Blasted brick, cream-coloured stone smudged with smut and warm ochre, strange stone faces scumbled over with soot; bumpy rooftiles patched and spotted with yellow lichen, terracotta chimneypots tall or squat, cracked, leaning; garret windowframes with peeling paint, surrounded by spiky weeds and here and there a bright flower. Up here it still looks like London. The rain has stopped and the setting sun shines warm and soft on the rooftops and stone. Some of the windowpanes kindle with a beautiful pulsing bronze light. In the radiant moment London seems like it always did, when I was a child, a youth. Beautiful-ugly London, familiar and ancient, like an old wrinkled scuffed brown leather shoe that fits warmly and comfortably. Home.
The windows of the top deck of the bus are fogged with condensation and I am peering through the circle I made with the heel of my hand. The bus is crowded and nearly every seat is occupied. Two seats ahead of me an East European man in a baseball cap mumbles monotonously into his phone. A little way behind me, on the back seat, a woman, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, is emitting a piercing, continuous stream of sound like a wailing or keening. At times it takes on a yeowling quality, like a cat in distress. It’s hard to hear and I wince in discomfort. Is she in some kind of trouble? When I glance round I see a face staring blankly ahead, mouth open, phone held rigidly in front of it. None of the other passengers seem to notice. The air jangles with the tinny din and crash of earphone music. Across from me a young Arab man with a backwards baseball cap, knees drawn up level with his face and feet on the edge of the seat, gazes raptly at his hand-held screen, his chin and jaw pumping as he chews gum. On the seat in front of him an Asian woman communes with her phone, thumbs moving deftly in rapid scriptsign over the glowing screen. The two or three English-looking people on the bus are all absorbed with their electronic devices. One of them, a student-age man with a short blond beard and glasses, sitting on the front seat, has his laptop open and earphones in and is watching a film or tv programme.
The bus waits at a traffic light and the front window is lit up with it like red frost. At last it goes yellow, stays yellow for a moment as if thinking about it, and then green. The bus rumbles into life and moves past the green light. Through the circle of clear glass I watch names and phrases slide by on the walls, ghostletters stencilled onto the bricks, faint, fading. John Sayles, Sons & Co. Purveyors of. Peter Lambert, Fruiterer. Wholesale and Retail. Paul Simpkin Ltd. Established 1881. F Rogers, Violin and Bow Makers. The bell clangs. People start to move down the narrow aisle towards the stairs at the front. The bell clangs again. The bus slows and noses in to the kerb, a waiting crowd at the bus stop. A whoosh and clatter of the doors and then after a moment a beep, again, again, as the boarding passengers scan their cards. Beep. Beep. Beep. Feet come tramping up the stairs. An African man pokes his earphoned head up from the stairwell, looks about, ascends, heads over to a seat. Next an Arab man in a baseball cap clutching a phone. Then three Indians. A lanky, floppy-fringed young man with big headphones clamped over his head. Some Chinese people. Some Africans. Some East Europeans. An English-looking woman in her forties sits in the seat next to me. Instantly, automatically, her hand goes into her bag and starts rummaging. I wonder what she’s going to get out of her bag? Oh a phone. That was unpredictable. The thumbs dart over the magic screen and she goes under the spell. Four tracksuited youth come up from the stairwell and perch on seats near the front. Out come the phones. The rapid clatter of tinny drumbeats starts to play on the phone speakers. Oh god’s sake. The keening and yeowling of the woman on the back seat continues.
The doors rattle shut and the bus moves slowly onto the road. It settles into the bus lane and picks up speed. Shops going by, cafés. Fried Chicken. Middle Eastern Food Market. Lebanese Restaurant. Polski Slep. China House. Boss Kebab. Gone are John Sayles and Sons. Gone are Peter Lambert and Paul Simpkin. Gone, F Rogers. Not much demand for violins and bows now. Down on the wide pavement, a girl with white wires trailing from her ears, holding a phone in front of her face. A black man ambling along in a tracksuit, eyes fixed on his handheld device. An Arab man in tracksuit trousers and a baseball cap, speaking, phone pressed against jaw. One lone young man, striding, alert, head up, no phone. Blessings on your head, sir. Then it’s back to the phones. The sports clothes. The earphones.
I draw in a long breath and let it out in a sigh. The bell clangs flatly. It clangs again. And again. It only needs to be pressed once. I close my eyes and lean my temple against the cold glass of the window pane. I try to remember a time when a bus journey was not a test of endurance. How that time has passed away. Memory. Sunbright gold, rippling, dancing. On a bus in London. When I was eight years old, on the top deck of a bus, with my parents and sister, the sunlight pouring through the tumbling leaves outside and cascading all over the inside of the bus in shimmering spangles. Me laughing, startled and delighted by the sudden burst of light and motion. The bus arcing gracefully round a wide corner, past trees and statues and elegant lamps. London buildings. A few feet ahead a burly man in his sixties sits sideways with his feet planted firmly on the floor, flatnosed old boxer with hoarse cockney voice, happy and flushed with beer, telling a story or joke to his companions - a slender chinless woman in a black hat and black gloves, a broad old lady with glasses and a perm, and a chubby small-eyed man, all of them smiling, listening. The old cockney man spreads his hands and saws the air like a conductor to embellish his words. The chubby man screws his face up in mirth and pinches the top of his nose. My parents listen too, smiling. Me looking at the old man, smiling, thinking “This is London. Our capital city. That old man looks and talks like my granddad. These are Londoners. This is my city, these are my people”. The thrill I felt then comes to me across the decades, clear and intense, fading, like a hot coal, dimming, as the sounds of present-day London return.
The yeowling woman has mercifully ended her phone conversation and is staring quietly towards the front of the bus. Up ahead a ringtone shrills out, once, twice, and a stocky greyhaired Middle-Eastern man starts yelling hoarsely into his phone. Across from me the lanky boy with the headphones nods dumbly along with the silent beat, a trancelike expression on his face. Nod. Nod. Nod. The bus is stopped again and people are boarding. Through the window a building site, a hive of concrete oblong cells stacked up, grey, unfinished. My eyes wander over the billboard. A couple, white woman black man, smiling, entwined, the woman’s belly bulging with pregnancy. Coming Soon. An Exclusive Development of. We Build Your New London. Luxury. Retail and Office Space. High above, the red light of a crane flares against the darkening sky. Cranes. London’s skyline. For years now. A mass of red lights crowding in, swarming over the city. Like an invasion of aliens or something. Cranes moving, marching on the skyline. Filling in every space, every square foot.
The bus moves on. A woman’s head, Malaysian, Indonesian, Singaporean, emerges from the stairwell. The head turns, fixes sternly on the tracksuited teenage boys. A long strident stream of words emerges, something something something McDonalds something something. Message delivered, the head swivels and descends out of sight. The boys’ gazes drop down to their phones. A few moments later the aforementioned McDonalds comes into view on the left. The bus stops at a traffic light alongside it. On the plastic counter by the window, a tubby Middle-Eastern man in a baseball cap, slumped, fingers mechanically poking food into the munching mouth, tired eyes fixed on a phone; two side by side muslim girls staring siamese-like at laptops; an Indian man with glasses sitting with his empty red and yellow food boxes, lost in communion with his device. Every café now an internet café. The diners behind, all of them Asian, African, Arabs, Polish, almost all of them absorbed with their handheld computers. On the wall, big grainy blow-up photos of smiling black and Chinese children. Behind the far counter the staff bustle about, seven or eight of them, every one of them Indian or Bangladeshi. The hollowness of it. What does any of this have to do with me? The people, the phones, the clothes, the photos. What does this have to do with my culture, my people? This New London that has been plonked down in place of the old fascinating London, the London of my youth. What does it have to do with me? Where has my city gone? Where do I go to feel at home, to feel as I did when London felt like London? An obese Turkish-looking man in a baseball cap and football shirt lumbers across the road in front of the stopped bus, shouting into his phone. On the other side of the street, set back, a large supermarket, flat grey paved ‘courtyard’ in front of it, women in black muslim garb, men in shorts and baseball caps, Africans, Poles, Indians, Arabs, moving in and out of the building. All over the city, every square mile, every corner. All the same. Tesco Metro. Pret a Manger. Subway. Costa Coffee. Starbucks. Sainsburys. McDonalds. Corporate blandness, everyone foreign, everything filmed and monitored, everyone away in their electronic media bubble, absent while present. They say London was drab and boring before, when it was English. But look at this. The hollowness of it, corporate and alien and bland. Your New London. The New London that is so vibrant and exciting that the majority of its inhabitants are staring at their phones and listening to music or watching a film as they travel around it.
The bus rolls on. Down on the pavement a teenage girl. Earphones? Earphones. Every single time. Just surprise me, once. That day near Holland Park. A nice May day. One of the cool shady streets alongside the park, a breeze tossing about the branches and leaves above, patches of shimmering sunlight moving slowly over the pavement and the smart red-brick buildings. And into this glowing patchwork of sun and shade came a girl of about twenty, in a white summer dress, slim and pretty, walking with her man, head up, alert, coltish bare legs treading the shining street. My heart quopped and I gazed fascinated at her tumbling chestnut hair, fired into smoky gold by the warm sunlight. Passing now, a glowing vital form of white and gold, like a bright messenger from another realm. To see a woman like this gladdens, refreshes, like a cool draught of spring water. But it comes with a pang. The pang is from knowing how rare it is now to see a young woman dressed with simple elegance and carrying herself with grace and intelligence; how rare to see a girl who is looking around, listening, taking in the things around her, not downgazing at a phone screen with earphones in; to see female limbs unmarked by tattoos and a female face unblemished by metal studs and rings. The realisation that I live in a society where it is startling to see a young woman who is engaged with her surroundings and is not dressed like a boy or like someone from the ghetto. Remember when seeing women like that was an everyday thing? Remember when girls didn’t have a phone welded to their palm and earphones glued in their ears?
People are boarding the bus. The woman and her phone have gone. Two tracksuited youth sit down in front of me, across the aisle from each other. Out come the phones. One youth communicates to the other the excellence of the McDonalds discount voucher that you download onto your phone. Well. McDonalds certainly does seem to be a theme today, doesn’t it. Discussion of their various burgers and chicken meals ensues for several minutes. The conversation turns to music. You gotta hear this tune, man. Oh no. The fingers move on the magic screen, summoning the song. Please don’t let it be rap. Oh. It’s rap. I get up and move down the aisle, past the rows of dark heads with their gadgets. Not far now to the stop where I get off. Going down the steps I hear the clamour from the lower deck, voices bawling in various languages. I stand on the bottom step and look around. Crowded, people standing. What a racket. A crying baby in a buggy, the mother on the phone in Polish. An Afghan or whatever woman in a black garment like a nun’s habit, near the back, on the phone. A group of Indians engaged in a loud back-and-forth across the aisle. A girl with earphones, of course. The bus slows to a stop at a red traffic light. A few feet in front, sitting sideways on to me on the front seat, is a stout old man with a wooden walking stick. Looking at him I think ‘English’. He just looks English. It’s a startling sight. It’s rare to see old English people in London. The old English man has his eyes closed and his hands calmly clasped before him on the handle of his stick. He’s wearing a Navy blue blazer and light buff trousers, shined leather shoes firm on the floor. Slicked-back white hair he has and a neat white moustache. How old? Eighty? No companions, on his own. Weird to see him sitting there, dressed like that, among the leisurewear and the Islamic garb; out of place, foreign. Sitting on the window seat next to the old English man, on his left side, is a woman in her fifties, Afghan, Syrian, who is engaging in a loud conversation with a man who is in the seat behind the old English man. She is twisted sideways in her seat to speak to him. She appears to be recounting some event or situation that has enraged her. Angry, indignant, her voice hammers out, guttural, impassioned, machine-gun like, rising over the other sounds in the bus. The man behind mutters something in sympathy, shaking his head. Off she goes again, voice blasting out in staccato machine-gun bursts, palm upraised flat next to her face and jerking up and down, fired up with passion, strident.
The woman’s mouth is about three inches away from the old English man’s left ear.
I watch, fascinated. The old man’s face is serene, the eyes closed. Steady in calm dignity he sits with his large hands resting on his staff. The voice yammers on and on. A whole minute passes. She is shouting right in his ear. Still he sits in calm profile, stout and silent, English. The woman slowly starts to wind down. Her voice descends in pitch, down to a mutter. She turns back to face the front of the bus. The man in the seat behind asks a question and the woman throws up her hands and flops them down onto her lap. The man says something and with sudden vigour the woman twists round again, letting loose the floods of her indignation, firing off volleys of bursting plosives and fricatives, chopping the air with her hand, her voice swooping and soaring. On and on it goes, thirty seconds, forty, longer. The bus is near my stop. The bell clangs. The old English man draws in a deep slow breath and then heaves a long long sigh. His head bows slightly, wearily, and a furrow appears on his broad brow. A flush spreads slowly through his cheek. On and on goes the woman’s voice. The old man’s face seems to crumple slightly and then the fists tighten on the handle of his handstaff. Suddenly the stick raises up and then bangs down hard on the floor, once, twice. No-one notices. The woman carries on, strident, oblivious. No-one saw it but me. People are coming down the steps behind me. The old man sits with head bowed, broken. Say something. But what? The doors clatter open, people are pushing behind me. Helpless, I move past the old man and the yammering woman and step off the bus and onto the pavement.
I barge roughly through the press of bodies crowding to board the bus. Someone complains but I don’t care. I come through the other side and my feet walk me swiftly away from the crowd of foreigners with phones. Oh, but here come some more. Always more. World without end. Striding quickly I pass Five Guys, Starbucks, KFC, Subway. All of them filled with foreigners, staffed by foreigners. The neverending pavement stream of immigrants, sportsclothes, phones, earphones. Wooh. Feel the vibrancy. Welcome to London. The New London that has been made uninhabitable for English people. That old man on the bus. Bloody hell. The red flush spreading through his face. Wish I’d said something to him. ‘Gammon’, they call him, people like him. My people, my family. ‘Gammon’. You are no longer required, Gammon. Shut up and be replaced. I feel my own face burning, the flush of anger passed on from him to me.
I did not want to write this. I moved to London because I wanted to celebrate it. I wanted to write about how exciting and inspiring London was. Twenty five years ago, it was. I moved to my capital city because I wanted to renew myself by connecting with my culture and my roots. And instead I found this. The New London. Where your dispossession and degradation are shoved in your face, shouted in your ear, a thousand times a day. Confronted with this city, what it has become, how could I not write invective?
So I will witness what is happening to my people and my culture and my city. I will proclaim it, document it. I will try to describe how the city that once seemed to me the most exciting place on earth has transformed into this boring, soulless dystopia. Because no-one else is doing it. So my poor talent must step up to this great theme, reluctant, unworthy. May I be granted some measure of eloquence to aid my task. May my forehead be flinted against those who would wish to harm us. I do this because I love my people, their potential, and I love my city, what it was, what it could be. And because I love pretty white girls in summer dresses. May there be pretty white girls in summer dresses for ever and ever, and may they often cross my path.
You suggested, and I must admit, I'm not disappointed one bit - not that you need my validation. I believe through my lens - I may have been yearning for a visit to a London as you described you were familiar with when you were a child growing up. Your description of the bus ride put me in a state of anxiety as I'm reading your words. It's unfortunate to hear this about your home. It appears inside you yearns for that place you once connected to. I feel I was attempting to reach out to such a place, but from what you've described, it seems no different from where I'm at in the world. I too am a "foreigner" but due to the lifestyles and habits that everyone else seems to prioritize. I observe them similarily as you did during this bus ride.
Keep it up.