Finsbury Park

Stephen Jeffreys

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781788500876
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

A short autobiographical monologue, first performed as part of the Come to Where I'm From festival at the Park Theatre, London, in 2016.

The pigeon slid slowly down the tiled wall. The man who had thrown it stooped and caught the bird before it hit the pavement. My father, walking homewards from the City Road, had just arrived at the railway bridges that cross Stroud Green Road next to Finsbury Park Station. He stopped to watch as the man threw the pigeon at the wall again and, when it skidded down, once more gathered it up, and, after a few moments pause to collect his strength, hurled it again. Once more, the pigeon hit the tiles with a splat. Once more it slithered down the wall into the man’s hands.

My father was intrigued twice over. Firstly he was a self-appointed protector of birdlife, frequently bringing home injured sparrows and thrushes for a couple of days recuperation in our cramped kitchen, patching them up and then releasing them back into the wild. Secondly he was an aficionado of the bizarre urban tableau and, in some curious way, seemed to attract incidents like this, to conjure them into being by his very presence.

He intervened: ‘What was the point of this torture?’ The hurler’s explanation was a good one. The bird, it seemed, had injured a wing. The man, spotting a small strip of grass at the top of the wall, high up under the railway bridge, had conceived the project of flinging the pigeon onto the grass so that it might enjoy some respite from the dogs and tramping feet that threatened its very life. Unfortunately, the hurler lacked the strength to achieve his objective. My father, tall, with a former merchant seaman’s physical power said ‘Allow me’ and, in a single attempt lobbed the injured bird onto its designated oasis. The two men shook hands and resumed their solitary journeys.

I find it hard to imagine this story taking place anywhere else but in the streets of Finsbury Park – not just because of the topography of the bridges, the tiles and the grassy retreat which you can still see today – but because the oddness of the encounter seems specific to the twilight world that defined, and still to some extent does define this area to me.

In the 1950s the area around Finsbury Park station was a place of darkness: no brightly lit shops, no theatre, not even a fruit stall (‘Banana, banana’). There was a man in a cloth cap who sat on an upturned wooden crate selling newspapers. And that was it. It was a location you passed through, a heads-down kind of world, a transit camp, a twilight zone where people dwelt in their own inner space, reading one of the three evening papers (the Standard, the News and the Star) while waiting for one of the three buses (the 233, the 212 and the 210.)

Yes, it was a dark place where the populace entertained their own peculiar thoughts, not speaking to or acknowledging e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Ian Rickson
• Introduction by Annabel Arden
• Original Production
• Finsbury Park
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information