CAMBERWELL BOY

Camberwell Boy is the story of a working class family's upbringing on a South London council estate in the 1960s. It is seen through my eyes, being the bastard love child of my Mother, which made me very different from my siblings. My Mother herself, was born into poverty, though her family prior to 1930, were middle class. She lost her father at aged five and then her mother at aged ten from suicide, following a direct bomb hit on their Walworth home, where her son was seriously injured and near death. Following two years evacuation with her slightly older sister, they were taken in by their well off Auntie. She made the decision to keep the malleable sister and deposit my Mother into the Dr Barnardos organisation. This rejection, separation from her sister and her consequent knowledge of her Mother's cause of death, made her unmanageable and she was pushed from pillar to post for the next two years by Barnardos. The Barnardos file I have on my Mother is the largest that they had ever compiled. She ran away from Barnardos at the age of fifteen following a work place harassment and disappeared into the London post war ether, surviving on her intelligence and beauty. The story veers between my experience within the family and my Mother's story. It is a tragic story of hard knocks and survival. It also depicts a way of life which is now extinct, due to the changing demographics of London, for it shows the Cockney community spirit with its shared values and culture. It isn't pc in places, but it is an honest account of the times that I grew up in. I believe that for those that grew up in South London between the 50's and 70's, what I have written will resonate with them, because nostalgia, apart from the Pie `n Mash shop, is all that we have left of the hard, but warm world we inhabited.