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...