Straight Outta Hackney

In late 1969 we moved away from the council flats in Amhurst Road, Hackney. A place I loved and the only home I had ever known. My dad had got a better job, which allowed my parents to take out their first mortgage. The new flat in leafy North Chingford had cost the princely sum of £5,400. I can still recall the family's trepidation at taking on such a fearful financial responsibility.

In truth, it was a good time to move. Most of the people we knew were being rehoused in newly built tower blocks. Ominous-looking monoliths that cast their brutalist shadow over the neighbourhood. This simple switch from living horizontally to vertically would kill a community's life force at the stroke of some authority planner's biro. Mums who had once stood out on balconies having a natter with 'her next door' while they kept an eye on the kids playing below would now not see their neighbours from one month to the next.

When they did, it was usually in a lift that stank of piss.

But hey, the flats had central heating. Yay.

So I was pleased to swerve them but broken-hearted about leaving the flats. Living there would always remain amongst my happiest memories. There was so much I would miss about them, not least my family, most of whom seemed to reside there.

Beneath us was my Uncle Sid and his four boys. Known locally as 'Joe Cunt', Sid was a taxi driver and streetfighter who also minded the door at the notorious Regency Club, just down the road. Being a somewhat chippy geezer, my uncle always thought people were taking liberties with him. On such occasions he was often heard to utter the phrase, 'Do I look like my name's Joe Cunt?' At some point everyone in the community decided the answer to that was a resounding 'yes', and the nickname stuck. Even his missus, my Auntie Milly, called him Joe Cunt.

Opposite us was my Auntie Bessy, who weighed in at a healthy thirty-four stone. She was apparently a good-looking woman in her day, though no one could tell me exactly when that day was. Her husband was a bald little bloke named Will whom she always affectionately referred to as 'shithouse'. The only thing these two had in common was that his weight went into hers exactly four times. A few doors along the balcony from us lived my nan and grandad. My nan's sister, Auntie Jinny, also lived with them. Today we would say that she had special needs. In those days descriptions were less generous. Jinny used to keep budgies that spoke in a chirpy imitation of her own rather strange voice.

She once said to me, 'I had three budgies. But they both died.'

If you think my family was some kind of oddball anomaly, then think again. That block of flats was like the Twin Peaks of East London.

There was one chap who rejoiced in the handle Ol' Bollock Neck. Okay, 'rejoiced' may be pushing it. I expect he hated said moniker. But that is what everyone called him, either way. If you have a spare moment or two, I'd like to tell you about him, because if I don't, no one else will.

His given name was Reuben. He must have had a second name, but I never stumbled across it. I only knew he was Reuben because my mum, a woman of some natural refinement, refused to say the word 'bollock'. She said a lot of other things, but a bollock never crossed her lips.

Now Reuben was an unusual-looking chap, to be sure. Rotund and walking with a cane, he boasted the kind of bright-scarlet complexion that I now know indicates high blood pressure. Back then I just thought his head was about to explode. On top of that was a shiny bald pate on which sat three different-sized growths in close proximity to one another. From an aerial view, his dome must have resembled a small map of the Galápagos Islands. Such bumps on the nut were not uncommon back in the day. My dad's sister Eva had a couple we used to see every Christmas when we dropped off the presents. Having an - albeit thinnish - head of hair in which to conceal them gave Auntie Eva the drop on Reuben. But us kids would stay amused for hours trying to catch the occasional glimpse of one through her wispy backcombed barnet.

Good times.

Now, any or all of these physical attributes might have warranted the issuing of a nickname. But none were responsible for Reuben's. That, you may not be surprised to learn, was down to a goitre on his neck. And what a goitre it was. It hung down on his shirt collar like a honeydew melon ensconced in an XXL scrotal sack. The bastard thing was enormous.

Every time Reuben walked through the flats some budding cockney Oscar Wilde would shout out, 'Oy, Bollock Neck' in his general direction. For years his response would be to raise his cane in anger. Later, like a stone floor worn down by the passage of time, the same gesture became more of a tired acknowledgement.

Now I would never see Reuben or his bollock neck again.

There were others. Ginger Sadie on the ground floor, who had the misfortune to own a front room whose outside wall was the perfect size and location to serve as goal during our not infrequent kickabouts. The endless pounding of ball against brick must have driven her insane. The game would stop as she came out screaming the odds at us. Then resume again the second she walked back in. The sheer repetition of this scenario playing out was a comfort I would miss. Though I doubt Ginger Sadie felt the same.

And let's not forget Roughy Brian, the wiry teenage bully with perhaps the campest nickname in all East London. As an eleven-year-old, I had grown tired of him always pushing us around and finally decided to fight back. During the set-to that ensued, I bit him hard on the ear and pushed him down a flight of stairs. I became hero for a day and brought proof to the old adage about standing up to bullies. The day after that, Brian got an older mate of his to kick the crap out of me, and normal service was resumed. I never trusted an adage again from that day to this.

Now it was on to pastures new. And pastures there certainly were. Despite its East London postcode, North Chingford was remarkably rural, the more so to an inner-city slicker like my good self. There were fields and forests, a village green and cows that wandered freely in the streets. I used to tell my kids that the first time I set eyes on a cow I thought it was the biggest dog I'd ever seen. This was a joke. I'd seen pictures of them in books, obviously.

The main thing that struck me about Chingford was how white and English it was. I had grown up amongst four-by-twos, Jamaicans, Irish and Pakistanis. The Jamaican presence, especially, had been impossible to ignore. The ska and blue-beat blaring out from the houses on Sandringham Road, the stalls selling exotic-looking fruit and veg down Ridley Road Market, the gaggles of snappily dressed rude boys hanging around street corners, talking in rapid-fire patois. It was a culture I took to easily and it had quickly left its mark. Queueing up for the latest Trojan releases in Musicland on Ridley Road Market. Playing them full volume on my sky-blue Dansette portable as I picked out my outfit for that night. The quiet thrill of being one of the few white faces in the Four Aces Club in Dalston.

Chingford was just a twenty-minute train ride away, but it may as well have been another planet.

I also made the mistake of arriving there with a bloated sense of self-importance. While I was still very young, I was a suedehead out of Hackney. One who had his new neighbours marked as yokels before he'd even met them. This misassumption was soon corrected. What they may have lacked in attention to sartorial detail, they endeavoured to make up for with an endlessly imaginative capacity for extreme violence.

There was a local night spot, the Lorraine Club, where such youths would gather for a skank and a punch-up. One night, a bus ferrying would-be revellers was attacked and firebombed by a rival mob from Debden. Seriously. Who firebombs a double-decker bus on a village green?

Another time I was at a dance at the Chingford Assembly Rooms when a Wild West-style fight broke out. Amidst the mayhem, a cassocked priest appeared with raised arms and appealed for peace. It didn't work. A fat bloke called Lips picked him up and threw him off a balcony. 'Seaside Shuffle' by Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs was playing at the time. I've always had an ear for detail.

Being less than enthralled with this new environment, I would get the train back to Hackney most nights and hang out with my old mates. I'd then get a late train home to Chingford and make the twenty-minute walk to our flat, which was on The Ridgeway, near the fire station.

On one such journey, while walking along Station Road, I saw three skins, all older than me, hanging around the dark and otherwise deserted street ahead. I felt like the captain of the Titanic must have on first spotting a big chunk of ice through his binoculars. I knew there was going to be trouble, as you always do on such occasions. I put my hand inside the pocket of my Harrington and clenched my keys in my fist as a makeshift weapon. Then I kept walking. Closer, closer, closer .

'Wotchoo fuckin lookin...