Prambulations

Boxes abounding, the removal men gone, I popped round to meet my new neighbour. A wizened old lady limped to the door, her greying hair in a dishevelled bob, the once-sensible skirt now slightly careworn, the suspicion of last night’s dinner on her jumper. But when she spoke, it was like a different person just arrived: ‘Allo Dahlin’, she said, a smile brightening her cracked face, ‘ow may I ‘elp you?’

‘I just moved in next door and wanted to introduce myself’.

‘Oh, pleased ta meet you dahlin’. Come in and ‘ave a cuppa tea, love. And call me Tootsie. Everyone does’.

So began my relationship with Tootsie, neigbour, Cockney sparrow, force of nature. She rented the house in Hammersmith, initially with an outside toilet, and even in 1989 no bathroom - a battered tin bath on the kitchen floor was filled from several kettles on the (probably irregular) occasions she decided to take the plunge.

‘So how long have you lived here then Tootsie?’, I asked, sipping hot tea with the sugar I had declined but got anyway, served with a smile and shaky hands in a rather chipped mug.

‘Now let me see’, she replied, ‘my son David was born in this ‘ouse the month we moved in, when I was seventeen’.

‘How old is David?’

‘Well ‘e was killed in the war, bless ‘im, but he woulda bin seventy-two this March. And I’ve bin widowed comin’ on fifty years now meself’.

Seventy-two years without a bathroom. I’m not convinced she paid a lot in rent.

Our few streets had been scheduled for slum clearance in the Sixties, but the Council never got round to it, and now they were being yuppified at a rate of knots. ‘Brackenbury Village’, the estate agents liked to call it. Gradually the working men and the housewives, the shop assistants and the social workers, all disappeared to be replaced by thrusting young tikes like me, the up and incomers. My new home was a two up, two down, originally an artisan’s cottage, at a time when ‘artisan’ was not yet imbued with that sense of smug over-pricedness it attracts today. When I arrived, the original locals still held on to the character of the place, welcoming us youngsters with good grace and (in the case of Plumber John, who lived opposite), an ardent desire to rip us off. You could imagine the street parties in the war, and the blitz spirit, which Tootsie embodied to the nines as she held court in the local boozer, always clutching a pint of mild with a whisky chaser. Quite a lot of whisky chasing went on with her, to be fair. And then, a singsong, before stumbling the hundred yards home.

My house had been badly converted ten years earlier by a woman with a rather lackadaisical attitude to cleanliness, who smoked what I think can only be described as cheroots. Took a long while to get rid of the smell, pulling thick cork tiles encrusted with nicotine off the walls, wondering how much of the plaster would come off with them. I learned a painful lesson building a kitchen extension, employing a builder for the first time on a major project. David was his name, twice; christened that, he decided in his infinite wisdom to change his last name by deed poll … to David. So David David he was, whose workmen never appeared to do any work, always but always ‘on a break’ when I popped round to check. (Conclusion: never, ever, do a job in London on time and materials). Learning from these mistakes, we developed our little places to within an inch of their lives, and then some. Later, the loft became a third bedroom: after I sold up and moved to the country, my house acquired a basement that never was there before. Don’t ask too many questions about the foundations.

Gradually, the street filled up with Golfs and Peugeot 205s, evolving to BMWs before the Porsches arrived, along with residents’ parking. Once, opening the front door with my unlocked car immediately behind me, I turned round to see a couple of likely lads running down the street, my newfangled brick of a cellphone in their exultant hands. Suddenly a burglar alarm seemed especially necessary.

When Tootsie died, surviving in her little corner of unimproved real estate into her nineties, I went to the funeral, a glorious ‘strike a light gor blimey’-type affair seemingly attended by the entire population of West London, where Pearly Kings made a guard of honour, buttons glistening in the cold autumnal light. ‘She was a character, that’s for sure’, we all intoned, drinking her health before going back to our renovated pads and opening the Chardonnay. Her landlord had the place cleared in no time, sticking it on the market for a quarter of a million, selling it to a delightful young couple, she a solicitor, he a barrister. More business for John. When he ran out of people to exploit, he moved out of town, scarcely believing his luck at how much his place had fetched, and a banker moved in. There’s a hedge fund guy there now. I think this is termed going up in the world.

It was my third property but first real home, which despite the changing nature of the populace was always quiet, and friendly, and had good schools, some of them even free. And it’s where, exactly thirty years ago today, my firstborn came home from hospital. Wrapped in the inevitable swaddling clothes, a shock of reddish hair already on her head, I began to realise that all those National Childbirth Trust classes had taught us everything about labour, nothing about what happens afterwards. Half an hour into this unfamiliar new regime, boxes of nappies littering the floor, the new buggy cluttering the hallway, I heard my wife say something and rushed into the room …. to discover she wasn’t talking to me. We were no longer alone.

That baby, my oldest daughter, has her own place now, and a lovely boyfriend. She’s recently started noticing how cute young kids are. Won’t be long now. When that glad day comes and I become a grandad, I’ll take a leaf out of Tootsie’s book. Thirty years ago tomorrow, she came round to meet the newborn, clutching a gift - a bottle of whisky.

‘You’ll be needin’ this, Paul’, she said, with the wisdom of age.