Latest Essay: People of the Cally
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www.williamruby.blogspot.co.uk

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http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindness-is-a-City-ebook/dp/B009N0DCY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359279700&sr=8-1


Latest Essay:

People of the Cally

Despite the best efforts of the millionaire club of white men currently running the country inner city London remains just about the most socially and racially diverse place on earth. And I live in the most diverse bit of this very diverse inner city; reportedly over two hundred languages come through the gates of my local primary school each morning with the children (an unofficial world record). However, before any disorientated Daily Mail reader out there starts to froth and vent about the coming of Sharia Law and the apparent End of Times, I think it timely to assert that London English (Longlish, we should call it) rightly still prevails within this very rich local linguistic brew. Innit, boss. You get me, fam?

When I pop down to the shops on the local high street I am rubbing shoulders with people who owe their origins to societies and cultures from every inhabited continent, whether they be first, second or third generation immigrants, or indeed are of the mongrel tradition that has given a grateful world the white Englishman. The social and class status of these people vary greatly; no inner city--not least London--is complete without its bohemian colonists and its inbred and incorrigible dregs. I sit in Kigi's cafe having Turkish grilled chicken, chips and salad with TV producers and transgender pamphleteers, market stallholders and muggers.

I live on the Cally. That is Caledonian Road, King's Cross, Islington.

It is a remarkable place. These are its people.

There are the Turks who own a very large minority of the shops and cafes and stalls and minicab firms between the railway bridge near Pentonville Prison and Copenhagen  Street, the true heart of the Cally. These Turks are in the main friendly, hard-working and fierce, if roused; it is perhaps no coincidence that Turkish-influenced areas of the city were little-visited by rioters in the summer of 2011. They stayed up through the night in large numbers to defend their livelihoods at all costs (the rioters clearly had some sense). Among their number is Uncle Eric, former Cally kebab shop manager turned cabbie. He told me recently that London is his home, Turkey a memory. After thirty years away from Istanbul he went back to visit family there and was mugged in a busy street. Rob a Turk on the Cally and you may suffer a legion of insistent visitations.

The white, working-class population that likes to imagine it is the indigenous elite of the Cally lives chiefly in the area to the West of the road, massed particularly in the Bemerton Estate and its outrigger apartment blocks. The Bemerton enjoys levels of socio-economic deprivation almost unmatched across the city. People walk slowly here, or not at all, on crutches and Zimmer frames, or in bad ways on bad feet in ill-fitting clothes. I see little resentment for the 'new people' writ large among the white Cally folk who never moved out to the city's suburbs, but one still senses its existence in glances and gestures and poor jokes overheard in passing.

Dave Elvis, who changed his name by deed poll from Dave something-else, can often be encountered in Joe's Cafe or the Tarmon pub performing Memphis classics (the pub has karaoke as a conduit for Dave's singing, Joe's does not). He even made it through one round of X-Factor a few years ago. A skeletal local eccentric in an outsized white jump suit and huge shades, Dave has no idea how bad he is, and few are inclined to tell him. His localness insures him against ridicule and censure. He is at home.

In many ways of course, I am not at home. One old-timer told me I would never be of the Cally because I'd not been born of the Cally. I would have got the same sort of answer from a Maasai warrior herding his cattle on the Mara.

To the east of the Cally lies Barnsbury, the expansive tree-lined area centred on Thornhill's original Georgian model estate. Got a spare two million and you can bag yourself something modest up on the hill (or more likely the lower slopes nearer the Cally's grime). Four million and we're really talking. Tony Blair once lived up there, as today does half of the BBC and a fair smattering of the maybe less reactionary City banker type (Gerrard's Cross is just too far away from Cornhill and Le Coq D'Argent you see, and it would be nice for the kids to get a sense of living in the city with, well, you know, normal sorts of people and black people and stuff). This upper middle-class gentrification has long been in the making but is still nonetheless astonishing given its close proximity to the urban blight and poverty just across the road. There are incursions onto the Cally by the posh people but they are undertaken briefly and in plain clothes. Luxurious Upper Street sits hubristically on top of the hill like a Siren calling to them from the shore.

A small but significant West Indian population has been here since the 1970's and is very well-integrated. Young grandmothers with braided hair talk proper north London cockney in loud voices while herding large groups of small children about. Gentlemen in vests stand drinking cans of Red Stripe in the doorway of betting shops. Everybody's Friend (as I call him), a genial guy who is never without a black bandana on his head and who works in the Clockwork Pharmacy takes his seat outside Kigi's every lunch time to bestow kisses and largesse on absolutely everybody who walks past. I have never encountered a single other human being who knows so great a range of other people by name!

Trundling slowly onto the Cally from the Bemerton in a mobility vehicle is the elderly Trinidadian man who greets everybody as his brother, male or female. I have pushed him off the cobbles outside the health centre on several occasions. He broke wind loudly once during such an operation and claimed it was an explosion up at Holloway.

Northern and eastern Africans are increasingly in evidence: on street stalls, in pound shops, in Ethiopian and Eritrean cafes and in halal butchers. The Menelik restaurant right opposite Kigi's features occasional late-night shenanigans with machetes and is avoided by polite society (or at least the Cally variety). I am informed that old tribal grievances are only very reluctantly confined to history. One north African guy occasionally works a fruit and veg stall whilst clearly in the grip of Tourettes Syndrome. You can get more than your change from him if you play your cards right. He potters around outside the Kennedy's pub but is never allowed in. People glance out through its windows to see him barking at them. He appears to have no home.

Undeniably the Cally has been known for crime. Which area of inner city London has not? Gangs made the area their home a long time ago. Gun battles were being conducted in the Copenhagen Street area well before the First World War. The Cally was a Mecca for the fencing of stolen goods of all kinds from the 1920's through to the 1960's. By the 1950's it was the loosely affiliated White family bossing affairs on the local streets, by the 1980's it was the even more notorious Adams family (and that's no joke).
Bemerton Street gained a reputation as a particular no-go area for the police after the second war, a stigma that lasted until maybe twenty years ago. In 1955 a cache of IRA weaponry was discovered at number 257 Caledonian Road, just one incident in a long-running history of London-based Republican 'safe houses' in the area, and evidence of a much larger Irish population at that time. Stray King's Cross prostitutes were still occasionally conducting business in the little gardens on Bingfield Street within the last decade.

Quite a few dangerous prisoners have escaped the high cream battlements of Pentonville and merged with the local landscape. Their infamous executed fellow inmates--Crippin, Cristie, Heath et al--were dispatched within the prison grounds and are buried behind the wall close to the road. I wonder how many people passing by actually know this.
Today the nefarious nature of the Cally appears to be waning. There has been the odd shocking, high-profile crime in the area in recent years but one does not any longer get a sense of tiptoeing through territory that has been staked out for generations by feudal scumbags. The feared and hated Naish Court flats are now long gone. The grey joggers of the young street drug dealers are harder to spot, fewer car windows are being smashed in the night, fewer sirens heard. One can only hope that the children playing at the Crumbles Castle adventure playground do not grow up with the same unlawful intent of so many of their adult cousins, their dads, their granddads.

Students abound now. Central St Martin's College and swathes of newly built (and highly unattractive!) accommodation within the gigantic King's Cross regeneration scheme have seen to that. I spot these young eastern Asian students walking blithely down Bingfield Street on trips to the Cally: nonchalant fish-out-of-water types who wouldn't know a Terry Adams from a Terry Wogan. I wish them well; I hope they will invest at least a little sense of belonging in their new home. I'm not sure many of them know how lucky they are. 

Indeed some of the less lucky ones end up housed in Andrew Panayi's lightless underground rabbit warrens (he featured as the Rackman-like villain landlord in the BBC's excellent recent documentary The Secret History of Our Streets). I suppose though that their time here will be brief, their apparent privations soon ended.

There are other people of the Cally who will never live anywhere else.

I too will be leaving this place soon. It will be a huge wrench to go. These recent years have been both rich and fraught for me, and the Cally has figured very large in them. When one grows up in a quiet down-at-heels suburb of a fading northern seaside resort, a community like the Cally offers a variety of unimagined experiences. I am unlikely to ever live in a place like it again, but I will remember it--and its people- with a fondness that has always surprised me. It is my sort of place.

As Dave Elvis would sing,

I don't need a mansion on a hill
That overlooks the sea

William Ruby


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