Tito

19 August 2025

Today marks the first anniversary of my uncle’s passing.

I wrote this last year, shortly after he passed, and read an abridged version of this at Brixton Book Jam last November.

* * *

We said goodbye to my uncle in the late summer. ‘Tito’ as we call our uncles in southern Spain, had been unwell for a long time, so it wasn’t an unexpected loss, but he’d been in my life for almost twice as long as my parents, so his passing is one I’ve felt keenly.

My uncle and aunt, childhood sweethearts, had moved to London in the mid-sixties. Like many Spaniards of their generation in a country still struggling to recover from a brutal civil war a quarter of a century earlier, they had to leave the country to find work.

My uncle just had done his national service in the navy, on sail ships mostly, and would tell me alarming tales of having to scale the rigging in all sorts of weather. He then spent a year on the Isle of Wight, laying the groundwork for bringing my aunt over after they married in Spain in 1965. They then moved to Hyde Park together. Imagine working class people being able to live in Hyde Park now. After Hyde Park, a brief stint on South Lambeth Road in SW8 followed, above the old Post Office, before they spent some 8 years living in Stockwell, in a home that would actually become my own family’s home for over two decades.

They would, like most of the Spanish community I grew up in, move largely in Spanish circles throughout their near sixty years in this country, a mistake I feel made by many mediterranean immigrants of that era. This failure to properly integrate in this country meant that even after all this time, between them they barely knew 100 words of English and it was us children who as soon as we could read would have to read and oversee any correspondence.

But one aspect of English my uncle, like many immigrants of that time seemed to master, was the swearing. My uncle would often marry two separate EXPLETIVES that British people would never put together – a very common trait amongst the Franco-era Spanish immigrants here - and my uncle and EXPLETIVES were comfortable bedfellows. If there was a swearing World Cup, my uncle would’ve been seeded and fancied to come close to lifting the thing.

Tito worked as a wine waiter spending a quarter of a century at L’Ecu de France, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Jermyn Street which, I think closed in the early nineties, while my aunt was a cleaner. Like many southern Europeans of her generation, she’d be on the old number 2B bus at 6 in the morning, bound for the rich houses of Belgravia’s historic squares.

I spent much of my childhood with my cousins, my uncle’s sons, in Brixton after they’d moved from Stockwell to the new yellow brick Angel Town deck-access estate which by its early years had already firmly established its ferocious reputation, its misguided design of overhead walkways and linking bridges making it a boon for robberies. The bridges were later removed in an attempt to make it harder for thieves to flee, but this forced residents and visitors to enter and exit the estate via poorly-lit staircases where you never knew quite what was waiting for you. My aunt and uncle would endure a difficult 17 years there.

I’d go to Angel Town once or twice a week after school and during the school holidays where my cousins and I would play lots of football, both the real version and the table soccer version Subbuteo. With the latter, like most kids of our generation, we were never fortunate enough to play it on a table, playing instead on uneven carpeted floors. By the time we were young adults, we were already struggling with our backs and knees.

Five years into their move to Brixton, and two burglaries later, Toby arrived. The estate, like pretty much every other estate of that era, had the usual ‘No Dogs’ signs but these were uniformly ignored. Toby was a mongrel, a German Shepherd mixed with a collie and even as a puppy, his bark was as bad as his bite.

This was a more innocent era of trophy dogs. The arrival of Dobermans and Rottweilers was around the corner and by the turn of the new decade, Pitt Bulls would become a thing. But at this point, Alsatians were the dog to fear and in the canine battle to be King of the Estate, Toby would pick up some considerable scars in the ongoing battle to prove himself, literally, the top dog. Just in my cousin’s square alone, there were a handful of dogs that could rival and perhaps best Toby.

Boxing in that era had its Four Kings, the quartet of all-time greats duking it out to be the best in the middleweight division. There was the Hands of Stone, Roberto Duran, my own favourite, Marvellous Marvin Hagler, the golden boy Sugar Ray Leonard, and the unconventional and rangy Thomas the Hit Man Hearns whose opening round tear up with Hagler in 1985 remains the greatest single round of boxing ever. Meantime, Angel Town’s dogs had their own canine equivalent, with Toby battling it out with Lady, who also happened to be his mum, and brother Maverick, who cemented the family’s fierce reputation by also biting one of his owners. Like Toby, Maverick was very protective of his human dad and the story goes one night the wife was getting into bed with her husband and Maverick took a not insignificant chunk out of her. This struck a chord when it happened as my aunt could rarely go anywhere near Tito without Toby coming between them. As my aunt once remarked “Is it any wonder we never had any more kids once we got Toby.” Last but not least, challenging the family hegemony was Rocky, another Alsatian mix, who bit a number of friends on the estate.

My uncle worked two daily shifts, arriving home in the middle of the afternoon following the lunchtime rush, and then just after 6pm, he would head back for the significantly longer late shift. If I was visiting after school, Tito would drop me home first in his mint green Hillman Avenger, walking ahead to collect the car from the foreboding underground garages - he was the strong silent type - car keys in hand, a Rothman’s in one hand, my little legs trying and failing to keep up with him. He would never wait for me, only occasionally looking back at me as if to say, “This is how we do this.”

The car trips home were always conversation-free. I don’t even remember if the radio would come on. My uncle would light up the customary cigarette and that was it. He was the complete antithesis to my raconteur dad. The problem I had with my dad was finding some segue that would help me end some interminable conversation. With my uncle, there was no segue my childhood version could seize on as a way of firing up some conversation.

There are those, myself included, who don’t mind a comfortable silence. My uncle though, who was equally fine with an uncomfortable silence.

Whenever my uncle dropped me off home, I could never shut the car doors properly, a habit that dogged me into my early twenties. My parents never drove so I just wasn’t au fait with these things. Tito never said anything but even as a boy, I could tell he wasn’t impressed.

There was one drive home one evening - it was just a short journey from Brixton to Clapham North - that I remember for all the wrong reasons. I would’ve been about eight. A police motorcyclist by Brixton Police Station pulled him over for flicking a cigarette outside his window. The experience traumatised me for some time – probably making my car door closing even more erratic for a period - and it was only decades later that I felt comfortable asking him if he remembered the incident. He did, though it turned out it was one of several he’d have. I have a memory of the police office pulling my uncle over in dramatic fashion, lighting up his bike, and of removing his helmet in deliberately slow fashion as he walked towards the car. Tito was given a stern lecture, of which I imagine he perhaps understood very little beyond that he had been pulled over because of the discarded cigarette and this was seen as dangerous.

My uncle took me to my first Liverpool game at his beloved Chelsea when the Blues were a second division side. In terms of football allegiances, we were a family divided along Chelsea and glory hunting reds lines, never foreseeing that in the coming century, the roles would be reversed and it would be the team from west London accruing trophy after trophy.

Back to that first game though. Liverpool lost, they often did at Stamford Bridge in those days. In actual fact, I would never actually see them win at The Bridge. To be honest, given the severity of the hooliganism in those dark days, the result for me was always secondary to just being able to get home in one piece.

Toby’s reign of terror, at least for me, arguably peaked one October Sunday afternoon when I crouched on my uncle’s front room floor after he’d asked me to reset the clock to Greenwich Mean Time on his VHS recorder, at which point Toby mounted me. I always felt my uncle could have called the dog off a fraction earlier. Perhaps it was his teeming resentment from all those years of nor closing his car door properly that played a part in that.

It wasn't until my early 20s that I really felt I got to know my uncle as he suffered his first health scare. As the creative one in the family showing no inclination to enter the world of 9 to 5 – the rest of the family would use the term ‘unemployed’ – from the mid-nineties onwards, I was regularly charged with accompanying Tito to hospital on interpreter duties to bring him up to speed with how far that first cancer might be spreading. I think our relationship, eventually a close friendship, was forged in those waiting rooms of south London's hospitals. For the first time, I didn’t freeze in his company.

I couldn’t, not when the stakes were so high.

There was still nothing offered from him in the way of segues, but I was now confident enough to lead and drive our conversations.

As that relationship deepened, as much as I wanted to ask him about that evening he was pulled over by the police motorcyclist, I still had enough about me to think, ‘actually, I’d better give it another twenty years before I ask him.’

Life became easier when they moved back to Stockwell in the mid-nineties. Forced to take early retirement because of ill health, my uncle would sent the final third of his life taking himself off on walks after lunch, usually sporting a curious combination of shoes with tracksuit bottoms which somehow he managed to pull off, and then on his way back, he’d pop into the bookies on the high street to place his regular bets on the horses and the dogs. Fellow gamblers would bump fists with him in Stockwell long before fist bumping established itself as a serious rival to the handshake in this post-pandemic world.

Like many mediterranean guys, my uncle was always quick to temper but was always put in his place by my feisty aunt. Often I’d see them coming back from the shops, my uncle reluctantly dragging the shopping trolley behind him, cowed like some mighty beast forced to plough a field, probably thinking of the other errands my aunt had lined up for him when they got back to the flat. They were the funniest couple I have ever met. The ‘Stockwell Costanzas’ as we called them.

Standout memories in recent years include the time I had to go to their flat for a meeting with the council. When my uncle came down, we found we were wearing identical shirts. I told him we were going to look like idiots at the same meeting in the same shirt and as he was at home, perhaps he could change. “What do I care?,” he told me. “I’m old and I don’t need to impress anyone.” I then suggested we would at least need to acknowledge the shirt duplication at the meeting, perhaps make light of it, put everyone at ease.

“Do what you want.”

He’d also refused to put his false front teeth in for the meeting, causing my aunt no end of stress.

“Put your teeth in,” she told him as the council delegation made their way up in the lift.

My uncle refused.

“Look at the state of you.”

My uncle, nonplussed, gestured to his missing teeth. “The state of me? Look at the state of you. What’s the big deal? This is how we’re meant to look at this age.”

The meeting went ahead with both of us in the same very distinctive shirt. These shirt duplications weren’t unusual. Whenever my aunt saw me in a shirt that she liked, she’d go out and get the same one for my uncle, not appreciating that we were two generations apart and shouldn’t have been dressing the same. There were a couple of occasions where I introduced them to girlfriends only for another shirt clash to occur. Not long after, those relationships would peter out. Coincidence, I’m not so sure. Maybe they thought I was dressing like my uncle when in fact my uncle was dressing like me, or rather, being dressed like me by my aunt.

In later years I would look to find the kind of woman who might have enough about them to consider the possibility that it probably wasn’t me buying shirts more commonly worn by the elderly and that in fact my uncle was duplicating my shirts, albeit through no fault of his own. When taking a girlfriend to meet them, I would phone ahead and describe the shirt I was wearing to minimise the chances of another shirt duplicatin.

Then there was the time in hospital where my aunt had to be rushed in one Christmas and he was in the changing room with her, helping her change into her gown. The ensuing row as she pulled him up on his bra removal technique was audible to everyone, though probably understood by no one as they argued in Spanish, but I’ll never forget the look on the nurse’s face as they turned to see what all the commotion was about to find the curtain screen moving manically, like some Morecambe and Wise sketch.

His final years were cruel and difficult as his illness brought him down. If there is something after this life, I hope everything my uncle never had in those final years, and more, comes to him, because he was a good man I looked up to.

That fateful day when he left home for the last time and I was wheeling him into A&E, as I wheeled him into reception, I forgot to put the brakes on the wheelchair and watched in some horror as the wheelchair knocked into the reception desk. My uncle turned round to give me a look that took me back to childhood and all those times I failed to properly close the door to his beloved Hillman Avenger.