Back in 1970, I found myself moving into one of the largest council estates in the UK. Leigh Park is a massive housing complex owned by Portsmouth City Council. It houses those who can’t afford their own homes by offering subsidised rents. The houses are good and solid, there’s enough land with each to grow some vegetables. If you can put up with a few dodgy neighbours it’s possible to have a reasonable standard of life, although if you’re a Times or Guardian reader you’d better forget it.
At the time, my then-wife Cindy was pregnant with our daughter, which is what had made us eligible for assisted housing. We’d been living in the city in a run-down flat for a while and attended the local congregation, Portsmouth South, where trouble was a-brewin’!
Many of the newly married couples had gravitated towards each other, and rumours were just starting to surface as to exactly what these couples were doing on their frequent get-togethers. Whatever it was, Cindy and I were on the fringes, pregnancy not being an desirable commodity at these little soire’s - so when the opportunity came to move away from the city, we were quite glad to be gone. Until…………
One day, in the back garden of our new home, I heard Cindy talking animatedly through the thick hedge at the bottom of the garden. She called me over and introduced me to the couple on the other side of the hedge. Their garden backed on to ours. Now I didn’t know this couple, but Cindy quickly explained that they were JW’s who had just left the city at the same time as we had arrived, about a year beforehand. They too knew about the goings-on in Portsmouth but, like me were unaware that one day, they would also be labelled as part of the "Dirty Dozen".
Larry and Isobel, as they were called, had a young son and Isobel too was pregnant again, so we began to associate with them sometimes as we seemed to have something in common. Larry was a real character, when anything pleased him, he would exclaim “Mustard!” very loudly. I thought Isobel weird, for example she didn’t peel potatos before slicing them up for chips. She also had a complexion similar to that of a potato. I digress.
One day, Larry called me over to show me his new car, a huge Vauxhall Viscount. Actually it was crap car to drive, a bit like driving a 3-piece suite. He then lowered the glove compartment and showed me what was concealed in the interior. Blue magazines! WoW!
Now I had never seen anything like this before and I was absolutely astonished that a fellow witness could look at such things, so I checked through all the mags carefully, and, yes, they were all absolutely, well, unbelievable. Gosh! They looked like they belonged to a gynaecologist or similar, whatever, I never looked at a cucumber again in the same light.
A couple of weeks went by, and once again I found myself down by the hedge at the bottom of the garden, when I heard Larry calling through to me. I pushed the branches aside to view an un-shaven, red-eyed and tousled Larry, who exclaimed that Isobel had packed her bags and left him, gone home to her parents with one kid and one on the way, and that her parents were going to call the police if Larry so much as entered their home town of Worthing in nearby Sussex.
Why why why, I droned, you seemed to be quite happy, how can her JW parents do this to you Larry? Hmm, Larry shuffled his feet and mumbled about perhaps making excessive demands of his missus, whatever, he was obviously now rated as a pervert by JW Isobel’s JW family, who had more than adequate means with which to provide for their newly esconced daughter.
A few more weeks dragged by, then, late one night, at around 3.30am, all hell broke loose. I was awakened by the loudest roar that I have ever heard in my life. Our bedroom windows shook and rattled and the whole room was lit up in a brilliant light through the carelessly drawn curtains. The loud, deafening roaring just went on and on.
I rushed to the window, and there, at the end of my garden, I could see Larry’s house in flames. The roof was partly gone and white-ish flames were jetting from the windows like the flame from a gas-torch. The noise was absolutely incredible. All the houses around were lit up as though it was a summers day. Birds were flying panic-stricken everywhere, having been thrown off their roosts by the blast. It was indescribably terrifying.
But the most terrifying thing was just starting to impinge upon my dulled hearing. It was Larry’s voice, screaming from inside the burning building…
End of Part1.
Englishman.
Bring on the dancing girls!