Merton Road, and Results

 

24 hours after our big last show in Edinburgh, drained and hoarse, I opened the door of my new London pad and caught a strong whiff of sweaty men. One of them I knew to be Gary who had been in residence in Merton Road for a year already*. Picking my way past bicycles, piles of rubbish and a traffic cone, I walked up the dark stairs to the sitting room where Gary was one of six blokes slumped, smoking in front of the TV. After cursory hellos and mumbled introductions I climbed more creaky stairs to the bedroom I had been assigned, a thin chamber, sloped ceiling, lit by a grimy skylight and a naked bulb suspended from the nicotine-yellow ceiling. A partially-dressed man, passed out in the foetal position, lay snoring on my bed. Hi honey, I’m home.

 

My feeling of anti-climax, which had been growing all day, now bloomed into outright misery. I had no money, no job, no girlfriend, no prospects and now it would seem, no bed. My future stretched across the horizon like a vast, featureless, arctic wasteland. Oh Gawd, what was I going to do? I put my bags down next to the recumbent drunk, went downstairs and joined the silent smokers.

 

* 

 

184a Merton Road, South Wimbledon was one of the greatest student-style slums the world has ever seen. On the occasions during my years there when I invited a girl back I always felt the need to add the proviso: ‘it’s a bit of a shit heap….’ This would elicit the response, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been in shit heaps before.’  But then, when they arrived, even if they didn’t say it, I could see from their expression they were thinking, ‘Christ, this really is a shit hole.’ If they were prepared to stay the night you knew they must really fancy you.

 

Consider the bath. It was large enough to accommodate a small whale but the apertures of the tap were so unequal to the challenge that it took nearly an hour to fill. In the unlikely event there was hot water in the tank it had cooled down to tepid by the time the tub was even half full. Dirty tide-marks ran round the off-white interior, black lines which resisted the most vigorous scrubbing (that’s what we assumed - no-one actually tried cleaning it). After a hearty game of football or rounders on muddy Clapham Common everyone wanted a bath and the only way this was possible was if we all used the same water. Being last in was a dismal short straw to draw.

 

Or the kitchen, in which every surface lived under a permanent layer of oozing grease, and the cupboards were full of unreturned, mildewed milk bottles. There was a kettle that was so tired of life that in the time it took to boil, you could nip to Tom’s corner shop, buy tea bags and still have time for a sit-down before its frail whistle struck up. The rarely-used oven skulked beneath old chip-wrappings and morsels of discarded kebab.