17 September 2015
There's been some sad news from the cafe over the last day. One of the owners, a delightful Portuguese woman who long time readers of this blog may recall used to give me a memorable tall glass gesture on arriving in the cafe, has passed away. I placed huge - most probably disproportionate - stock on that gesture. I was having a terrible time, moving from one place to another. People had died, people had left. The latest TV deal had slipped away once again and I was barely seeing anyone that mattered to me as I battled to bounce back. That lady's tall gesture always told me that here was someone amidst the chaos my life had become who recognised me. As lost and rudderless as I felt, I wasn't invisible.
Not to her.
I never forgot that.
She had previously disappeared from the cafe for a lengthy period three or four years ago and it was obvious then that something was going on behind the scenes. Returning looking like she had overcome a serious health battle but as affable as ever, the cafe enjoyed her presence for another three years but earlier this year she had started to look alarmingly thin.
There had been a sense over the summer that in the absence of the owners, the staff were pulling together and putting in extra shifts and that something very big was going on behind the scenes.
At a time of huge change in both SW8 and the surrounding post codes as south London bends over for the money, so much of the old community is disappearing and so quickly too. What this lady and her husband brought to the community in the mid-nineties is as good as anything I ever knew when I was growing up in the area. The cafe opened on the site of a gloomy old junk shop I remember from my school days. Up until then, South Lambeth Road had been a colourless road, unsafe and definitely somewhere you were wary of being in after dark, but the cafe's arrival transformed it.
It was the first of the Portuguese cafes that line that middle stretch of South Lambeth Road and it more than any other place brought the new community together, becoming its meeting point much the same way St Anne's Hall had been the hub of the old Spanish community that had preceded the Portuguese invasion. On a personal level, the cafe got me through some dark periods and creatively has given me not only a place in which to write, but plenty of inspiration too and above all, during a nomadic decade and a half of trying to feel part of something, they gave me a home of sorts too.
When I was seventeen, my dad took me out one day. It was the last time he was able to do that. By then I'd started shaving and I think once you start shaving, your parents kind of know they can only really take you out if you agree to go out with them. I agreed that day. We were walking through Green Park when my dad told me that in this city it's important to find somewhere, in his case, a cafe, where you can just sit and kill a small part of the day. Some place where you can think or not think, as he put it. But you sit down. You have that coffee and you have that little time to yourself. After years of searching, I finally found that place in this South Lambeth Road cafe.
Not many people leave a legacy behind for an entire community. This lady changed the area for the better. Not many people can say that. Her passing is sad for her family and friends, those that loved her, and for her customers too because she and her husband gave us something.
Somewhere special.
A place to be in these difficult times.
And incredible coffee and the best custard tarts in London too.
RIP Sra Ilda.