Jeff and Ridley Road Market
In these days when every human pleasure carries a government health warning the company of my unashamedly non-PC pal Jeff is always a joy. Yesterday it was my turn to take him to lunch and we went to Cote where the food is reliable and the prices fair. When it came to ordering, there was no question of alcoholic abstinence, fear of calorie as he tucked into 3 courses. A Falstaffian figure with a massive gut, meals for him are to be savoured and enjoyed. He particularly recommended the Creme Caramel, which proved to be a rich creamy concoction of some 500 calories.
If there is a hinterland of an unhappy relationship, an addiction or inner melancholia, he certainly disguises it well as in the year or so I have got to know him he has only one mood, joviality. I have never heard him speak badly of anyone, nor anyone of him, seems happily married and after a successful career as accountant, financier and his own bathroom fitting business no obvious financial worries. In short his company is an unalloyed delight.
In searching and failing to find a concluding pithy paragraph on Jeff, I’ve just heard the news on Doten Atenbayoh’s Up All Night that Ridley Road market is closing down no doubt for the building of gentrified flats. My parents lived close to Dalston, where it is situated, from 1947-64 and my mother would do her weekly shop there every Friday. A creature of habit and believer in loyalty, when we moved to upmarket St Johns Wood she still made the arduous journey to Dalston and returned with bags of goodies, delicious produce and tales of the market. This world of spivs, shysters, dodgy merchandise and produce far more flavoursome than any sanitised supermarket can offer was epitomised in a superb film starring Sydney Tafler called It Always Rains on Sundays.
Ridley Road was also a close to Jacksons Corner an entrance point to the old East End. Shamefully allowed to reconstitute his fascists after the war as the British Union of Servicemen Mosley and his blackshirts marched on the East End. At Jackson Corner they were stoutly sent on their way with the anthem ‘They shall not pass’. It provided many an unlikely hero. Nat Fleischerg, a hero of Arnhem and ABA champion, took on all comers, Morry Beckmann who died only two years ago an artist with a Stanley knife ensured that many a fascist “tuches” ( Yiddish for backside) was attended to in the London Hospital; Young Jack Dash got the dockers out and seventeen year old Vidal Sassoon the pioneer of global hair dressing was another on the front line. My father who lived in nearby Clapton Common told me:
“Whatever people may tell you about Hitler’s rise to power it did not happen democratically but because the Nazis controlled the streets. At Jackson Corner we defeated fascism because we did not let them do so.”
I wonder how many new residents of £800, 000 apartments in Ridley Road know of, or are interested in, the fascinating history of their neighbourhood.