Anarchic cabbage, tyrannical Greeks, and a dark-haired man; all elements of the 1960s in London: Camden Town to be precise. Arlington Road was a hive of movement radiating outward towards Parkway, the Sunshine Cafe, the Inverness Market, a Rowton House, and further up Parkway, the sublime Regent's Park.
Parkway was full of small family-owned shops. It had a bakery, a pet shop, small Italian restaurant, Irish butcher, hardware and pubs and, as it curved towards Regent's Park, it gave way to elegant Regency houses and trees where Louis MacNeice had once lingered and Anthony Armstrong-Jones had done innovative things at the zoo.
The Irish emigrants congregated after Mass at Arlington Road Church. This was serviced by Belgian priests who had been expelled from China. They had mastered Mandarin Chinese but few had completely mastered English. This was more than compensated for by by their love and service to a nomadic congregation with an `in-flight' lifestyle.
Impervious Albion
Changing digs and flats, bearing their uneasiness and rootlessness like a seven-pronged candelabra gravitating towards their own tribe. They were a group within a group. It was not so much perfidious Albion as impervious Albion.
The emigrants were outsiders to the culture of the rolled umbrella, the dog on the lead, the washed and waxed cars, and the socialists from Gloucester Avenue shopping at the co-op and attending experimental theatre at the Round House on Chalk Farm Road.
Nearer to Regent's Park lived the arty and film people, script writers and buyers of cultural films who, in their spare time, practised Buddhism in Hampstead.
On Sundays after Mass, bearing copies of the Sunday Press, the Irish men made their way to the Sunshine Cafe run by two Greek brothers. I've always thought of cabbage as a friendly, bouncy vegetable, diving cheerfully to martyrdom in a cauldron of simmering bacon. But these Greeks considered it anarchic.
They cooked it relentlessly and then, fearing an obdurate streak, compressed the result into what can only be described as green briquettes. These they served in slabs, with large plates of meat and potatoes.
Following lunch, many climbed to the top of Primrose Hill to try and tune radios to catch Micheal O Hehir's match commentary from Ireland. Later, at night, after a feed of Guinness, they discovered the delights of onion bhaji and chicken pilau in the long, narrow Indian restaurant on Camden High Street.
Explaining and cajoling
RO] The dark-haired man arrived in Camden to explain the intricacies of obtaining housing to people who had no chance of a mortgage or offered no collateral. He explained, cajoled, simplified, and won co-operation.
Men, still covered in the dust of their toil, re-wired and plastered older houses and made them habitable for Irish families who paid a modest rent into a central kitty to finance further housing.
Due to his passion and enthusiasm the housing association flourished. His very passion for people was later to be his undoing. Side by side with his deep generosity of spirit lay the seeds of the folly of the human heart; the seeds that flourish in us all.
Across in the Bedford Arms, a great raw sound was gathering and evolving; it was Margaret Barry singing with her companion Michael Gorman. This sound did not carry to the other group within a group, the successful Irish who lived in Chelsea Cloisters and Hans Crescent, whose clubs were Eaton Square Irish Club and the Challoner. Dentists, engineers, advertisers, master builders, hotel owners, and doctors, they were putting down layers of what would be a substantial, influential group in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Camden Van Zuyt centre with its pubs, became the centre of social life. Irish culture was encouraged by the Belgian priests. Benefit dances were run in conjunction with pub whiparounds for the widows of men killed in the construction of new underground tunnels and the building of the Post Office Tower.
On Saturday night in the Oxford Arms, in the manner of pre-match Italians crying "O Lazio", the Connemara clientele burst into that moving song Anach Cuain, a poignant heart turning anthem for a terrible drowning tragedy. There were Dissenters too.
Camden Dissenters
These read Marx and Nietzsche in their cramped rooms, and resolved all conflict in the Connolly Movement. Unlike today's Dissenters, orthodox in their conformity, these Camden Dissenters didn't make a meal of it.
The core of these people was hard work, some heavy drinking, fidelity to faith and group, self-reliance, and lack of a welfare mentality. They took little from the common purse. Irish men injured at work usually signed out of hospital as soon as they recovered their shoes and clothing. Years later some returned home without flourish, trying to accommodate a new Ireland - some of its prosperity helped by their sacrifices. Family homes were often re-occupied, and a better class of carpet-bagger, with third-level cuteness, purloined undocumented small acreage and unused bog. Some ended up rootless in two places. Some integrated. The dark-haired man fell from grace. It was all in the papers. He went away to Ecuador to serve its people. He was the priested part of ourselves; full of dark shadows, but capable of an incandescent shining generosity and love. He was one of our own who stumbled.
Old man whose dark hair has turned grey, come home. It is time for forgiveness, healing and hope. It already started here for us on Good Friday.