Trelawney Avenue

The Irish club is now a nursery school. 

Lurking behind the Catholic Church, Friday nights were for the grown ups drinking in full house lights all night. Match of the Day on the tubular TV mounted on the wall. In the darkness of the room next door, Benson and Hedges took out Silk Cut for a weekly slow shuffle to American country songs. We skidded on shiny knees and glugged the Coca Colas that we gladly took as payment from our parents to allow them to forget they had us for the evening.


On Sundays our parents took us to Catholic mass in our crispest beige, just so that they had someone else to talk to. The conversation was as bland as the mass we’d just sat through - spontaneously coughing up prayers and daydreaming of a world outside those sombre walls. Sunday was the slowest that time could pass.

In primary school, we ascended holding hands on to this little parade of shops and were all designated a shop to draw and interview the shop keepers. I sat on the small fence and drew the butcher’s window of parts of dead pig.

Along side the butchers, there was a sports shop selling only Gola football boots, two newsagents at either end: one selling multipack cans, a hairdresser, a Blockbuster VHS rental shop (no less), a greengrocer, and an off-licence where I would get a pack of Maltesers by suggesting my parents might enjoy a drop of wine that evening.



On one Monday morning, I wrote at primary school about my weekend being about meeting Lavinia Lafflin on this patch of grass and playing chase. On Valentine’s Day when I was ten, Lavinia sent me card calling me a “sex pot”. 


I threw away the card and We didn’t speak again. 



My dad took an office in the units behind the shops. Out of the way, where the bin bags and mattresses were left. Five of six offices in an L shape like stables for discreet business. Each office a single room hidden from the public like retail’s dirty secret.

My brother idled his evenings here in halogen shadow, arriving home late before falling into the bottom of our bunk bed. He smelt of alcohol and cigarettes and I was glad he was home. 

I’m here again on a Saturday afternoon and I return to that feeling of limbo: waiting for mass to finish, for conversations to finish, for a parents work to finish, for my childhood to finish…. But this time I’m here by choice and can get in my car and leave this place behind. 


I wish the Irish club wasn’t a nursery though. 

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