When I was Five
By Mortimer Ribbons
My grandfather wore a bowler hat and carried a furled umbrella to fight off baddies in the City.
One day he took me with him on the train ‘into town’. I was so proud to live in London; London was the centre of the world. When we reached Victoria I was overwhelmed by a vision of the City at work. I sensed an infinite pattern of interlocking lives as people performed their appointed tasks, and I knew I was part of it. I have never entirely lost this first love of the city. However far I’ve travelled, I have always returned. London is the pearly moon that controls the tides of my life.
My father lived in Chelsea, which he regarded as one of the few suburbs acceptable to an artist. To visit galleries or museums he would need to ‘go into London.’ When an acquaintance decided to start a coffee bar, to be called the Troubador, he thought it was a splendid idea in theory, but he doubted that anyone would ever find it in a desert like Earl’s Court. Could the fellow not find premises in London? How we laughed at dear old Dad with his narrow horizons. London was vast and free and democratic, and it stretched from Eel Pie Island to the Isle of Dogs. An endless pageant, from the Deep South to the Frozen North – even unto N16, made famous by the Stoke Newington 8, a band of bombers who were London’s own answer to the Red Brigade.
Now it seems Dad was right all along. London’s somewhere else, and I don’t live there anymore. The place has been cut in half. The haves who live in the rich areas are encouraged to drive everywhere for 4 quid a week, and the have-nots, like us, have to pay for them. There’s a voice inside me that says keep your fucking city, Ken, I’ll go somewhere else. I mean how big can an Exclusion Zone get before it includes everyone it used to charge? Residents of Hampstead, Greenwich and Richmond are furious at being left out. ‘We’re rich too’, they cry, ‘some of us filthily so. We need to ride round free an’ all.’ Ken’s been ordered to extrude a lump round Regents Park, and construct a Primrose Hill Corridor to the Heath. Followed by a New Traitor’s Gate Extension from Tower Bridge to Blackheath. Hackney was to have been a key component of the Parking PermaFringe, until it was discovered that there aren’t any tube stations here so there’s nothing to park for.
In front of our shop Murphy’s dug the same hole twice. To be sure, to be sure. I said, ‘Would you consider fucking off altogether now, and leaving us in peace?’ He said, ‘You should be thanking me for keeping them gas and electric fellers at bay. And I take three sugars in me tea, as you know full well by now.’ I said, ‘You’ve stopped all the traffic, the customers can’t get in the door, and all the girls who work for us are trying to get jobs on your road gang.’ Murphy snorted derisively. ‘No woman could drink enough tea!’
I said, ‘They’re attracted by the three-day week and the four-hour lunch-break. Our Ulrica used to be a Girl Guide in Sweden, and she’s particularly taken by the little transparent tent thingie that you all sit in all day.’ (Actually, this isn’t the entire truth; her boyfriend’s been slung out of the country for being too American. They both earn their living here, without signing on, and they’ve been through all the proper channels – so they’ve only themselves to blame. They’re to be replaced, in a new government initiative, by a Romanian couple who have agreed to beg on the streets for two years before they’re allowed to look for a job.) |
