Lilford

I grew up in an environment I variably call ‘the Lilford community’;

Cigarette smoke mixing with the scent of an afternoon sourdough and late night bonfire built on the logs we found fly-tipped across the road. I grew up in an environment where every day was a Sunday sunny-day sunshine-through-the-big-open-window-with-a-crack-in-it-day. Where the tip tap of rain dripping into saucepans through the broken roof means nothing. Where a collage of antique red carpets line the floors and the walls are bare ripples of painted brick. Sun-chimes, wind-chimes, goldfish in the garden and crooked teeth vibes. My friends were 40 year olds with broad imaginations, living in squatted homes like royalty. There was a train track overhead, peeking over the walls of our garden with jealousy, watching the little girl chasing the cat, chasing the ants, chasing the air of real living. Big leaning rooms on a slope on a rise and fall. We do not exclude the homes from our bonfire when they breathe and beat the same. And for hours on end I would watch the mirror fairies dance at the roots of the cherry tree in our shared garden. And I would climb big mountainous steps following the pencil lines I scribbled into the walls. Watch my mum cook on an old black gas stove in a kitchen with framed post-it notes and thousands of childhood hand prints in browns reds and blues. I would go to the house next door and watch Andy put another loaf into the oven, ask him for a jellybean, as him why he didn’t mind the spiderwebs that lined the corners, then creep away back into the garden to ask the goldfish why they could breathe underwater and yet I could not. Guitar strums from The Beatles lullaby out of open garden doors and fill ears with white t-shirt hazes. Sung to sleep under the shade of the sunflowers on a Sunday afternoon and wake up on a Sunday morning in the long grass to a 4 year old, struck by nostalgia over the smell of smoke that drifts and mists and takes you back.

To that time Where you lived In the Lilford Community.