Hidden Gem

I saw it the other day on the internet.78 Shepherds Hill.

Apparently it is now a “hidden gem”. Big Victorian house, now carved up into flats.

Lovely garden. Period features. The sort of place estate agents get all excited about.

Price tag somewhere around the million pound mark per flat.

Hidden gem my arse.

To them it is a property. Square footage. Original fireplaces. Catchment areas and all that bollocks.

To me it was the first place on earth that felt even remotely like home.

Back in 1981 I arrived there with a social worker called Zak. We drove from Wood Green to Crouch End making small talk. It was raining quite heavily and I remember shrinking down into the seat watching the streets go by. The same streets where everything had gone wrong for me the previous couple of years.

But in my kid’s head I was not thinking about any of that.

I was just swapping one gaff for another.

What I was really thinking about was which bus would take me back to Wood Green later so I could hang around the garages with the other lot. That and what might be for dinner.

Kids are simple like that.

Then we pulled up outside number 78.

Walking through the front door was like stepping into another world.

The first thing that hit me was the heating.

Proper heating.

The whole place warm and clean. Outside it was cold and miserable but inside you could walk around in a T-shirt and feel comfortable.

The other kids were laying the table in a dining room. Yes, a proper dining room.

Dinner that night was chicken curry with rice. One of the girls, Sandra, showed me that if you put butter on the rice it made it taste even better. I had never sat around a table eating dinner like that for years.

Everyone talking, laughing, just normal.

I kept scrunching my feet inside the brand new slippers they had given me and rubbing the sleeve of my pyjamas between my fingers. Clean clothes. Soft carpet. Hot shower with coconut body wash.

Things most people would not even notice.

For me it was like landing on another planet.

Later that evening Zak looked at me and said, “Why don’t you go to bed mate, you look shattered.”

He was right. I was absolutely exhausted.

That bastard Z-bed I had been sleeping on before had done proper damage on me.

So I went upstairs and climbed into the softest bed I had ever slept in. Warm sheets. Full belly. Clean skin.

I remember laughing to myself as I drifted off.

At long last I was somewhere I was welcome.

That house became my base camp.

From there the world started to open up.

North London in the early eighties was a funny old place if you were a kid like me. Care homes, council estates, school yards, bus stops, bits of waste ground where everyone hung about smoking and talking shit.

And music.

Always music.

By that time I had already drifted towards the punk scene. Safety pins, boots, the whole lot. To most people we looked like a bunch of lunatics but to us it was just our tribe.

Punks were outsiders and most of us knew it.

Funny thing is the reggae sound system crowd often looked at us exactly the same way.

A bunch of weird looking white kids with spiky hair and torn jackets turning up at dances where we probably looked completely out of place.

But there was always a strange respect there as well.

They knew we were outsiders just like them.

And we knew they were us.

I only went to a couple of those sound system nights but they stuck in my mind forever.

Massive speakers stacked up like furniture. Bass so deep you could feel it in your ribs. Proper roots reggae shaking the walls while people moved slow and steady in the dark.

Nothing flashy.

Nothing fake.

Just music and atmosphere.

Compared to the chaos of the streets it felt almost peaceful in its own way.

I remember standing there one night looking around the room thinking how strange it all was. Sonder they call it.

Here we were, punks and reggae heads, kids from all sorts of backgrounds, all standing in the same place just letting the music roll over us.

Nobody worrying about where you came from..

Nobody worrying about where you were going.

Nobody asking questions.

Back then people seemed more interested in what we had in common rather than what separated us.

These days it often feels the other way around.

But those nights were only possible for me, because of that house on Shepherds Hill.

Every kid in that place had their own story.

Some had been abused. Some had been abandoned. Some had simply been written off as too much trouble. A complete mish-mash of kids really.

But somehow we made it work.

We became a family.

And Haringey Council, for better or worse, were the closest thing we had to Mum and Dad.

Some nights we would all pile into the grey minibus with the yellow star on the door and go to the pictures or ice skating. Things I had never done with my own family.

Other nights we would just sit around the living room watching television or listening to records in the garden room.

Nothing fancy.

Just normal life.

Which for kids like us felt extraordinary.

So when I see that house today described as a “hidden gem” worth a small fortune it does make me fucking angry.

Because the real value of that place was never the bricks or the bay windows or the size of the garden.

The real value was what happened inside those walls.

Hot showers for kids who had never had one.

Clean pyjamas and slippers for kids who arrived with almost nothing.

Meals around a table where nobody shouted or threw things.

A warm bed at the end of the day.

For a scruffy kid who had spent a long time thinking he did not belong anywhere, that place was more valuable than any million pound property listing.

And that is how I will always remember it.

Not as a hidden gem.

But as the place where a lost kid finally found a bit of ground under his feet before heading back out into North London to discover reggae to go with the punk, and a world far bigger than the one he had come from.