If it hasn’t got Brexit in the headline, nobody’s gonna read it!

New Cross Gate

By Harvey Morris

The sun’s out at last, so I thought it was time to get back on the road. Well, back on the street actually. Any street heading out from Tower Bridge for two or three miles in any direction – a four-cigarette walk, as the Greeks would call it. The daily jaunt is supposed to keep you fit, and just now there’s the added bonus of getting out of the house and avoiding the interminable referendum debate on Radio 4. Latest: Johnson today “warned” of EU immigration “risks”.

I thought I’d kick off the season by taking the back streets through Bermondsey to New Cross Gate. I grew up there from the age of 0 and wanted to check on what had happened to our old fish and chip shop since the Cypriot couple who last ran it sold up last year.

The Gate is one of those rare corners of inner London to have so far defied gentrification, although the makeover under way at The White Hart is a worrying sign. A post-war social history described the area – the dog end of the Old Kent Road for those who don’t know it – as one of the most run-down corners of what was then an almost terminally run-down London. But you don’t notice when you’re a kid, do you?

It would be easy to romanticise New Cross in the fifties as one of those white working class, chirpy Cockney, Passport to Pimlico neighbourhoods where you left your front door open, made each other endless cups of tea and, if you were old enough, reminisced about the good old days of the Blitz. The Gate was a bit like that, but then again it wasn’t.

Our neighbour at the chip shop was Mr. Posner who ran the dry cleaners. (it was reincarnated as a betting shop in the sixties and is now a West Indian jerk chicken store). Mr. Posner was a Polish Jew who managed to get out before the war. I knew him from such an early age that I don’t remember not knowing him. A bit like your parents. A real gentleman, who always wore a dark suit and tie as he sat behind his counter stitching the repairs.

Then there was Mr. Fonda, the ice cream man. He had a cart that said “Fonda’s” and he wore a flat cap. He was Italian, as were the Cacchiolis who ran the caff across the road. I think Papa Cacchioli was briefly interned in the war, until the government decided that “our” Italians were about as perilous as Pinnochio and let them out.

Big Mick lived round the corner in an alley off Besson Street. He and Mrs. Mick had come over from Ireland. Little Mick, my age, was the spitting image of his “black Irish” dad. They were the Romanians of their day.

Even the died-in-the-wool New Cross indigènes were quite exotic. You could forgive Mr. Cooper the Cobbler his northern adenoidal grumpiness when you found out he’d fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. Auntie Renee at the newsagents was Jewish, which only reinforced her Londonness. My mother was a Scot, which was about as British as you could get in those days.

Don’t get me wrong. There were plenty of salt-of-the-earth locals, whose connections to what had once been a staging post on the road to Canterbury no doubt stretched back to the dawn of time. I’m maybe thinking of the Cashman brothers, a dodgy little crew who went marauding in bowler hats a decade before The Clockwork Orange. They slung a half-brick at me one time but I never told my dad. I was scared he would kill them with one of those tricky commando moves he learned in the war.

He joined up the day war was declared in ’39. His later excuse was that he was maybe a bit pissed at the time. Dunkirk, No.8 Commando, the Western Desert, the Battle of Leros, and POW camp from which he escaped, convinced him that war was a really bad idea. He had a horror of seeing children in uniform. He never said I couldn’t join the Boy Scouts, but I never did.

He had this notion that if the youth from around the world could get together there wouldn’t be any more wars. Pity the poor German who ventured into our shop for a cod and chips or for directions to the Dover Road! He was immediately smothered with my father’s internationalist embrace. There was once a group of backpacking Rheinlanders who were persuaded to stay in our back loft for a month. I never liked to tell them that the hole in the asbestos roof was from a German firebomb.

I don’t know what dad would have made of Brexit. Sadly, he died even before we went into the Common Market. He was political with a small p and conservative with a small c. He didn’t trust mass movements after the war. The only people he ever had a bad word to say about were Randolph Churchill and Evelyn Waugh, who he had the misfortune to serve with in the Commandos. Oh hang on! He also despised Pierre Poujade, the Farage-like French right-wing populist of the 1950s.

Do you know what? He mainly hated, above all, those armchair warriors who were constantly banging on about the Battle of Britain spirit, parading up and down with their Union Jacks from the safety of their suburban golf clubs. Sound familiar?

When I got to the chip shop, there was a man in an orange vest and tin hat behind a health-and-safety barrier. “What are they going turn it into,” I asked him. “I grew up here.” He said, “Fish and chips gone! Apartamenti! Sorry, I Italian. No Speak English.”

“Plus ça change,” as we say in New Cross.