The week we moved in I was scratching my skin until it was torn to bits.
The house was dormant for a good long time and the sofa had fleas living in it. My skin doesn’t like fleas, or ticks, or horseflies or midges or mosquitoes. I flare up like a balloon and back then I didn’t know the magic of antihistamines.
The living room had a big beaten leather sofa, I would sit there to smoke and watch the blue swirls shoot down the light that came in on the evening sun while I phoned my mummy at home in Fermanagh.
There was a little corner shop at the top of the street. The shopkeeper was a shy woman who came from the other side of the world, I never got her name as her shyness brought the same trait out in me and I never dared to be ballsy enough to ask. She had the loveliest smile. And apron.
The chip shop opposite our house sold Pukka Pies- Made in Leicester and the biggest portions of chips I have yet to see beaten. I can still see the steam on that window and the queues on Friday evenings. The decor was from the 1970s and hadn’t changed a bit with Formica yellow tops and yellow tiles. I loved the place. I have always loved chip shops. I worked in one for years and so did my mummy, my sister, and my brother owned one. Chips are in my DNA.
If you walked down the hill you came to a shop called Kwik Mart and I always thought of The Simpsons when I went there and had a little giggle. It was the kind of shop where branding and food go to die. There was always a sense of lazy shame that came over me if I was shopping in there. I hadn’t been organised to go to a proper shop. I was also afraid. People who were addicted to heroin and other things used to hang out around there and often I would be harangued for money and cigarettes.
Grace Road Cricket Ground was behind all of this and on Saturdays in the summer you could hear the cricket fans in their tandem cheer sound like a gentle glad or disappointed hum. I loved that sound.
George lived next door, he was a widower and he grew strawberries in the back garden and taught me bits and pieces about how to take care of our garden. I was never very good at it. I was 21 and interested in learning, but not interested in doing all the work that George did to make perfect strawberries.
I used to sit and smoke at the window in the living room – it was on the first floor. I would smoke and watch George bend down repeatedly into the soil and back up. Digging, sewing, weeding, waiting. George was a beautiful person. I think about him when I think of Duncan Road. I wonder if he has died. I lived next to him for over three years.
The couple next door were different to George. They did not like living next to young people.
I heard that they had been dancers in their youth and had traveled the world dancing with some BBC ensemble. The wife of the couple was famous in her day. I wanted to be famous back then. When I met this woman who was famous in her youth, and heard the stories of her far flung travels, and saw the pain and the anger and the vitriol in her eyes, I changed my mind about the pursuit of fame, I wanted to make something else.
I based a whole lifetime of choices on the meeting of one person because I was scared.
Duncan Road changed me and shaped me in so many ways, and I painted every day I lived there, made music, made friends, made a lifetime friendship with the amazing men I lived with and made a mess of so much all at the same time. One house can do so much.
