What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

JOSEPH CONRAD

On a foggy autumn morning in Southampton’s eastern suburbs, you can hear ships’ horns cutting mournfully through the thick air like sonorous sheep lost in the mist. By night the clank-clank of the dredger takes over, as it gouges out a passageway from the sea bed. In the still air sound bounces off suburban walls, and behind curtain-darkened windows families gather round flickering TV sets, just like families all round the country, in other suburbs of other provincial towns.

This is Sholing, where I grew up. There was little to distinguish it from other suburbs, still less as an adjunct to a port; a transient place which people passed through rather than visited for itself, Sholing had little claim on the national consciousness. A jumble of Victorian villas, 1920s semis and post-war estates, its name – Anglo-Saxon, meaning ‘the hill by the shore’ – may have dated back to the Domesday Book, but the place no longer had any discernible centre, its borders only vaguely marked by vestigial streams and river valleys once wide enough to earn the area its ancient title. Once the sea came closer to these hills; more recently, this was still open countryside, Hampshire heathland rolling gently eastwards from Southampton, yielding soft fruit from its fields, shingle from gravel pits, bricks out of clay seams, water from its springs. For centuries its common land was used as a military camp, as archery grounds and shooting ranges, a place for soldiers, travellers and horse traders.

Then, gradually, its population began to grow, shifted here by the industrialisation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the incomers this indefinable area needed an identity, something to give it meaning; the one it acquired came from a past which its more genteel residents would have preferred to forget: Spike Island.

Ask any local of a certain age or disposition and they’ll come up with various explanations for the nickname. Some cite the heathland’s characteristic gorse, Ulex europeaus, which still sprouts up wherever it can, spiky and resilient, once collected by furze-cutters for fuel or cattle fodder. Its toughness has its own romance as ‘one of the great signature plants of commonland and rough open space, places where lovers can meet, walk freely and lose themselves, if need be, in its dense thickets’. Others attribute the name to the spike shape of the area itself, a memory of the time when the sea did indeed come closer to its hills, yet an island now only within the extended boundaries of the rivers Itchen and Hamble which separate this peninsula from the rival city ports of Southampton and Portsmouth.

Of little agricultural benefit, until 1796 the heath was marked on maps as ‘Nomans Land’, and held just forty-three permanent inhabitants. Only in the last years of the eighteenth century, as the common land began to be privatised by the Enclosures Act, did houses appear in any number: low brick cottages built by travellers attracted by the troops stationed on the common with whom they could trade.

Marked out by the caravans in which many of them still lived, they were looked down upon by the inhabitants of the older villages of Weston, Woolston and Netley nearby. Perhaps it is no coincidence that ‘spike’ was also argot for the workhouse, or that the gypsies called themselves ‘pikeys’, another potential source for the nickname. Long established in Hampshire and its New Forest, they were living outside the confines of normal life on this furzy heathland, its spiny gorse somehow expressive of their own resilience, and perhaps this sense of being outside, of being beyond the law and civilisation, informed the most romantic of the explanations for Sholing’s nickname. It was claimed that convicts being transported to Australia were held on its common, chained by their feet to a great spike.

Transportees convicted at Winchester’s courts were certainly marched to the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, and could have been stabled for the night there, just as their fellow inmates from Dorchester gaol were held overnight in a prison-like barn with slit windows and oak studded doors, ‘all chained to a central post’. The place became known as ‘Botany Bay Farm’, just as the first part of Sholing to be settled in the 1790s was nicknamed ‘Botany Bay’ after the new penal colony of New South Wales.

From 1831 to 1840, more than 50,000 men and women were transported from England. The gypsies were particular victims of these purges, subject to persecution in the Southampton area in the tumultuous first few decades of the nineteenth century. With a population driven by the enclosures from the country to the city, crime rates and a general instability necessitated the invention of a new sort of English colony, an ‘official Siberia’. These penal settlements came to occupy some impossibly remote part of the public imagination, places of horror and damnation where men made pacts to kill themselves in order to escape the appalling conditions.

If Sholing’s Spike Island had witnessed the export of unwanted Englishmen and women to become colonial forced labour, then perhaps it was a mirror image of the slave trade that had been carried out from other British ports, at Bristol and Liverpool, where other Spike Islands would be found. But if Botany Bay was the slavery of Britons by any other name, then the most likely explanation for Sholing’s nickname seemed both to reflect this sense of a prison colony on the other side of the world, and to relate it closer to home.

Across the Irish Sea, a small island off Cobh in Cork Harbour had been settled by monks in the seventh century. Its name was Inis Pich – Spike Island – depicted on early maps as a spike-shaped piece of land. Used since Cromwellian times for holding Irish rebels, by 1847 Spike had become a dedicated penal colony, a nineteenth-century Robben Island for deportees, ‘From th’emerald island/Ne’er to see dry land/Until they spy land/In sweet Botany Bay.’ Up to 4,000 convicts at one time were held here, clad in grey jackets, moving great mountains of earth and rock to construct the island’s fortifications, building their own prison walls. Many would be buried in the bleak ‘convicts’ graveyard’ in one corner of the island, marked only by numbered headstones. In 1916 Spike would be used to confine the insurrectionists of the Easter Rising and the seeds of modern troubles. The island was handed back to the Irish in 1938, but its inmates could still be identified by particular tattoos indelibly marking its provenance on their hands, as indelibly as the island was marked with its past.

There was, I now realise, an almost genetic reason for my mythologising of my suburban surroundings, for my fascination with these tenuous traces of local history: their arcane details seemed to reference a greater story; a personal thread which linked the legends of Sholing-as-Spike Island. My maternal forefathers had been involved in the slave trade in Liverpool, while my father’s ancestors had fled Ireland during the potato famine. Such dark romantic notions counterpointed the ordinariness of present-day suburbia, and seemed to ally me to Sholing’s shadowy epithet. They gave my rootlessness an identity.

By a strange process of insult and immigration, the infamy of Ireland’s Spike Island, wreathed in crime, insurrection and its terrifying consequences, had been transposed to an odd little suburb hundreds of miles away in southern England. In the mid-nineteenth century, Irish workers were attracted by the ship-building industries of Southampton and Woolston’s dockyards, and by the shipping lines which had begun to ply between Southampton and New York. Just as the gypsies had acquired the slur of ‘Botany Bay’, so the incoming Irish brought with them the reputation of Spike Island – used either in half-ironic humour by themselves for their southern exile, or by their suspicious neighbours as a slur on their supposedly criminal characters. They would come to glory in the nickname, perhaps as a rebellious gesture against the moneyed class which also began to move into the neighbourhood.

Courtesy of the railway and Southampton’s growing port, land here had begun to command a premium, and in the 1850s came more houses, constructed from the products of the local brickworks and gravel pits; slowly at first, then moving more swiftly along the new railway line from Southampton to Portsmouth, over a horizon as yet undarkened by brick and slate. Then grander houses appeared, wide double-fronted houses in yellow brick, as if their colour marked them out from the commoner product of Spike Island’s clay and its brickworks. Invested with authority and capital, their inhabitants aspired to gentility, with their mock turrets, conservatories and brick walls. Sholing acquired the veneer of respectability; the institutions of church, freemasonry and local politics. Its pines and cedars and holly hedges set out the social status of its merchants, vicars, doctors, shop-keepers, all firm in their expectations of the future.

Then the unthinkable happened, and Armageddon intervened on this complacent scene. After the First World War the serried ranks of ‘homes for heroes’ marched over the land, their strip-like plots providing every Englishman with his own piece of land. The larger, older houses shrank into flats or nursing homes, or disappeared into rubble and rhododendron; gypsy cottages became bungalows or crumbled back into the dirt from which they came. After the Second World War, developers finished what the bombs had started. Spike Island was swallowed up by modern suburbia and the discrete identity of Sholing was blurred – a process almost complete by the time our family moved there in the early 1960s.

On my way to school, I used to walk past a cottage around the corner from our road, one of the low little homes that dotted the neighbourhood. In its garden stood a round summerhouse, ingeniously constructed to turn heliotropically, like a flower following the sun. Its windows were empty, the green paint peeling from the wooden slats. I’d imagine some frail elderly lady sitting inside, dressed in lace like tea-stained curtains, the pale sun falling on her papery skin. Then one day the summerhouse disappeared, and in its place grew a bed of blinding French marigolds.

Along these avenues and cul-de-sacs, the comforting icons of stained-glass sunbursts and galleons on wavy seas would soon give way to the bland stare of plastic windows, and the porches which welcomed the milkman or postman would be boarded up against the world. But for now the corner shop still sold Fruit Salad and Blackjack chews, the grocer sliced cooked meat with scything machines ready to take off an inattentive finger, and the chemist had huge bottles of blue and red water in the window and cream and chrome scales on the counter for weighing babies like quarter-pounds of sweets.

On the other side of the road from the cottage and its summerhouse ran a ribbon of woody valley where a meandering, rusty stream sought the freedom of the sea. Around it lay the vestiges of Sholing Common, the traces of its ancient provenance marked only on old Ordnance Survey maps in the gothic script of tumuli and Roman roads. The valley was crossed by Church Path, a narrow lane which descended steeply to the stream, then rose up towards a stone and slate church with a modest steeple, described in Pevsner’s Buildings of England as ‘prettily set in a pine-backed churchyard in a strange Victorian rural backwater of suburban Southampton’.

Those pines were less covered by sinuous ivy than they have since become, but even then Church Path was a shadowy place. My mother would point out tiny gravestones in its churchyard, memorials to Romany children from Botany Bay, where the dark-faced inhabitants, looking like ancient Britons, spat at us while we waited in the family car as our parents went to buy some plants from their father. Their caravans stood next to their bungalows, and sometimes we’d hear the sound of horse hooves clattering down our road, and run out to see the young blades riding past on a pony and trap.

Invested with the strangeness of the people who lived beyond Church Path, this wilderness at the bottom of our road both fascinated and terrified me. It was where, in my imagination, chained convicts awaited their criminal exile, languishing on the scrubby grass, indolently desperate figures out of Gustave Doré’s Dante. During the war, barrage balloons had been set up on the common, leaving behind rusty iron rings which in my mind became tethers for the manacled prisoners. Now they secured two lonely gypsy ponies, slow-moving, semi-wild beasts with shaggy manes, big round bellies and a sad look in their big black eyes, as if to plead for their release.

Sometimes, on the bus from school, I’d go on a stop and walk back through Church Path. It was a self-consciously daring act. The way home led through a green tunnel overhung by yew, ivy and laurel, dipping steeply into the damp valley before the distant light at the end; the pathway was dark and scary even on a sunny day. I once found a dead mole there, its black velvet unbloodied, tiny pink fin-like paws sticking out stiffly at right-angles to its lifeless and blind body, like an abandoned soft toy dropped from a passing pushchair. On the other side of the path from the churchyard – where a girl from up the road once told me I’d be haunted that night because I’d walked across a grave – was a derelict house. Its garden contained a large rectangular pit roughcast in concrete, apparently a pre-war swimming pool. It may have been the same girl who told me that the house had been owned by a Dr White, and that he had invented something called the tampon. In fact, the owner was a plain Mr White, undistinguished by the invention of anything at all.

Below the churchyard, where dead wreaths and old prams were chucked over the iron railings into the valley’s dip, was another low cottage with a tiled roof and green wooden door; smoke could sometimes be seen coming from its chimney. It looked like a farmhouse left over from a previous century, still standing firm in the last vestiges of wild land as the modern world closed in; or like the old railway carriage in which we used to take our holidays at Gunard on the Isle of Wight, around which the bats flew at night.

Chickens pecked about in the small patch of cultivated land in front of the house, and there was a tethered goat with curly horns and bulging eyes with demonic slits for pupils. Another Church Path legend claimed someone had been murdered in this valley, blasted at short range with a shotgun; I saw the act replayed in slow motion, the blue smoke of the weapon’s discharge, the recoil of the body, the red of the victim’s blood. Although I had no reason to suspect the inhabitants of this cottage – which, like the rotating summerhouse, disappeared sometime later in my childhood – I was scared of the seldom-seen old man who lived there. Sometimes he would stand by his cottage door, white-haired, bent double and propped up with a stick. Perhaps his wife joined him, in a white pinafore, her hair done up in a silver bun. Or perhaps I invented the scene, like the psychic timeslip in The Man Who Fell to Earth, when the orange-and-yellow-haired alien, Thomas Jerome Newton, is driven through countryside and glimpses a family of nineteenth-century hillbillies outside their shack, its chimney smoking, a burst of inter-bred banjo on the soundtrack.

Like the privet cutway that ran up the back of our house where my brothers used to catch bucketfuls of slow worms, these wild places produced tales of innocence and loss, of murder and abandoned babes in the wood. From Church Path, the stream flowed through the old clumps of bamboo planted by the inhabitants of the cottage, past Mr White’s concrete pool and widened out into Miller’s Pond, a still, deep pool overshadowed by the tall brick arches of a railway viaduct. There were tadpoles and sticklebacks in the water, and it froze solid in winter, its glaucous ice spiked with dead bullrushes. On our way to the park we would walk past the pond, and I’d lean over the low wall and look down into its brackish water, imbued as it was with another local legend.

One Sunday in February 1909, Alfred Maurice Mintram, the fourteen-year-old son of Charles Mintram, a coal porter who lived at Fir Grove Road – the road which crossed ours – was spending the afternoon sliding on the iced-up pond. A witness to the subsequent enquiry was walking round the pond ‘when someone shouted that there was a boy drowning’.

He ran round the bank, and saw a constable taking his tunic off, and together they went to the lad’s assistance. They got to within four yards of him, and witness called out that they would soon get to him. Deceased replied, ‘Hurry up, I can’t hold on much longer.’ The next minute, the ice gave way, and they were all struggling in the water. There was ice between them and the boy, and it was impossible to reach him. There were no ladders or ropes or anything they could have used. The boy threw up his hands and went down …

Reported to the coroner, in the still, formal air of the courtroom, the boy’s last words – plaintive, panicking, banal – seemed to presage a forthcoming tragedy which would strike the inhabitants of these streets and households. The melodramatic fatalism of the scene is compounded by postcards depicting the boy’s funeral, his classmates clumped together on a cold day in February, dressed in their Sunday best, bearing wreaths. Another card shows Alfred’s humped grave in Sholing churchyard, surrounded with laurel leaves and a row of five bouquets laid along its top, each protected by an odd wire frame like an upturned hanging basket. Three years later, the same families would lose brothers, fathers and lovers who foundered, like Alfred Mintram, in icy water, uttering similarly plaintive cries as Titanic sank.

I have only a vague memory of the house in which I was born, in Portswood, on the other side of the Itchen which divides Southampton as clearly as the Thames divides London. ‘Akaba’ had been the home of an army officer, and had been empty for some time when my newly-married parents discovered it in 1941, and managed to lease it, for one pound a week, from the major’s widow.

The house was a large, semi-detached, red-brick villa; the names engraved on its lintel and those of its neighbours – ‘Rahwali’, ‘Gwalia’ – were as redolent of the last century as the street itself, named Osborne Road after the late Queen’s Isle of Wight retreat. The monkey puzzle tree that stood along the road was a further mark of Victorian gentility, its spiky exoticness somehow reminiscent of a colonial past. Superstitiously, we’d hold our breath as we passed it, for fear something awful might befall us.

Set on the corner of the road and raised above pavement level with a walled garden, Akaba had a turret which loomed proprietorially over the junction on which it stood. It also had bellpulls to summon servants from its kitchen and scullery, and a wide mahogany staircase which turned at right-angles past a stained-glass landing window. Not that I remember much of this. My only memory – indeed, my very first memory – of Akaba is of waking in my cot; I must have been less than two years old. Gripping the wooden bars, I hauled myself out of prison and, reaching up to the bedroom doorknob, carefully descended, with a toddler’s halting step, the big, wide, dark stairs illuminated by pale coloured light, looking for my mother. It must have been summer – it was still daylight – and as I made my surprise entrance in the sitting room downstairs, I saw the upturned and startled faces of my parents and three brothers. Amused at my audacious jailbreak, my mother scooped me up in her arms and carried me back, with certain praises for my adventurousness, to bed. It is a virgin memory, of a life light and uncluttered and untainted by anything other than love. The dark red brick of the house in which I lived did not register on my consciousness.

In 1962, our house – which my parents had by now bought – was compulsorily purchased to make way for a bypass which would remain unbuilt for twenty years. When it was finally constructed, the planners had no need of the land freed by Akaba’s demolition, which was promptly acquired by a neighbouring garage and yet became a victim of the combustion engine as a forecourt dedicated to the display of used cars. In the meantime, saddled with an empty property, the council had tried to rent out Akaba, but found it difficult to lease. Tenants complained that it was haunted and called the police; later an exorcism was performed. Perhaps we’d left our spirits behind, although as my mother pointed out, the ghosts may have been due to the fact that we had left an unwanted upright piano buried in the garden which still tinkled as you walked over it.

So we left Osborne Road and its monkey puzzle tree, holding our breath, driving in a family convoy – mother, father, my three brothers and their vehicles, my baby sister and our dog – for the sunny suburb of Sholing, away from the urban traffic which was already swallowing up Portswood. For my mother, it was a homecoming. Born that side of the Itchen, schooled in Sholing, she knew its valleys and lanes and funny little corner shops, its peculiar character, its strange mixture. It was a place where she felt at home.

My second-ever memory is of the house in which I would grow up. Ruddy cheeked, round headed, blond haired and four years old, I ran excitedly through the front door and up the uncarpeted stairs accompanied by Bimbo, a blackish mongrel of erratic temper who later grew so wild and savage that when he eventually ran off, his absence went unregretted, at least by my parents. Having reached the top, we both promptly fell all the way back to the bottom, landing, unharmed, at the foot of the stairs. Soon after I had another accident, in the corrugated iron Anderson shelter which still stood in the garden. Trying to reach a large metal and wood model locomotive about half my size on an upper shelf, the train fell on my head, and – in my remembrance, at least – momentarily knocked me unconscious.

The incident left me with an abiding image – as though knocked into my head – of the metal and wood of the toy and the metal and wood of the shed and its dark interior where a family had once sheltered from falling bombs. But life in Sholing was quiet now, following the pre-ordained, uneventful rites of suburbia. I went to a Catholic primary school a mile away in Woolston. St Patrick’s had been founded in 1879 by Fr Henry Patrick Kelly, the chaplain to the military hospital at Netley; its school hall was the old Edwardian ‘tin church’ of green-painted corrugated iron, and the rest of the school buildings consisted of the remains of what had once been the local police station. The boys’ toilets were roofless and open to the air, but dark and smelly inside, and in the grounds stood a bunker-like concrete air raid shelter, overgrown with brambles like barbed wire. A pair of classrooms were housed in corrugated iron huts like extended versions of our Anderson shelter, while in the far corner of the playground stood another shed, a smaller cousin of the tin church, also painted dark green. ‘Miss Enright’s hut’ had also come from Netley, where it had been the matron’s quarters in the First World War.

It was in this little hut, with its tilting floor, that on my first day of school I answered the register by calling out ‘Yes, Mummy’, and shortly afterwards wet myself; the water trickled slowly down the slope to the back of the classroom. I was not easily reconciled to leaving home: no sooner had my mother put me on the bus in the morning than I got off at the next stop and promptly walked back again. An ex-police station, a military hut and open air toilets did little to allay the fears of a knock-kneed boy in a home-knitted green jumper and grey shorts; still less an elderly teacher with an iron calliper on her leg.

In our tin classroom we would dutifully copy out Miss Clements’ copperplate writing from the blackboard, dipping our nibs in china inkwells filled by the ink monitor from a giant bottle of Quink, inevitably staining our fingers and our shirts dark blue. We recited our times tables, and on Wednesday mornings we’d file next door for Mass in the big ‘new’ church, built in 1939 (and promptly gutted by incendiary bombs in 1940). Now refurbished, with its green stained-glass windows, a stone statue of St Patrick over the entrance and, inside, another huge portrait of the saint driving the serpents out of Ireland, it was as invested with Irishness as were our green school uniforms and the bunches of shamrock which would mysteriously arrive from Ireland on St Patrick’s Day. They were symbols of a statehood I did not share, except by the association of faith, and, somewhere in my green eyes, the faint traces of a genetic Irishness.

Class by class we’d troop across a parquet floor dented by a decade of Sixties stilettos, file into our seats and pull down the kneelers. Crouching, I’d look through my fingers to the wounded, contorted figure of Christ above the altar, and the glass mosaics on either side, art deco versions of Byzantine icons. On one side, Jesus pointed to the exposed and radiant heart, red and glowing in His chest; on the other, in front of me, was the Blessed Virgin, her oval face surrounded by a gold tesseral halo. Like her grown-up son, her body lay full length against the wall, floating in space and impossibly attenuated; but in the folds of her transcendent blue gown she clasped an unwounded and perfectly formed Christ Child holding up His baby hand in blessing. Sometimes, as I stared, I felt I too could float into the air, to be suspended above the congregation, to the amazement of my fellow pupils. At the end of term we would return for Benediction and its Latin litany intoned in clouds of intoxicating incense, and on May Day we would process through the church gardens behind a statue of Our Lady carried on a wooden stretcher, her beautiful neat head crowned with a garland of flowers as we sang, ‘Ave, ave, ave Maria’.

One dinnertime I ran down to the school gate to see my father arrive in the big old family car with my beaming little sister, her brown hair in bunches, not yet old enough for school, jumping excitedly up and down on the passenger seat. We drove home to see our new baby sister, pink and bawling in crocheted wool and carry cot by my mother’s bedroom window. She was as blonde as my elder sister was dark; they were a perfect pair, and I loved them and they loved me. The world seemed as safe and secure as our new baby swaddled in her cot, her tiny fingers clasping the wool like soft pink bird’s talons. I read the Beano on my father’s knee on dark winter evenings and he cut my finger- and toenails.

The house was yellow and warm, but one day I came home from school to find my mother airing clothes on a wooden clothes horse in front of the coal fire, upset by the news she had just heard on our old valve radio (with its illuminated dial and place names as strange as the lunchtime shipping forecast). Many children had died after a mountain of coal had fallen on their school in Wales. Later, on TV, there would be grainy black and white images of a destroyed building in a mining village, and men in coats picking over what looked like a bomb site. In my mind’s eye I saw the black soot engulfing the high ceilings of my classroom, pouring in through the big wide window, silently crashing and crushing.*

But mostly life and death carried on over my pudding-basin-haircut head. I went to school as the sun rose at one end of the street, and went to bed as it set at the other. I saw my first streak of lightning make an electrified crack in the sky, and ran home for cover. I played soldiers and feared hospitals, and once visited the dentist’s in an Edwardian house opposite our school to have a tooth pulled out. In grey shorts, another green home-knitted jumper, and a permanent scab on my knees, I saw the brass plate at the entrance, the venetian blinds at the windows, the unadorned front garden: all too neat, too clean, too white to be a home. I panicked as the black rubber mask descended, halo’d by the yellowy examination light that shone on the steel instruments laid out in a tray at my shoulder. The nauseous smell of the rubber was pressed down on my memory with the hiss of the gas as it was clamped over my small face, the dentist’s white coat and stubble and glasses above. The next thing I remember was staggering out of the porch, spitting gobs of gelatinous blood like leeches, reeling on to the front lawn and lying there, the world turning above me as I experienced my first intoxication, mixed with medically-induced pain from a suburban house of torture.

If these were the worst things in my life, the rest of it must have been pretty good. But then everything changed.

It was a Saturday morning. I remember coming downstairs and looking over the banisters – another aerial view, as if I were removed from these proceedings in my life, these out-of-body experiences – and watching my parents moving about in the front room. They were not doing the housework; they were not moving in the way parents should move.

My brother had been injured in a car crash. He was twenty-three years old. After a week in a coma, my mother and his young wife staying at the hospital to be at his bedside, Andrew died.

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