8/9/2019 Big Freddie - A South London Housing Estate Character Tale

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Big Freddie – A South London Housing Estate Character Tale ©Kevin Anslow 2006

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Monday, June 05, 2006. London

Big Freddie 

Big Freddie is a tall, portly, but muscular man in about his late 30s or early 40s. Hewears tee shirts that reveals the ancient, fading tattoos on his massive arms, and he

wears jeans. His stomach pushes the front of his tee shirt out into a curtain of swaying

cloth. He has a balding, ginger pate. He has kind, but distant blue eyes, and weathered

skin.

He lives in the council estate when I myself am living at present. I think he lives with

his mother, but I am not too sure. Big Freddie doesn't work, but he has a job. He is the

local mascot; he is the principal lost soul in a community of troubled souls without

compasses, and without him, my neck of the woods wouldn't quite be the same.

Make no mistake, where I am living at present, in a council housing estate, it is not ahappy community. This isn't suburbia, even if the sweetness of suburbia frosts its

fringes. Though the local area is fast becoming one of the most desirable and richest

parts of South London, someone built a huge public housing estate here, back in the

50s and 60s, and no-one is going to be tearing down this little reminder of ordinary

existence any time soon. Hundreds of people live here in a space occupied by only

dozens, a few hundred meters away.

Acres of blocks of flats, little concrete boxes that hide numerous stories of misery,

apathy, dissolutionment and despair. Rico, my housemate, has a sister who once shared

the flat with him, and she knows a social worker who does rounds hereabouts. Her

stories are harrowing, are sad, and are tragic. This just confirms what you feel anyway.You never see much evidence of what goes on out on the streets - people just look 

weary and furtive - but sometimes you hear the screaming rows late at night, and there

is a haunted restless air to the neighbourhood you cannot ignore. This is not the place

you want your son or daughter to end up, after all your hopes and dreams, born out of 

their smiling innocence and the promising optimism of their unblemished eyes.

And what anyone hoped for Big Freddie is hard to say. he doesn't strike me as the type

of man who ever had any grand ambitions, and it is quite possible he grew up around

here and only left for time, the inevitability of return always hanging over him. Of 

course I could just ask him. But the thing is, Big Freddie doesn't say much. Big

Freddie doesn't really seem to have much to say. If you talk to him, he will smile a

little shyly, or grunt something, never anything hostile or rude, but he kind of doesn't

seem to like to be pushed any further than a brief hello or a short sentence that puts the

conversation to rest. Big Freddie doesn't like to do much or say much, he just likes to

hang around and watch, he just likes to be, and he likes to do that in this neck of the

woods. I somehow doubt he could do it anywhere else.

I have never seen Big Freddie do anything aggressive, but I wouldn't want to push Big

Freddie; he is not called Big Freddie for nothing. The tattoos on his arms look very

much like army mementoes to me, and he has that slight hint of - that ghost in his eyes

- of someone who has been places and done things that you would rather not knowabout. He certainly never looks remotely frightened of anything his sees, he just looks

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Big Freddie – A South London Housing Estate Character Tale ©Kevin Anslow 2006

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like he stopped trying to find a better place a long time ago, and may be that is far

more frightening than whatever he once experienced.

Most of the time you see Big Freddie around the vicinity of the local shops, a minute

or two down the road from me. All day and a good part of the night he just drifts fromshop to shop. Sometimes he sits in real estate agent, in a chair, saying nothing.

Sometimes he is standing in the Kebab shop, still saying nothing, but grunting

greetings to anyone who recognises and acknowledges him. Other times he just stands

outside the liquor store, in a favourite spot, and slowly drinks a can of beer, looking

out at the world he knows so well, like an old sailor looking out to sea. Once in a while

he will help out in the liquor store. He never takes any money, but he stands in the

background, and ferries orders to the counter, silently and without comment. Other

times he just roams around the area, on a mission only he understands, slowly making

his way through the day in according to a route and purpose, known only to himself.

Who is Big Freddie? What happened to him? Who knows. Everyone around hereknows him, but no-one seems to know a thing about him. He is just Big Freddie, and

this is Big Freddie's neck of the woods. Perhaps that is enough. But it makes me

wonder.

All of us started out with possibilities, with hope. Few of us started out with the future

set in stone. We started much the same - the rude experience of being a little pink thing

cruelly taken out of the perfect haven, breathing air with virgin lungs, and naked to the

world, because there are no Gap or Gucci baby stores in the womb, there is just us and

our slowly forming tissues.

What happens to a man to make him a ghost haunting the earth before he is even dead?Did he make himself a living spirit, or did circumstances do it for him? I just don't

know, and neither does anyone else. Perhaps big Freddie himself doesn't know either.

He is just Big Freddie, but his eyes, though haunted, are kind, and that makes me sad