I love the word geezer, it's one of my favourite words. It's cocky, confident, masculine and full of working class pride. It's also geographically specific to the place and decade in which I was raised. Often a term of brotherly affection, I'm not sure there is a greater aspiration in life than to be 'a diamond geezer'.
I was one of those weird, loner kids. Not bullied, that was never gonna happen with the back up of six older brothers and sisters, but never really part of any crew, always on the periphery. Apart from anything else I was mute. One day when I was still really young I just decided to stop talking, and waited to see if anyone noticed. Nobody did, so I carried on, feeling happier and safer in my silence. Having an innate sense of self will over physics, I thought if I remained silent I would disappear, become invisible, duck a few blows at home and be forgotten about. Being a voluntary mute is much easier than you imagine, especially in a family of eight kids, where generally the hard part was getting a word in. Most people are happy to be given the space to do the talking and I was happy to let them fill that space chatting breeze.
To escape the mayhem of a large Irish family crammed into a two bedroom council maisonette, I would disappear on my own in an act that I called 'going out'. Going out was venturing into the forgotten, abandoned, nowhere places that exist in abundance in the space where the city dwindles and countryside proper has yet to begin; the landscape you pass through on the way to the neatly clipped hysteria of the suburbs. In London this was Zone 4. Growing up on the edge of London, the wrong side of the North Circular road, these edgelands were on my doorstep with a host of magical spaces: ditches full of frog spawn; abandoned concrete forecourts bursting with spring flowers; and rewilded shrubland, overlooked and forgotten by authority of any kind. An ideal space for the lone wolf and a young lad looking for something to do, a landscape waiting with accidental adventures.
I would spend days cycling on my brother's racer around the wide open roads and carparks of the industrial estates, empty and silent for the weekend. Vast functional spaces made up of wide tarmac forecourts and grey flat pack buildings, signed of with Irish names from men to their sons. Here I would practice stunts and no hands; learning to lean back, balance, relax and move with the bike. My T-shirt stripped, bare-chested, white skin pinking, freckles popping. Feeling cocky, confident and king of the road.
On unofficial tipping sites where the ground was springy with rotting mattresses lying hidden beneath the lush grass and sticky weed; nature quietly reclaimed the avaricious junk, creating strange rectangular plateaus on the landscape. In the corners of the field, dog roses embraced plastic toys, and old washing machines slowly rusted into orange puddles. Here I would build my own house, making walls and a roof from wooden pallets complete with manky carpets I dragged across the field in an act of determination to have a 'proper looking floor'. My very own palace, boasting a mouldy sofa and smashed tv. When I finished, the final job was to make a fire, no home complete without the hearth and as the evening came in I would do what every Catholic boy does when they are in front of a fire; I would dream into the flames and be reminded of the hell that awaited me.
Industrial wastelands are the domain of men, big men in big trucks, with yellow vests. Men whose job it is to operate machines that can lift up cars and crush them whole. With the men at home for the weekend, I would squeeze under the gates of the scrap yard and creep between the towers of crushed steel. Knowing I had entered the space I was not yet big enough to fill, a cathedral of masculinity. My heart would pound as I moved between the monuments of twisted steal and smashed glass. Here is where our men would spend their day crushing the dreams of other men into transportable cubes of metal. Collecting bravery I would climb up into the cab of the fork lift truck. Had the key been left waiting to be found for Monday morning? And if it had, would I have the balls to turn it? This landscape is full of statuesque beauty made by men, and holds untold risk opportunities for boys looking to be men.
In rewilded strips of woodland sandwiched between the A406 and retail parks, I would wander below the canopy of young trees, under fervent bird song dedicated to the task of mating, despite the competition from the big road. Standing pissing into the fractured sunlight, claiming this little strip of bluebell magic as my own, and leaving a warning to the foxes. This place was taken.
And then there were horses, lonely horses in fields. Climbing the fence and clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth, the big, lolloping cob came over looking for a treat or attention. Proudly I ran my hand over its strong flank and gently, tentatively, stroke its velvety nose. Admiring the manes and feathers of travellers horses, with their long, lucky tails caked in mud and needing a groom. If the horse tolerated this attention, I would smoothly edge over the fence and slid across its broad back. I'd like to say I rode bareback, but mainly I just sat on the horse and it did what it liked.
In these wide open spaces, detail is sparse but when it comes, it stands stark and resilient against a brutal landscape; This is where I came to practice being a geezer away from the scorn and the straight jacket that was home. In secret, I spent days perfecting the walk. You know the walk? The one where your balls are so big that the width of your stride takes up the whole of the pavement. Yeh, that walk. Convinced that I had that down, I tried it out one day back home on my estate in front of the other lads and my sisters, less said about that the better.
The best prize was coming across an abandoned car. With number plates stripped, a gift silently waiting for this burgeoning arsonist. Standing back as I ceremonially deliver the last sacraments and waited in excitement for the fuel tank to catch. Knowing the soul of the car was no longer with us but lived on in the memory of Sharon & Dave whose names still stretched across the windscreen where their love had been consummated. Cremating cars always made a good day.
Spiked with hunger, I'd cycle home under the giant concrete pillars that hold up the A406. Cold, even in the middle of summer and smelling of damp shadows and diesel fumes, the constant drum of traffic overhead. Would today be the day that the giant pillars crumbled? One HGV too many. In the dark, damp corners of the underpass a poet had dreamt of a better future leaving evidence of his dreaming with a simple anarchy sign.
In the year before I left the edgelands I got the closest I had ever got to being one of the geezers. By now my favourite older sisters had become a favourite of all the geezers on our estate. Their bicycles had been swapped for pimped out cars with pumping speakers and lights that glowed under the chassis. These working class masterpieces would be raced and wheel spun around the industrial estates at night. In a bid to get in my sister's knickers, the geezers would have to put up with her younger sibling, not only that, they had to let me drive their car. My sister always made everyone pay. I think this was my fist real lesson in what a man would do to get his dick sucked.
Eventually I gave up trying to be a geezer. Gave up on trying to join the world of men. It was never gonna be possible now my hips and curves had begun to betray me. So Instead I joined John Major's army of teenage mothers and waited in line for my council flat. Sending the conservative press into hand-ringing frenzies over societal breakdowns and the emergence of the new repulsive underclass. That was a long long detour, in which I learnt to speak and raised two kids, and navigated the world as a working class woman with all the joy and shit that that brings. But this bit of writing is about masculinity, and in particular working class masculinity and the landscape where I found it. In London's own mythical badlands, the forgotten nowhere places of zone 4 with its miles of pylons and unkept, uncared for spaces, I lived my secret boyhood.