Jamaica Road

Jamaica Road

I am quizzing my mother on a well-worn old family story about a journey I made aged two. It was sometimes told to evidence a ‘rebellious tendency’, sometimes ‘independence of spirit,’ and always ‘good luck.’ 

‘I want to talk to you,’ I say down the line, ‘about when I stole out to the park alone. When I crossed Jamaica Road.’ 

There is an unusual pause. We are at the end of a call, after the usual catalogue of family enquiry and evaluation of my mother’s poor health. 

‘You want to talk to me about what?’ 

‘I want you to talk about the story about when I disappeared and you found me in the park,’ I tell her. 

She cuts across me now.

‘You know the story.’ She is suspicious of a joke or a trick or a serious discussion.

‘I know roughly, but I haven’t heard it for years. I am trying to write it down.’

‘What, are you taking therapy?’

I laugh at this, and so does she, settling the mood, and we make a date. 

Summer 1967. The far end of Jamaica Road, Rotherhithe, South London; where the road meets the entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel. The Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society (RACS) are repairing their houses along the length of this street, the scaffolding slowly progressing up the road. The sound of knocking and splintering has been in the air all year. That din is then mixed with the noise of mid morning traffic outside. The residents are worn down. They are protesting by not shopping in the local Co-op until the work is completed. It is taking too long. Previously they had been protesting because the work had not started. My mother, despite being married to an RACS man, is at the root of these protests.

Today, there is a constant stream of commercial vehicles and cars wanting to cross the river through the tunnel. It is sunny. Cyclists weave along the centre of the road avoiding the grooves left by the tram tracks recently removed. It is a good place to cycle because the drivers avoid it from habit. 

 Our house consists of the basement, garden and first floor of a four-story apartment, a former shop that spills out directly onto Jamaica Road opposite Southwark Park. The house is run-down and unsafe, we want to move but cannot despite a vigorous press campaign run by a journalist aunt. So we too are waiting for the scaffolding to arrive. We are practically last.

My mother Eileen has pushed out Christine, her reluctant daughter of ten years, to school. She will arrive at the end of first break and the teachers, as usual, will not notice - or choose not to notice because they know that Christine will have been helping her mother. Half the time they are right. 

My sister Jackie, aged 5 years, is a mouthy paraplegic and unable to be schooled or tamed. She is trouble. My mother carries her everywhere in her powerful arms, moving between rooms, arranging and responding. Partly she cannot let her alone because of holes in the floor that Jackie might drag herself to (using her own powerful arms). We all fence in Jackie – it seems - until we can find a daytime solution, somewhere for her to go. That ‘we’ includes me, aged two. I am walking and talking and with a considerable amount of freedom most of the time. I have both a well-developed sense of protection for Jackie and a jealous temper.

My father, Alexander, is away on a long haul drive in his lorry for the RACS. He stays away for days, sleeping in the cabin bed of his cab. He is more and more out of touch with his family. We do not have a telephone. He turns up when he does and that is that. This house comes with his job. When he goes for good – which he will in a little while – so does the house. Soon, a Saturday, he packs an unusually large bag for work and climbs into his lorry, and drives off. Christine watches the cab turn the corner, my father feeding the wheel like rope between his hands. In a series of shrugs he’ll be gone. Then we’ll move. For the time being and on this day we are all trapped.

Then Jackie spills my mother’s scalding hot tea over her legs without noticing or crying out. She cannot feel them properly, and therefore does not react strongly. Nevertheless the liquid is burning her skin. My mother is in another room. I get her and silently take her hand, and lead her. In the room, responding, she shakes me free in irritation and begins to deal with my sister, hoisting her away to be cleaned up.

Thirty-nine years later my mother gently takes up the story again for me alone. I am used to a fast, third person comical telling and I realise, without an audience this cannot happen. It feels a little like a different story. 

‘I was busy with Jackie, in a panic. Meanwhile in the hall you, with a stool from the front room; climbed up, turned the door handle and you were gone. It should have been locked, of course. You were only wearing a terry. Gone’

My mother snaps her fingers.

‘I douse your sister’s leg in water for a long time, rub in some butter and wrap it in a towel. Complete balls that butter! Makes a burn worse but I didn’t know that then. And I’m talking to you but you are not answering. Then I hear the sound of the traffic. Outside noises. I stop the tap, I look for you and you are gone.’

My mother laughs nervously, bringing her fingers up to caress her brow.  

Outside the tunnel-bound cars were bumper to bumper because of an accident. Two cars have knocked one another in the centre of the road. It is a sedate affair. Some of the drivers have got out of their vehicles to look, smoke wait or talk. 

One driver sees the blond head of a child bob along from left to right; his small steadying outstretched hand brushing along the bonnet. The child continues to the busy still-flowing opposite side of the road. The driver reacts at last and shouts at the boy, which causes him to start running. Simultaneously he opens his car door and hits his horn. The child stops and turns for a moment to look at the driver. Behind the boy a car whizzes past. The child turns back and walks in front of a van, which clanks on its breaks, roughly swerves away, and misses him by inches. Frightened, the child runs to the safety of the pavement, on and into the entrance of the park.

He is flabbergasted, as he will tell my mother when she eventually rushes out.

‘ere luv, are you looking for a young ‘un. A little boy?’

My mother perfectly mimics his cockney voice. Even now, these many years on, she has half that frantic look on her face from the time. 

‘I rushed out and you were nowhere to be seen. The cars were at a standstill, and I thought ‘that’s it’. I have your sister in my arms and I am just rushing up towards the accident when the driver catches me.  The butter is melting on Jackie’s leg and my hand keeps slipping. I also associate the smell of butter with that day now!’

‘He’s just crossed the road. A right lucky charm. Little bleeder!’

Mother repeats his phrases.

‘He told me that you’d gone into the park and I went after you. But you were gone.’

My mother holds up both her palms and gestures their emptiness.

‘Gone and nowhere to be found.’

‘I wonder where I was.’ I say, ‘and if I was hiding from you?’

I have no memory of any of this time.  She has no knowledge of the events that occurred when I was missing. She searched for me for three hours, intermittently going back to the house in case I had turned up there. When she found me by the swings, I was filthy and I had mud in my mouth.

This usual ending is with laughter, but this time, with just me she is sombre and I am surprised. I don’t recall those hours in the park. I also don’t recall those family times when my father lived with us.

 We speak for a while about the stresses of bringing up three children for her and two for me, about her divorce and mine, about disability and health, and how spread out around Britain our family has become. I remind my mother that when my first marriage fell apart she told me that I had not tried hard enough to hold it together. 

‘I say a lot of things,’ she responds, and then we pause for such a time that our reminiscence stops altogether.

James A Bullion 2008

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