In January, when mum moves out of the rented mews flat in London we’ve occupied since 1978 it feels like I’m saying goodbye to the centre of my life.
Even though I don’t live there I always felt like maybe I would go back. Up until now I always had.
In 1978 we sailed across the Atlantic from Montreal on a Russian ship and drove off at Tilsbury in the car we lived in for a while. Back then “we” was my baby sister, me, mum and my stepdad. Being a hippie kid I longed for a normal place with sit-com inspired must-haves like wall-to-wall carpet or a balcony that hadn’t been used as a dumpster, or a bathroom.
We didn’t get that.
We got a project.
But we moved in and that cold, run down, dodgy flat above the garages was home. Legend has it, in the early days we went on cycling tours to the country most weekends because staying home was too cold and we couldn’t afford coal.
The pub at the top of the mews was a live music venue sometimes biker bar and as a kid I had to navigate urinating men or step over the bodies of the comatose to get home. Hammersmith wan’t trendy and Shepherd’s Bush was more WH Smiths than Westfields.
It’s hardly Angela’s Ashes but it was a different landscape. One where Thatcher was yet to gain power and the shops shut in the afternoon.
As West London gentrified I went to Addison Primary School where I met Frankie who showed me which way was up from day one.
“Don’t ask people for an eraser, it’s a rubber.”
(For the record, if you are Canada-side, definitely do ask people for an eraser.)
I went off to Holland Park Secondary School where I learned how to do math smile cards and skin up. I went to Kingsway Princeton College and stuffed up my A Levels.
Meanwhile we opened up the attic and it became my and my sister’s bedrooms. Me and Frankie and another preteen friend Rachel got so excited about this new space we named it Leotaurus. With budding pretensions we cleverly amalgamated our star signs leaving my Aires sister well and truly out of it.
I may have once wanted wall-to-wall carpets but that soon just became walls. In the attic our walls were made from a big box of buttons that we had found on Portobello road strung together with fishing line. At 13 I added colorful geometric squiggles to the exposed whitewashed brick but they unfortunately just looked like multicolored sperm.
At 18 I moved out in search of normal walls to move in with a way-too-old-for-me musician and then moved back pretty sharpish when Wimbledon turned bad. Sometimes walls come with too much drama behind them.
Eventually the Mews became the centre and felt like the safest space. In retrospect it probably wasn’t because of all the motor oil stored in the garage. And my stepdad’s interesting homemade wiring. You could easily short out the entire house by putting the lights on in the wrong order. And then there’s the heavy nuclear trains piling past in the middle of the night shaking the whole house. Waking in the knowledge one derailment would be apocalyptic.
But it was the center for our little family and our found family. Like the generations of NSUK buddhists, then SGI-UK buddhists piling up the stairs trying to save the world. Every time the loudest bell in the world would scream whatever mental little dog we had at the time would throw themselves against the door it would be like opening the door to community. One time that even included a Japanese priest in full ceremonial robes followed by the even more discombobulating sight of my mum pretending to be a submissive woman. I can still remember all those people. All the ones we lost to 80’s AIDS scythe like Stewart, Joe, Graham, Steve, Kevin, Eddy, Gary. The list is an endless punching machine.
I walked out that door to go to Uni and moved back. I tried my hand at living in Toronto and moved back two months later broke, broken and humbled.
And it was standing on the cobbles in the mews at 23 I last saw Tony Deary. He gave me a long pep speech because I was off back to Derry to do my Masters. “You’ll be alright pet,” he said at the end. “You’re clever and you’ll get by.”
I watched him walk away with I Will Always Love You in my head because I’m dramatic.
Then he died suddenly a week later. Now that cheesy song reduces me to a puddle every goddam time.
Turns out a lot of this is about death.
It was home I last saw my stepdad before I moved back to Canada at 27. Not planned. I was like a pendulum swinging back and forth across the ocean and I just happened to lose momentum on that side.
When I bring the kids back I can’t believe they never saw him in this place. Their London home holds different images for them. The Street party watching the World Cup. Walking Banksy the Jack Russell. Stalking Troye Sivan with group of fans outside the K-West Hotel and Spa.
He’s not in that house for them.
But for me he’s there. On the balcony where his heavy, greasy overalls flew off the washing line onto the railway tracks out back and we rescued them with hooks made from rope and coat hangers. Or patiently explaining the intricacies of plumbing to me and my friends as he pulled sanitary products out of the sewer. Or gently recommending in the most low-key, laid back way that it might be better if I did not use a butter knife to pry toast out of the toaster.
But his domain was the left-hand garage while mum would do stained glass on the right. He rescued and rebuilt cars and drove to Glasgow like it was nothing because he grew up in a land where a six hour drive would only get you to another Ontario town, like Brampton.
When he died and I came back from Canada I had a vivid dream he sat down at the kitchen table and asked how I was doing. That same table where in life he would bring bits of engine and try to get us interested in the lack of corrosion. That same kitchen where he would make us eat mung beans and dandelion coffee after he went macrobiotic. That same chair he stayed back in the night me and mum and my sister drove down to Little Hampton to watch the sunrise because we couldn’t sleep.
“You all go hang upside down from a tree or whatever you need to do, I’ll be here.”
And he is still there. With all the memories I have housed there.
I guess it’s the same for everybody. We don’t even know whose memories we moved in on and the next in line won’t know mine are there. We walk through our houses sweeping past other people’s memories all day, every day.
I’m going to miss the mews.
Even Leotaurus because we lost Frankie this year too.
My earliest memories of the Killaloe Community Craft Fair are from the olden days when hair was pinned in middle partings, fell straight or glinted from the frizzy bare chests of skinny men.
oonawoods 