Some months ago I went across the river to Peckham, to where my grandmother was born. At the age of three she was taken by her father to Salford where she remained the rest of her life - till she died in 1984 aged 87. I was searching for her grandfather’s grave, my great-great grandfather’s. I was unlucky. The cemetery had recently systematically cleared out the graves abandoned from before 1920. I did, though, find a reference there in the records - as Alfred, died age 64 in August 1914.
Charlie Chaplin was eight years older than my grandmother. He was born in Peckham. His early life there, the poverty and distress, was terrifying. I’m glad my grandmother escaped it - into something relatively more comfortable, though I’m not sure we’d think of it so now. Her life, a Lancashire miner’s wife, was hard enough.
There’s a sculpture of Charlie there now. It’s not up to much, but it marks a remembrance.
This is Charlie’s composition ‘Limelight’ - into which he, by his genius, was able to escape to live, and my grandmother and great- great grandfather weren’t.
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