So there are few places worst in the universe to be born into than a South London council estate in the 1970s. Roundshaw Council Estate was so bad that they literally blew the whole thing up and started again. Here's my mate Wayne's flat getting blown up.
Roundshaw was a brutalist style socialist project of the 1970s inspired from the Communist tenement blocks of Eastern Europe. My mum was a 'societal refugee' from Malta (her fiance died when he was 17 so she was on the scrap heap by not being married by 16) and my dad was a postman (who pulled my mum in the Cats Whiskers night club in Streatham with pick up lines she couldn't understand because she couldn't speak a word of English). They didn't particularly fall in love but were equally hopeless and being driven by cultural pressures they got married. By the time my mum understood what my dad was saying and realised what a penniless cockney wide boy he was it was all too late. Like a lot of people in poverty they thought it was a good idea to bring six children into the hell they were in and ended up in council housing and on benefits.
I was born with the umbilical chord wrapped around my neck, seemingly trying to hang myself before it all started but I didn't succeed. My childhood was on a slab of concrete (called a deck). The commie idea behind the deck was the shared space at the front of the flats where all the kids could play. As it was a 'floating' slab of concrete there were no cars to worry about.
The deck, where I grew up.
This was such a natureless hell that I don't even remember seeing a Feral Pigeon or House Sparrow there.
Anyway at age seven (1978) Margaret Thatcher had started her mission to rid the UK of socialists and commies so she encouraged 'council scum' to buy their own homes. On a below minimum wage my parents were able to get a mortgage and buy a 4 bedroom house (eight of us plus my nan later had to share rooms). Granted the house we bought was next to a sewage farm and we were one of the few people in Hackbridge (the crack) that had 'moved up in the world' to get there- most others there had fallen from grace.
As the only money we had went to pay off the mortgage, we couldn't keep up with the 'flash jacks' (now called Chavs i.e. poor people who spend all their money on consumer shite) so in the late 1970s and early 1980s we couldn't afford the ZX Spectrum, Acorn BBC, Commodore 64 computers , video recorder or even a colour TV. They couldn't even afford to dress me in Farahs and a Y-jumper so I had to go round dressed up in a Jamaican boys clothes (complete with tropical patterned pants and vest) who my mum knew from her church and was two years older than me and was growing out of his clothes. I was basically perpetually bored (despite the oversized dazzling underwear) so we had to be creative to pass the time- which usually meant fighting and torturing my siblings.
Just before we escaped Roundshaw Council Estate, Fundamental Christian Evangelists from the southern states of North America had launched a 'mission' on the estate to 'save souls'. They were from a cult called the Church of Christ (which featured on the TV a lot during the 1970s for brainwashing). Anyway, they brought the 'good news' to my mum and dad, basically convincing them that they were actually global elites instead of 'council scum', and were chosen by God to build a spiritual empire on Earth (for a small weekly donation and signing up to be a member- a numbers game to keep the preachers funding coming in as part of US Jesus Imperialism).
So by the time we got to Hackbridge I had two choices, either stay around the entertainment free house with all the bible bashing, hymn singing, american evangelists and cult members or bugger off over the nearby sewage farm with my mates to throw stones at the gypsy horses penises when they got erections. So I chose the latter and we also split our time between trying to hit the balls eye (literally) and stoning the ducks in Beddington Park. We also did a bit of arson (setting fire to Mitcham Common and Beddington Farmlands) and mild vandalism (although my mate Tim went to prison eventually as things used to get out of hand when we went out with him). When at home I used to pass the time by pulling the legs off spiders (I even wrote a song about that here). So I was slowly 'connecting with nature'. Meanwhile my brother used to sell soft drugs and pirated porn at the front door during prayer meetings when my parents were occupied talking to Jesus.
Anyway it was on one of our Horse ball-eyes missions with Wayne and Chris to the sewage farm that I saw something stranger than anything I'd seen before (and I had seen a lot of weird shit). There was a bloke looking through a telescope over the sludge beds. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was looking for a Lesser Yellowlegs. This was in 1984. I remember thinking WTF is a Lesser @@ing Yellowlegs. Just then the Thames Water van started driving towards us so we had to leg it (as we were trespassing as it was permit only). As we legged it off we did the standard thing and shouted insults at the telescope bloke.
Shortly after, an ex- Devil worshipper in my parents cult (he'd been converted!) gave me a bird book and a poster of garden birds. I put the poster up on my wall and read the book because I didn't have any other books (apart from the Bible) or any other posters that my mum's religion would permit me to put up. Meanwhile at school we started doing nature studies too. Then my parents bought a caravan in Bognor Regis and we started going to the coast on weekends and visiting Arundel (the free bit outside the WWT reserve). We also visited my mum's island of Malta and I met my cousins and uncles who were bird hunters and had stuffed bird collections which I found fascinating.
Now on family weekends to Bognor and in between soft vandalism with my mates in the local green spaces (we also built camps along the River Wandle) I started noticing birds from the ex-Devil worshipper's bird book and poster. I started ticking them off in my book and so I went back to the sewage farm on a new mission and started asking more questions to the strange bloke with the telescope, Garry Messenbird, who started showing me what he was looking at through his telescope. I was electrified and soon became obsessed. In 1985 I started my first birding notebook here. So it began.
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