rose wood gramophone case, the motor, long gone, once used for keeping my toys in. It had two doors and a lid, each fitted with a brass pull ring. It looked very sad now, sitting rather dismal, sloping with a broken leg. All through my Navy days and the Antipodes affair, it had remained in exactly the same spot, along with the bed, the bed head having a raised design carved in the wood, which, when I had nothing better to do,  would follow round with my finger.

From my position at the bedroom window, sitting at an old table, with an equally old chair, an unrestricted view, the full length of the estate. Such was the length, it went into perspective. A pair of pink curtains hung at the window, to my knowledge they had been there for twenty years, always open, although anyone passing could look directly in, nobody ever bothered.

The air-raid shelters ... parallel to the main building, had been converted into bike sheds, still with the two feet of concrete on the roof. In the centre of the estate stood, once resplendent, what was known as the 'community hall' which at the outset, was just that. Throughout the war it always had its share of dances and films regardless of bombs or anything else. The only compromise to the outside world being that all its windows were taped up, a psychological protection against flying glass. Beneath the hall, on the ground floor, was a laundry, split into cubicles, each with a sink, washing machine and wringer with the greatest thing of all, electric dryers, no more miles of washing hanging about.

All this splendour, according to the sociologist, was the answer to the working class,  neat, tidy, and it worked.

Each evening, at Sunset, the superintendent, bowler hat firmly on his big head and flanked by two caretakers, would stroll round the estate and sweep the hundreds of squealing children out of sight and into silence. No need to lock the street door, most of had keys hanging from a  piece of string inside the letter box for all this security and comfort, the rent, ….twelve and sixpence a week.

It all looked rather different now. Everything had disintegrated. The Hall, the tennis courts, yes, tennis courts, the very concrete had been attacked by blight. Rubbish, huge piles lay everywhere, the heavily tiled hallways had been smashed up. Did not recognize anyone. Pat Mears still lived two floors above me. I never did stay around to marry her, although even our respective mothers, although hating each other, thought I would.,,a natural progression.

Strangely, I had fallen in with this overwhelming sense of decay, disintegration and hopelessness. On my way across the channel, on the ferry, people appeared dressed for a macabre carnival, mostly in what appeared to me, to be rags, after the hats, collars, ties and suits of Aussie.

Accepted everything, not consciously realising it, but  I, part of the generation of death. As a child, death had been prevalent. In the streets, in huge holes in the ground, the gaping, gutted houses ... the mountains of rubble. Death and devastation had been part of our lives ... something I picked my way through on my  rare visits to school.

But this ..before me, another kind of devastation, devastation from within. A rotting paralysis. The sense of belonging had gone. Perhaps there lay the answer to my wife's constant plea "Why do you destroy everything!" No answer to that, how could she have ever understood ... sitting there, in her room, overlooking the quiet garden, shrouded with the lemon, orange and almond trees, the blue bougainvillea , She, playing her clarinet. No destruction in her life, until fate itself had intervened and she had met me.

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