Up early again, I caught a bus over to Whitehall and walked through Horse Guards up to the edge of St. James Park to Buckingham Palace. The Queen being away in Canada, the Royal Household was quiet, with a few soldiers patrolling the grounds. At the entrance to the public area, a soldier stood guard, dressed in camouflage and holding an automatic rifle. He looked so professional, yet very, very young, almost too young to shave. Armies make men out of boys very easily.
Hyde Park was quiet, with a smattering of joggers sweating along the paths. I hung about at Speaker’s Corner for a while, but there wasn’t anything happening, so I wandered back to the flat.
PLATFORM 1, PLUMBSTEAD STATION, 11:10am, 22/08/94
These are some notes that I wrote at Plumbstead Station while we waited for a train into Central London. We had gone to Plumstead, a suburb in east London, downriver from Greenwich, to look for a chador for Linda to wear in Iran.
Platform 1, Plumstead Station, 11.10am, 22.08.94. Fourteen people on the platform await the next train into London via Greenwich and all stations to Charing Cross. Next to me, on the red steel bench, Nabila Majid reads her CV. Two seats down, a black man with a goatee beard reads The Sun, his lips moving silently with each word his eyes pass over. A cool breeze fans the warm, smoky air around in the birch trees growing up the steep bank beside the platform. A train pulls in on the opposite side, its servo brakes winding down like an air raid siren.
We spent the last hour in a shop in Plumstead High Street drinking tea and talking with a Sikh shopkeeper whom Linda had bought a piece of material from to use as a headscarf in Iran. After 22 years in England, his English was still broken, but he managed to have an interesting conversation about the hardships faced by Sikhs in India.
The train glides into the station, sleek and new, with bright blue seats and black graffiti. We board and settle in to watch the grey outer suburbs of London roll past. At Mayes Hill, four octagonal chimneys of brown brick rise above a huge oblong factory. The sky is bleak and hazy, swallowing up the towers of Canary Wharf, a couple of miles distance on the opposite side of the river. Thick vegetation grows along both sides of the railway, overhanging the retaining walls and crowding back up the embankments towards the rear of the closely packed houses: elderberry, sycamore and birch. And along the tracks, among the rubbish and oily ballast, a host of weeds and grasses cling tenaciously to life between the silver and orange tracks.
The main tower of Canary Wharf almost blends into the grey background haze. Its outline delineated by rows of slate-coloured windows, its pointed pyramidal roof displaying a bright flashing light. The tower blocks are grey and black and desperate, the stalagmites of culture shock. In between them spread the occasional areas of littered and dirty waste ground. The gothic spies of Tower Bridge appear behind the remodelled Butler’s Wharf, and beyond, the black sentinel of the NatWest Tower stands guard over the city.
A few people are scattered about on the platform at London Bridge Station, but because today is a rail strike day, many people have made other arrangements for their daily commute. Not a busy day then, for the train spotter hunched over his pad on a red painted seat. The train screeches around the twisting chicanes of the Metropolitan Junction, and cruises into Waterloo East, the backs of the buildings along the track close enough to reach out and touch. A woman in floral shallots, a look of dazed resignation on her face, stands on the platform, wringing her hands and chewing with bright red lips. Grey and green girders frame the Thames as we cross Waterloo Rail Bridge and into the darkened platforms of Charing Cross.
6pm. We have to take a bus back down to Abbey Wood as the strike by signalmen has stopped all eastbound trains. The bus is hot and crowded, people crammed together and sweating like an African matatu. I sit on the stairs for a while after we leave Elephant and Castle, then find a seat up in the top decks next to a young black man. Linda sits downstairs next to a sour-faced woman in a dark blue suit. Outside the bus lies the jumble of south-east London, baking under a gunmetal sky.
A man reads a holiday brochure showing golden sands, turquoise seas, and terracotta Spanish villages. They couldn’t be more further removed from the drab suburbs through which we now pass. We pass the Sharma Indian Takeaway. The man leafs through the page that is advertising holiday in “Ceylon”, a place which no longer exists in anything other than holiday brochures and tea caddies.
The sign outside the white heart reads TH WHITE HAR. The man with the brochure reads about the Taj Mahal. The bus slowly empties out and Linda comes up to the upper deck as we pass through Deptford and cross the railway lines now empty of trains. It is a long slow climb up Blackheath Hill to Greenwich Park, an expanse of green enclosed by the city, but the air seems a little cooler. Four donkeys are tethered at the edge of the common next to a circus taking shape on the eastern end of the park.
CurseOfTheTraveller 