The Real Thing (11 page)

Today I am glad I am not getting off here. The escalator
often doesn’t work. Only a month ago, on one of the blackboards the staff use to communicate their thoughts to passengers was written in jaunty white chalk: ‘You are probably wondering why the escalators so often aren’t working? We shall tell you! It is because they are old and often go out of order. Sorry! Have a good day!’ Which message, absolutely in the style of London humour, sardonic and with its edge of brutality, was enough to cheer one up, and ready to make the long descent on foot.

In jump three youngsters. Yobbos. Louts. Hooligans. They are sixteen or so, in other words adolescents, male, with their loud raucous unhappy braying laughter, their raging sex, their savagery. Two white and a black. Their cries, their jeers, command everyone’s attention-which is after all the point. One white youth and the black are jostling and the third, who puts up with it in a manner of stylized resignation, smiling like a sophisticated Christian martyr: probably some film or television hero. Impossible to understand what they are saying, for their speech is as unformed as if they had speech defects-probably intentionally, for who wants to be understood too well by adults at sixteen? All this aggro is only horseplay, on the edge of harm, no more. At Baker Street the two tormentors push out the third, try to prevent him from re-entering. Not so easy, this, for trains take their time at Baker Street, the all-purpose junction for many-suburbed London. The three tire of the scuffle and step inside to stand near the door, preventing others from entering, but only by their passivity. Excuse me, excuse me, travellers say, confronted by these three large youths who neither resist nor attack, but only take up a lot of room, knowing that they do, knowing they are a damned nuisance, but preserving innocent faces that ignore mutters and angry stares. As the doors begin to close, the two aggressors push out the victim, and stand making all kinds of abusive
gestures at him, and mouthing silent insults as the train starts to move. The lad on the platform shouts insults back but points in the direction the train is going, presumably to some agreed destination. As we gather speed he is half-strolling, half-dancing, along the platform, and he sends a forked-fingered gesture after us. The two seem to miss him, and they sit loosely, gathering energy for the next explosion, which occurs at Bond Street, where they are off the train in dangerous kangaroo leaps, shouting abuse. At whom? Does it matter? Where they sat roll two soft-drink cans, as bright and seductive as advertisements. Now in the coach are people who have not seen the whole sequence, and they are probably thinking. Thank God I shall never have to be that age again! Or are they? Is it possible that when people sigh. Oh if only I was young again, they are regretting what we have just seen, but remembered as an interior landscape of limitless possibilities?

At Bond Street a lot of people get out, and the train stays still long enough to read comfortably the poem provided by the Keepers of the Underground, inserted into a row of advertisements.

In get a crowd of Danish school-children, perhaps on a day trip. They are well-behaved, and watched over by a
smiling girl, who does not seem much older than they are. Tidily they descend at Green Park, and the carriage fills up again. All tourists. Is that what people mean when they complain the Underground is so untidy? It is the xenophobia of the British again? Rather, the older generations of the British. Is what I enjoy about London, its variety, its populations from everywhere in the world, its transitoriness-for sometimes London can give you the same feeling as when you stand to watch cloud shadows chase across a plain-exactly what they so hate?

Yet for people so threatened they are doing, I think, rather well. Not long ago I saw this incident. It was a large London hospital, in a geriatric ward. ‘I’m just on my way to Geriatrics’ you may hear one sprightly young nurse tell another, as she darts her finger to the lift button. An old white woman, brought in because she had fallen, was being offered a bedpan. She was not only old, in fact ancient, and therefore by rights an inhabitant of that lost Eden of decently uniform pinko-grey people, but working class and a spinster. (One may still see women described on old documents. Status: Spinster.) For such a woman to be invited to use a bedpan in a public place before the curtains had even been drawn about her was bad enough. To be nursed by a man, a male nurse, something she had never imagined possible. Worst of all, he was black, a young calm black man, in a nurse’s uniform. (‘No, I’m not a doctor, I’m a nurse-yes, that’s right, a nurse.’) He turned back the bed covers, assisted the old woman on to the bedpan, nicely pulling down her nightgown over her old thighs, and drew the curtains. ‘I’ll be back in just a minute, love.’ And off he went. Behind that curtain went on an internal drama hard to imagine by people used to polyglot and casually mannered London, whether they enjoy it or not. When he returned to pull back the curtains, ask if she was all right-did she want him to clean her up
a little?-and then remove the pan, her eyes were bright with dignified defiance. She had come to terms with the impossible. ‘No, dear, it’s all right, I can still do that for myself.’

In a school in South London where a friend is governor, twenty-five languages are spoken.

Now we are tunnelling under old London, though not the oldest, for that is a mile, or two or three, further East. On the other side of thick shelves of earth as full of pipes and cables, wires, sewers, the detritus of former buildings and towns as garden soil is of worms and roots, is St James’s Park-Downing Street-Whitehall. If someone travelled these under-earth galleries and never came up into the air it would be easy to believe this was all there could be to life, to living. There is a sci-fi story about a planet where suns and moons appear only every so many years, and the citizens wait for the miracle, the revelation of their situation in the universe, which of course the priests have taken possession of, claiming the splendour of stars as proof of their right to rule. There are already cities where an under-earth town repeats the one above it, built in air-for instance, Houston, Texas. You enter an unremarkable door, just as in a dream, and you are in an underground city, miles of it, with shops, restaurants, offices. You need never come up. There are people who actually like basement flats, choose them, draw curtains, turn on lights, create for themselves an underground, and to them above-ground living seems as dangerous as ordinary life does to an ex-prisoner or someone too long in hospital. They institutionalize themselves, create a place where everything is controlled by them, a calm concealed place, away from critical eyes, and the hazards of weather and the changes of light are shut out. Unless the machinery fails: a gas leak, the telephone goes wrong.

In the fifties I knew a man who spent all day going
around the Circle Line. It was like a job, a discipline, from nine till six.
They
couldn’t get at him, he claimed. He was having a breakdown. Did people go in for more imaginative breakdowns, then? It sometimes seems a certain flair has gone out of the business. And yet, a few days ago, on the Heath, there approached a Saxon-well, a young man wearing clothes it would be possible to agree Saxons might have worn. A brown woollen shirt. Over it a belted jerkin contrived from thick brown paper. Breeches were made with elastic bands up the calves. A draped brown scarf made a monkish hood. He held a spear from a toy shop. ‘Prithee, kind sir,’ said my companion, somewhat out of period, ‘whither goest thou?’ The young Saxon stopped, delighted and smiling, while his companion, a young woman full of concern, looked on. ‘Out,’ said the young man. ‘Away.’

“What is your name? Beowulf? Olaf the Red? Eric the Brave?’

‘Eric the Black.’

‘It isn’t your name
really,’
said his minder, claiming him for fact.

‘Yes it is,’ we heard as they wandered off into the russets, the yellows, the scorched greens of the unforgettable autumn of 1990. ‘My name is Eric, isn’t it? Well then, it is Eric’

Charing Cross and everyone gets out. At the exit machine a girl appears running up from the deeper levels, and she is chirping like an alarm. Now she has drawn our attention to it, in fact a steady bleeping is going on, and for all we know, it is a fire alarm. These days there are so many electronic bleeps, cheeps, buzzes, blurps, that we don’t hear them. The girl is a fey creature, blonde locks flying around a flushed face. She is laughing dizzily, and racing a flight or flock of young things coming into the West End for an evening’s adventure, all of them already
crazed with pleasure, and in another dimension of speed and lightness, like sparks speeding up and out. She and two girls push in their tickets and flee along a tunnel to the upper world, but three youths vault over, with cries of triumph, and their state of being young is such a claim on us all that the attendant decides not to notice, for it would be as mad as swatting butterflies.

Now I am going out to Trafalgar Square, along a tunnel, and there, against a wall, is a site where groups of youngsters are always bending, crouching, squatting, to examine goods laid on boxes, and bits of cloth. Rings and earrings, bracelets, brooches, all kinds of glitter and glitz, brass and glass, white metal and cheap silver, cheap things but full of promise and possibility.

I follow this tunnel and that, go up some steps, and I am in Trafalgar Square. Ahead of me across the great grey space with its low pale fountains is the National Gallery, and near it the National Portrait Gallery. The sky is a light blue, sparkling, and fragile clouds are being blown about by winds at work far above our level of living, for down here it is quiet. Now I may enjoyably let time slide away in one Gallery or both, and not decide till the last possible moment, shall I turn left to the National, or walk another fifty paces and look at the faces of our history? When I come out, the sky, though it will not have lost light, will have acquired an intense late-afternoon look, time to find a cafe, to meet friends and then … in an hour or so the curtain will go up in a theatre, or the English National Opera. Still, after all these years, these decades, there is no moment like that when the curtain goes up, the house lights dim … Or, having dawdled about, one can after all simply go home, taking care to miss the rush hour.

Not long ago, at the height of the rush hour, I was strap-hanging, and in that half of the carriage, that is, among fourteen people, three people read books among
all the newspapers. In the morning, off to work, people betray their allegiances:
The Times
, the
Independent
, the
Guardian
, the
Telegraph
, the
Mail.
The bad papers some of us are ashamed of don’t seem much in evidence, but then this is a classy line, at least at some hours and in some stretches of it. At night the
Evening Standard
adds itself to the display. Three people. At my right elbow a man was reading the
Iliad.
Across the aisle a woman read
Moby Dick.
As I pushed out, a girl held up
Wuthering Heights
over the head of a new baby asleep on her chest. When people talk glumly about our state of illiteracy I tell them I saw this, and they are pleased, but sceptical.

The poem holding its own among the advertisements was:

Walking back from the Underground I pass three churches. Two of them are no longer conduits for celestial currents:
one is a theatre, one derelict. In such a small bit of London, three churches … that other-worldly visitor so useful for enlivening our organs of comparison might, seventy years ago, have wondered, ‘What are they for, these buildings, so like each other, so unlike all the others, several to a district? Administrative buildings? A network of governmental offices? Newly built, too!’ But these days this person, she, he or it, would note the buildings are often unused. ‘A change of government perhaps?’ Yet certain types of buildings repeat themselves from one end of the city to the other. ‘Just as I saw on my last visit, there are “pubs” for dispensing intoxicants, and centres for fast movement by means of rail. Others are for the maintenance of machines like metal bugs or beetles-a new thing this, nothing like that last time I was here. And there is another new thing. Every few yards is a centre for the sale of drugs, chemical substances.’ A funny business-he, she or it might muse, mentally arranging the items of the report that will be faxed back to Canopus. ‘If I put them in order of frequency of occurrence, then chemists’ shops must come first. This is a species dependent on chemical additions to what they eat and drink.’ Within a mile of where I live there are at least fifteen chemists’ shops, and every grocery has shelves of medicines.

As I turn the corner past where the old mill stood I leave behind the stink and roar of vehicles pushing their way northwards and I realize that for some minutes it has been unpleasant to breathe. Now Mill Lane, where shops are always starting up, going bankrupt, changing hands, particularly now with the trebling and quadrupling of rents and rates. Soon, I am in the little roads full of houses, and the traffic has become a steady but minor din. The streets here are classically inclined. Agamemnon, Achilles, Ulysses, and there is an Orestes Mews. Add to these names Gondar, and one may postulate an army man, classically
educated, who was given the job of naming these streets. In fact, this was not so far wrong. The story was this. (True or false? Who cares? Every story of the past, recent or old, is bound to be tidied up, rounded off, made consequential.) An ex-army man, minor gentry, had a wife in the country with many children, and a mistress in town, with many more. To educate all these he went in for property, bought farmland that spread attractively over a hill with views of London, and built what must have been one of the first northern commuter suburbs … for remember, in the valley just down from this hill, towards London, were the streams, the cows and the green fields my old friend took a penny bus ride to visit every Sunday. The commuters went in by horse-bus or by train to the City.