It was one of those nights a long time ago. Helen the hairdresser had just stabbed Eddie Woods the dustman with her snippers and the blue lights were flashing outside the Foresters.
Well he had tried to touch her breasts without asking permission.
Tanked up on Holstein, the chaps had given the arresting officers a bit of lip and the cops were threatening to come back mob handed and fracture a few skulls, just as soon as they’d dragged a spitting and screaming Helen into the Black Mariah and bundled her off to the cells.
Post stabbing, the lads all wanted something else to happen. Was that too much to ask? But after weighing up the pros and cons of scrapping with club-wielding policemen, the wisest decided to slip away to the EDT, respectfully stepping over the puddle of Eddie’s blood on the way out.
Maybe it was the super lager or maybe it was the full moon but the air crackled with possibilities. We might have driven to Brighton in stolen cars, run naked across Goose Green or just fought amongst ourselves, but none of those suggestions quite hit the button, so when Billy the drug dealer burst in the door with this wild story, it was perfect timing, and we were all ears, ready for anything.
He knew this guy he said; this guy who had built a boat and tonight was to be its big launching; champagne cracked across hull; 'I name this ship,' etc. and bon voyage. Billy, part of a press gang, had been deputised to scour the local bars and recruit volunteers by whatever means necessary. The ship’s captain had ordained that the able bodied of East Dulwich should assemble and help him extricate this fabulous creation, his dreamboat, from its berth in the back garden of his house. The suggestible half drunk congregation instantly rallied to the cause and soon a flotilla of beaten up motors led by a Suzuki Rascal made its way to the dry dock in Underhill Road.
There were probably a hundred others like us there, milling about by a huge parked up low loader its ramps jutting into the street, and the road had been coned off by the same cops we had just been jeering. Cars parked everywhere and nearly everyone stunk of booze but the cops weren’t bothered, even they were glowing with the anticipation of this great event.
You see, this wasn’t some dinghy or a gin palace; it was a colossal concrete-hulled hulk, which rose from the back garden like a mini Cutty Sark, the tips of its masts visible over the terrace roofs. And the garden wasn’t beside the road, it was three houses in, making it necessary for the captain to demolish his neighbour’s fences and move their washing lines, sheds and rhubarb frames to facilitate his well-planned extraction.
Rolling logs had been laid down across the shattered gardens and ropes attached to the prow of the ship, then, like Egyptian slaves, we gathered the ropes up and in two long lines took the strain and heaved. At first nothing, then the monster stirred and moved, while the captain stood high on the foredeck yelling down instructions. The cops turned all their headlights on full beam illuminating a primal scene of grunting, swearing labourers, tearing muscles and burning hands.
In ancient Egypt it might have been water-bearing maidens but in modern Dulwich, it was girls with flagons of cheap cider that quenched the raging thirsts and stoked up the alcohol levels of the two toiling teams. The captain knew well the difference between what his crew wanted and what they needed and the cider was dispensed liberally while the navy rum was held under close guard until the task was complete.
It seemed never ending but finally the leviathan was perched and chained onto its lorry. The rum was sloshed into paper mugs, the 'Bon voyages' declared and the great ship trundled off to the Thames with a police car escort fore and aft, on a carefully planned route that avoided south London’s low bridges.
We never found out the name of either the captain or his ship. Apparently he threw a party on the boat the following evening but for reasons I can’t recall, we didn’t go. Word came back that he and his wife and kids were off around the world. Hopefully they made it or perhaps his dreamboat rests at the bottom of the estuary; certainly he was never seen in Dulwich again. However, it’s tempting to think that a man with that much drive and perspicacity is currently dangling his tootsies in the Indian Ocean perhaps in the Maldives, watching his grandchildren dive for pearls.
I can’t reminisce or check facts with others about this Fitzcarraldo-like adventure that took place under a full moon outside a kebab shop in SE22 in the late 70s since those I remember being there have either died or moved on.
Sometimes I wonder if it ever happened at all.
Illustration: Doug Gordon
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