There are Russians in the Harrow Road!

Arthur Nounce, of Old Holborn was not, as it happens, a character from Dickens’ lesser known novel, “The tragic Misfortunes of Josiah Buttockfondle”. Many years ago, in an episode of “Only Fools and Horses” the Trotters’ father appears on the scene, and Del is far from ready to welcome him back into the bosom of the family. At one point he makes the observation “He sold his soul for half an ounce of Old Holborn.” The moment I heard this line I thought immediately of my father.

I wouldn’t want you to think that I had a grim childhood, far from it. But the happiness and normality were due to the efforts of my mother and my nan. When it came to fatherhood the late George Clark was a bit pants. Well, he was a lot pants. In fact, let’s call a spade a spade. He was the whole underwear drawer.

I don’t want to make this out to be a tale of woe and misery, because it really wasn’t. But I don’t think I was that old by the time I realised that there was precious little that he wouldn’t do to get his fix of the aforementioned tobacco product and Taunton Autumn Gold Cider. At a pinch he could do without the tobacco, but not the cider. Which doubtless contributed to the pickling of his pancreas that resulted in its removal in the mid 70s. By the end of the decade he’d left the cider far behind and graduated to some awful concoction called Clan Dew, which blended whisky with wine if I remember correctly. After his penultimate drinking binge in 1981, our long-suffering GP, Doctor Cowan, came to the house (which shows you just how long ago this was) and told him, “Mr. Clark, if you drink again, then you will die. Not could die. Not might die. You will die.” This shocked my father sober for a year, but being who he was he had to test whether Doctor Cowan was exaggerating or not. So a year later he went on one last binge, and it practically did kill him. He survived, but was only kept alive by a combination of drugs for the last 9 years of his life.

In one way I think it’s pretty amazing the way that he went cold sober without joining any support group like Alcoholics Anonymous. But, being the person he was, by the mid 80s he found another way of getting off his face without taking to the demon drink. He discovered that if he took a week’s dose of his medicines in one go, not only did it save time, but it also got him completely out of his tree. And this is where the title of this post comes in. In the summer just before I moved to Wales, I came in to the house to find him sitting stark naked in his swivel chair. “Why are you sitting naked?! I asked him, or words to that effect. He mumbled what to him seemed like a perfectly logical answer, “Because there are Russians in the Harrow Road.” I promised him I would deal with them if he put his clothes back on – a promise, incidentally, that I have never kept. My younger brother happened to walk in during this exchange, and ever since that time this phrase has been part of our shared vocabulary. Even now, if we’re together and someone says a particularly baffling non-sequitur one of us is bound to say “There are Russians in the Harrow Road!” setting the both of us off in fits of conspiratorial giggles.

If you have been sharing these ramblings with me for some time now you’ll know that I have an enquiring mind. I have often wondered just how the old man’s mind latched onto the idea of Russians in the Harrow Road. I mean, back at the time the Soviet Union was consistently portrayed as the Evil Empire, but why on earth the Harrow Road? As far as I know he had no connection with the Harrow Road at all. Well, even if I’d asked him about it on one of his more compos mentis days I somehow doubt he would have been able to shed any light on it, or why the thought of it necessitated him stripping or action.

Now, in my current occupation I talk to many people on the phone every day. Some of the people I speak to seem to have no familiarity with the word or concept of ‘oversharing’. One of the people who rang with a query proceeded to tell me about how the pain from his teeth had led to him overdosing on his prescription drugs and boom – the phrase “there are Russians in the Harrow Road” flashed into my mind.

So, today, on a whim, I googled that same phrase, fully expecting nothing even remotely connected to Russians or the Harrow Road to come up in the results. Yet what did come up was a news story from earlier this very month. A group of Bulgarian people, living in Harrow, were convicted of spying for Russia and sentenced to a combined total of about fifty years in prison. Apparently  the neighbours’ suspicions were first raised a couple of years ago when they put up a large satellite dish, conspicuously pointing in the opposite direction to all of the other dishes in the street, and tried to put up an aerial about half the size of the Eiffel Tower. Alright, slight exaggeration there, I admit. Now okay, I don’t know if the part of Harrow where they were based was anywhere near the Harrow Road, and they were Bulgarian, and just spying for Russia. But come on! You have to admit that it’s interesting, don’t you? Well, please yourselves.