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.

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.