On Silva Cafe and folk heroes of Edmonton
I phoned a lady called Terry while I was researching local figures and this is what we talked about
The first time I heard about Pam, I was in an Uber home in 2019. I mean to say that I heard about her as a person, Palmira Silva, and not just an unnamed newspaper headline. My Uber driver was a Greek Cypriot man who picked me up because he was headed back to North London and we got to talking about his memories of living in Edmonton. We were passing one of the new Turkish cafes by the train station when he mentioned how he remembered eating there when it was another place — Silva’s Cafe. In 2014 the cafe was embroiled in a tragic turn of events that hit national newspapers. The boss, a local Greek Cypriot lady named Palmira Silva, or Pam, was murdered in her own back garden by a man with a machete who was going through a psychotic episode. The story registers only faintly to me when he tells me.
Later I flick through old news stories online and see her photographs, a sweetly smiling old lady. A grandma, locally beloved. Struck down by a crazed villain, neighbour, Fat Nick, 25-year old, Nigerian, cagefighter and watcher of Jihadist videos. I go on Google Streetview and scroll through the year viewer to 2014 and the recognition sparks when I see Silva’s Cafe, its name announced on a sign in a friendly purple sans serif. It’s three years after that when newspapers appear covering up the window, so the Silvas carried the mantle on for some time. The bittersweet part of this experience is how oblivious I am about this woman, who lived and died in close proximity to me in terms of both time and distance. I walked past this place countless times on my way to and from the station as a teenager, and then going home during uni years, but by the time I moved back and started aimlessly frequenting cafes, Pam’s place was gone.
—-
It’s 2020, and like lots of others in lockdown I’m spending a lot of time in my neighourhood. I have the idea that I could reach out to people online about things I wanted to know about local history. I start posting in local interest groups on Facebook about Pam’s place, which is now a different modern, Turkish-run spot, still a cafe. The plan is to talk to people who remember her. Four people reply that they remember Pam, and how sad it all was. One of them, Terry, knew Pam well enough that she wants to speak to me on the phone.
She’s an Edmonton resident in her 70s. When I ring her up she initially talks to me about her kids, who are in their middle age, and her adult grandkids, all of whom she names by first name and surname. She asks me if I know a Barry ———, who is her youngest son. Barry is a local character who knows half of Edmonton and half of Edmonton know him, she says, which is a very intriguing thing for her to say but I don’t manage to enquire further. Terry asks me my parents’ names, which I find cute (because my parents have hardly spoken to anyone in English in the ends apart from the GP and the dentist, much less introduced themselves by their names, which are Chinese, and which they typically avoided telling to people in fear of mispronunciation).
My parents’ friends who live/d or work in Edmonton: Xiaomei and Xiaoren (relocated) Tracy Ma Ah Xiu Dr Zhang Roger’s mum Roger Eileen
Terry asks me if I know her boys Barry and Paul, floats the names of her Paul ———, and then her Linda ———, who has had a regular presenter part on a major daytime television show. Needless to say I don’t know them. Barry is definitely a local character, she says, he lives in Ilford now. She describes her husband and her family’s relations to the area via local points of interest - the garage her husband worked in behind the petrol station, Linda’s house on the road that branches out at an acute angle from my house, and it makes a little map in my head.
Terry moves us on: what happened with poor old Pam?
“As a couple, Pam and her husband, you could have made a sitcom out of them. They were the funniest couple ever. I only used to go in there to be truthful, to listen to them. They’d be effing and jeffing. I used to cry laughing at them the pair of them.” Terry is mournful as she’s describing her.
Pam was prone to fussing over her customers like a grandmother, she says. Ever the frugal matriarch, if Pam saw a diner hadn’t eaten all of a certain food in the dish, she would give them less of that component next time. Terry’s laughing as she reflects, “So many people loved Pam. They spoke so highly of her, and she talked to them like she was a relative.”
The word “reputation” comes up a few times talking about Pam, like a celebrity but they’re in your social sphere. You relate to them like family, and they give you a way to contextualise yourself. What I find tantalising about the Pam story is how she was a connecting dot in a community I wasn’t part of, and under all of my questioning I’m thinking, maybe inelegantly, whether her death could be some kind of symbolic break in the already discontinuous concept of “community” in Edmonton.
—-
It’s 4th September 2014 when Nick Salvador makes his way through the residential back roads up towards Ponders End, the blade in his hand for protection against the devils chasing him. He is fighting them back and he fells one of the devils, it’s a terrible creature, feline. Then he turns towards a more sizeable foe, she’s doing garden work and she approaches him, but it’s not who it looks like at all, he blinks his vision clearer, seeing pure terror. She morphs from demon to human to spirit, each version of herself more aborrent than the last. The evil she exudes makes him grip his weapons tighter. He pulls back the machete to strike her neck.
Nick was 25 in 2014, and the word Terry uses to describes him with when she talks about him is ‘boy’. He too, had been a customer of the cafe. Her granddaughter Stacy was acquainted with Nick and witnessed Nick’s decline in health during the period leading up to the events. His illness led to his dismissal from his job pasting billboards. Terry feels there’s more than one victim in this story. Nick had been failed by social services, in her opinion, (who had seen him a mere two days before the murder). “It’s tragic for all of them. Do you honestly believe people belong in prison?” — (Note that Nick was sent to Broadmoor, not a prison)— “It’s the system that’s at fault,” Terry says.
I wondered if such “random” violence had a tendency of lingering in North London, bearing in mind how the riots of 2011 began in Tottenham, Wood Green, Enfield and Edmonton. 2011 was provoked by the stifling grip of policing on poor and black people, combined with unemployment from austerity introduced by Clegg and Cameron, the taking apart of youth and mental health services… the state lining up people in its path, tumbling its spikes around, destruction prompting further destruction like a Rube Goldberg machine. And before that, in the 00s, people nicknamed Edmonton Shanktown because of its frequent youth stabbings.
In media coverage of Pam’s story in 2014, family and acquaintances speak about the decline of the area. Daughter Celestina is quoted in the Daily Mail, of her mother, “She knew the area was changing but she was determined to stay. It seems such a dreadful, senseless waste.” Celestina said that Edmonton was no longer safe.
I raise this with Terry. Does she think the area’s changed? “Nowadays, when people say oh it’s changed, it’s gone downhill, I think my god are we talking about the same Edmonton? There aren’t more villains. They call it a shithole and they move to seaside towns, like Clacton, but it’s got the biggest heroin problem there. Edmonton’s okay now.”
Terry feels there is something to correct about Edmonton and people’s association of it with crime. “There is one thing that makes me laugh about people who say Edmonton’s gone down the pan.” Basically it’s been dodgy to some extent for as long as she can remember. She mentions names of gangsters from the 1970s. She talks about someone called Jimmy Montague, and refers to murders and stabbings he was related to. There’s rumour that the legendary East End criminal brothers the Krays had a meeting in the present location of the Capital Restaurant (local Turkish spot) with the Montagues and the Keys. Barney Keys was a fistfighter. She mentions other names: Danny Jones. Rockey Murter. The bullion robbery, 50 million, jewellery heist at Hatton Gardens. “If you take a walk over to Edmonton Cemetery you’ll see where they’re buried by the size of the monument because they’re huge.”
“If you ask me about when people slag it off…. it’s racism. It’s the majority of people are Turkish, Asian, nothing wrong with them, much less crime. It’s not a bad place. People tend to really run it down, and they move out because foreigners have moved in.”
I’m Mmmming in agreement. Fuck prisons, fuck psychiatric systems, fuck xenophobia. Go Terry.
—-
It’s October 2022, I’m hovering near the snack table with my friend Timi when he points out the man with the moustache. “I think the guy who got your job is here, I just spoke to him.”
We’re at the library in Upper Edmonton and my would’ve-been-but-they-rejected-me employers have put on a film screening, it’s a Thursday evening and we’re here because Timi’s documentary is showing. Last month I interviewed for a part time role here as an event programmer for a community-facing project, based in Edmonton, which I really wanted because it had great pay. Here was the opportunity to sustainably do work in an area I was passionate about without having to keep cobbling together money for one-off projects. I missed out on the gig even though I sweated preparing what to say to them and I was only one of two candidates, the other being this white dude who’s now hovering around in his new balance looking like he’s never entered the Turkish Food Centre in his life.
I’m projecting blasé about it as I make comments about the guy’s facial hair to Timi, but my jokes arise from a feeling of inadequacy that is creeping. Really though, why haven’t I got the job? I think of myself as a “local” and I never shut up about it. Granted I do I live a bit further down the A10 now in Tottenham, but the charms on my necklace announce my postcode and whenever someone asks me about the area I reel off Edmonton's famous people with pride. Tion Wayne, Scorcher, Bruce Forsyth, Chas and Dave, Delboy from Only Fools and Horses.
People use folk heroes to tell stories about who they are. Because working class people have had comparatively less history preserved physically or in writing, a lot of the their symbols come as oral histories, AKA gossip about so-and-so: infamous characters, minor celebrities, et cetera. In the 14th Century, King Edward III pushed to tell stories about St George amongst the British subjects, to shore up his claim to the throne because he was insecure about his French lineage, and George as a symbol became more intimately tied up with British identity along the way. I can’t honestly claim “working class” identity but I guess I’m trying to tell you a story now to try and say something about who I am too. And it’s relieving to do the telling. Talking about shared mythology has been important for a former lonely kid that has, in adulthood, been fervently seeking community and local context. I know that other local people, for differing combinations of factors to mine, seek connection and context as well.
Walking past where the Silvas’ place used to be, I wonder about the food I would have ordered from the Greek Cypriot grandma I never had. Sitting in the cafe, what stories could I have overheard, and what conversations and hearsay could I have been party to? I have a lot of “questions about me” and who I am that I’m still working on, but rather than achieve a conclusion I’m trying to focus on having a lot of chitchat.