A short story on a London bus for the ninth blog linked to Lewisham Voices Facebook video posts.
In this weekly series, the stories, memories, poems and writing from people who lived, worked or wrote about the area of Lewisham are shared.
Enjoy Lewisham Voices.
https://www.facebook.com/LewishamLibraries/videos/p.583970992258247/583970992258247/?type=2&theater
Bus travel in South London, stories from the City over the Water is a collection of London fiction written by Chris published in 2019. It consists of short stories set on South London buses. Chris reads New Cross Roads and Friendly Streets which references the true historic events and buildings - the V2 rocket bombing during WWII, the Battle of Lewisham, the old Elephant House on Lewisham Way. A story on the Number 21 bus that traverses through Lewisham.
The Deptford story references the true historic events and buildings - the V2 rocket bombing during WWII, the Battle of Lewisham, the old Elephant House on Lewisham Way.
Another Lewisham story 'The Raven & the Kat' and others by Chris are on the Podcast link below. The Raven story came about through a project around redevelopment of Catford Broadway and Chris took liberties with time lines but nothing is wrong exactly. There was a film industry in Catford, it just never coincided with the theatre. Sadly Raven and Kat are not real people. Part of the redevelopment project was to create a kind of folk memory around the spot by making the characters appear real. The podcast site is here.
Another Lewisham story 'The Raven & the Kat' and others by Chris are on the Podcast link below. The Raven story came about through a project around redevelopment of Catford Broadway and Chris took liberties with time lines but nothing is wrong exactly. There was a film industry in Catford, it just never coincided with the theatre. Sadly Raven and Kat are not real people. Part of the redevelopment project was to create a kind of folk memory around the spot by making the characters appear real. The podcast site is here.
Bus travel in South London, stories from the City over the water. It’s London but not as you know it. Welcome to the south, the Surrey Shore, the Sunny Side. Get on a bus, go Transpontine and immerse yourself in some of the stories of the city over the water. South London is Britain’s second largest city held together by shared geography and buses. The stories are set on, linked by or alongside some of these bus routes and are divided between those that might be considered real and those which could be labelled magically real. This is a less than perfect dichotomy in a place that contains a HellRaiser bus stop near the Bricklayers’ Arms Roundabout, dozens of roving bus preachers as well as the Peckham Terminator at Nigel Road stop. If these are real, and they are real, how does one designate the uncanny?
https://www.thecityoverthewater.com/
https://www.thecityoverthewater.com/
Chris Roberts is a London writer and tour guide who has written books on the history of nursery rhymes, London's bridges, lost words and superstition in football. He has been conducting walking tours around London for most of this century. He is also responsible for a failed musical about Margaret Thatcher and, in the form of One Eye Grey, the resurrection of the penny dreadful in the 21st century as well as the character of the Roman era football commentator Tacticus and the Football Art Masterclass series for the award winning Café Calcio radio show. Chris has lived and worked in South London for 25 years and currently lives in Camberwell.
Bus Driver's Prayer
Our Father,
Who art in Hendon
Harrow Road be Thy name
Thy Kingston come
Thy Wimbledon
In Erith as it is in Hendon.
Give us this day our Berkhampstead
And forgive us our Westminsters
As we forgive those who Westminster against us.
Lead us not into Temple Station
And deliver us from Ealing,
For thine is the Kingston
The Purley and the Crawley,
For Iver and Iver
Crouch End ..
Our Father,
Who art in Hendon
Harrow Road be Thy name
Thy Kingston come
Thy Wimbledon
In Erith as it is in Hendon.
Give us this day our Berkhampstead
And forgive us our Westminsters
As we forgive those who Westminster against us.
Lead us not into Temple Station
And deliver us from Ealing,
For thine is the Kingston
The Purley and the Crawley,
For Iver and Iver
Crouch End ..
The Bus Driver's Prayer, also known as the Busman's Lord's Prayer, is a parody of the Lord's Prayer that takes the bus driver around Greater London. The original words have been around since 1960 at least and an earlier version is of stations. The one here is Ian Dury's version and Chris Roberts has another version just of South London.
New Cross Roads and Friendly Streets
“Off out dancing?”
Denise adjusted her umbrella to see the Plumsteads cheerily waving at her from upstairs. A re-angled drip went down her neck.
“Hardly,” she yelled back. “Can’t even face cycling in this.”
Denise was dressed as for a night out, at least as much of a night out as she had these days, and even if there was no music or lights there would be people and chatting.
The rain lashed against the old Hatcham Liberal Club opposite and the wind shifted at a decent clip off the river from Deptford. The building was now residential but still dominated the street. The Plumsteads had met there, he up from Peckham, she from Deptford, both mods who bonded over the ska sounds of the late 1960s. A decade later they moved in opposite the club and watched as the punks traipsed through its doors. No more dancing on the parqueted floor, thought Denise, and reflected that if it had still been the working men’s debating club it had started out as, she’d be spared a trip to Lewisham on the number 21.
Hatcham itself had vanished as neighbouring New Cross usurped its place on the maps but in the Domesday Book it was recorded as Hacheham, meaning “home of a man named Hæcci”. Nine villagers lived there and there was sufficient woodland for three pigs. Denise liked the idea of three little piggies, as the wind gusted about and tried its best to take down the houses. Hatcham was in Surrey and Lewisham had once been in Kent but county boundaries meant little today compared to more pressing divisions between manors to do with waiting lists, drugs retailing and cultural identity.
These modern distinctions involved shifting complex fashions, whereas Denise longed for simplicity of cause, action and reaction, a time when left was right and right was wrong. The past represented clarity for her. Denise knew whose side she would have been on in 1865 during the strike against Mr George England’s Hatcham Iron Works where the Hong Kong City Chinese restaurant now stood. Likewise in 1926, in what the Kentish Mercury described as “Rowdyism in New Cross”, she would have been with the two thousand pickets blockading the entrance to London’s largest tram depot.
Denise sighed as she reached Ilderton Road and climbed to the top deck of the 21. She’d never been a fan of the bendy buses but these replacements were a terrible waste of money. Water streamed down the windows and she had to rub them to see out to the supermarkets, station and shops on the run up to New Cross. Not far behind the buildings was Clifton Rise where in 1977 the National Front rallied. The planned march by the 500 extreme right wingers through Lewisham was prevented by thousands of left wingers and local people. This represented a turning point for, as Goebbels said, “he who controls the streets controls the masses” and from that point the NF no longer controlled the streets. This had been Cable Street for the double-denim age, a stand against evil and a point in time when wickedness was halted.
Lewisham ‘77 exercised a kind of juju on Denise and was one of the things that had attracted her to the area. She’d arrived in the 1990s in time for the golden age of the Venue club with its Brit Pop edge but, by the time New Rave – New Cross’s other claim to musical fame – emerged, she had developed a fondness for bluegrass and divided her spare time between playing that and politics.
Denise had worked for the great leaps forward of 1997 and 2000 with the elections of Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone, and had been one of the thousands thronging the South Bank in the dawn hours in ’97, singing “things can only get better”. Bright eyed, full of joy, holding hands for the first, and as it turned out, last time with Clarissa. They’d swayed along the Thames, kissed and, briefly under the leafy protection of some bushes in Bernie Spain Gardens, gone rather further. It had felt liberating, like anything was possible.
She wasn’t alone then. She was part of something bigger. In an act of remembrance, she wrote “Portillo” on the bus window after the defeated Conservative MP, Michael Portillo. Then, slightly embarrassed, wiped it clear again.
Denise’s workplace, Lewisham College, appeared on the right and she recalled her union walking out in support of workers at another college two years previously. The other college had gone on strike for months while she and others tweeted in support, donated money and waved flags. The strike failed but it made Denise realise how unusual it had been to hear the phrase “all-out indefinite strike” in the media. One just didn’t any more.
She didn’t hear from Clarissa either.
Ghosts! Denise thought as the bus passed the site of the old Elephant House on Lewisham Way, its gothic splendour replaced by a modernist block on the downhill trajectory towards Lewisham. The old house had been built in the mid-nineteenth century, gaining its name from a giant elephant’s head sculpture that once hung ominously from the front of it. Denise had been to a squat party there, where she began a brief affair with a mature student. More ghosts!
She banished the past and focused on the present. There had been much excitement at her work about the night’s meeting and, though an unreliable guide, the Facebook attendee list was impressive. Denise was thrilled that she’d know people, all there for a common cause, and maybe she would meet new folk or even meet someone. She banished that hope but felt positive as the bus drew up at the bottom of Loampit Hill.
The venue was a former British Home Store secured for the night by hipster supporters of the Movement For Change. The Leader’s ability to galvanise the young as well as older lefties like herself impressed Denise. She waved at some colleagues and fell in with them as the crowd thickened and funnelled into the pop-up village hall.
The furnishings were basic but in one corner there was a bar selling soft drinks, warm and cold, and opposite was another taking “donations” for a glass of something stronger. Denise made a contribution for a red wine and took a seat. Elsewhere, groups of students seemed happy to take up positions on the floor around the periphery.
The mood was earnest but upbeat after the warm-up acts of union officials, young party members and one long-term ally of the Leader. Denise relaxed and looked about her. By her estimate and experience of counting assemblies at work, there were more than four hundred people in the room and most communities were represented, even if the majority were white, and it appeared to her that students and public-sector employees made up the majority.
Denise applauded enthusiastically as the Leader stepped up to the microphone and she was impressed at how ordinary he was in the flesh. He was, to Denise, deliciously unflashy and somehow real. The Leader spoke calmly in a low clear voice and built up to elicit a response, using his hands to beat out a strong point.
“We are accused of denying their economic reality; yet all the time they deny our real poverty.”
The audience responded wildly and the Leader followed up with more. He focused on those in the hall and instilled in them the belief that they, in the hall, in the movement, were correct.
“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come and, comrades, we can be that idea!”
Cheers erupted around Denise as about her people were being told what they wanted to hear, and she heard what she needed to. It felt like the certainty she craved, and it wasn’t just her. There were shiny eyed career woman, young men flushed with emotion and an elderly chap waving his cap like a football supporter in an old newsreel.
“On the 25th of November, seventy-two years ago today, a shop much like this one in nearby New Cross was hit by a V2 rocket fired by the Nazis. One hundred and sixty-eight people died. Thirteen more people died in a fire started by racists thirty-five years ago; and next year will mark the fortieth anniversary of the heroic uprising that stopped the fascists marching in Lewisham.”
The Leader paused.
“We have a proud history of opposition to fascism and people have died here because of it. We must not, with their talk of austerity and globalisation, let the new oppressors or their media allies deceive us. We must not let them mislead us. We must believe in a better country; we must fight for it and we will achieve it!”
People whistled, stamped and cheered as the Chair grabbed the microphone and yelled, “The leader of the largest political party in Europe and with your help the next Prime Minister!”
Her face flushed, Denise felt surrounded by joy and belonging, and she clapped till her hands were sore. The ghosts of 1997 had reappeared, but they seemed friendlier and differently dressed. Behind them she could sense her younger self, an eager teenager voting for the party at her first election. In her mind’s eye, past election campaigns and political struggles flashed by, along with haircuts, badges, coats she had loved and places she had been. Then someone touched her arm and broke her reverie. Did she fancy going to the pub?
Denise left with them and outside there were songs, not about things getting better but about righting wrongs; not about governance but vengeance. Where was the love, Denise wondered, as she listened to people sing.
“Build a bonfire, build a bonfire.
Put the Tories on the top.
Put the Blairites in the middle
And burn the bloody lot!”
Someone shouted, “Red Front!” and no one laughed, at least not ironically.
Denise felt the most awful deflation as the mood shifted from the warm optimism of her journey there and in the hall to the ugliness and cold of the street outside. She changed her mind about the pub and got on the bus and pondered why the first half of the sentence about being the largest party was greeted more loudly than the second. As if that was the most important thing.
The rain stopped as she walked up Queens Road and turned into the drive. The Plumsteads were just in front of her with their Scottie dog, Elsa.
As she stepped into the shared hall, Mr Plumstead asked about the dance.
“Well”, said Denise, “we certainly took a jump to the left.”
To which the Plumsteads chorused in unison.
“That’ll mean a step to the right.”
“Probably” said Denise, glumly, as she turned the key in the lock.
“Off out dancing?”
Denise adjusted her umbrella to see the Plumsteads cheerily waving at her from upstairs. A re-angled drip went down her neck.
“Hardly,” she yelled back. “Can’t even face cycling in this.”
Denise was dressed as for a night out, at least as much of a night out as she had these days, and even if there was no music or lights there would be people and chatting.
The rain lashed against the old Hatcham Liberal Club opposite and the wind shifted at a decent clip off the river from Deptford. The building was now residential but still dominated the street. The Plumsteads had met there, he up from Peckham, she from Deptford, both mods who bonded over the ska sounds of the late 1960s. A decade later they moved in opposite the club and watched as the punks traipsed through its doors. No more dancing on the parqueted floor, thought Denise, and reflected that if it had still been the working men’s debating club it had started out as, she’d be spared a trip to Lewisham on the number 21.
Hatcham itself had vanished as neighbouring New Cross usurped its place on the maps but in the Domesday Book it was recorded as Hacheham, meaning “home of a man named Hæcci”. Nine villagers lived there and there was sufficient woodland for three pigs. Denise liked the idea of three little piggies, as the wind gusted about and tried its best to take down the houses. Hatcham was in Surrey and Lewisham had once been in Kent but county boundaries meant little today compared to more pressing divisions between manors to do with waiting lists, drugs retailing and cultural identity.
These modern distinctions involved shifting complex fashions, whereas Denise longed for simplicity of cause, action and reaction, a time when left was right and right was wrong. The past represented clarity for her. Denise knew whose side she would have been on in 1865 during the strike against Mr George England’s Hatcham Iron Works where the Hong Kong City Chinese restaurant now stood. Likewise in 1926, in what the Kentish Mercury described as “Rowdyism in New Cross”, she would have been with the two thousand pickets blockading the entrance to London’s largest tram depot.
Denise sighed as she reached Ilderton Road and climbed to the top deck of the 21. She’d never been a fan of the bendy buses but these replacements were a terrible waste of money. Water streamed down the windows and she had to rub them to see out to the supermarkets, station and shops on the run up to New Cross. Not far behind the buildings was Clifton Rise where in 1977 the National Front rallied. The planned march by the 500 extreme right wingers through Lewisham was prevented by thousands of left wingers and local people. This represented a turning point for, as Goebbels said, “he who controls the streets controls the masses” and from that point the NF no longer controlled the streets. This had been Cable Street for the double-denim age, a stand against evil and a point in time when wickedness was halted.
Lewisham ‘77 exercised a kind of juju on Denise and was one of the things that had attracted her to the area. She’d arrived in the 1990s in time for the golden age of the Venue club with its Brit Pop edge but, by the time New Rave – New Cross’s other claim to musical fame – emerged, she had developed a fondness for bluegrass and divided her spare time between playing that and politics.
Denise had worked for the great leaps forward of 1997 and 2000 with the elections of Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone, and had been one of the thousands thronging the South Bank in the dawn hours in ’97, singing “things can only get better”. Bright eyed, full of joy, holding hands for the first, and as it turned out, last time with Clarissa. They’d swayed along the Thames, kissed and, briefly under the leafy protection of some bushes in Bernie Spain Gardens, gone rather further. It had felt liberating, like anything was possible.
She wasn’t alone then. She was part of something bigger. In an act of remembrance, she wrote “Portillo” on the bus window after the defeated Conservative MP, Michael Portillo. Then, slightly embarrassed, wiped it clear again.
Denise’s workplace, Lewisham College, appeared on the right and she recalled her union walking out in support of workers at another college two years previously. The other college had gone on strike for months while she and others tweeted in support, donated money and waved flags. The strike failed but it made Denise realise how unusual it had been to hear the phrase “all-out indefinite strike” in the media. One just didn’t any more.
She didn’t hear from Clarissa either.
Ghosts! Denise thought as the bus passed the site of the old Elephant House on Lewisham Way, its gothic splendour replaced by a modernist block on the downhill trajectory towards Lewisham. The old house had been built in the mid-nineteenth century, gaining its name from a giant elephant’s head sculpture that once hung ominously from the front of it. Denise had been to a squat party there, where she began a brief affair with a mature student. More ghosts!
She banished the past and focused on the present. There had been much excitement at her work about the night’s meeting and, though an unreliable guide, the Facebook attendee list was impressive. Denise was thrilled that she’d know people, all there for a common cause, and maybe she would meet new folk or even meet someone. She banished that hope but felt positive as the bus drew up at the bottom of Loampit Hill.
The venue was a former British Home Store secured for the night by hipster supporters of the Movement For Change. The Leader’s ability to galvanise the young as well as older lefties like herself impressed Denise. She waved at some colleagues and fell in with them as the crowd thickened and funnelled into the pop-up village hall.
The furnishings were basic but in one corner there was a bar selling soft drinks, warm and cold, and opposite was another taking “donations” for a glass of something stronger. Denise made a contribution for a red wine and took a seat. Elsewhere, groups of students seemed happy to take up positions on the floor around the periphery.
The mood was earnest but upbeat after the warm-up acts of union officials, young party members and one long-term ally of the Leader. Denise relaxed and looked about her. By her estimate and experience of counting assemblies at work, there were more than four hundred people in the room and most communities were represented, even if the majority were white, and it appeared to her that students and public-sector employees made up the majority.
Denise applauded enthusiastically as the Leader stepped up to the microphone and she was impressed at how ordinary he was in the flesh. He was, to Denise, deliciously unflashy and somehow real. The Leader spoke calmly in a low clear voice and built up to elicit a response, using his hands to beat out a strong point.
“We are accused of denying their economic reality; yet all the time they deny our real poverty.”
The audience responded wildly and the Leader followed up with more. He focused on those in the hall and instilled in them the belief that they, in the hall, in the movement, were correct.
“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come and, comrades, we can be that idea!”
Cheers erupted around Denise as about her people were being told what they wanted to hear, and she heard what she needed to. It felt like the certainty she craved, and it wasn’t just her. There were shiny eyed career woman, young men flushed with emotion and an elderly chap waving his cap like a football supporter in an old newsreel.
“On the 25th of November, seventy-two years ago today, a shop much like this one in nearby New Cross was hit by a V2 rocket fired by the Nazis. One hundred and sixty-eight people died. Thirteen more people died in a fire started by racists thirty-five years ago; and next year will mark the fortieth anniversary of the heroic uprising that stopped the fascists marching in Lewisham.”
The Leader paused.
“We have a proud history of opposition to fascism and people have died here because of it. We must not, with their talk of austerity and globalisation, let the new oppressors or their media allies deceive us. We must not let them mislead us. We must believe in a better country; we must fight for it and we will achieve it!”
People whistled, stamped and cheered as the Chair grabbed the microphone and yelled, “The leader of the largest political party in Europe and with your help the next Prime Minister!”
Her face flushed, Denise felt surrounded by joy and belonging, and she clapped till her hands were sore. The ghosts of 1997 had reappeared, but they seemed friendlier and differently dressed. Behind them she could sense her younger self, an eager teenager voting for the party at her first election. In her mind’s eye, past election campaigns and political struggles flashed by, along with haircuts, badges, coats she had loved and places she had been. Then someone touched her arm and broke her reverie. Did she fancy going to the pub?
Denise left with them and outside there were songs, not about things getting better but about righting wrongs; not about governance but vengeance. Where was the love, Denise wondered, as she listened to people sing.
“Build a bonfire, build a bonfire.
Put the Tories on the top.
Put the Blairites in the middle
And burn the bloody lot!”
Someone shouted, “Red Front!” and no one laughed, at least not ironically.
Denise felt the most awful deflation as the mood shifted from the warm optimism of her journey there and in the hall to the ugliness and cold of the street outside. She changed her mind about the pub and got on the bus and pondered why the first half of the sentence about being the largest party was greeted more loudly than the second. As if that was the most important thing.
The rain stopped as she walked up Queens Road and turned into the drive. The Plumsteads were just in front of her with their Scottie dog, Elsa.
As she stepped into the shared hall, Mr Plumstead asked about the dance.
“Well”, said Denise, “we certainly took a jump to the left.”
To which the Plumsteads chorused in unison.
“That’ll mean a step to the right.”
“Probably” said Denise, glumly, as she turned the key in the lock.
Battle of Lewisham took place over 40 years ago on 13 August 1977.
Local people and antifascist activists united to stop the racist National Front from marching through the streets of Lewisham. The confrontation that followed was one of the largest of its kind.
The link below to the exhibition explores the background to the battle, the day itself and its legacy.
Local people and antifascist activists united to stop the racist National Front from marching through the streets of Lewisham. The confrontation that followed was one of the largest of its kind.
The link below to the exhibition explores the background to the battle, the day itself and its legacy.
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Bath Place, Blackheath, 1930s
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