Cockney Waters

Cockney Waters Part One

Contains an autobiographical essay followed by the first of three photo-journeys along the Thames.

Cockney Waters depicts what childhood in East London was like for my family and I during the mid-twentieth century. I grew up there at a time when Cockney life was under threat and in later years, I watched helplessly as it was destroyed. During the 1970’s and 80’s, big business and striking dockers under Jack Dash took away our traditional livelihoods, while incomers either displaced or drove out the indigenous population. My father’s family and its traditional East London life was virtually extinguished and my own docklands upbringing made harder than it should have been, by the turmoil that enveloped East London while it was forced to change.

This is my story, in words and pictures: followed by a photo-journey by river on the Thames Sailing Barge ‘Will’, from the edge of The City at Tower Bridge to the Thames estuary and Essex coast.

In the beginning ......

Chapter One

“It's 03.30am - get up! We sail with the high tide before dawn.”

I needed light to photograph my voyage on the Thames Sailing Barge "Will", but it was grey. Grey, like my breakfast coffee and my mood.

It was 1982 and we were to depart St. Katherine's by the Tower for the Thames Estuary, then go coastal, landing at the little Essex port of Brightlingsea.

I was searching for remnants of the culture that I was a part of as a child. Life had revolved around the river, which buzzed with activity supporting local industry and people. Then, in the 1970's, while its polluted water cleared, a way of life so vigorously lived had withered and died. I wanted to document what was left before it vanished completely, because East Enders like my father’s clan had begun to all but disappear, replaced by multi-cultural Londoners. But Cockneys are tough - they didn’t become extinct - so I hope that this is only part of our family’s story. I hear that others are thriving now, in the place that I came from.

*

I was born on March 5th 1953, the day that the Russian dictator Stalin died, but fortunately I wasn't his reincarnation. I was an Essex Girl. It didn't last long though. A single year lodging with Mum’s elder sister. Kitty and her brother-in-law, my father Charlie, lived at loggerheads in her house at Leytonstone Church, until a final row brought exile, back to Dad’s patch in Docklands.

My father had married above his station. Throughout his life, a chip on his shoulder grew. No matter how hard he worked or what he achieved, he was an East Londoner - not Essex born, like his wife. The chip flamed with anger and resentment, frequently scalding Mum and me, their only child.

Water ran at odds through our Essex and East London families - the Thames versus the swimming baths. Mum's family, the Virgins, came from the forest, Epping Forest, which had no natural waterways. Despite this handicap, Mum’s Virgins were champion swimmers, medal winners in backstroke and breast. Dad’s family, the Sandfords, were by the river and not far from the sea, but could not - would not - swim.

I remember my father's horror of water. If a waterman fell in, he would either be dragged down under in the boat's wake, or poisoned by the cess-pit filth. Swimming would only prolong the agony of dying. They called the casualties “dead 'uns". No-one fancied the shrimps nibbling away at their eyes while they slowly died. I loved the water - needed it to always be near - but never swum until after I left London for Devon in 1978.

When I was a teenager in 1968, my father was persuaded to leave the rest of his family behind in East London, following the river out to Essex on the Rainham side of Hornchurch. He resented this. He was fiercely colour prejudiced, seeing the refugees fleeing Idi Amin’s Asian purge in the 1960s as invaders who attacked and overwhelmed his home territory. Feeling alienated, we joined an exodus of traditional white East End families into Essex.

My father remained hostile to “coloureds” throughout the rest of his life. He had served as a soldier in Africa and India during WW2, describing “the natives” in their squalid living conditions as “low-life”. He told tales of India, his memories of heat, dust, “punkawallahs” and beggars. In the streets, old men held up disfigured children, waiving them at the passing soldiers for pity and pennies. My father treated them with disdain, believing that poor Asian families would select a child to earn them a living, deliberately distorting and scarring the victim. They were “untouchables”, beneath the lowest level of the Indian caste
system, but my father saw the whole of India (and come to that, Africa too) as unworthy. I disagreed with him at my peril. How could they come to England! He was proud of his white Docklands heritage and hated the inevitable cultural change. How dare they force him to leave London! Indignant, my father took verbal revenge on every black person he encountered throughout the rest of his life.

Dad’s family had historically close river ties, with his grandfather being a Master Ship's Carpenter. The tools of his trade were carried around in two wooden boxes, one ruby red mahogany and the other, English oak. Inside the oaken lid lay racks of beautifully turned wooden handled tools, for chiselling or carving. These were kept lightly oiled and shiny. Beneath them, jostled loose saws, spokeshave, a mallet and three wooden planes. These were variously sized and designed, but all had fiercely sharpened blades, which shaved wood cleanly while sprouting curled feathers of spent timber.

Most of these lovely tools were given away by my father without my knowledge or consent. I had only a single refugee screwdriver from a set of twelve, and an exquisite wood piercer called a “gimlet”. In his shed after he died, covered in dusty cobwebs and faded dull brown, I found the mahogany box. It was empty of its compartments, but rattled errant treasures like cut-glass crystal screw caps, and hand machined “tacks”.

Our family also had its own river-craft. We had two lighters, “Dorothy” and the “Gladys May”: they ferried grain from the heavily laden ships in the Royal Docks to the canals radiating from the River Lea, a Thames tributary. These waterways formed a complex network, linking goods coming into London with local products going out, then distributed nationwide. The water teemed with barges, swarming around the honeypot docks like worker bees, then dispersing, slow and unremarkable as they trundled the water fully laden. Our family lighters ferried the grain to Abbey Mills in West Ham, then returned with cargos of milled flour. The dust stung reddened eyes, rising in choking clouds which lined the lightermen's lungs. Coughing, bent over double, they puffed out grey mucous and sometimes blood.

My father's Uncle John was a lighterman. He was killed falling headlong into the bowels of “Gladys”. Looking up from below the mast of another Thames Sailing Barge, the “Vigilant”, in Devon recently, I imagined him crashing down and breaking his neck. TSBs were designed to carry cargo and sometimes to race, so crew and passengers have to look out for themselves. I had to walk the plank across a dangerous gap from the quay, negotiate the rotting deck, then clamber backwards down a steep ladder into the cavernous hold.

Lighters were like TSBs stripped bare. No tall masts or elegant sails for them. They were workhorses powered by heavy horses, narrow boats hauled along the slender canals by raw horse power. My father, as a child, loved to lead the horses towing our family lighters. He felt at ease guiding the gentle giants along the tow paths, with the water lapping by his feet. Dad was distraught when told of his uncle’s death, like his father, who had crewed the other barge. The family’s supplementary income was lost when the lighters were sold.

In hard times, these craftsman and navigators became Dockers. When the heyday of traditional Thames boatbuilding had passed, Dad’s dad, a boilermaker, was reduced to lining up at the Royal Docks entrance competing for a daily work ticket. My father was always very bitter about the humiliation and the poverty that his family suffered as a result.

Chapter Two

Unlike my father, I willingly left Docklands, but it did remain in my heart. That led to my photographic project, its acquisition by public collections, its exhibition and then -  nothing, because it needed developing into a story. Ironically, hundreds of miles away from London, the restoration of the Thames Sailing Barge “Vigilant", inspired my return to “Cockney Waters”. Its transformation from wreck to seaworthy encouraged me to enhance my project, with digital pictures and a commentary for publication.

Thames Sailing Barges were moored at the newly renovated St Katherine Dock, when I was given my weekend on the “Will”. Its owners were a huge container shipping company, whose barge was kept to give hospitality to wealthy clients. I dressed smartly and swished my waist length hair at their City HQ. This persuaded their MD that I was an up-and-coming photographer, who would give them stylish publicity shots. On the voyage, however, I dressed in faded blue jeans and baggy tee-shirt, the usual scruffy journalist’s uniform. This did not endear me to the other smart passengers, who regarded me (quite rightly) with suspicion. They were there for pleasure, whereas my purpose was to film the opening sequence of “Cockney Waters”, which set the scene for the intimate view that walking the riverside would later provide. Isolation was the price I had to pay for my free transit.

Until we passed through the still scaffolded, brand new Thames Barrier as dawn broke, the riverside was drab. But suddenly, the scene was transfigured by the light of a gorgeous summer day.

Then we were becalmed. We ate a sober lunch, but set every sail, harnessing a fickle breeze to transform it into wind. Finally, full rigged and glorious, we processed around the Essex coast to Brightlingsea.

Disappointed and glum after poor light when it mattered, in Docklands, I must have cut a miserable figure on the voyage. Neither fellow passengers nor crew spoke to me. I felt betrayed and trapped by the water I had always loved. The weekend became like a jail sentence with me in solitary. I only took two pictures after we left the Thames. At Brightlingsea, we anchored overnight in the open water. The crew launched a dinghy, but I could not go with them because I was a Sandford. If there was an accident, I could not swim. I watched them head out into the darkness like a frail moth attracted to the harbour lights and yearned to go home.

*

I had long admired the Thames Sailing Barges. They were a proud part of our river heritage which was struggling to survive. St Kats was their only refuge, with all the other docks being semi-derelict or shut. In the London Dock, the water had been drained and the basin readied to build over. In 1982, I had stood there for a few precious moments, like its Victorian architects had done all those years ago during construction, until security guards swooped on me.

“Oi! Where have you sprung from? This is private property. You’re trespassing.”

I clung to my cameras like a snared rabbit with its last supper carrots, while the guard harangued me with threats of detention and arrest. Another arrived, with a growling Alsatian dog which sniffed me.

“Who are you? What are you doing here? We prosecute all trespassers.”

The Docks had always operated behind high walls and a veil of secrecy, policed by civilians although most were ex-coppers. My captors had the look of a Dock Gestapo, enjoying the good old days before closure again, when they had wielded dreadful power.

Darting my eyes around, frightened and squirming, I saw in the distance a swirling cloud of dust moving closer, at speed. The guards paused to look too: out shot a green Cortina. Breaking heavily by my side, the driver flung open a door, driving a wedge between my tormentors and me. I jumped in. “Ignore the stupid gits,” he shouted, as we roared across the wasteland. I was set free at the old dock boundary, into the sunshine and out of the mud, hugely relieved to be rescued.

A similar incident with bad, then good security guards, happened at the West India Docks.

Afterwards, I was invited into a little round gatehouse with a pristine turret, the officer's own private Docklands Museum. Crammed inside what should have been his office were stacks of the iconic signs which had identified each part of the London Dock: wharf, warehouse, name, section and number, in blue and white enamel over metal. Some had insignias, others were plain. All were poignant remains of places that had once been there, full of men working, unloading ships and packing sheds with wares.

The officer explained that there had been a pair of gatehouses, crowned by unique rounded turrets. Each had a purpose, either inspecting visitors or checking workers for stolen goods from tempting cargoes. Contraband had been big business. “It’s all gone now,” he said wistfully, “like the other gatehouse. But at least I have commandeered one and preserved it.”

Why didn't I photograph it? And I should have recorded those unique Dockland remnants, bravely rescued from the bulldozer. I had been imperilled, like them, then plucked from danger and taken to safety - by the same man. I should have repaid his kindness by helping him, but I failed because of struggling to grasp the bigger picture.

The sheer size of Docklands was overwhelming. I tried very hard to obtain “aerial” views to give an overall impression of an entire district, which also helped me to plan my walking route. Access to the top of Tower Bridge, for my opening Docklands vista from St Kat’s to the Thames Estuary, was straightforward. Access to the top of of tower blocks, however, could be difficult.

Oh how I coveted the birds eye view that the top floor of a tower block afforded. Climbing hundreds of stairs was punishing, but the reward was worth every rasping breath and aching muscle. No matter how dull or sordid a neighbourhood looked at ground level, high Here on the top floor could be found THE BIGGER PICTURE.

Everyday life, or the demolished remains of it at ground level, became an inconsequential part of a vast panorama. It felt like a platform in the sky up there. I became addicted to drinking in those wonderful views. In each new district I visited, l deliberately sought out its tallest buildings. There was a valid reason of course, which gave me an excuse for my voyeurism. The view would act as a huge map, to give me my bearings and help me plan where to go down below. In my heart though, I yearned to simply just be up there, with the gods.

Tower blocks have a bad reputation. Could a breath-taking panoramic view compensate for multi-storey life? I imagined that flat dwellers endured isolation and loneliness in their vertical communities. Whole street-fulls of people were stacked on top of each other in rigidly separated homes. Only the prefabricated walls and ceilings of each flat made direct contact with each other. The voices, gestures and cups of tea from neighbourly street interaction were gone. Bleak corridors, dirty lifts and concrete 'n steel staircases where footfalls echoed, were not places to linger. I did not encounter a single resident as I rattled around inside over a dozen tower blocks.

The blocks surroundings were usually featureless, with no attractive, yob free, public places to encourage a “Hullo. How are you?” amongst neighbours. No wooden park benches on which to huddle and gossip; no children’s playgrounds. Just housing estates and fenced-in places with the look of cages. It was an alien world for the friendly Cockney, but at least I could come and go as I pleased without fear of arrest for trespass.

In one tower block, I gave up counting the steps that I at first leaped upon two at a time, at a hundred. Chest heaving, I had reached the top, but instead of the spectacular panoramic view of the Isle of Dogs that I expected, I faced two slit windows. The glass was misty with dirt and they were too high for me to reach easily. ‘Slits are great for deterring suicides,’ I thought, but useless for photography. I turned away and slouched all the way back down to the ground floor.

Outside again, I scanned the top floor of an adjacent tower block and “yes!” I said to myself, “ it’s got bigger windows.” Off I went, struggling up the echoing concrete and metal staircase with robotic legs, left and then right, again, again, then stopping after every three or four flights to prevent dizziness. Was I tempted to use the lifts? No. They looked operational, but were prone to breakdown, were claustrophobic, and in the wrong company became an assault victim's cage. Better to climb up those stairs on all fours if need be, which is how I arrived at the top after my next but one block scaling (the second block had been hopeless too, with heavy slats across the top windows like Venetian blinds). Finally, in that third block, there was a panoramic view of the docks beneath me. Unfortunately, the windows looked out between two parapets which cut diagonally across my view, but they would have to “do”. I couldn’t cope with any more mountaineering.

Chapter Three

My “Cockney Waters” photographic project covered a huge area, from Tower Bridge on the City of London boundary to Shoeburyness at the mouth of the Thames in Essex. It took two years to complete, travelling most weekends between my home in Devon and London.

I usually stayed with my parents in Hornchurch, Essex and went by Tube or bus to the river, wandering alone along the mainly eastern shore. I was young, with attractive waist length hair and carrying some very expensive camera kit - but the only trouble I ever had was with those security guards in the docks and the police at a skinhead rally in Southend.

It had been a dull afternoon. I was visiting the seaside with my parents until we heard a commotion. I wormed my way through the crowd, held my camera to my eye and then hundreds of skinheads fell silent, staring at me. After a few seconds, they broke into a riotous chanting. The police had ringed them with Alsatian dogs and made them take the laces from their boots, placing them nicely under control - until I had arrived.

After taking two pictures, I made the mistake of grinning and saying thanks to those nearest. The officer by me exploded into rage, accusing me of inciting them to riot and threatening arrest, but then he got distracted. All the officers had to work together to try to contain the pandemonium as the skinheads surged forward and the police dogs went barmy. Unnoticed, my parents arrived and I was spirited away in Dad’s car before the police realised I was gone.

When I was a child, outings were often made riding pillion with my father on his BSA motorbike, arms tight around his waist, sporting Mum’s handmade tartan trousers (no jeans, too tomboyish they said), plaits flying in the wind and poking out from under my (second hand, dented) helmet like handlebars.

We sped past the Becton Alps, a smelly local landmark made of gasworks waste. They were long and high, with snowy white pristine slopes in hard winters only. Usually, these mountainous slopes were grey green and sludge covered, with sulphurous eddies will-o’-the-wisping across the heights. I watched them in wonderment as we hurried by on our way to the river.

On one of my motorbike forays with my father, we did some shopping on the Isle of Dogs. Dad and later, the television, were always talking about “The Docks”. They spoke of containerisation, the Unions and Commie Jack Dash leading the strike that broke them in the 1960's, angrily and sadly: but no-one except workers ever saw inside them. I remember high walls, with security staff prowling barricaded gates and lorries breaking in an out of a virtual prison. Near the walls there was a dingy shop run by the local “fence”, Mr W (Mr Dubball-Ewe). He clutched a grubby little white linen bag, which when tipped out revealed ceramic and mother of pearl faced watch movements, with golden wheels and intricate engravings. They lay naked on the table, denuded of cases. Stolen watches made of gold and silver passed readily through the docks, their valuable cases taken to be melted down and sold by weight. My father chose a solid looking white faced movement and turned to me with it, saying “This is for you.I have an old chrome case that might fit it.”

My face dropped. This was my to be my punishment for losing my ‘James Walker Jewellers’, jewelled lever movement watch. It was leather strapped and brass buckled (I refused to wear a bracelet, yuk, too girlie) and it had been lost earlier that week. I arrived home from school, but the watch didn't. My father was volcanic, blaming my flexible strap choice over his recommended tight bracelet for the loss, as though it were deliberate. I was to have an old, worn, basic timepiece instead. I hated it. I wore the heavy ribbed elasticated chrome strap like a shackle and the watch was always slow.

“Cockney Waters” took me to riverside places that I remembered from childhood outings, like Canvey Island and Leigh-on-Sea, where we had enjoyed "the seaside" and its pleasures like cockles and mussels, or smelling the briny. Occasionally my mother and Auntie Kitty took my only living grandparent Nanny Virgin and myself to the coast. No Cockney playground, Southend, for us! Posh Westcliff-on-Sea was our destination.

We got cheap day returns and travelled by steam train, a great adventure for me. I hung my head out of the carriage door watching the whole train snake through the landscape whooshing past, retracting my head only when soot stung my eyes. The carriage compartments had no connecting corridor, so the four of us were locked in for the duration with our fellow passengers. Anyone who had intended to sit quietly reading, or stare dreamily out of the window at the landscape rushing past, was in for a shock. Nanny Virgin had dementia. The sweet old lady in their midst who smiled shyly like a little girl, would suddenly begin giggling, igniting the whole carriage into hopeless puzzled laughter.

Nanny Virgin never spoke about what amused her, or indeed about anything in her past. I had to rely on Auntie Kitty and her little sister Mary‘s recollections for clues. Wartime antics featured regularly. Their home in Essex was close to East London, so air raids were frequent. Usually the air was heavy with German bombers, but sometimes V2 rocket bombs droned across the sky. Doodlebugs!

During The Blitz, Nan stubbornly refused to leave the house during an air raid. The sirens wailed relentlessly but she would not be moved. Neither the public shelter, nor her end of garden, family size Anderson shelter, held any attraction for her. Her knees shook regardless. Nan was a gentle soul who loved nature but spiders and slugs were uninviting sleeping companions in a dug-out. Alternatively, the public shelter was a ten minute walk away and beyond safe reach. So, while the doodlebugs droned overhead, Mum and Nan crouched under the kitchen table, transfixed by the sound of the bombs’ motors. “Listen and await your fate,” they purred. Nan was a devout Catholic, so she prayed for them to pass overhead without cutting out. When one did, peace was quickly followed by oblivion, as the huge bomb cut through masonry and flesh. By a miracle, they escaped untouched.

Nan must have felt especially vulnerable after Mum enrolled in the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service, the female British Army). Mum left Essex to be an enemy aircraft spotter in Devon. On a lonely hilltop overlooking Plymouth Sound, Mum watched and plotted the courses of these killer planes, working for the ack-ack batteries protecting our naval dockyards from the German night bombers. Years later, struggling with dementia like Nan did, Mum tried to remember where exactly she was based, mentioning Seaton, a small seaside town near where I lived in East Devon. Wandering along the “prom” amongst holidaymakers licking ice cream cornets, we struggled to find the connection with Plymouth. Eventually, we discovered Seaton Barracks in the city of Plymouth. Plus, we found that her “ack-ack” guns were stationed at the exotically named Noss Mayo, in Devon’s South Hams. The village may have sounded like a south sea island in a Joseph Conrad novel, but it was quintessentially English.

These were the places beyond Nan’s kitchen table which featured in Mum's War. She enjoyed them enormously. The unit mascot, a sheepdog collie from a local farm, was called ‘Mary’ after Mum, in recognition of their mutual beauty. Would-be suitors chased after her, despite her name (Virgin Mary at roll call). She was popular. We visited Noss Mayo together. Mum’s face glowed with happiness as she stood by a pretty waterside cottage, remembering tea parties hosted by grateful locals for their ATS protectors. Young soldiers had zoomed in like wasps to the honeypot ladies, who flirted and ate scones spread with cream first then jam in the Devon way. I knew nothing of her Devon life before this day, yet I had chosen her special place as my home. Our poignant visit had revealed a touching coincidence.

Nanny Virgin loved a tipple, so Mum stowed away a few pennies or an occasional shilling from her meagre weekly household allowance, to treat her with. When we visited her cottage Nan always greeted us with outstretched arms, but not for a greeting hug - just the whiskey. I never felt her warmth or saw the lady hidden underneath the crust of debris from a hard life, because she was exhausted. She had been bounced around her kitchen by my grandfather, wall to wall, leaving her body broken and her face haggard from his abuse. Then dementia had occupied her empty shell.

Nan’s Leytonstone cottage bordered the open Essex countryside, which flooded across her unkempt garden in a flurry of wild flowers and crickets. All were welcome and offered sanctuary in the forgotten corners and dark nesting places of her home. Eventually, it became a depository crammed with detritus, including my own.

She had a favourite painting of mine which began life as numbers. I could recite our address, “faw-three-three Kath-er-ine Road,” with gusto, confident I should never get lost: I could stand erect to proudly intone Mum's Co-op membership number at checkout, “one-oh-five-oh-dubb-all-six-oh.” But I hated arithmetic. Then, by the till, I saw a ‘painting by numbers’ kit of a horse's head. That, to me, epitomised numbers: empty, without meaning in themselves, awaiting embellishment. I wanted it. The finished picture, plump with oil paint overflowing its rigid numbered lines, eventually hung in Nanny Virgin's kitchen. Its finish grew grubby with soot from the range, while the horse's head faded. Eventually the image was destroyed by its scorched varnish bubbling like boiled treacle, but the picture still sat comfortably in that old house.

On arrival, Mum would brush a chair, clean two teacups, and send me to retrieve a frosted glass and a bottle of flat cream soda from Nan's bedroom, where special things were kept. Here was her piano, barely upright, burdened by candelabras and woodworm. Sometimes she would tinkle those ivories, reeling off old songs and snatches of classics, all at breakneck speed in case she forgot them part way through. Inevitably, after chimney fires caused by careless lighting, with sheets of burning newspaper drawn up the flue, followed by an unlit gas oven threatening to blow her up, Nan was taken to an old folks ghetto, wardened accommodation. Her cottage was demolished and replaced by an estate of red brick houses, while Nan, always a victim despite her new ‘sheltered’ home, suffered a break-in.

Auntie Kitty found her, propped up against her bedroom cabinet, face smashed in like the window by her bed. In hospital, she remembered nothing (Would you remember, if you were an old lady with dementia, asleep, with only even one of those impediments?) Consequently, neither the police nor the hospital were interested and she was left to languish on a hospital ward. Mum wondered why no progress was made, until Aunty Kitty visited out of hours. She heard Nan screaming and found her being cruelly marched around the ward by two uncaring nurses.

Kitty was formidable. “Bring a doctor, NOW,” she demanded, while practising her Red Cross first aid training. Kitty found that her Mum was heavily bruised. An X-ray followed, showing a broken hip. “That forced exercise on the ward must have been truly been agonising,” she told us, not a dementia fuelled delusion like the nursing staff said.

Nanny Virgin died during her emergency hip operation.

A row ensued between our family and the hospital about how and where the hip injury happened. Was she extensively ill-treated at the hospital? Or did the intruder who smashed into her bedroom beat her up too? Neither the police nor the hospital authorities could answer the Coroner's questions at the inquest, so her death was recorded as a misadventure.

That verdict has disturbed me to this day. There can be no “rest in peace” for Nanny Virgin.

The horror of her death lingers, plus, the family squabbled over her will (a classic family feud: Mum's two devious brothers surreptitiously persuaded Nan to change her will entirely in their favour. Aunty Kitty contested this injustice on behalf of all three sisters, citing Nan's unsound mind, so the bogus will was voided), leaving me with an unsettling legacy.

I lost touch with what remained of Mum's family. The link faltered by my parents' grave, amongst the morbid wind chimes in their desolate cemetery. I buried Mum's fragile wedding ring as dowry for Dad in their joint grave. Auntie Kitty died soon after - her funeral, my pilgrimage. She was interred in the old City of London plague pit cemetery by Wanstead Flats, near to where I was born. The cattle still roamed their Commoners rights just as I remembered, drinking from the Hollow Ponds and evoking memories of Kitty and Mum, arm in arm discussing family business. I ran truant with Kitty's Golden Labrador one morning, playing out his long rope lead, dropping it, then losing it and the dog, in a bid not to be ignored. Dirk lolled about in the water for a while, supine, out of our depth, then legged it. He returned to his home, a disused coal bunker cum kennel in Auntie Kitty's back garden, while we searched for him in vain. It was a silent dinner that night. Dirk waited quietly, salivating under the table, until Kitty told him “no liver and bacon leftovers for you, bad dog,” when he switched to glaring begrudgingly at our plates.

The two sisters were close friends, so when Mum and I visited Auntie Kitty, I could conveniently disappear to poke about in the Forest. Red squirrels danced around me in sun flecked glades, and I watched tiny creatures in leafy micro worlds. The call to dinner was a wrench, with home-time blues to follow. I dreaded the sparking trolley bus journey home. I was afraid of fire, had it instilled in me by Mum. “Don't play with matches. Be careful lighting that gas hob. Don't put those dolls around the hearth.” Too late. Totty’s head caved in and oozed pink rubber down her neck into the flaring grate. And all my teddies lined up in a row were singed. Then one raw winter’s day, I watched the newspaper drawing a stubborn newly lit fire implode in flames and fly up the chimney, igniting it. Nan's house was threatened. I shrank away in fear. The fire engine, fire hose, fire men, and the roaring fiery noise, reinforced my horror of fire: but my love for water was confirmed because it was obviously the antidote.

Despite these hiccups, Mum and I loved boarding public transport and escaping to Kitty's Essex world. As a child, it was an adventure, but as I grew up, journeying around London became a chore. The countryside had been spoiled by urban sprawl and suburbia, with crowded trains and uncomfortable buses. But occasionally I did have exceptional journeys.

Chapter Four

The London Underground’s New Year’s Eve train services were usually nothing special. Passengers had to catch the last train, regardless of whether their evening out was finished or not, so the carriages therefore had an air of disappointment about them. They were generally quiet, apart from an occasional drunk in a kilt wailing highland ditties, or lads with cans and "up the hammers" refrains. I always tried to be somewhere positive on New Year’s Eve, not stuck in transit, weary after wine and fighting off sleep. But on New Year’s Eve in 1982, I found myself doing just that.

The train carriage doors slid open at Bromley-by-Bow, where the Underground becomes overground. Fresh air tumbled in. I gasped it like a swimmer breaking surface after a dive, then looked around and listened. It was quiet, not at all like a festive night. A lone river boat hooted, its high note fading to low and holding in the air like a wolf howling. Then another started up, plus dozens more, all vying for a high pitched solo spot before joining a richly layered chorus. Finally, a church bell tolled. It was midnight. New Year! The river boat horns reached a crescendo: I imagined dozens of individual ships’ bells clanging and ruddy faces lit by marine flares, hand held and waving, reflecting on the water surface with sparks whizzing past like shooting stars.

In the train carriage, my fellow passengers jumped up from their seats like the dead awakened. Hands were outstretched and “Happy New Year” exchanged. I could hardly believe it: we were celebrating, on the Tube, at midnight. It was unheard of.The moment lingered into minutes, but then the carriage doors closed with a clunk. Greetings completed, we were all left awkwardly standing until the train lurched then pulled away from the station. Like Cinderellas fleeing the party, everyone scuttled back to the security of their seats, grabbing books or shutting tired eyes as before. ‘Had it all been a dream?’ I wondered. No. Although we had reverted to normal passenger behaviour, withdrawn and insular, I had a warm glow inside me. I knew that I had witnessed and enjoyed a unique New Year celebration.

Christmas on the Underground was also memorable that year. I was sitting at the end of a row of seats, with a glass partition between me and the sliding doors, when a drunk lurched by. He nudged my foot as he passed, distracting me from the train driver singing tuneless carols over the intercom. It was a performance deserving commendation, but the only Christmas spirit amongst the passengers was inside that drunk propped against the doors. Suddenly his lolling head straightened and his eyes fixed on mine. Like a spitting cobra, his body stiffened and his head jutted forward. A stream of orange coloured vomit flew in an arc towards me. Horrified but pinned to my chair, I felt the air movement and smelt the whisky fumes and the puke. Splat! The glass screen was plastered in a vomit porridge but miraculously I remained clean. Meanwhile, the carriage had fallen silent. It stank and looked disgusting, but I was so relieved not to be covered in puke that I laughed. My fellow passengers did not join in.

Through the murky glass I watched the drunk drop down on all fours and crawl out onto the next station’s platform, where he squatted while everyone walked around him, just like they would a lump of dog poo. No one helped him, perhaps he choked. Happy Christmas.

At Upton Park, our local railway station in the 1960’s, the Underground was overground, with mainline steam trains passing through or sometimes waiting, steaming up. Much admired on the platforms, they were unwittingly showcased upstairs too. The Booking Office had soot encrusted windows, stuck open by broken sash cords, with blasts of steam billowing out from the line below. I watched as people literally disappeared, leaving only chuffing engine and shrill whistling sounds to fill the space after the fog cleared.

Upton Park, home of West Ham United football club (Dad's team: obsessive, dictatorial,  dominant in our house, with television football, radio football, Daily Mirror sports page football, in your face from his mouth football) was a place to avoid on Saturday afternoons. The Crowd was like a huge ball of energy, which tore through the station and ripped through the trains. “Don't catch their eye, sit huddled, be invisible,” I told myself, trapped on a train while a running knife fight was sweeping through the carriages. Then I saw them: skinheads from the Boleyn gang, jumping like fire crackers on and off the seats before the rest of the crowd pressed in. The Hammers had lost and someone had to pay. “Not me, please,” I prayed. The adjoining carriage doors slammed all along the train, menacingly, like beating drums, before the crowd reabsorbed them. Dad brought home a bag of monkey nuts that evening, munched while endless football results were enumerated on the telly, before eating our fish n' chip supper during ‘Match of the Day’.

Skinhead gangs were a feature of East London. I was an easy target, long haired, with tie dyed tee shirt and crushed velvet trousers. I vividly remember being marooned on a road island while I was pelted with greasy chips in a busy high street. Another day, a skinhead jumped me from behind, gripping my hair and screaming abuse, but I was carrying a large ceramic flowerpot (I loved cacti) which I thumped squarely into his stomach. He swore even more doubled up helplessly with pain while I escaped.

Another attack came as my Best Friend and I were waiting at a bus stop in a deserted Canning Town after dark. Unknown to our parents, we had been watching a rock band play in a packed pub. The cool night air was a relief after the crush, the booze and the fags, but our escape was short lived. I felt my long hair being grabbed from behind and yanked back, while cold metal crossed my throat. Irene screamed. I squirmed. After a struggle I corkscrewed under his arm and the metal frame of the bus shelter, which had been between us. The attacker had been reaching out, so that threw him off balance. He let go of me. I began to scream then too, forcing my attacker to slide back into the shadows, gliding slug-like along a wall until he disappeared. We stood in silence until the bus came.

East London seemed to be infested with indecent exposers, but we saw most of them off with hoots of laughter and much pointing. It did not occur to our childish minds that these men could be dangerous. We dared each other to go up to them and stare. I lost count of exactly how many sightings I had, but like trophies shot down in their prime, I could reel off a list of them when challenged by a rival flasher spotter. Some years later, teenaged and beyond childish giggles, I had my last encounter. In Upminster, at the posh end of the District line, a man hidden in a shop doorway flashed as I wandered past en route to a church organ recital. The irony hit me so hard I had to stop and roar with laughter. I named him the Organ Grinder. He went bright red, tucked himself away and shuffled off head down, hands in pockets, humiliated.

Our Gang did look a bit conspicuous carrying foiled umbrellas when the sun shone during the summer, so the Brolly Bashers were disbanded to avoid the police (or worse, our parents) suspecting that we were gangsters.

I had already been banned from visiting a fellow gang member’s home because her father said I was a bad influence. He actively disliked me, after I dunked my chocolate coated digestive biscuit into a cup of tea. The chocolate slid off the biscuit, forming an oil slick across the bitter liquid. As I drank, this left a greasy tide mark down the inside of his favourite mug, which I should not have been given in the first place. After snatching back his mug and rinsing it, he glowered at the soggy lump of biscuit huddling under siege in the bottom, then at me. If looks could kill, I would have been incinerated into a pile of dust like Dracula at daybreak, but I thought it was funny.

There was one incident which was deadly serious. It happened when I was a teenager.

Once, and only once, I accepted a lift from a passing stranger in a car. Of all the risks I have taken and dangers that I have faced, this is one of only a handful of incidents that I believe truly put my life in peril.

Chapter Five

Cold and miserable in a windswept open sided ‘shelter’, I had been waiting for a bus home from a small village in rural Essex. Over an hour had passed and I was considering trying to walk to Romford, the nearest town about six miles away. When a car drove slowly past, then stopped, reversed and its driver pointed and beckoned, I froze. Lifts from strangers were taboo. Yet, I was stranded. When the passenger door sprung open invitingly and the driver grinned, saying “Want a lift?” I wavered, pointing to a large parcel by my side, almost my height and half as wide. Mercifully, it was flat, but a month earlier, the painting I was carrying had been very awkward to bus to the village art shop for sale. Now, unsold and unwanted, it felt like an albatross strung around my neck.

The car driver stared at my package. ‘Is he going to slam the door, rev-up his engine and speed off?’ I wondered. But this was an estate car with a hatch back. ‘No problem’, he smiled, loading the picture and me, then trying to strike up a friendly conversation. “What luck,” he said, driving us along familiar streets, “my destination is the same as yours.”

We sat together in awkward silence for a while, until we slowed at a road junction and he turned left instead of right. “That's away from town, out into the countryside again,” I protested. He ignored me. I turned towards him to insist he was wrong. Only one of his hands was on the wheel. The other was masturbating. ‘Is he going to rape me?’ I thought, feeling queasy. ‘Maybe he intends to kill me, then dump my body.’ I was trapped.

In times of danger, when quick thinking is essential, split seconds take an eternity to pass. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion and from a distance, as though I was watching it unfold. I felt no panic - a spectator is beyond harm. I was floating high above the car, with another robotic me still active down below. My mouth had developed into a strange new life form, existing in its own right: a huge beak which clattered and jabbered. It created a wall of chatter between the stranger and myself, a shield which allowed me to ignore his disgusting behaviour. I carried on as though we were on a nice, ordinary, comfortable journey, while I waited for an opportunity to escape.

The road continued to rush by. We were out in Epping Forest now. I had noticed that the car was unlocked, but decided it would be foolish to throw myself out at speed. ‘Anyway,’ I thought ’he’s bound to make a grab for me. He looks very strong, heavy set verging on squat.’ Straining my neck to peer into the rear view mirror, I noticed that his eyebrows met across his forehead. A bad sign. “Neanderthal tendencies,” Mum had once told me. There was nothing I could do but sit still, trying to push aside the fear that he would murder me and no-one ever find my body. With my neck drawn down into my shoulders like a tortoise retreating into its shell, I waited to see what he did next.

Eventually, by a clearing in the woodland, he slowed the car and turned off the road. We bumped up and down over rough ground, creating a mini dust storm. I noticed that he had both his hands on the wheel, then we stopped. Everything had stopped: the car, the motor, my blabbering mouth, the man's masterbating hand. My heart. From somewhere deep within me I found a tiny voice. "Please". I turned to him, fully rooted in the moment. "Please listen." His head was facing away from me, but his eyelashes flickered. "I was only picking up my painting from the art shop and trying to take it home. That's all. I wasn't a tart touting for custom. You came along when I was stuck and you said you would help me. I trusted you. Can't you do what you said you'd do?" I knew that I was pleading for my life.

It was so quiet I could hear him breathing. It was erratic and then stopped. I held my breath too. Finally, he exhaled loudly, with his head waving from left to right, gesturing ‘no’. Was he exasperated, or shaking his head in disbelief at what he was about to do? He closed his eyes and brought his hands up from the steering wheel in fists, then banged them against it, hard, with his head down. I caught my breath and held it, watching his hands. His nails were dirty. “If he thrusts them at me I won’t be strong enough to fend him off.” I braced myself to twist sideways and try to release the door, but felt hopeless.

Suddenly, he moved. His head rose and his shoulders shifted up and back against the driver's seat. His hands moved down below his waist and fumbled. ‘Oh God, not that again,’ I thought, easing my arm towards the door handle. He was fiddling with the zip on his trousers. Those ugly hands, where were they going next? Towards me? No. He dropped them down to either side of him, one turning the ignition key and the other gripping the gear stick. We were off, juddering across the pot-holed car park and onto the road.

"Are you taking me home? Like you promised?"

"Yes. I am taking you home like I said I would."

I sat very still and watched the road ahead. Houses began to flicker past, replacing the forest and then at last we reached town. My parents' house was on the far side of it, but when the driver asked for direction, I hesitated, thinking. ‘Do I really want him to know where I live? No. So, I will take us to the nearest to the major road junction.’ There was a small pub just before it with an easily accessible car park. An anonymous place, which might be attractive to him, too: a young girl deposited home by a strange man could risk questions or confrontation from parents or neighbours. He nodded agreement to the drop off point. We drove on, with only my occasional "turn left" or "straight on" breaking the silence. My head felt like it was stewing in a pot, with words drifting out like bubbles as it boiled. All sense of time passing or coherent thought had gone. There was just the horror of the moment.

My abductor parked on the side road by the pub. He sat very still, motor running, waiting for me to leave. I could escape, but instead of grasping my opportunity, I turned to him and asked, "Could I have my painting please". As soon as the words hit the silence I regretted them. Was I as crazy as him? He could have walloped me unconscious, then driven off with me again. I knew that I should escape while I had the chance, but no, I sat there coolly in his car, waiting for a sex fiend to get out and remove my luggage as innocently as a taxi driver. Amazingly, he did. I saw him clearly then. He was in his mid-forties, dark haired, and dressed smart-casual like a well groomed golf club member. He looked perfectly ordinary and respectable, except for those caveman eyebrows. I could easily have described him in detail to the police and helped them build an identikit picture, or pick him out in an identity parade. He must have realised that. Why did such a dangerous man let me go?

I walked away from the car clutching my painting without daring to look back. I could feel him watching me, his gaze slithering down my spine. All the time I wondered if he was going to pounce from behind and drag me back into the car. After a few paces, my whole body began to shake, but desperation kept me moving while realisation came crashing in on me. Was I one of many pick-ups? He could have been a serial rapist and a multiple murderer. And I never reported him. No-one went willingly to the police where I came from.

It took me many years to feel completely free of him. I kept a lookout in case he came searching for the girl he let go. I never told my parents. No-one knew. Until now.

Chapter Six

My parents knew very little about my Docklands adventures. Our communication gap was huge, even when I was a child. I was always a rebel, a ‘tomboy’, never conforming to their idea of how a girl should be. Plus, the gaunt shadow of the war had haunted my early childhood, with bomb-sites all around and ‘going without’ almost a religion. How I welcomed the swinging sixties, growing into them with gusto, but my parents never did.

One day, over Sunday lunch, I told them a story from my teenage years. I was sometimes out all night helping with the St Mungo Community ‘soup run’ for down and outs in central London, or all day at Hyde Park’s open air music festivals - so I thought they must often have wondered what I’d got up to then. But no. Dad grew angry and fixed fiery eyes on mine across the dinner table, splattering accusations of pregnancy and abortion mixed with mint sauce and roast lamb into my face. It was all so preposterous that I laughed at him. Mum froze. Dad glared. I did have an Asian boyfriend briefly, and Dad like many white East Londoners then was racist. In his prejudiced imagination, I had become pregnant with a coloured child and done away with it. I should not have laughed - a real life Alf Garnett isn't funny. He suspected me of perpetrating two taboos and hated me for it.

My father was illegitimate. His brother and his sister were too, but it was kept secret while his parents maintained the pretence of marriage until he was aged 29. Out of the blue, he told me. “On their wedding day in 1946 I was my own father's Best Man, and a witness.” He tried to look amused but was deeply ashamed of being a bastard. It was part of the smouldering chip on his shoulder. “Florence Jane Hibble, a spinster aged 65, and James Charles Sandford, a former boilermaker aged 75, married when my father was free at last of his first wife,” Dad confessed. She had chosen death above divorce, forcing the family to endure the stigma of illegitimacy.

I have a single memory of my grandmother Florrie: tiny, shrew like and bad tempered, erupting from her scullery clutching a washing bundle like a mouse with stale cheese. I disliked her intensely. Perhaps it showed. Was the feeling mutual? She acted as though it was, either ignoring me or hissing “do as you’re told. Keep quiet or clear off.” She died soon after. I wasn't sorry. Mum wore black to the funeral, but looked stunning when she collected me from infants' school that day. Her dark wavy hair cascaded around her shoulders and her curvaceous black dress was crowned with a multi-coloured crystal brooch. Funeral? No - celebration!

My father had a brutal upbringing, which he continued like a family tradition throughout my childhood. His father had inflicted ‘the belt’ on his two sons in frequent ritualistic punishments, and ridiculed the two brothers for their ambition to leave private rental or council housing to buy their own houses. Their sister was ‘boxed around the ears’: a generation later, I was too, and actively discouraged from going to university or pursuing a career. East End women were kept at home and ‘knew their place’, I was told. It still rankles, because it made home life awful.  “Lay the table for Sunday lunch,” Mum had said, as she was busy in the kitchen. There were only three of us to dine. Father was reading his newspaper as he waited impatiently nearby, which made me edgy. Quickly, I clattered down the place settings and ‘wrongly’ set knives to the left, forks to the right.

My father scraped his chair heavily along the floor before moving towards me. As I laid the last of the cutlery, he grabbed a fork and stabbed me through the back of my hand. I was naturally left handed and so frequently cack-handed, which annoyed him and often made me the target of his rage.

It was decreed by authority that "thou shalt be right handed.” So being southpaw was wayward and had to be forcibly ‘corrected’. At school, I was made to sit at the front of class and watched by teacher. If I transgressed, she would reprimanded me by rapping my knuckles with a wooden ruler. My poor hands. How could they be so offensive? I still don't understand why they were beaten and stabbed. I have never forgotten those assaults.

My Mum suffered terribly from my father’s constant taunts and derision.“You will end up just like your mother, a madwoman,” he would tell her every day. The taunts accumulated. He drove her crazy. Imagine being forced to hide your true self to protect it from constant attack and bullying. Resistance was useless, only triggering further assault. At age forty Mum was reserved. At fifty, withdrawn. At sixty, despairing. Mum’s wavy black hair became grey and brittle. She was trapped, too old to leave. "You are just like your mother.” At seventy, unwashed and uncombed, mum’s bird nest hair clung stickily together in upright peaks. “You will go the same way as your mother.” Forgetful. Forgotten. Surprised if someone did notice her. Crushed if she was mistaken and they didn't. Mum’s dementia wasn't just an illness, it was the inevitable consequence of years of neglect and cruelty.

Which leaves me in a quandary. Mum. Her mother. Me. Dementia is in the genes, isn’t it? And I have faced domestic abuse, with violence too. Will I also become deranged, like them?

I had to break the pattern. My parents showed me how not to be. I did escape the drudgery of married life and find opportunities to better myself, despite Dad’s opposition. But it is hard to be successful from a working class background, with no-one influential to speak up for you. My father let himself be eaten him up in a cancer of bitterness. I wonder if Charlie Sandford secretly wished that he was born a Virgin, from affluent Essex.

Dad died in Millennium year 2000, dressed only in a sodden nappy on a hot day in August. He suffered from bowel cancer and lay dying while my mother scarcely noticed, or cared. She had descended into the hopeless pit of ‘Lewy' bodies dementia, chased by phantoms which blotted out my father’s plight. She may once have plotted revenge, for all her miserable years enduring his torments and bullying, but it was too late to savour it. Mum was dying too, joining him a few months later. No fresh start for her in the 2001 Millennium.

I hope that Dad has since found peace, coming back as he always wanted, soaring high in the sky as a skylark: a lovely speck, high pitched and singing, freed of his shoulder chip by infinity. Perhaps his song would be the same as mine might be, tinged with sadness that we were never fully reconciled.

Chapter Seven

Open skies with singing birds were scarce when I was a child in Docklands. We lived in Forest Gate, next to a wartime bomb site, with a devastated terrace end wall rearing up over our house and garden, blocking out our light. It was claustrophobic, so on Sunday afternoons, we would escape by walking out of the East End to Wanstead Park on the edge of Epping Forest. It was an amazing trek for a family with a small child, but Essex was worth the effort: I could pond dip and return with a seaside bucket full of sticklebacks or tadpoles, tipping them into my builders’ buckets menagerie at home to remind me of the countryside.

My longest living captive (two years) was a fish called Donald. My shortest lived (one day) were woodlice. Dad looked after our pet goldfish, Johnny, housed indoors in a tiny tank which he cleaned religiously every Sunday morning, for twenty one years. Tibby the tortoiseshell cat and Joey the budgie completed our household. No other Sandfords had pets, but all the Virgins did. Why was this? I fondly remember my Auntie Georgette being followed everywhere by her five yapping chihuahuas and Auntie kitty feeding her butcher husband Phil’s stray cat menagerie. But the Sandfords? Only rabbits, to eat. Was it just because East Enders had harder lives, immortalised by their stoicism  in the Blitz?

In West Ham, close to the Royal Docks, my father's family endured incessant air raids during the war. They were bombed out twice. I remember their third and final house: it had a huge sewage pipe running along in the open air behind it. Just as well that wasn’t bombed, because the outside ‘privy’ was rank smelling enough as it was. Beyond lay devastated houses morphed into wasteland. Bomb sites. I was a post war child who grew up with them all around. Bomb damaged houses gaping cellars. Wild gardens featuringred brick rockeries and feral cats. Years later, some were still

there, mature bomb sites, abundant with life. Scrubland grew from nutrients present in the brick dust, aided by pioneer plants like clover which injected nitrogen into embryonic soil. Buddleias with butterflies flourished in wasteland drinking in the sun. Until the late fifties, when most were reclaimed and gone.

Only the river kept big skies, while the city grew and jostled for space along its crowded banks. But then the Docks died. The devastation of Docklands that I witnessed in the 1980's hit it like another Blitz, except that this time there were no shelters for its people. Emptied of population, the land awaited renewal and rebirth.

The London Docklands Development Corporation was responsible for much of the area that my project was covering. I went to see them, hoping for financial support, at their West India Dock HQ. A darkly suited man sat at the far end of a huge table, distant and in silhouette against a window. This symbolised power to an outsider like me and should have been intimidating, but my attention focussed instead on a dog sitting at the table too. A Cavalier King Charles Spaniel was ensconced in a soft leather committee member chair. I abstractedly put my bag down and fussed my new friend, ignoring the man I should have been seeing. Seconds later however, he was with me, swopping stories about his spaniel compared to mine, similar to his, as though we had all been friends for years. John Grosser told me that Kimber was named after his college "scout" at Oxford, who I imagined must have been quite a character, sporting large droopy ears and panting a lot. Perhaps man Kimber had been asthmatic, but doggie Kimber was just excited and hot. Distraction aside, I was awarded one-off funding to help me complete the project, despite its obvious criticism of the widespread destruction that LDDC appeared to be encouraging.

Months later I was surprised to receive a telephone call from John, sounding distraught. He had been headhunted by the Scottish Whisky Distillers Association, but his dog was not welcome. “Could you re-home him?” he asked. When I took Kimber, that powerful executive broke down in tears. The LDDC had lost a fine man.

After completing photographic work on Cockney Waters in 1983, I spent the following two years trying to publicise and sell it. This entailed writing to institutions about the project and then traipsing around London with my work, trying to persuade them to stage an exhibition or help publish it, and to give me some financial support. The Guildhall Library and Tower Hamlets Council invested in the project in addition to LDDC.

The Museum of London responded by inviting me to an interview to show them my work. The initial reception was good, but despite an assistant's recommendation, the Director was too busy to see me. I was deeply disappointed. He was in an adjacent room, so near that I could hear him say he was busy, and had never heard of me, anyway.

Only the Guildhall really saw Cockney Waters as an important historical and social document, helping me to stage an exhibition in 1985 at the Guildhall Art Gallery. It lasted a month, but had no publicity, so hardly anyone visited. I was gutted. It broke me as a creative photographer. I never attempted a large photographic project again.

Now, almost forty years on, River Thames water is clear and full of marine life and its banks are crammed with smart apartments. TSB ‘Will’ sails the waters by charter, handsome in her white hull with gold trim. TSB ‘Vigilant’ has a new hull and a new home port. Essex turned its back on her when help was requested, refusing to support her restoration, so Devon embraced her instead. She is now proudly ‘TSB Vigilant of Topsham’. But what happened to the Cockneys who used to live and work in Docklands?

My own immediate family moved along the District Line from Upton Park to Hornchurch. A cousin moved main line to Rainham; my childhood best friend went off to Canvey Island; close friends of my parents moved along the Central Line to Loughton. Meanwhile, Dad became a refugee in Harold Wood, making sliding doors and hating it. He had taken pride in his work at Robinson King in Stratford, making smoky peach glass mirrors, or feathering acid to etch brilliant-cut fancy window panes. This firm shared the manor of another Firm, the Krays. Dad would often have a beer in the Two Puddings pub, where the twins drank, before the shooting there blasted Ronnie and Reggie into notoriety and prison.

What became of my Uncle Joe Evans’ family, amateur boxers and associates of the Krays? "I don't want to bore you so stop me if you've heard this before,” he would say (no stopping once started), before telling his wonderful stories. During World War One, illuminated by searchlights, he witnessed Zeppelins bombing London from his hideaway in the hold of ship, having runaway from home aged fourteen. He travelled the world, especially Africa, returning multilingual to Docklands - telling tales interspersed with Arabic phrases or Swahili asides in polished but still Estuary English. What a Cockney character, in his camel coat and loudly chequered suits! No wonder he was the darling MC of East End boxing, and counted Henry Cooper and Cassius Clay amongst his friends.

At Uncle Joe's funeral, a finely plumed horse drawn carriage carried his casket, led by a top hatted undertaker. A procession of elderly men followed behind on foot. They were edgy in the spotlight, all gangsters from London manors representing their own underworlds at the gateway to the next. I thought of the axe man Uncle Joe had described, who chopped up his bodies and burnt them in his cosy front room grate. He carelessly put the ashes out for dust men to collect, with a giveaway ringed finger still intact. I’d often stood on Wanstead flats, peering at a row of terraced houses, wondering which one the monster had lived and killed in. At Uncle Joe’s funeral, I tried not to stare. “What a tribute from these quiet men, united in their grief and respect,” I thought as I watched them, wondering who they really were.

And now I wonder who I am. Docklands, Epping Forest; town, country; London, Essex and the Thames. All of them were mine. Moving further along the railway lines was a logical progression for my family. Did most of the displaced Docklands community follow suit? I think it must have, eventually, after the massive upheaval that scattered us. My pictures are an eerily empty, poignant record of a way of life that had to be abandoned.

From Tower Bridge to Shoeburyness, from The City to the Essex salt marshes, the river ran and so did I, to Devon. My life. My elusive heritage. My ghosts. All remain shrouded in those muddy ‘Cockney Waters’.

Cockney Waters Part One continued

My photographic journey through East London by river and then on foot, from the edge of The City at Tower Bridge to the Thames estuary and Essex coast.

Picture Sequence with commentary

A riverside voyage aboard Thames Sailing Barge ‘Will’, from a murky dawn to the dusk of a hot summer day.