Saturday 5 March 2011

Park Life


The park is not just a place to empty the dog out and get mugged for your phone, or to race pushchairs and crash odd-shaped bikes. All human life is here.
Kids stand contentedly smearing 99 flakes round their cake holes in the diesel fumes of the ice cream van, weekend dads stare abstractly at one-legged pigeons scattering psittacosis while they fight over a chip. And the ancients run their fingers over the names of old comrades on the backs of the benches.

Still drunk Sunday leaguers shout, ‘Square,’ and ‘man on,’ and ‘for f**** sake.’ Red-faced joggers limber up, while dreaming of the full face at home, then out for some beers with their mates. Lovely jubbly. Poseurs pump iron on the new contraptions and a swarthy tennis player with a demon serve has a racquet in one hand and a fag in the other. A watery sun smiles down on us all.

Sounds: By day dogs bark, kids yell and all manner of music drifts over the hedges, calypso and gangsta, fox trot, dubstep and grime. By night the screams of the foxes mingle with the squeals of lovers and sometimes the hovering chopper means man-on-the-run. A hound down the street thinks the sirens are the bay of his pack and he joyfully calls back in a dog and car chorus, then they pass and he stops, hangs his big dog head and wonders why they ran off without him.

Sadly gone are the galloping police horses and the doppler whoosh of the Eurostar, engines fore and aft. One night there was a monumental fireworks display; a barrage of aerial bombshells threatened to take out the windows as if NATO was playing games down the garden. Sometimes the delicate chimes of Christ’s Chapel waft this way when the wind allows. Then there is the ever present swish of the South Circular which you can trick your mind into thinking is sea.

Also gone are the bagpipes. About ten years back on odd mornings, a faint skirl arrived with the breeze, a ghostly piper playing at dawn. People scoffed when I told them that but I swear it’s true.

However, the strangest thing I ever heard in the park was also the strangest thing I ever saw. First came the commotion of some moving machine through the trees closely followed by the padding of light feet… paws? Then shouts, a man shouting. But what is he shouting? ‘Mush’? Is he shouting ‘Mush’? A team of loll-tongued huskies raced toward me dragging a sled on wheels, Ben Hur on the back of it, wild haired and sweating, clinging on and shouting. It seemed exigent to fling myself in a bush and as I lay the sled swept by its charioteer yelling, ‘Morning,’ and, ‘dreadfully sorry.’ Perhaps I imagined the crack of a whip.

I’d like to have asked him if he was flying the Dulwich huskies to Alaska for the Iditarod but there was little opportunity for chatting. Maybe he did and maybe he won because he never came back. Surely the dogs preferred the white wastes to the Dulwich green and he swapped his commute for a cabin.

Dog teams, pipers and sex in the bushes, failed footballers, fireworks and fights; roller blade hockey, Earl Grey at ten thirty, sausage rolls, burgers and cakes… oh, and ducks. What more could you ask?
Dulwich Park is just a field behind the houses but it’s also all things to all people, a field of dreams.
© Steve Overbury 2011

Steve’s book London Babylon: The Beatles and the Stones in the Swinging Sixties is available in local bookshops or from www.londonbabylon.co.uk priced £12.99. There are 414 pages of previously untold stories, anecdotes and pictures. Each visitor to the site is entitled to the two ‘missing’ chapters free.

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