Constance Street

by Charlie Connelly

  Every one of the extended Greenwood clan made it through the Blitz, though in some cases only just. Win’s husband Jim Mitchell received a citation for moving a barge packed with explosives away from the burning wharves into the centre of the Thames at the height of a raid, at great personal danger to himself. Joan’s husband-to-be Charlie Thunstrom, in the middle of a fire-watching shift on the roof of a building in Greenwich, saw his best friend killed when a Messerschmitt broke away and targeted the pair as it flew upriver. Charlie made it to the stairs in time, his pal didn’t.

  In many ways the Greenwoods could consider themselves lucky – at least they were all safe and well – but 7 September 1940, ‘Black Saturday’, changed everything, and the reverberations can still be felt today. They were torn from their roots, torn from everything they knew. In the space of barely an hour their ordinary lives, with all their routines, hopes, dreams, comforts and possessions, were burning to the ground as the collected joys, despairs, laughter and memories of more than a quarter of a century were ripped open and scattered by the hot winds of a hellish firestorm.

  I’m writing these words in a notebook while waiting for a sausage and egg sandwich in Buster’s Café. It’s March 2015. There’s a steaming mug of tea in front of me, salt and pepper cellars and a bottle of ketchup on the formica table. I look around the room, its high ceiling, its plastic chocolate-box painted landscape high up on the wall, beneath it the luminous stars with extra menu options written in black marker pen. The windows are steaming up at the top; at the bottom they’re stickered with labelled photographs of dishes – ‘lamb’s liver’, ‘Bolognese’, ‘breakfast’, ‘on toast’, ‘toasted BLT’, ‘rolls’ – designed to tempt passers-by inside. Two Polish builders sit at a table by the wall in grubby hi-vis jackets and work helmets, arms folded on the table, talking in low voices. There’s a Daily Mirror on the next table, fattened and wrinkled by erstwhile readers. For most, Buster’s is a typical London greasy spoon like any other. For me, though, this caff is not like any other at all. Buster’s is unique and it’s special. Just the act of being in this room is special, in fact.

  Buster’s Café sits on the corner of Constance Street and Albert Road and it’s all that’s left now, the last building of the old Constance Street and the only thing my aunts would recognise today. Buster’s is on the ground floor of a sturdy, functional, three-storey Victorian corner building with round-arched windows on the first floor and rectangular ones on the second, a building that is in itself, like the café it houses, typical and unremarkable. Highly agreeable though Buster’s sausage and egg sandwich is when it arrives, I’m probably the only person who ever comes here for sentimental reasons; the only person who makes a special journey from my home on the other side of the Thames. That’s because the room in which I’m scribbling these words used to be the Post Office. These walls that now echo with tinny Radio 1 and the sizzle and hiss of frying bacon used to resonate with the sound and chatter of the people of Constance Street as they’d buy their stamps, send their parcels and collect their old-age pensions. And it’s all that’s left.

  I’d like to say that as I sit here sipping my tea I can feel something of the old Silvertown, that I can almost see the ghosts of Constance Street passing by the window between the extractor fan and the pictures of lamb’s liver and Bolognese, but I can’t. Too much has changed and everything is different, even in here, in Constance Street’s last stand.

  If Harry and Nell Greenwood stood outside the door of Buster’s Café today and looked around them, other than perhaps the pillar box in front of them, the one that had its top painted with special gas-sensitive paint at the start of the war, they wouldn’t recognise a thing. Across the road Silvertown Station is no more: the line closed in the mid-2000s and the station and tracks are all gone. There’s no trace now of the place where Harry and Nell bumped into each other after Harry’s inadvertent eight-month maritime adventure. Tate & Lyle is still there on the other side of the old railway line, but it’s an enormous modern complex now that dominates Silvertown, cased in a blue corrugated exterior, and its two thin, grey, black-tipped chimneys are now the main Silvertown landmark in place of Silver & Co’s long-demolished single, giant, smoking sentinel.

  Cundy’s has gone now, too. It outlasted every other pub in Silvertown and survived until as recently as 2010. When I first visited it a decade or more ago it looked tatty, uninviting and run-down, was accessed by ducking under a half-closed roller shutter, and had no identifying sign anywhere to tell you where you were (the man behind the bar confirmed to me that I was in ‘the Railway Hotel – but everyone knows it as Cundy’s’). Inside, the place was equally run-down but one could tell that it had been quite something in its day: the sturdy marble-clad columns and the beautiful, custom-made, floor-to-ceiling shelving behind the bar would have been just as Harry knew them. The first decade of the new millennium saw a downward slide, however: marketing initiatives such as introducing strippers on weekday afternoons failed to pull in the necessary crowds, and a century and a half after it first opened for business the old place finally closed for ever.

  Standing in its place is a revolting, wishy-washy green, aluminium-faced apartment block above an empty retail unit with large, sightless, whitewashed windows. The building is constructed on exactly the same footprint as Cundy’s, making it resemble a grotesque, snot-coloured pastiche of the famous old pub that was the heart of a community. A plaque by a side door suggests that it’s called William Owston House – a nice nod to local history, in principle, Owston being listed as the first landlord of the Railway Hotel in the 1850s, but they chose completely the wrong landlord to commemorate.

  All the old houses have gone too, replaced by low-rise sixties council blocks that don’t even follow the old street pattern. By my estimation 15 Constance Street, where the Greenwoods lived for a quarter of a century, where my grandmother was born and my mother spent her first few months, is now the end of a row of parking spaces opposite a parade of shops and a branch of the British Legion, all of them dingy under a low protruding roof separating them from the flats above and all of them firmly steel-shuttered but for the Mace grocery shop.

  St Mark’s Church is still going, after a fashion: since its days of deconsecration and vandalism the church has been reborn in recent years as the Brick Lane Music Hall, which Nell would have liked.

  The docks, of course, are no more: where once they were an important, if not the most important, global hub of international trade, the waters are still now, and the quaysides are home to the London City Airport. Where Silvertown once resonated to the clank and rattle of the working docks, now the air is rent only by the occasional commercial jet taking off and landing.

  Gentrification will no doubt come to central Silvertown eventually. There are flats going up on the riverfront to the west, and it looks as if the actual site of the Silvertown explosion will be built on for the first time since that chilly January night in 1917 (it’s been a car park for most of the intervening years). When I passed it earlier after descending from the Docklands Light Railway station at West Silvertown, tipper trucks were roaring in and out, thundering past the padlocked blue wooden box construction that conceals and protects the explosion memorial.

  There’s no dressing it up: Silvertown today is not an attractive place to visit. If I’d had no connection to the place and visited now I probably wouldn’t be able to get out quickly enough, to be honest. But even though I can’t glean any sense of the hardworking, hardbitten community that lived, breathed, ate, slept, worked, played, celebrated and commiserated there, and even though it’s unlovely, run-down and neglected, I still find Silvertown a very special place. Inexplicably so.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  My memories of childhood suggest there was some kind of family party taking place just about every weekend. While that couldn’t have been the case, it was inevitable that in such a big, close-knit family excuses for celebration would come thick and fast: christenings, birthdays,
wedding anniversaries – there seemed to be a constant rotation of life landmarks that involved big, noisy parties, and the Greenwood sisters were at the heart of them.

  Norah had died in 1964 (Nell, 86 years old by then, exclaimed on hearing the news, ‘Oh no, not one of my babies!’) and I have only vague memories of Annie, who died in 1982, and Win, a year later, but my world revolved around my grandmother Rose as well as Joan, Kit, Ivy and Ruby.

  The aunts, as they were known to all the generations, were dyed-in-the-wool cockneys: strong, warm, generous, witty working-class women from the East End of London. They were different shapes and sizes and had wildly differing characters, but they were all unmistakably sisters who were never happier than when there was something to celebrate among the family.

  These parties were formed from a template honed over many decades. The furniture would be pushed back to the walls and the record player would spin with pub favourites, fifties rock’n’roll and Chas & Dave. If there was a piano in the room, Kit, so tiny and thin you’d suspect the swish of a curtain could send her sprawling, would thunder out old music hall numbers, vamping away on great syncopated octave chords with the sustain pedal pressed permanently to the floor even though to look at her you’d think her feet wouldn’t reach. Great-uncles would sit pouring beer from cans into dimpled half-pint pots, hair smoothly oiled, best suits dry-cleaned, ties neatly knotted, shirts starched and bleached brilliant white and braces firmly buttoned as they reminisced about the docks, their old cars and vans and West Ham United.

  In the front room a brilliant white tablecloth – boil washed so thoroughly it should by rights have crumbled to the touch like ancient papyrus – would be all but hidden beneath plates of sandwiches, sausage rolls, cakes, potato salad, chicken drumsticks, flans, whelks and cockles, all cling-filmed and kitchen-foiled until the official nod was given.

  At some point in the evening it would be time for the ‘turns’ to commence: a range of monologues, sketches and songs that had their roots in the music halls but were made entirely the performer’s own, polished and perfected by years, sometimes decades of party performances.

  Of all the family turns the Lost Patrol was probably the oddest, which, take it from me, was saying something. No one can remember the exact origins of the Lost Patrol, but it became the highlight and focus of any family gathering. The eponymous tune was the B-side to the 1962 ‘Theme from Z-Cars’ single by the Johnny Keating Orchestra and began with the sound of a desert wind rising out of the stylus crackle, from which a jaunty, whistling melody emerged over a capering, military-esque snare-drum and repeated itself for a couple of minutes before retreating back into the scorching wind and fading to the click, thump and crackle of the run-out groove.

  ‘The Lost Patrol’ was not exactly a milestone in musical history. Most likely knocked out in a studio by a bunch of session musicians with one eye on the clock after someone realised the Z Cars theme needed a B-side, few people, even those who bought the record, will remember ‘The Lost Patrol’. Yet to us as a family it was – and is – probably the most important piece of music ever made. It’s been a soundtrack to my life and the lives of my relatives to the extent that it’s even escorted coffins into family funerals.

  While the Lost Patrol was the ultimate ‘turn’, it was the one that required the least talent for performance. It went something like this. The men present would all leave the room, the needle would be dropped onto the record and the patrol would commence: a single-file shuffle back in through the door and around the room, each man with one hand on the shoulder of the man in front, heads bowed, as if they really were just emerging sand-blasted and half dead from the desert, while the assembled women and girls clapped along in time, laughing, hooting and pointing. As the tune faded, the ‘patrol’ would make its slow march out of the room, again to applause, whistles and demands for a repeat performance.

  Over the years a props basket developed, filled with toy guns and plastic swords either outgrown by their original owners or purchased specifically for this battle-weary band of itinerants, and a selection of caps and helmets of various vintages and nationalities. Brooms were pressed into service as crutches, tennis rackets as wooden legs. As things became even more sophisticated, aunts were deployed to administer bandages smeared with tomato sauce to heads and limbs, the condiment manifestation of some imaginary strafing among the dunes (to this day a whiff of ketchup can have me absent-mindedly whistling ‘The Lost Patrol’).

  In my mid-teens – I forget the specific occasion, they’ve all melded into one – it was decided that I’d come of age and was worthy of a place in the Lost Patrol. With me being the eldest boy in the family at the time this meant the platoon consisted for the first time of three different generations. A greatcoat was draped over my shoulders, a tomato sauce-smeared bandage tied around my head, and I was handed an old cricket bat to serve as my rifle. We gathered in the hallway, the music began, everyone clapped in time and, led by my great-uncle Charlie as our commanding officer, blowing on a wooden spoon as an imaginary flute, off into the room we went, this old, battered, cockney platoon plodding in slow circles until the music faded into the whistle of the dry, hot, desert wind. I could only have been 14 or so, but I felt like I’d passed some kind of test, that I’d received tacit acknowledgement from the family elders that I was now one of them. My true coming of age wasn’t an eighteenth birthday or a twenty-first, it was my press-ganging into the Lost Patrol.

  Eccentric ketchup-smeared parading notwithstanding, it was perhaps inevitable that the tune of ‘The Lost Patrol’ became the family anthem because in a way that’s exactly what we were: forcibly displaced, unable to return, destined to be lost in the London suburbs for ever, it seemed. The Lost Patrol parade was not of Silvertown but it was and always will be linked to the place. Those family parties were a continuation of the ones held in Constance Street between the wars, the birthdays, the weddings, the christenings, the jubilees that shook the floors and walls and were brought to an abrupt and permanent end on a warm, sunny September day in 1940.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  My family left Silvertown for good in the late afternoon of 7 September 1940. They hadn’t planned to, but Hitler was insistent. The blue sky of a hot summer Saturday had become speckled with aircraft spilling bombs from their bellies, turning day to night as the factories, warehouses, shops, businesses and homes of the London docks burned and belched choking black smoke and everything changed for ever.

  Forced to flee for their lives and wrenched from everything they knew, the Greenwoods were scattered, to Eltham, Abbey Wood, Feltham, Romford, Chesham – a map of family members in the post-war years would have revealed a wide circle around the fringes of London. At the centre of the circle would be Silvertown, even though, after 7 September 1940, no family member would ever spend another night there.

  Nell eventually settled in Mottingham, near Eltham in south-east London, watching the world go by from the window and remaining firmly in charge of the entire extended brood (at granddaughters’ weddings she’d make her own speech, reminding the groom that the bride was ‘only on loan’ from the family). She died in the spring of 1967, a few months short of her ninetieth birthday. Kit lived in a flat on the floor below, and died in 1991.

  My grandparents Charlie and Rose were eventually re-settled in prefabs on Blackheath, the first home my mother Valerie ever knew. In the early 1950s they were given a council house in Richmount Gardens, Kidbrooke, where Rose would stay until moving into sheltered accommodation with Ruby in 1997 (Charlie died in his sleep in his favourite armchair in the house in Richmount Gardens in April 1976). Ivy died in 1995, Rose in 2000 and Ruby in 2001.

  Now there’s just Joan left, the youngest of them all and the longest-lived, at 91. Still the best story-teller I’ve ever met, still one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. After years spent running shops and cafés in Greenwich, and widowed on Charlie Thunstrom’s death in 1997, she lives by the sea at Broadstairs in Kent in a house
that’s noisy, boisterous and full of children.

  My mother might be the last of Greenwood Silvertonians, in that she was the last to be born there, but Joan is the last who can conjure up the sights, the sounds and the smells of Constance Street from first-hand experience, not to mention providing a hand-drawn diagram.

  Like all the aunts, Joan is always happy to talk about Silvertown. Arguably, it’s when she’s happiest. The cruel, sudden wrenching of the Greenwoods from their island home was a wound that remained open, but one that would be dressed by the sticking plaster of nostalgia. Silvertown as they knew it lived on, in their memories and in the stories that have been passed down the generations. Every time two or more of my grandmother’s sisters would gather together it wouldn’t be long before the talk turned to Silvertown. It was a happy place, an idyll.

  When I was a child sitting at their feet listening to the stories, Silvertown seemed to be a blissful state of mind; an abstract, a home, a nostalgia, a song, a history, a dream.

  I suspected that Silvertown had to be real because my grandmother and great-aunts told me stories about it whenever I saw them. In fact they didn’t just talk about it, they relived the place. I’d be taken for visits to their houses scattered around the rim of London, but there was never a sense that these were truly their homes, in their hearts. The stories they told were all of Silvertown, tales that had the brisk freshness of the contemporary even though none of them had lived there for at least forty years. Like Narnia and Neverland in the books I was reading, Silvertown came to occupy a blurred hinterland between the real and the fantastic and was an inextricable bond between the generations, between those who had been dispersed from it by Hitler’s bombs and those of us who came later.