Leaves: A Beautiful Drama about the Passage of Time

By John Simmons

Experience London in 1970 as a journalist captures a community’s ups and downs over the course of a year in this slice-of-life saga.

Ophelia Street, 1970. A street like any other, a community that lives and breathes together as people struggle with their commitments and pursue their dreams. It is a world we recognise, a world where class and gender divide, where set roles are acknowledged. But what happens when individuals step outside those roles?

An observer amid Ophelia Street watches, writes, imagines, remembers, charting the lives and loves of his neighbours over the course of four seasons, revealing the flimsily disguised underbelly of urban life in all its challenging glory. As the leaves turn from vibrant green to vivid gold, so lives turn and change too, laying bare the truth of the community. Perhaps, ultimately, we all exist on Ophelia Street.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781504071734

John Simmons

JOHN SIMMONS is the founder of Testimony House ministries, which creates Christian podcasts, videos, and films. He is also the author of books Finding Faith and God Has a Sentence for Your Life . He lives in St. Louis, MO with his wife Megan and their four children.

Book preview

PART ONE: WINTER

1 Beneath the window

Ophelia Street was. It existed, way back then, in a time and place that seems as distant today as America in the Jazz Age. I am writing this now, some thirty years on, with all the embellishments of imagination to fill the gaps of memory.

Ophelia Street was. A no-through road, a huddle of houses, obscured from sight in North London in the year 1970. A place that had seen better and grander times. Like a once-fine ocean liner slumped on a deep sea bed, giving sustenance to the creatures swimming in its darkness.

In January, we used to say, you saw Ophelia Street in its natural colours. Wintergrey hung like a fog; window boxes lay dormant; through net curtains watery bulbs gleamed. And every so often it rained.

Ophelia Street. The pre-Raphaelite fancy of its Victorian builders mocked its current mediocrity. Ophelia Street, with Hamlet Close, a tired collection of houses which frowned upon romanticism; a cul-de-sac with a dirty yard leading off it. An air of boredom had seeped into the very bones of the street; boredom that in better times had called itself ennui. And within the confines of the street the inmates were forever restless, straining to burst free from its hold. Yet it was not that easy to escape: the mental chains that confined them, once confined earlier generations. Ophelia Street was a home, a prison.

I was struggling to make it my home, my first proper one since arriving in London. I’d come down from university a few months earlier, a provincial newcomer to London, and I’d got a job as a journalist on a local paper. I was simply learning my trade, the trade of reporting and all the skills that I believed went with it. Ophelia Street for this year became my featured subject and my training course. By ‘Ophelia Street’ I mean the people who lived there in the houses next to me, for the most part unaware even of my existence because I was young and unimposing and content to look on from the sidelines. I didn’t really touch their lives but they touched mine. I got to know them a little at first by the shallow contact of nodding acquaintance, then to know them more deeply as time passed. Through observation and investigation, my developing journalistic skills, and then – I must admit – through the exercise of my imagination, I fleshed them into the people you will read about.

But I swear it is true. Even with the hindsight of thirty years, this is the place and these are the people that I knew then. The words I wrote then, and that I revisit now, are the relics and artefacts brought to the surface from that sunken period. Through them the people remain alive. Some of those people, perhaps even the ones I got to know best, I hardly exchanged words with at the time. But that is the way I am, as well as the way they were. Take us for what we are and were.

The right hand side of the street was a shabby row of ten houses which had seen brighter days. Steep steps led up to heavy front doors, behind one of which, in an upstairs flat, I lived for that year. The houses leaned listlessly against one another for support, too old to care about appearances. This row was faced by a pub, three more houses, a shop on the corner of Hamlet Close, a high brick wall; then at the top of the street two grander dwellings sat like mayor and mayoress, although the chains of office had gone a little tawdry. These two houses were detached and identical in structure, but the one on the left had the more imposing air, with its fresh coat of olive green paint and the statue of a black cat which guarded the front gate, peering over the privet. The cat sat at the head of the road, its green eyes fixed straight ahead, staring unblinkingly at every coming and going, monumentally refined, monumentally hostile, monumentally patient. Next door the matching house squatted abandoned, hollow and colourless, like the twin that had been damaged at birth.

The high brick wall between these houses and Hamlet Close was, on closer inspection, the side of a building. The bricks proclaimed spray-painted messages – ‘Arsenal champions’ and ‘Skinheads are great’ – but turning the corner into Hamlet Close, a painted sign, half-obscured by the grime of time, announced another purpose. Like the eyes of a monster peering from its lair: ‘G.A. Fermin & Sons. Manufacturers of Accoutrements and Accessories for Domestic Animals. Established 1886.’

A car comes, an old blue Morris of late 1950s vintage, rounding the corner into Ophelia Street. It drew up outside the shorter row of houses, engine reverberating; like a pebble bouncing on a pond before, with a final plop, settling into the silence. With his briefcase swinging in one hand Keith Russell walked round the front of his car and up the steps of No. 3 where he lived.

Standing at the door, digging in his pocket for a key, he might have been searching for gold. There was an air of frustration and desperation about him, an aggression hardly kept in check. He yelled into the clammy evening.

‘Brenda! Brenda!’

In other times, other circumstances, this might have seemed usual. Four or five years earlier at university, for example. But this was urban life in the year 1970. The ebullient, optimistic flowering of the previous decade was in regression.

A yell became an intrusion of privacy. Was this a clamouring for entry into houses, or lives? Looking on then, looking back now, I wish I could have been more definite. It might have made me a different, better person, a player not a spectator.

‘Brenda!’

Defiant, he stared down the street at the flutterings of curtains, turning his back on door and doorbell. In any case the bell had been out of action for three months now. He could not be bothered to repair it.

In the street a couple of half-wild dogs scurried about, snarling and snapping at each other. The sodium lamps were changing from red to yellow. A plane droned overhead, with red eyes winking, an eery electronic predator. An unhealthy sallowness washed over all, and in the background a metallic clanging from the factory.

Eventually Keith gained entry to his own house. People streamed out of the factory, and one or two drifted into the pub. Some children were sent out by their mothers to the corner shop to buy forgotten groceries, and raced home through the twilight. Doors were opened, and then closed.

So this was how it was. A neighbourhood did not lightly shed its secrets. Strangers walked the streets. I walked with them.

Inside the house guarded by the black cat, the occupants used to drift shadowlike from room to room in never-increasing circles. It was a dreamy, dreary house, one of those houses where the lights seemed to illuminate the gloom.

Two people sat eating fish for dinner.

Gerald Fermin was a jaundiced man in his late forties. The yellowness of his skin might have seemed a trick of the light were it not for the contrasting whiteness of the fish flesh on his plate. He sat, staring beyond his dinner at nothing in particular, nose in the air (a characteristic Fermin mannerism) as if not quite certain of catching his next breath. Now and then he would fastidiously lift a fish bone from the flesh and set it down on a plate in the centre of the table; or sip at the tumbler of water. All the while chewing small pieces of his food and his thoughts in a lethargic, rhythmic way.

His sister, Selene, perhaps some ten years younger, seemed animated by comparison. Her cheeks were pink, her hair was curled. An air of loneliness, tinged with desperation emanated from her; a feeling made stronger by the seeming self-sufficiency of the man sitting beside her. She finished her meal and waited for him, fidgeting with the cutlery and the remnants of food on her plate.

At last his knife and fork were laid down side by side on the plate.

‘Thank you,’ he murmured. ‘Very fine.’

The evening, like a deep river, drifted on while seeming motionless, its undercurrents unseen in the darkness.

The large clock on the marble mantelpiece ticked loudly in the customary stillness and hollowness of the Fermins’ home. The fire flickered, without blazing. The furniture was old but not particularly comfortable, and monotonously dark and brown. Along the whole of one wall were glass tanks and in them were the flashes and glints of tropical fish. Gerald sat in a large armchair at the side of the hearth; Selene sat opposite him, staring into the fire.

The stillness of the evening was disturbed by the sudden snarl of a car engine; a thud, a whine, and once again silence.

‘What the hell was that?’

Keith Russell had just returned to the front room after reading a story in bed to his son David. Already Brenda was peering through the curtains.

‘I can’t really see,’ she said. ‘I think there’s something there by the lamp. But there’s no one about.’

‘I’ll go and have a look,’ he said.

He went down the stairs two at a time. A sense of urgency came naturally to him. But, outside, the winter evening was comparatively restrained; no rain, no wind, no moon. Thick cloud gave the sky a uniform dullness.

A dog lay in a pool of blood and light. Smashed against the lamppost, its head had split open and spilt its contents like a broken bottle.

‘Jesus bloody Christ,’ muttered Keith to himself.

He stood there, stunned, not knowing where to start. To move it? How? Where? What for? The dog lay in the gutter but seemed in a strange way to demand a greater dignity. It could not be ignored, but what purpose would it serve to move it to, say, somewhere less conspicuous like an alleyway dustbin?

Joe Wheatley joined him, to Keith’s great relief. Joe lived in the flat beneath Keith. Joe’s very appearance, quietly and without fuss, still in his workclothes, seemed to offer reassurance that something practical could be done.

‘Not nice, is it?’ said Joe, as he squatted down to look at the dog. ‘Must’ve been a car. Didn’t stop, of course.’ Then, an afterthought as he stood up, ‘Dogs usually find better things to do with lampposts.’

Keith was feeling sick, but was unwilling to show it. Trying to disguise his feelings he walked up and down as if searching for evidence, but in reality seeing nothing. He began to feel a little stronger with the exercise. At last he was able to talk.

‘Joe, we couldn’t have been the only ones to hear it.’

Joe shook his head.

‘No, don’t suppose we were. Still…’ he shrugged his shoulders.

‘Why should they? Anyway, someone did.’ He nodded, pointing with his head across the road.

She had been trying to stand in the shadows, but seeing herself observed she came forward into the circle of light. Selene Fermin had thrown an overcoat around her shoulders, to protect herself from the cold or whatever mystery awaited her. It was obviously not enough to prevent her being drawn into something she might have wished to avoid. For, standing there in the ring of lamplight, the three of them clustered around the new-spilt blood, they might have been enacting a pagan rite.

At last she shuddered.

‘It’s horrible. Who could have done it? Such a horrible thing. Poor creature, it can’t be left there. Do you think you could move it? Without straining yourselves?’

‘Shouldn’t we call the police?’ asked Keith.

Joe shook his head. ‘No need. What for? It’d only cause us trouble. Let’s just shift it.’

‘But where to?’

‘Let’s put it in a bin. There’s one round the corner.’

‘Oh no,’ protested Selene. ‘No. Please. Can we do better?’

Keith and Joe looked at each other. Joe walked off down the road a little and opened the back of his van. He returned with a piece of sacking and a shovel.

‘Right, where d’you want it?’

Selene hesitated. ‘I wonder. If you would mind. You could bury it in my garden.’

‘OK, love. Whatever you want.’

Keith stood mute, amazed at the strangeness of the happenings; watching while Joe, under the gentle supervision of Selene, spread the sacking on the pavement as if for a picnic. Then feeling impelled, caught in the curious spell that bound the three of them, to help Joe lift the dog onto the sacking and carry it along the road in a silent procession to the house at the end guarded by the statue of the cat. And once again a spectator as Joe dug with a steady rhythm deep into the hardening soil of January in the Fermins’ front garden.

In a short time, or so it seemed, it was done. The earth covered the dog, making a slight mound between the dormant rose bushes. And when it was done, the reason for their strange fellowship removed from sight, they each felt oddly embarrassed, unsure how to return to convention. Until then they had acted automatically, driven only by a sense of rightness, swept along in the current.

‘Could I offer you a cup of tea?’ asked Selene.

‘No, no thanks, love. Better be off.’

Selene thought. ‘I could bring it out. If you would prefer.’ As if suddenly realising that both might be constrained by the now obvious thought that Joe, shovel in hand and mud on boots, was a’tradesman’.

But Keith had walked off without a word. That was his way. There were times when he could not endure the knowledge that the common language is the least thing held in common. That was a feeling we shared, something that also kept us apart.

‘No. Must be off. Thanks all the same,’ said Joe and shut the gate behind him.

They walked together down the street, the two men, aware of the shadowy figure in the garden watching their retreat. Joe disappeared into Hamlet Close to dispose of the bloodstained sacking in a dustbin. ‘Just a sec, Keith,’ he called and went deeper into the darkness of the yard. He emerged in a little while with a pile of sand on his shovel. Back under the lamplight, where the dark stain ran into the gutter, Joe sprinkled sand.

‘That’s better,’ he said, with some satisfaction. ‘Now all we need’s a drop of rain.’

Keith shook his head. ‘What a crazy night.’

‘Funny, eh? Miss Fermin and all.’

‘I’d never seen her before.’

‘Don’t suppose you have. Only if you’ve lived here for years. We used to see her more when she was a kid.’

There was a long silence. There was too much to say and it all needed to be drawn out slowly, like a splinter from a wound.

‘I need a drink, Joe. Are you coming?’

‘No, better be off, Keith. Edie’ll be wondering what the hell I’m up to.’

They said goodbye, Joe to climb the steps to his flat, Keith to walk the twenty yards along the road to The Lady Ophelia on the corner. At the top of the stairs Joe called after Keith: ‘I’ll tell Brenda what’s happened. She might be worrying.’

Keith raised his hand, without looking round, to let Joe know that he had heard and continued walking to the pub. Down the street, some curtains fell back into place. I kept mine drawn back, in the darkness, still watching.

‘What on earth have you been doing, Selene?’ asked Gerald, standing in the hallway as his sister closed the front door behind her.

Selene took off her shoes and coat, uncertain, perhaps unwilling to answer. Looking in the heavy walnut-framed mirror she pushed at her hair, as if to tidy it, yet all too obviously to gain time.

‘Well?’ pursued Gerald.

‘Well?’

‘What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing Gerald. Nothing of importance.’

‘You have obviously been doing something. To take you out of the house for a winter’s evening.’

Selene turned towards him with an innocent smile.

‘I had to look after a dog, Gerald. It was injured in the street. But it’s all right now.’

She moved through into the sitting room. There with the fish tanks around her, the heavy velvet curtains, the green patterned wallpaper, she could retreat into the depths of an armchair like an eel into a cave. And so she did until, half an hour later, she announced that it was time for bed.

The Lady Ophelia was practically empty. Tuesday night was always one of the quieter nights, especially with Christmas and the New Year so recently past. The Christmas decorations around the bar looked tired and subdued, as if resenting being kept up so late.

There were only five customers in the pub and Keith knew none of them to talk to, although he had seen them often enough to exchange acknowledging nods. But he could not face the effort now of starting a conversation, getting to know any of them. Suddenly he felt lonely and isolated. He took his beer and sat at a table in the corner on his own.

Without wanting to, he found himself listening to the conversation of the two people standing at the bar, but he could only make out the occasional word or phrase. To remove the temptation completely he took out a shilling and put some records on the jukebox. The selection available reflected the taste of some years earlier, but that suited Keith. His tastes in most things had ossified in his late teens and early twenties.

‘…never needed anybody’s help in any way…’ sang the Beatles.

Keith bought himself another pint and looked at his watch. He had hoped that Joe Wheatley might have followed him down to the pub, even though he had said he would not. So he sat there staring into his beer, with the nostalgia of the music washing around him, and resentment building up at the streams of memory and a mounting sense of desertion and loneliness. More than anything else in life, he feared loneliness, perhaps because he suspected it was his inevitable fate.

Keith quickly finished his beer and walked out into the night. It had started to rain. Grimly he thought how the rain had come in answer to Joe’s wish. Standing on the corner he looked both ways; left, into the stillness of Ophelia Street, and right, into the relative activity of Malvern Road, where two cars splashed through the thin layer of rain on