Palmers Greek Part 3

One of the benefits of doing a paper round, apart from the almost-too-much-to-spend income of £8-10 a week, was the feeling that Palmers Green was my kingdom. It was deserted as I walked (or for a while, roller skated on my disco roller skates) from street to street at 6am each day.  The woman who was in charge of the newsagent shop would let me take a chocolate bar for free, and because Wispa was new and an ABSOLUTE REVELATION OF CHOCOLATE JOY, I’d always take one of these, have a bite every 5 minutes and avoid chewing it (applying the fruit pastille rule) to make it last the whole round.  The only shitty thing about the job was when the tabloid newspapers introduced Sunday supplements. Those News of the World and Sunday Mirror magazines may have been full of crap, but they felt full of bricks once you squeezed them into my sack-cloth shoulder bag and attempted to stand up straight with it slung over my back.  I walked around like a hunchback (and skating with that extra weight meant that each sloping garden path I got to, I’d end up slamming into the front door at 30 mph.)

Coincidentally, linking the paper round and hunchbacks, was a girl that my mate Darren and I cruelly (but secretly, because we’re not bastards) named Helen the Hunchback.  Helen also did a paper round and my mum knew her mum.  Before I even encountered her, my mum, in a desperate effort to land me a girlfriend, convinced me that Helen looked like Kate Bush, whose posters adorned my bedroom wall at that time, and suggested that I ask her out.  This assertion may even have been the prompt that led to me deciding to take up the paper round. It wasn’t until I’d had several similarly encouraging mentions of this fabled beauty by my mum that I actually met Helen in the newsagent’s one early morning. All that she had in common with Kate Bush was her gender (and even that similarity wasn’t irrefutable).  What she did have, wasn’t a hunchback (we exaggerated with the nickname slightly), but she did have a pair of shoulders on her that meant that she could have delivered the Sunday papers to not just Palmers Green, but the whole borough of Enfield, without feeling like that gargantuan bag weighed any more than a box of Kleenex, something she wasn’t ever going to have any teenage boys reaching for.

On the subject of reaching for teenage boys, behind our back garden was a mechanic’s workshop and the bloke who worked there was nicknamed Robert the Iron by my dad. (You’ll need to know your rhyming slang to understand that one.) My Dad’s evidence for suggesting that Robert was homosexual - and therefore (in the logic of the times) interested in touching young boys - was based on three factors: Firstly he was unmarried; secondly, he lived with his mother; and thirdly he was friendly towards us.  Indisputable proof, your honour. That didn’t prevent Dad acquiescing when Robert asked if he could take me to an Arsenal game, it just gave him a lot of pleasure joking that I should watch that he didn’t sneak a touch of my bottom if Arsenal scored.  As it was, unsurprisingly, Robert didn’t do anything of the sort, but he did stop outside the ground to feed an apple to a police horse and this was even more embarrassing, so I didn’t want to go to Arsenal with him again.

Palmers Greek Part 2

Palmers Green Triangle was half a mile and two bus stops north of where we lived, so you’d never walk that far if you could help it.  It was uphill too. I once decided that I’d look pretty fucking cool if I jumped nonchalantly off the 29 before it came to a complete halt opposite Woolworth.  The subsequent stumble and unacrobatic head-over-heels - as my still-travelling body met a very static and very hard pavement - was neither nonchalant nor cool. Nor pretty.

There weren’t many reasons to venture to the part of Palmers Greek that I erroneously assumed had once been the village green.  That assumption was based on its central location, the proximity of the train station and the Triangle itself, a concrete central reservation that bore no signs of ever having been a pre-industrial hub of the rural community.  I think it just came into existence by accident, because of how Alderman’s Hill forked as it met Green Lanes, and having done so, a local town planner was thus inspired to exploit the space by plonking ladies’ and gents’ subterranean public lavatories there. Nothing else, just the bogs.  Unlike aforementioned counterparts near our house, these were in use, but I never had recourse to take advantage either because I was good at holding it in or Broomfield Park was nearby or I equated public lavs with ‘perverts’.

(As an aside, ‘pervert’ was a wonderfully comfortable and even slightly cosy inclusive term for a plethora of sexual deviants, thus robbing us of the need to distinguish between paedophiles, cottagers, molesters, flashers, swingers, kinky sex participants, sex shop customers and your average user of porn, either actual porn or convenient substitutes such as the Gratton or - more desperately - the Argos catalogues.)

The only pull factors the Triangle held for us were Woolworth, Superdrug and an Asian off license. Woolies sold chart singles for under a quid.  Superdrug stocked those cheap toiletry gift boxes that served every family member’s Christmas present need.  The number of Brut Talc and After-shave sets I bought or had bought for me in the 80s would suggest that I was a significant source of income for both Henry Cooper and Kevin Keegan. And then there was the off license. The received wisdom of the time was that Asian shopkeepers wouldn’t ask your age if you wanted to buy booze, hence the choice of retail outlet for anyone well under 18 looking to enjoy a bottle of Woodpecker cider in the dark confines of Broomfield Park on a Friday night.

At the time there was only one local pub that you’d graduate to after outgrowing the park and that was The Fox, five minutes up from the Triangle and no questions asked about your age as long as you were out of nappies.  Being served alcohol here at 17 was what distinguished it from the underground gents. It’s the only place where I’ve been in a team that’s won the pub quiz, and that says far less about our general knowledge than it does about what was lacking in the minds of the regular clientele.  And I spent the final hours of the 1980s there on a New Year’s Eve piss up that was so enjoyable that at a quarter to midnight I pissed off to buy a pizza and sat eating it on someone’s garden wall as it quickly lost its warmth in the wintery night air.

Such was the retail and leisure attractions of Palmers Greek.  In part 3, I will move on to explore some other tedious old shit about the place...

Palmers Greek Part 1

I’m reading a book sub-titled ‘Now that’s what I call an 80s music childhood’ and it inspired me to want to write my own short, blog-sized version of being a teenager with evolving music tastes in that wonderful day-glo decade. But then I changed my mind for several reasons, not least a premonition that it might bore you all rigid. But the need to nostalgically and sardonically reminisce remained. And so I hit upon a different unifying theme, one that really tied the decade together for me, and that was the fact that for most of that time we were living in Palmers Green, North London.

If you imagine North London as a Christmas cake, then the inner city is the fruit sponge, stretching from Camden to Wood Green, and the white (literally in those days) icing is the suburbs of Winchmore Hill and Enfield. In that analogy, Palmers Green is the layer of marzipan in between. The only undermining feature of this metaphor is that I really liked Palmers Green, but I’d rather lick the floor in a public lavatory than let marzipan anyway near my mouth.

Talking of which, if you walked out of our house on the North Circular Road in those days, and turned left in the same direction as the three lanes of traffic heading west with enough seismic power to constantly rattle the walls of our end-of-terrace house, then within 50 metres you’d pass first a petrol station (which sold porn mags), a disused public toilet (probably home to disused porn mags), a betting shop (filled with blokes with large collections of porn mags) and then a newsagent (from where I’d never buy a porn mag, because I did a paper round there. And was too young. And, er, didn’t buy porn mags, of course.)

This was right on the big junction of the North Circ and Green Lanes and opposite the pub that changed names in that time from The Cock to The Manhattan to Legends (and much later, the Faltering Fullback and finally Polska Bar Sportowa, suggesting that the area should be referred to as Polskas Green now.) We called it Palmers Greek for reasons you can easily work out, although the town had at least as many Asian families living there, including Mr and Mrs Clark who owned the 2nd newsagents along and who weren’t really called Clark, we worked out, and who greeted everyone with either ‘Hello Friend’ (Mr Clark) or ‘Hello Sonny’ (Mrs Clark), which we found highly amusing as they drove a Datsun Sunny. Palmers Greek was grid-locked on a Saturday with Datsun Sunnys, Datsun Cherrys and many a second hand Mercedes.

From this crossroads we could travel anywhere we wanted to in the world, which tended to be northwards to school (29 to Enfield Town then some rural green bus out to St Ignatius), westwards to Arnos Grove (usually to the park there for football and failed attempts to find girls to ask out) or southwards into London (again the 29 with a Red Bus Rover illicitly shared between two.) But never east. East took you to Edmonton. Unlike Napoleon and Hitler, we knew that only misery and grim death would be the reward of going east.

That junction, which we stoically tried to keep referring to as The Cock, years after Manhattan had become the landmark pub’s name, held a few attractions for us other than the newsagents.  Green Lanes Sauna, we innocently assumed was only a sauna, albeit one popular with short fat middle-aged Greek men, when they weren’t gambling in one of the nearby clubs.  Other short fat middle-aged Greek men - who were not gambling or treating themselves to a ‘sauna’ - ran the numerous grocery stores along Green Lanes, a barber’s at the back of a hardware store (where you’d be better off asking the hardware store owner to take some cheap shears to your 80s mullet) and Hellenic Video, the Mecca of VHS films, both clean and electric blue in content.

These men were all called George, Andy or Nick and their daughters all wore heavy black make-up, black outfits and black leather coats, accessorised with gold jewellery, and their sons George, Andy and Nick juniors, spent their time in the snooker hall behind the Manhattan and the bus garage.

So you can see that far from feeling xenophobic in relabelling it Palmers Greek, we positively embraced Greeks bearing gifts, because those gifts included Greek food, dirty videos, cheap haircuts and snooker. It was only booze that we had to walk up to Palmers Green Triangle for; but I’ll leave that for part two...