These poems draw pictures of a densely populated urban area
in northeast London, which is a network of dozens of different ethnic and religious
communities, coexisting as well or as badly as they can. It’s a lively
and exciting borough to live in and the pictures I’ve drawn are my own,
everybody in the road in which I live would draw very different pictures and
we could argue the toss about which are representative until the cows came home,
and still not agree. There is no core community, whatever “Eastenders”
might lead one to think, and, as one of my originals remarked to me, in considerable
ire: “That soap makes all us Cockneys out to be stupid, the East End is
nothing like that! But what on earth does it make the rest of the country believe
about people like you and me?”
“The Open Book” appeared in “Obsessed with
Pipework.”. The language and banter in “Common Courtesy” is
straight reportage and yes, stereotype as it is, the original of Roxanne was
nursing a doll in a baby’s shawl as she wept. Her distress, and the rough
kindness of the stallholders, had such pathos I cried all the way home. There
are happy and funny things as well, amusingly summed up by a most respectable
retired nurse and devout Catholic, describing her work with the Christian Kitchen:
“Of course, it’s good that the homeless and down and outs have one
hot meal a day, but it’s so embarrassing! Now whenever I go up the High
street to do my shopping, all the winos say hello to me!”
I’ll leave you with the poems…