Ghost Signs

Sometime last year I took this picture, sadly as a consolation to myself for the terrible loss of a favorite local sight. It had withstood years of rain and weather of all types and although a little faded was still legible in all its fragile hues, the ghost sign of the Music Roll Exchange.

Speaking as it did, of things long past and firing the memory with images of such seemingly distant and bygone contraptions as pianolas and gramaphones or of heavy old 78's and the sheets of music to all the latest popular songs that were the singles of their day I found it was possible to imagine that it was as if a key to the past had been left painted there amidst the grime and the noise and the rush of traffic.
Spread boldly across the wall above the one time Music shop, (since become the all night store), the fuzzy black words like incantation, an invocation - as if a doorway to the past can be cracked open through which those willing could step back into memory and conjure up the sights and sounds of those long distant days. The smokey darkness of the rowdy music halls and the Big Band sound coming from the radiogram, music of the dance halls, the sound track of our lives. And that perhaps sitting there on the top deck of the stifling bus I could be transported back to a seat on the Clapham Omnibus as it wended its way up towards the common to the faint strains of a ragtime tune or the popular singers of the day, Cole Porter, Ivor Novello.
Across the street another relic of the past hangs on grimly by its fingertips, a shop. The proprieter of Jeanettes sewing shop and haberdashers told me he remembers the sign 60 or so years ago. We spoke together about its sad passing....its still there he said, under the paint...as if it were somehow a comfort to know that obliterated as it was by the act of greed or stupidity or ignorance that some how its secret mystery and magic was still acting subversivley against the tide of the bland and ubiquitous spread of all that is mediocre and souless. For myself the knowlege that the words the magic key lies hidden beneath gave no comfort for sixty years or more of all that the weather can throw at it will probably still never uncover what is lost.