The house on Gunnersbury Park was the first place I lived in London and it was one of the filthiest and most unfortunate grub holes in the whole city. For a start, it was much too small for purpose. There were over 25 bodies under that roof and we only had 8 rooms between us – and that’s not even mentioning the backpackers, dilettantes, idlers and debauchers who were always turning up on the doorstep in need of a place to stay. Name a country and you can bet we had one of their sons or daughters sleeping somewhere in there at one time or another. You could cook with the Italians, argue politics with the Portuguese, samba dance with the Brazilians, gamble with the Polish, and get dismally drunk on discount wine with the Australians, all in the same evening. At one point we had an entire Lithuanian family spend the winter in a twin room that was too small even for two. Their room was a garage conversion and when it was snowing it would get colder than you could believe. I still don’t know how they put up with it for so many months. Back home they were successful hoteliers with a daughter preparing to study medicine in King’s College. In London back home doesn’t count for squat and so they ended up slumming it with the rest of us. We were all good friends and we did everything together.  Everyone was equal in that house.

Most of us worked catering jobs in those first few months and we always ate well. We brought home all sorts for everybody to share; end cuts of beef, roast ham, every kind of cheese, the most incredible breads, croissants, pies, muffins, fresh fruit, eggs, chocolate, the lot. Nobody went hungry and a few of us even put on weight while we were living there.

We had bed bugs, maggots and lice, but the rats were the worst. We hated the rats more than anything. You couldn’t open the front door without one of the hideous little monsters making its way into the house. They’d run behind a couch or a cabinet and it’d take everything to get them out. One was hiding in our kitchen for almost a week before we spotted her. It took three of us to get her out – the burliest, lifting the oven she was hiding under, another blocking her path with an old ironing-board and myself, battering her out the house with an old Hurley stick.

Things were always getting smashed or broken. The washing machine never worked, we burned out two ovens, destroyed dozens of glasses, demolished tables, shattered a couple windows, flooded the attic and melted the carpet. That’s what happens when you put so many people all on top of each other. The bathrooms were disgusting and it was by chance alone we discovered that our South American cleaner had been using the same cloth to clean the toilets as she had for the dishes. It was a gruesome place, but we always had hot water and it was cheap. We paid the rent in cash, no contracts were ever signed and nobody asked any questions. The whole setup must have been all sorts of illegal, but we were immigrants, we were poor and we were desperate. No one outside the house could ever understand why we stayed there but in truth we liked it.

My room was on the ground floor and it was by far the most disgusting. Many years ago, this had been an ordinary family house and what we were sleeping in was still quite recognizably the front living-room. It comprised two sets of bunk beds, four free-standing cupboards, a sink and a table on top of which was piled all manner of junk (that we never did find any identifiable owner for). Three of us were Irish and were in the house long-term, the fourth bed, however, played host to an ever changing conveyor-belt of short-term occupants such as drifters, travelling tradesmen and friends too drunk to find their own homes. The room was cramped and the smell in the morning was indescribable. We never opened the curtains and nobody would bother cleaning the floor. It was no place for the dignified, but we did our best not to complain and tried to ignore the discomfort of it all.

My bed was in the left-hand corner on the side nearest the door. I took the top bunk with another of the Irish, John, on the bottom. He was a labourer and a brute of a character but he was honest and I liked him. He’d no time for books and no need for culture. If there was beer in the fridge and food for the table, he was a happy man. Some of the women weren’t all too fond of John, viewing him as some sort of neglected savage, but I never had a problem with him and we always got on well.  Even so, he used to stink like hell. He would come home after a day of work, eat his meal and go to bed without showering. Often still wearing his work gear. You wouldn’t want to imagine the dirt, sweat and grime that accumulates on a man who would not wash himself properly even when he could.

One night, I’m sleeping alone in the room and he comes crashing through the door at 3am with some woman he’d picked from God only knows where. Both of them drunk off their asses. They start going at it on his bunk like you wouldn’t believe. I can hear everything. The whole bed is shaking with every tussle. I pull the pillow over my head to try for some sleep but it’s never going to happen. In a hushed whisper, he starts his begging.

Please, put it in your mouth.

She’s not having any of it. I can feel her head shaking through the bed-frame. It was near tragic. He must of asked her a dozen times, never a change in the phrasing, but ever more desperate in tone. Enough. I leap down from the bunk and land heavy on the old floorboards. I yell at the pair of them.

She can hardly stomach the smell of the fucking thing, never-mind put it in her mouth.

I slammed out that door and spent the night sleeping on the kitchen table. He couldn’t look me in the eye for weeks. Finally, one afternoon, with his head down and chin on his chest, he put his hand out to me. That was John, you had to forgive the stupid bastard. I took his hand in mine, we shook and I told him to forget about it. Life is too short and besides it was one of those things that seemed better not to talk about. This kind of thing happened all the time.

Know that I made sure to wash that hand afterward.