audio file
"On the corner like on an angle like that…somewhere… and there was an angle there used to be a convent there. It belonged to a church and he used to…what did he call them? Imbecile people. I said “That’s…That’s not nice. They’re not imbeciles.”
He said, “They looked it.”
And I said, “To you in those days, yes. But today it’s a different name.” I said, “they’re handicapped.”
“Oh” He went “Oh”
I said “Yeah they didn’t do nothing for them in those days. They just put them in chairs and they had the um baskets with the wheel in front… and they had those kind…and they used to put them on this balcony and they used to go and wave to them, my dad said. And they loved it when the kids all came round to wave to them."
And when they pulled it down to make a playground for the kids, the wood that they had there from the rafters and that. Beautiful colors. It’s a wonder that nobody didn’t take a picture of it. To try and get it. The colors of that wood when it was on fire…alight…it was beautiful. Different colors of the rainbow. And I couldn’t believe what I was seeing I thought, “God it was beautiful.” No one took a photo of it."
PRESENT
Can you connect this to a story of Shoreditch present? Email present@shoreditchfutures.com, quoting the title of this blog post as the subject line. Or leave a voicemail on 020 3355 0983, quoting the same information.
FUTURE
The fires attracted many children including a little boy called Joshua who was playing nearby at the time. When the supervisor's attention was elsewhere he managed to take a small piece of burning wood off the pile as a souvenir of the evening. For some reason he kept hold of that wood, leaving it to his son in 1997 in his will, following his untimely death.
In 2010, following a messy divorce and in a period of much work stress the son found the wood in a box in his attic and taking it out became sure that he could see within its knots a picture of the Virgin Mary. Reporting this excitedly to the police and his local priest generated a lot of media interest and the son found himself a minor celebrity. Although the papers lost interest in him after a while, he was able to resurrect his 'career' by an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother 24, where he memorably danced around the kitchen singing Ba ba black sheep with his pants on his head (to win his team mates extra rations).
