silcock

The Silcock is our local park, cradled in the lowest and wettest part of Croydon. It’s two cricket fields in summer, four soccer pitches in winter, populated by a variety of pooches and hounds most Sunday mornings, red-coated instructors from the Croydon and District Obedience Dog Club marshalling the dog-owners.

The JRT has walked, played, run, fought, rolled in shit and dead creatures, and hunted ball here his entire life, Miss Meg with him till she died. Going on twelve, the JRT’s happy now to trot beside me some days, but his favourite occupation is still nose down, bum up, tail flailing as he burrows into long grass or a dense shrub tracking down his ball.

At nine every weekday whatever the weather a group of retirees gathers under the pavilion awning in winter, out on the northern cricket pitch in summer. They escort up to fifteen dogs, short-legged moppets, grizzled and paunchy bitzers, sometimes a spritely newcomer.

Dogs and owners circle like flocking birds. Bums are sniffed, yesterday’s events retold. A group of dogs bursts off like gas flaring off the sun before shrinking back to the milling mob. Around ten they toddle off and the Silcock is a green desert till late-morning mothers arrive with prams and toddlers.

Surrey Road borders the Silcock’s southern end, back fences the west and north sides. The north end is referred to as the rough end, spotted with big trees, a gravel path meandering through. Young Karen and Chin men, refugees, have carved a volleyball court in the clay between the trees. They hop the fence from the cheap housing estate, cross the tracks, play here in the late afternoons.

Curving along the eastern border is the railway line to Lilydale, unfenced until a month ago. In no time up go the steel mesh panels, each two and a half metres wide, two high. Suicide by train might justify the expense, but a serious attempter would need fifteen seconds to scale the mesh and rest a neck on a rail.

The young brown men from Burma’s route is cut off now; they must take the long route via the pedestrian crossing at the bottom of Surrey Road where a disabled bloke’s wheelchair once stalled on the tracks and a city-bound train cleaned him up.

I’m going down late one afternoon. I hope to see the young brown Burmese scrabbling up and over the railway lines and that mesh fence like Christmas Island crabs.  

Rock on.