Twenty Five Million Ghosts

by Steve Aitchsmith

  I thanked them both, shook hands and promised I’d visit again for the tour. They were both fascinated by and supportive of what I was doing on my tour. Charlie particularly loved the idea of Dave’s missing millions, I suggested he contact Dave and discuss it. I’m not fool enough to think that all mosques would be this welcoming to me but I think most of them would be. They need to sort out their nutters and they know it. They will, I’m sure of that. In fairness, we need to sort out a few nutters as well and I’m not quite as convinced we’ll do it.

  When I left the mosque I wandered through a couple of back streets. I was looking to pass a red brick hall known as the Cornwell Centre. It was named after John, or Jack, Cornwell who died heroically and pointlessly in the battle of Jutland, at sixteen years of age he continued to man his ship’s gun even after being badly wounded. The gun itself is in the Imperial War Museum. Legless and dazed he kept firing and drove the enemy away. Stunningly brave, I can’t deny that, but because he died there were no little John Cornwells to carry on. By Dave’s formula there are about fifty or so people who have never existed because of his courage and that’s without counting anybody he killed in the action. A fine genome extinguished.

  About forty years ago, as the original population was beginning the process of removing itself and the new population establishing itself, there was a move to change the name to some Indian or Pakistani philosopher. It’s one of only two occasions that I’ve seen the originals take real offence. I don’t mean the individual racists acts of idiots, there are plenty of them, I mean a whole community up in arms. When the reason was explained to them the new group in possession of the hall, Hindu I think, agreed that the Cornwell name would stay in perpetuity. Each November they laid a wreath of poppies under the name plaque.

  The hall is now council offices, a one stop shop for the locals to turn to. The wreath no longer appears and poor young Master Cornwell seems to have been forgotten again in the streets where he lived, played and worked. I heard somewhere that the name of the hall can never be changed because the Hindus placed a covenant on the deeds to prevent the problem ever arising again. Truth or rumour? I don’t know.

  The other occasion really engages the challenges inherent in diverse cultures, in spades. It was way back when I was policing. I was part of a team tasked with solving the problems faced by a new large mosque recently built in inner east London. Smashed windows and pig’s heads were a regular occurrence. No matter how many people were arrested in operations to protect the building, it kept happening. As loudspeakers broadcast to call the faithful to prayer, the cars in the street would all sound their horns and fights would break out.

  A meeting was called. Those involved included me, the Imam (Bangladeshi), the local police area commander (Scots), the local borough commander (Welsh), the local policing team leader (Geordie) and the local intelligence officer (Scouse). As the meeting progressed it became clear that none of them really knew what was behind this.

  “Am I the only one here who knows why this is happening?” They all looked at me, surprised by my exasperated tone.

  “Go on then,” growled the area commander, “enlighten us.” The others chuckled. Everyone except the Imam, that is. He recognised the local boy and wanted to hear what I had to say.

  “OK,” I said, never one to suffer from obsequious reticence. “Under that building were about five hundred bodies and some of them are still there.” Mouths dropped, eyes widened. “That site was originally a huge rubber warehouse with several sub-basements. When it was bombed out the resulting pit was used to place blitz victims. Most, but not all, were eventually relocated to the City of London cemetery, fog of war and the exigencies of the emergency and all that. The locals are incensed because their dead are being disrespected by not acknowledging this. If any of you knew anything about this area, you’d have known that.” General silence.

  The shocked Imam put his head in his hands, the others looked at me in that ‘you know it all bastard’ way that you get used to if you’re an inner city Londoner in London’s police, most are from elsewhere in the country and many from outer London. Inner Londoners are a minority. It’s probably why I never achieved high rank; that and a tendency to piss people off.

  The mosque paid for a small Christian chapel at the side, nobody ever visited it and the mosque keeps it in good repair. The local vicar led a service to the lost, and the local Muslim community leaders paid for a plaque to commemorate the dead. The pig’s heads stopped appearing, the car horns fell silent, the windows remained intact. Job done.

  After the Cornwell centre, which was closed and lonely looking, I returned to the main road. Now on a winding road that leads to West Ham park, which was once the grounds of Elizabeth Fry’s home and dedicated to the public on her demise, as we were always told at school in attempts to elicit our gratitude for the largesse of our betters.

  On the sharpest bend sits the Spotted Dog pub. Now boarded up and sorry looking, this dilapidated old building dates back centuries in parts. Local legend says it was used by Dick Turpin as his base and from here he first urged Black Bess towards York. I don’t know about that, I do remember seeing my dad and my uncle Tam get drunk there from time to time.

  Tam, real name Alistair but he preferred to be called Tam, was a friendly and amusing man but liked a drink or several. He died in his sixties after years of alcohol abuse. I liked the man and I don’t intend to wax moral over his love of drink. Each to his own, hem’s own, and who am I to say who should do what? He was happy and fun. Nobody likes a serious morose puritan.

  He wasn’t a blood relative, he had married one of my dad’s sisters, dad says that his father was delighted that she’d married a Scotsman. Dad is about third generation London Scots which makes me part Scot, I guess. Then again, I’m roughly part anything, the family tree on that side even includes one chap by the name Goldberg, not a very Anglo or Celt name.

  I stopped just to look for a few moments. For the first time I imagined happy and social translucent shadows enjoying a beverage in and around the pub. Shadows of people who are no longer here or have never existed. Why now? Why here? Maybe the long walk on a warmish day had left me light headed but I felt fine. Maybe this small area, now so different from my memories, highlighted the change brought on by the losses. Maybe the historic associations of the building, maybe my meet with Charlie and Taz, who knows? For whatever reason, I could now see the missing millions, or at least some of them.

  Enoch Powell, an intelligent though controversial man, would have called this part of Forest Gate one of the swathes no longer recognisably British. He was right in so far as the changes and his view of ‘British’ go, his concept of British culture being very much informed by the pre-war paradigm. He was very wrong if he believed that British means unchanging and fixed as a culture.

  I may have mentioned that the lost traditional working class culture, often mourned by some, was in my opinion shit. I don’t mourn its passing; I hope it died suffering. I don’t think he really considered the consequences of losing two generations in wars, the inevitable diversity when lost generations leave a gap to be filled. I’m not one who struggles with diversity, I enjoy it because it’s interesting and it’s not the crap cloth cap world where I never knew my place.

  I sat for a while on a remaining wooden bench. Possibly the same one I used to wait on as a child while dad and Tam imbibed the evening away. There was plenty of junk on the floor. This detritus included sweet and crisp packets and empty glue tins. Over by the base of a low wall I could just see the plunger end of a syringe covered by moss. I didn’t stay there for long. The shadowy ghosts faded and that was the first and last time I actually saw them.

  However, I now felt their presence, I always had but now I knew what that constant underlying subtle sense of loss and regret was. I’d always put it down to being brought up in the aftermath of the war with the ruptured buildings and traum
atised adults. Now I knew, as I’d always felt, that it was real. The future that didn’t and couldn’t occur called out its distress at not being allowed to happen.

  The park is seventy-seven acres of grassland and small copses, a huge area in inner city London. I entered it by what I always thought of as the back gates although they are probably the front gates for people who live at this side. Part of the park is given over to an army reserve depot and so the military keeps touch with a place that was once a prime source of recruits. I suspect that it’s not so prime now but the base remains. The regular Sunday military parades along the local roads ceased many years ago.

  This ‘rear’ set of double iron gates are near a fenced off playground. My dad says that in his childhood it was a shallow pond. In mine it was an adventurous place of swings, slides and a thing we called The Horse. This was basically a huge RSJ built structure that swung end to end, always staying parallel to the ground by some cantilevered artifice, it could accommodate about fifty or more kids. It was nowhere near safe and often children were thrown off, smashed up a bit on the concrete floor and escorted to hospital. I suppose that this level of excitement was required when the same kids could just as easily go off to explore some fascinating bombsite, of which there were hundreds. Now, of course, it is long gone, the swings are low and the slides have safety sides. No risk allowed.

  The park really acts as a buffer between Forest Gate on the ‘rear’ side and West Ham on the other. When I was little, Forest Gate had a predominately black population mainly of West Indian origin. West Ham was largely traditional white. As more people of Asian descent moved into the area and the whites slowly took advantage of increased income and left, both areas started to develop their own micro cultures.

  There’d been more people movement since and Forest Gate was now largely black and Asian Muslim and West Ham black, Hindu and Sikh. Both sides, of course, retain vestiges of the original white groups. More white faces appear everyday now as the Eastern European presence increases. The park buffer accommodates the leisure needs of everybody.

  The resident park keepers disappeared long ago, the houses supplied to them as part of their employment are now expensive private residences and the park is patrolled and maintained by mobile council patrols. Forgive the suspicious nature I’m about to display but… the park was maintained by a trust fund and grant set up by the late Ms Fry. Now that this function is absorbed by local authority services, what happened to the money that was set aside to administer the land?

  I enjoyed strolling through the parkland lost in a personal nostalgia; here was where I played golf, here I played football, here we picnicked and here my friends and I built our hidden den. After about twenty five minutes I emerged through the West Ham gates into a similar but slightly different community. I’m told there is some conflict between the two park sides but it all seemed peaceful to me.

  The only concerning thing I saw was an obviously homeless and mentally ill man carrying his world in his arms. His world consisted of a dirty sleeping bag and a bulging and tatty Tesco carrier bag. He was walking in small circles and muttering loudly to himself. I never saw anything like this when I was small, this stuff is fairly new. There were always tramps but the modern homeless, the ignored mentally ill, they started to appear in the eighties as the country discovered selfishness and profit based services. Profit based services? That’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

  A short walk took me to Richford Road. I planned to head towards Stratford Broadway and if I veered round to the parish church near my dad’s flat I could still first walk down the road of my childhood. I paused at number one, I lived here until I was one but I don’t remember it. I paused again at number thirteen, this house I remembered. It was a bog standard terraced house. The Victorian front bay window had been replaced with one huge flat window, the same above it, it just looked wrong. The front low brick wall that my dad built was still in place. The house appeared empty and there was a sales board tacked onto a wooden pole. I entered the estate agent’s number into my phone. I’d call them later; probably still secreted in the house was the journal.

  I tabbed down to the sixties flats at the bottom of the road. This estate is built on one of the primary bomb sites/playgrounds I remember. An alley led down to the church and past my dad’s place. I continued straight past and onto the main road that took me past my old school, now a training centre, and the police station, built on the bombed out pit of what was once another church, about four hundred yards from the original police station, now offices.

  The churches didn’t fare well in the blitz, most of them were very old and did not withstand blast well. That’s true of the pubs as well which explains the strange fact that they were the two most commonly destroyed major buildings.

  This church had been opened up all the way to the crypt and I recall playing in the destruction where it wasn’t unusual to find old bones and coffins. Things that would be considered horrific now were just my normal world. Mind you, even then there were limits, this we learned when a friend and I suffered two strokes of the cane at school because we were seen fencing with two femurs. Most unreasonable in my view.

  About half way from this spot to my dad’s flat is St Lucia Drive. It’s part of a nineties build and the council probably named it to reflect the more cosmopolitan nature of the place. Historical ignorance once again provoked a response.

  Sade Morgenthau was a little Jewish girl of German extraction. She and her family escaped the Teutonic insanity of the nineteen thirties and resettled in this area, she must have been a baby at the time. They were not wealthy and her father worked in the docks to make a living. They were almost interned at the outbreak of war but somehow convinced the authorities that the family was now British and posed no threat.

  Morgenthau is a beautiful name; it means morning dew. Sade was a beautiful little girl and everybody loved her and her amiable family.

  The place where St Lucia Drive now stands was at that time a public bath house. It was flattened early in the blitz and the rubble cleared. Later in the war it had grassed over and was an empty area where the kids played. Sade’s father had gone to war with one of the Guards regiments. She, like many others, had returned to her mother from evacuation. She often played in the bombed out clearing.

  In the latter part of the war V2 rockets, launched because the Nazis were having a murderous tantrum at the prospect of losing, fell often in London. They were the brainchild of Wernher von Braun, later the architect of the US Moon shots. My dad says they were the least frightening of all the weapons used against this city and had no tactical value. He said that bombs and V1 doodlebugs create anticipatory fear, they announce their deadly intention and then follow through. The V2 just happened, one moment nothing then the next an explosion. The V2 didn’t create fear the way the other attacks could.

  As Sade played in the grass a V2 struck. The rockets were fast but one could just about see them a moment before they struck, a vengeful streak from the sky. This V2 crashed down and hit Sade directly. She was vaporised. Nothing of her was found. One second a happy little girl, the next she was molecules floating in the air. People wept and comforted themselves with the knowledge that at least it was quick and she was happy beforehand.

  Her father died a few months later while fighting in France. He rushed at a fortified position on some bridge and won a medal. Eyewitnesses said he’d been out of his mind at the time and they’d never seen such an enraged charge at the enemy.

  Since the new road started at the location of the V2 strike, my dad decided it should be called Morgenthau Drive. He launched a one man campaign and started to call door to door explaining he didn’t want it called St Lucia Drive. Typically, it didn’t occur to him to explain why and he was a little upset by the indifference he encountered. The fact is that most people now in the area didn’t know about Sade but my dad assumed everybody did. Demographic changes had
n’t exactly passed him by but for some reason he thought it was the same culture but with different people.

  While dad was on his rounds to garner support an elderly Jamaican man decided to confront the door to door racist he’d heard about. Two old men arguing must be a funny sight. It could have ended in some kind of embarrassing incident with both injured and probably arrested. Fortunately, both men were similar in that neither of them would strike the first blow. Neither of them would retreat either and so the neighbourhood was entertained for a few minutes while they shouted incoherently at each other.

  Eventually they understood that the Jamaican had mistaken my dad for a racist activist and my dad had mistaken him for an uncaring nihilist. Then they quieted down and explained themselves to each other. When the Jamaican heard the story he shook my dad’s hand and joined him, dad’s first and only convert to the cause. I’m told that these two caused much local amusement with passionate but inept attempts to explain their position to people.

  Eventually a kindly Sikh retired teacher living nearby listened to their story and wrote to the council on their behalf. The council was sympathetic but felt that the naming process was complete and didn’t want to spend more time and money on altering it. My dad is still furious with them but is happy that Sade’s name is known again.

  I headed on up to Stratford Broadway. There’s another small park just off of this route but I chose not to go through it. On the corner by the lane at the side of this park there used to be a red telephone box. In the early sixties a suspect in the nearby old police station produced a hand gun and killed two officers. As he fled he killed another who tried to stop him. His short flight ended in this phone box where he shot himself dead.