Croydon Quotes

What do you mean you’ve met?’ he demanded. ‘This is Zaphod Beeblebrox from Betelgeuse Five you know, not bloody Martin Smith from Croydon.

You just said you couldn’t stand Willstown,’ he objected. ‘Burketown and Croydon – well, they’re just the same.’ ‘I know,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not being very reasonable, am I? First I say I couldn’t stand living in a place like that, and then I say that you oughtn’t to think of living anywhere else.’ ‘That’s right.’ He was puzzled and distressed. ‘We’ve got to try and work it out some way to find what suits us both.’ ‘There’s only one way to do that, Joe.’ ‘What’s that?’ She smiled at him. ‘We’ll have to do something about Willstown.

I bet the house in Islington didn’t hurt either, I didn’t say. The loaded dad. I don’t dare rib him about it—people get weird talking about money. But if there’s one thing Will has always liked, maybe even more than the ladies, it’s money. Maybe it’s a thing from childhood, never having quite as much as anyone else at our school. I get that. He was there because his dad was headmaster, while I got in on a sports scholarship. My family aren’t posh at all. I was spotted playing rugby at a school tournament in Croydon when I was eleven and they approached my dad. That sort of thing actually happened at Trevs: it was that important to them to field a good team.

And you could do it. I promise. It’s not even that hard. I mean look at me.’ She directed my attention to her unclean clothes, her swollen chest, damp spots on the cushions and looked about to laugh, then like she was going to cry, then merely exhausted. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. Ingrid said, ‘When is it?’ I told her it was tomorrow. ‘In that case, a bag of salty liquorice. The kind from Ikea.’ The baby squirmed and pulled off. Ingrid let out a little cry and covered her breast. I helped her turn the cushion around and once he was on again, I asked if I could get her a kind of liquorice that didn’t require a journey to Croydon. She did cry then, telling me through tears that if I understood what it was like, being woken up fifty times a night and having to feed a baby every two hours when it takes an hour and fifty-nine minutes and feels like being stabbed in the nipple with four hundred knives, then I would be like, do you know what? I think I will just get my sister the liquorice she specifically likes.

Narinder Kaur had been told the story so often she believed it must be her earliest memory: that she was four years old when she’d sprinted out of their Croydon semi and straight into the road. The car braked just in time. But the funny thing was that the car belonged to a reverend, on his way to open the church, and the reason Narinder had run out of the house in the first place was because her mother had said they needed to hurry, that God was waiting for them. In other words, God, sick of waiting, had come directly to Narinder.

And it came to him then, as clearly and as certainly as if he had been watching it on the big screen at the Odeon, Leicester Square: the rest of his life. He would go home tonight with the girl from Computer Services, and they would make gentle love, and tomorrow, it being Saturday, they would spend the morning in bed. And then they would get up, and together they would remove his possessions from the packing cases, and put them away. In a year, or a little less, he would marry the girl from Computer Services, and get another promotion, and they would have two children, a boy and a girl, and they would move out to the suburbs, to Harrow or Croydon or Hampstead or even as far away as distant Reading. And it would not be a bad life. He knew that, too. Sometimes there is nothing you can do.

Londoners have intense loyalties to the areas from which they come. Those born in Croydon will argue that theirs is a borough with access to the green belt, excellent shopping and wide, pleasant streets, while the rest of the city flatly knows that Croydon is a soulless hole whose only redeeming feature is the novelty of the electric tram and a large DIY store with reasonable parking. Likewise, those from Hackney would contend that their borough is vibrant and exciting, instead of crime-ridden and depressed; those from Acton would argue that their suburb is peaceful and gentle instead of soul-destroyingly dull, samey and bleak; and the people of Amersham would proclaim that their town is the ideal combination of leafy politeness and speedy transport links instead of, clearly, the absolute end of the earth. However, no one, not one mind worthy of respect, could defend Willesden Junction as anything but an utter and irredeemable dump.

How I loved the municipal libraries of South Croydon. They were not child-friendly places; in fact, they were not friendly at all, to anyone. They were large, dark, wood-panelled rooms full of books, in which visitors were expected to be silent, and the only sound was the clicking of school shoes on polished parquet floor. The larger building in the town had its own children's library, accessible at one end of the hall via an imposing door, but what lay behind that door was not a children's library as we might understand it today, full of scatter cushions and toys and strategies of appeasement; it revealed simply a smaller, replica wood-panelled room full of books. And this - the shared expectation of respect, the solemnity, the shelves crammed end-to-end with books, no face-outs or yawning gaps - is what I loved about these places and what I found inspiring. The balance of power lay with the books, not the public. This would never be permitted today.

To start with, at that time I'd gone to bed with probably three dozen boys, all of them either German or English; never with a woman. Nonetheless -- and incredible thought it may seem -- I still assumed that a day would come when I would fall in love with some lovely, intelligent girl, whom I would marry and who would bear me children. And what of my attraction to men? To tell the truth, I didn't worry much about it. I pretended my homosexuality was a function of my youth, that when I "grew up" it would fall away, like baby teeth, to be replaced by something more mature and permanent. I, after all, was no pansy; the boy in Croydon who hanged himself after his father caught him in makeup and garters, he was a pansy, as was Oscar Wilde, my first-form Latin tutor, Channing's friend Peter Lovesey's brother. Pansies farted differently, and went to pubs where the barstools didn't have seats, and had very little in common with my crowd, by which I meant Higel and Horst and our other homosexual friends, all of whom were aggressively, unreservedly masculine, reveled in all things male, and held no truck with sissies and fairies, the overrefined Rupert Halliwells of the world. To the untrained eye nothing distinguished us from "normal" men. Though I must confess that by 1936 the majority of my friends had stopped deluding themselves into believing their homosexuality was merely a phase. They claimed, rather, to have sworn off women, by choice. For them, homosexuality was an act of rebellion, a way of flouting the rigid mores of Edwardian England, but they were also fundamentally misogynists who would have much preferred living in a world devoid of things feminine, where men bred parthenogenically. Women, according to these friends, were the “class enemy” in a sexual revolution. Infuriated by our indifference to them (and to the natural order), they schemed to trap and convert us*, thus foiling the challenge we presented to the invincible heterosexual bond. Such thinking excited me - anything smacking of rebellion did - but it also frightened me. It seemed to me then that my friends’ misogyny blinded them to the fact that heterosexual men, not women, had been up until now, and would probably always be, their most relentless enemies. My friends didn’t like women, however, and therefore couldn’t acknowledge that women might be truer comrades to us than the John Northrops whose approval we so desperately craved. So I refused to make the same choice they did, although, crucially, I still believed it was a choice.

It was a tall order. “We have no stationary, books, typists or machines, no chairs, and few tables, maddening communications,” Ramsay wrote home to his wife, Margaret. “I pray that war, if it has to come, will be averted for a few days.” But Ramsay’s prayers were answered. As it turned out, the Munich meeting ended in a controversial agreement which allowed Hitler to take the Sudetenland, the largely German speaking region of Czechoslovakia. There was “peace in our time”, Chamberlain told the crowds as that welcomed him home at Croydon Airport. So Ramsay and his small staff were stood down again.

The circumstances that had conspired to put them in their present predicament were convoluted to say the least. You could say the origins lay in an unlikely mix of rock and roll music, Adolf Hitler and a peculiarly persuasive ukulele salesman from Croydon.

briefly how she had managed to unlock the back door and why she should have seemed so resentful of him. She had, he decided, been musing and had made her way to this particular room for that purpose. Her pose over there by the window had betrayed as much and his sudden appearance breaking into her reflections, had startled her, so that, in a sense, her anger had been counterfeit. He remained standing where she had stood, wondering if she would circle the west wing and appear at the crest of the drive, but when he heard or saw something of her he fell to thinking about women in general and his relations with them in the past. His experience with women had been limited but although technically still a virgin he was not altogether innocent. There had been a very forward fourteen-year-old called Cherry, who had lived in an adjoining house in Croydon, when he came home for school holidays and Cherry had succeeded in bewitching but ultimately terrifying him, for one day when they were larking about in the stable behind her house, she had hinted at the mysterious differences between the sexes and when, blushing, he had encouraged her to elaborate, she had promptly hoisted her skirt and pulled down her long cotton drawers, whereupon he had fled as though the Devil was after him and had never sought her company again, although he watched her closely in church on successive Sundays, expecting any moment to see forked lightning descend on her in the middle of ‘For all the Saints’. Then there had been a little clumsy cuddling at Christmas parties, and after that a flaxen-haired girl called Daphne whom he had mooned over as an adolescent and had thought of a good deal in the Transvaal but now he had almost forgotten what Daphne looked like and had not recalled her name until now. Finally there had been an abortive foray

it was surprising to see that when the sun goes behind the clouds, a lot of American towns look just like Croydon.

But I felt sad for us, for our 'developed' world that keeps on developing and developing and doesn't know when to stop, that cannot help but expand without end. A world defined by acquisition and insatiable need, where our houses are filled with baubles, and where we pay for our out-of-town storage outlets to contain the overspill of our excess possessions. But where, in our endless plans for expansion, do we consider or pursue the intangible? Happiness? Community? Mutual respect? Can we ever reclaim a time when we weren't fearful and insular?

However fruitless it may appear, there is a point to everything if you are sufficiently invested in the moment.

Heathrow was referred to as an air port. Troy presumed that this fiction was in some way meant to distinguish it from such places as Croydon which had always been called an aerodrome or Brize Norton which remained an air field. It was a linguistic elevation, a sleight of tongue. What it amounted to on the physical plane was a shanty town of shacks and bulldozers, mountains of frozen mud, on the very fringe of London — so far out as to seem like another country. In this weather, Troy thought, it might as well be the North Pole.

Your heart keeps its own clock. It doesn’t care for hours and minutes; the fake lines of measurement, which the outside life uses to calculate success, age or achievement.

She was opinionated, thoughtful and funny, telling tales about a horrific shoot she abandoned when a producer started gluing stick insects to a branch in a garage in Croydon.

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Oh dear!” exclaimed the thin Miss Hervey, “how very stupid and trying. Edward will be waiting for us at Croydon.” “Edward will have learned of the delay,” said Miss May cheerfully. “We need not trouble ourselves about Edward. We can get a plane at Glasgow to take us south — or else go by train. As Miss Forrest rightly says we are fortunate in being safe. On second thoughts I should prefer to take the train, Ethel dear, if you have no objection. It takes longer, of course, but I feel I have had sufficient air-travel for some time.

…we are actually the only family in Croydon with a season ticket for the fish and chip shop.