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On a Clear Day You Can See Fulham Football Ground Hammersmith to Ireland (in my head)

Hammersmith was fucking cold. Ice had travelled over from Scandinavia, passed across the North Sea like a self-satisfied speed skater¹ and taken the short journey along the quiet, silver river to W6, where it had formed an unhealthy union with heavy metal particles, those noxious clumps of cancer dust that float around the major capitals of the world, but particularly the Fulham Palace Road. Most people would have cheerily admitted that it was no worse than normal. If I’d talked to anyone. But I went through phrases of not talking to anyone, particularly Londoners over fifty, who would, naturally, start to bang on about ‘pea soupers’ and the 1950s and rationing and how the Kray twins were ‘lovely fellas’ really and football teams were much better in those days. They weren’t, I wanted to say, actually. Better. The football teams. I knew this and had already made up an argument for the time when I would be confronted in a dark alleyway by a gang of preposterously nostalgic and assertive football-mad cockneys. Players in the forties and fifties were just a load of unfit brickies with smoking-related breathing problems who hoofed the ball from one end of the pitch to the other.

But despite the pollution, this part of Hammersmith is a beautiful place, full of life and noise and crap buskers and spilling-over pubs and real newspaper stalls (with more Irish papers than you can get anywhere in Ireland) and half-crazed hawkers selling six lighters for a pound (‘Laydeeezz. Lighters, laydeez?’), with Charing Cross Hospital looming over everything in much the same way that St Paul’s Cathedral must have dominated the old city in the late seventeenth century. Though Charing Cross Hospital isn’t quite as attractive. The upside of this is that there are no Japanese and American tourists taking videos of themselves or asking you for the way to the ‘Tower of London, buddy’, which has to be a good thing. People – well, estate agents and puff-piece hacks in the Evening Standard – are always talking about Fulham Palace Road ‘coming up’, getting smartened out and sorted. But all that ever seems to change are the pubs, which are the only things that don’t need changing.

There is nowhere in Hammersmith, to my knowledge, that you can get away from the sound of cars. Sometimes I’ll lie in the bath with the windows of the flat open. I don’t mind the cold. I want the noise. I listen to the traffic. It reminds me of the sea. The noise, the roaring, coughing eternal circle of Hammersmith Broadway, picking up speed towards the A4 and M4. It never stops.

I decided to do my bit for reducing air pollution by selling the car. My girlfriend Annie had bought the Vauxhall Corsa back in 1994 when we’d lived off Portobello Road and she was working in Weybridge. Now she’d been promoted and had headed off to Houston, Texas. What did I want with a car? This was my task, the one thing she’d left in my capable hands. We’d spent a day, back in November, driving around various garages trying to get a decent price. Then I remembered a conversation I’d had with a garage mechanic in Limerick at the tail end of 1992. He’d fixed the breakpads on my brother’s rickety old Ford Fiesta for a fiver, and told us that if we wanted to sell the car we’d get £1,500 for it. We were incredulous. Bearing in mind that the pound and the punt were almost on a par, it seemed like a twenty per-cent markup at least. The thought entered my head that I could drive the Corsa over to Ireland, have a holiday, sell the car and make a good deal. I’m no businessman, but the glamour of this proposition had quite an appeal.

I don’t know much about cars. But I knew I needed an adventure. I had just turned 33. Thirty-three. The Lord of Lords, our Saviour Jesus Christ, had done the business by the time he was thirty-three – had a real relationship with a deity, tried to lead his people to freedom, had arguments with the leaders of an occupying army, been crucified on a big hill in front of crowds of people then reincarnated himself for his friends. I had done none of that (though there was the night of a sixth-form party in Lincoln in 1982 when, after puking most of my innards up, I recovered sufficiently inside Ritzy’s night club to the extent that some people thought it was a miracle. ‘Truly, that man is the son of God’, said some little Lincolnshire disco girl in a John Wayne accent as I forced half a pint of cider down my throat.).

I needed to get away for a while anyway because I was becoming too set in my ways. I’d even stopped my regular habit of giving money to the bedraggled figures in the subway at Hammersmith roundabout. Well, one of them. He spoke in a Yorkshire accent but he could have been Russian, rocking backwards and forwards staring at his palm. Sometimes I used to think, sorry mate I’m just too skint, but I’m not as skint as him no matter how much I’ve pissed away in a pub on Archway Road. I once had to break up a fight he was in – he was about to beat up a skinny frightened guy who was trying to steal his patch. Luckily, I had a microphone stand; I was on my way to a gig in the Tut ’n’ Shive on Upper Street – the British Country & Western revival we called it (‘Brit cunts’, said our friends), so I brandished the mike stand and told them to stop fucking about. Now I was mad at him (and really mad at myself). I was down there once with my dad and brother and was going to tell them about the incident but they were mesmerised by an appallingly drawn picture of Bob Marley that some bloke was trying to pass off as a poster to tourists on their way to see Sir Cliff in Heathcliff at the Hammersmith Apollo.

What really annoyed me was that I wished this bloke was a nice friendly beggar who conformed to genteel ideas of homelessness, like the old Irish fellow further up Fulham Palace Road who stands in a doorway near the shoe shop, and who never wants money, just things to stare at.

My flat is, believe it or not, at the epicentre of old-fashioned tramp activity in the South Hammersmith area. Tramps must be descended from some ancient race that are tuned into ley lines which converge on my flat, or are inexorably drawn here by electromagnetic forces that we house dwellers don’t yet understand. In my more fanciful moments I think to myself that I might be The King of the Tinkers and they have come to claim me as their own. For much of the time I certainly look like a trainee tramp. Hair virtually down to my shoulders, a week’s worth of blotchy, sandpaperish stubble. Crappy old clothes (I’ve only been shopping for clothes twice since 1989).

My aforementioned ‘favourite tramp’ – whose name is Brendan and who comes, originally, from Co. Tyrone – leans against an electrical meter next to the newsagents nearest Fernando’s café on Fulham Palace Road. He patrols from there down to the doorway next to Luigi’s pizza place about two hundreds yards further south.² I’ve only seen him away from this area twice. Once on King Street opposite the Living department store (London’s only Third-World shopping experience. They’ve got a couple of items and you never get served because the staff are always on the phone – Now gone as well. A curse!). Brendan forages locally and lives on what he can find – usually some form of superbrew extra-strong lager which, in accordance with the manufacturer’s specifications, turns immediately and magically into urine as soon as it is swallowed.

Once I happened to be sitting on an eastbound Hammersmith and City Line train at the Hammersmith terminus, reading a collection of John B. Keane’s essays and stories in an attempt to travel to Ireland for less than a tenner (I try to save money by applying for those cheap airline ticket offers but they seem to get booked up years in advance). I was reading a chapter entitled ‘My Personal Tramp’ when he – My Favourite Tramp – sat down opposite me. I wanted to say to him – I didn’t know his name then – ‘Well, do you know what? You, Mr Tramp, are my favourite tramp in all the world, and I’ve just found this story called ‘My Personal Tramp’. And here you are on the train with me. Incredible coincidence, is it not?’ I could tell from his worn-out, sad-eyed expression that he would not, in fact, find it incredible, he would simply think I was some ranting nutter and would probably get quietly off the train and move up a couple of carriages. So I didn’t say it.³ Some facts – tramps’ hair goes thick because the alcohol lowers their testosterone levels. They stand in overcoats staring off into nothingness. Many tramps are like angels and think other people can’t see them.

Then it happened. Ideas that had obviously been kicking around in my brain for a while decided to join forces. I thought about when I was seventeen, and obsessed with Jack Kerouac, when life seemed full of possibilities, when a car was a symbol of adventure and freedom.⁴ I was struck with the idea of heading off like Sal and Dean into the west, except I’d be doing it in this pretty little bright-red girl’s car, with a guitar and a crate of beer in the boot.

I had a feeling my mate Terry might fancy the trip. A knackered-looking handsome Irish raconteur, Terry looks vaguely like Sean Hughes, that knackered-looking handsome Irish raconteur. Which was ironic, as he had bumped into Sean Hughes several times at after-hours pubs and clubs and would invariably try and get into an argument with him. Usually because Terry was about to get off with a girl who thought he was Sean Hughes, then the real Sean Hughes would come along and spoil it. Like a Brian Rix farce, really. Or a Brian Rix farce co-written by James Joyce:

What the Finlan saw a Butler sore her Mother Mary.

(Scene – late nightshite midnight black jean bar under the chip smell tourist choking Tottenhemhem Caught Road. Finoola, Assumpta, Terry in chitchat inebriation)

Terry: Wear you froming to?

Assumpta: To? To? From? Live?

Terry: Chunky fleshy Finoola.

Finoola: The beer-stained sweat of old pine, belly stubble shaved.

Assumpta: Are you Sean Hughes?

Terry: Me funny Sean. Sunny, heavy-lidded sad Sean.

Sean: No me real deal feelme funny Sean. Who are you?

Terry: Doppelganger boy. Johnny Stalker. Johnny Walker.

Assumpta: Double Sean bedfun thrusting, eh Sean?

Anyway, I put it to Terry that the trip might be a good laugh. I said something like, ‘Let’s go off to Ireland for a week or so, try and sell the car, meet people who know the truth, get drunk, stand on mountain tops, go painting, sit in pubs listening to old men’s stories, laugh at and fall in love with mad Irishwomen, shout on the western edge of the world, sing folksongs, cry in the rain, puke in soft green fields, catch a moving statue and put it in our pocket.’

Terry took a sip of his pint and smiled at me. ‘Argh, yeah, why not?’

I regularly wander through Hammersmith and see Irish faces everywhere – heavy-set red-haired women, beautiful dark-haired girls, old guys with lined faces and sad eyes, tiny, grinning leprechauns made of felt who sing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’ when you press their bellies. Hammersmith is an old Irish area. At present around eight per cent of the population of the Hammersmith postal district is Irish born – the figure for London as a whole is four per cent and one and a half per cent for Britain (from the 1991 census). It’s hard to know the figures for second- or third-generation Irish, the fresh-faced youngsters who choose to spend their evenings bashing away on bodhrans at the wonderful and lovely Hammersmith Irish Centre. This hive of Celticity is opposite St Paul’s church, round the back of Marks & Spencer with a good view of the flyover and its dark underbelly and of Coca Cola’s UK headquarters. It’s a yellowy brick building built in the mid-nineties. They run music, history, language and dance courses as well as occasional gigs and Irish music sessions and manages to appeal to the generation who came over after the War with stout and dance-hall music coursing through their veins as well as the kids brought up in the borough on hip hop and alcopops. It’s at the north-west end of what I regard as the Irish village of Finnegania⁶ – the spiritual centre of which is a discarded can of Guinness under the flyover which can be reached by crossing over the curve of the A4 and walking round the Apollo Theatre.

Inside the centre it’s very pale and high ceilinged, perhaps in an attempt to be like a church, although the atmosphere is more akin to an English village hall, the world of amateur dramatics and pantomimes, cake stalls and tombola, prized marrows and dollies made of wicker, the tables left over from university seminar rooms. Looking at the group of lads with their great faces and lost eyes, come to hear their grandchildren play the penny whistle or sing a ballad, I couldn’t help thinking that this scene should be a smoky low-slung pub in the forgotten back streets of a midlands Irish country town.

The workshop was a collection of musicians of all ages and talents. Whistle players, people on squeezebox, uillean pipes, banjos, guitars. The music sounded like Irish music yet didn’t really ever get going. The notes were right and the rhythm and speed were there but something was missing. A bloke who looked like Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Féin, was sat at a table surrounded by friends and family. When a jig came on, Gerry started dancing. Do you reckon that’s Gerry Adams? I said to my friends. No they said, it isn’t. Well it looks like him to me. I wonder what he’s doing here. Gerry Adams was dancing away with a baseball cap back to front on his head. Look at him. I’m not sure what the hard-liners of the IRA would think if they could see him now. That’s not Gerry Adams, Tim. You’d think, if he’s going to make a public appearance like this, that he’d have learned to dance properly. Still, I bet he can dance better than Ian Paisley. The music workshop group started to crank it up a bit. Ffaafnaaa nfffnaa twiddleidsleeeeeeeeee ggieee doo deeed didddle dee deee did diddd ddiiiidie dieeeeiieee … pipes and fiddle and accordion, more relaxed this time and my foot started to tap. Then a middle-aged guy took the microphone and introduced a couple of female singers. They did ballads, one in a high-pitched and haunting style about some tragedy or other, then a slightly younger girl did ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ followed by something about Johnny being the handsomest in the village (it’s always Johnny isn’t it, never Tim. How come it’s never ‘but Tim was the tallest and fairest and cleverest and funniest and most talented of them all’? – if there are Tims in Irish folk songs I’m pretty sure they’ll almost always be village idiots or something.)⁷