Street Sadness

    My Aunty Marge and her husband Fred, a taciturn, growling cockney, lived in Fairfax Road, Hornsey, although at the other end of the street to the house where I was born. I adored my Aunty Marge, a slight, rather mousy woman who was troubled by a stomach ulcer in later life. For many years she had worked for Marks & Spenser. As the eldest of her siblings, during the war she would make treks out to the countryside with ferrets, which she kept for the purpose of hunting rabbits in order to supplement the family's rations. She and Fred would a few years later retire to Clacton-on-Sea, where Marge was knocked through the glass kitchen door by an over-exuberant Boxer dog named Sheppy. Fred had been captured by the Japanese during the war and had endured unspeakable indignities and torture, the details of which he never divulged to anybody.     The house in Fairfax Road was situated near the end of the street, next to an alleyway. I remember as a...

    I was sitting having lunch and, as usual, people had brought their squalling brats into the establishment. At the next table two men and two women sat with a baby and two toddlers. The toddlers began to throw knives and forks onto the floor immediately and were allowed to do so by the oblivious parents. Then the toddlers began to loudly shout a list of farmyard animals, which went on interminably. Catching my look of disgust, one of the mothers pulled out half a dozen 'Mr Men ' books from her bag and began to read them aloud to the brats. Her shrill voice rang around the room as she catalogued the exploits of Mr Naughty, Miss Shy and Mr Fuck ing Idiot. The other woman took her baby, which was now screaming, out of its pram and flopped out her right breast. In the manouvering of the child to its teat a thin dribble of milk sprayed out onto the table.      "Oh, damn!" she said to her gormless partner, "Jake, can you go and get a cloth?" Jake shuffl...