Capital Letters - 2013 by The Wells Street Journal

CA P ITA L L ETT E R S An anthology by students on the Creative Writing: Writing the City MA at the University of Westminster, London

We are proud to present the first edition of Capital Letters! Challenged by our course leader, Dr Monica Germana, to publish an anthology about London, we, the MA Creative Writing students at the University of Westminster, decided to undertake the mission. Although editing other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work sometimes felt like we were re-arranging furniture in someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home while they were out, we survived, and now we hope you enjoy the poetry and prose of Capital Letters. The contributions come from students who were born in London, and others who travelled many miles to be inspired by its history and secrets. Love it, like it or loathe it, London is a fantastical palimpsest on which writers can endlessly scribble their tales. We hope that this first issue will spark a literary tradition for the Writing the City MA! The editorial team: Evelina Anissimova Vritti Bansal Ali Franks Aparna Narayanan Anne Reynolds With special thanks to Sam Brookes for the cover art. http://www.saatchionline.com/sfbrookes

Contents My Brother's Winklepickers – Jon Wood

The Cave – Jon Wood

A Walk in the Village – Jon Wood

Newly Risen – Jordhana Rempel

Minicab Elsewhere – Evelina Anissimova

The Hill’s Burden – Evelina Anissimova

Something that Happen Today to Me – Evelina Anissimova

The Divine Right to Rebel – Anne Reynolds

Black Market: 1796 – Anne Reynolds

On the Run – Anne Reynolds

Secret Rivers – Anne Reynolds

The 99% – Anne Reynolds

White Sound – Anne Reynolds

An Incompetent’s Guide To…Peckham – Erin Lake

Can You Hear My Hands? Iranian Voices of London and Beyond – Betsabeh Kamali

An Englishman’s England – A. Naji Bakhti

Oral History – Aparna Narayanan

Milk Sachets – Aparna Narayanan

The Battle of Goldhawk Road – Brian Harrison

As Seen on TV: Portrayals of London and its People – Peter Raynard

Four Hundred Quid – Vritti Bansal

So Cold – Vritti Bansal

A Southwark Latte – Crystal Hollis

The Tosher's Tale – Crystal Hollis

The Ghosts of London – Crystal Hollis

The Union Jack, My London – Kaori Maeda

Storyboard of London – Kaori Maeda

I Will Remember You – Kaori Maeda

Blood Lies – Ali Franks

The Amazonite – Inci Kartal

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My Brother's Winklepickers Jon Wood After bricklaying for twenty years, I came down to London and started to write about myself. The poems are mainly about incompetence and failure. There's some love thrown in as well. I try not to think of that as oil on troubled waters.

From within the volumes of the Villa I could hear his approach Tap tap tap His feet were woodpeckers They brought him out into the sunshine Through the grand open door Flanked by Rodins Dressed in English irony Set against a baroque facade Encircled by white top mountains There he stood in mock ownership Bright with the lakeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s love He was still the master of digression His feet tapping His words circumventing His wit a path through a forest fire It seemed so long ago last summer Growing grave through excess and age His coat a blanket He slept on my council flat floor A flock of drawing drafts fluttering Unfinished around him His Winklepickers lying dormant His words tapered The Winklepickers twitched 3

Then rat a tat tap They sent him back Through the Grand Villa door

The Cave Jon Wood Her cave was a lopsided left over room off the long Harrow road forty minutesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; race from Hackney going west through the arrhythmic flow of the city he arrives his flowers swapped for a skip full of kisses they were soon flush with a remembered skill seen only by the pale blue that seeped from the sky through her prison-like window he could hear her sound unconditional love and a face made more for Rubensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; than modern times he lost himself rolled in her exquisite folds they were sailors resisting the draw of the shore mining at a kind of truth until he had to leave. Gliding to his side of the metropolis shadowed by muted masonry facades hardly aware of gradient wind or surface 5

barely hindered by other people's lives her spell resistant to the draw of his slipstream how could he have known her guilt was on a timer? He cursed her God through London's drained of all night.

A Walk in the Village Jon Wood I make my way up the High St. past the mixed Victorian facades arranged by whim and fortune. Around the corner of Church Street the buggies begin to proliferate. Clear voices of the confident classes quicken the languid Sunday morning air: chastising, cajoling, passing on their eloquence to their smaller selves beneath crumbling cornices dead pediments, distant scrolls and many moulds of the gone. Everywhere the stage-set shops are pinned to neglected masonry faces under peeled and cracked laminated boards the naked new timber struts push against an old grave of corroding cast iron drains brittle and strong, nestled in the vintage grime of a deep brick groove. A pistol of fear hangs in the hollows. The girl in the film shop smiles like she can see the best of me through my fissured shell. I demand Art House to impress and she hands me The Turin Horse life's unutterable darkness.

I can hear the cemetery's glacial waves crack, twist and topple as I move towards the brown medicine that drips from taps - clichĂŠd salvation proffered from veined cheeks. I glimpse Joseff at the bar his face slipped from a classic mould Hung shoulders, dark brow bent tobacco and a sparrow hug. His lively pits of Catalonian eyes cannot forgive me. On, on to Rene's shop. Out of the greys I hear the sound of her calm lake I see her big stitched dress her deep black hair curtains her bone dust features. Following the friendly ripple of her Scandinavian vowel sounds I move closer into her winter a musty fold of velvet and fur. Leather coats flap as I circle in on her silver sand lips. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m hovering vertiginously over her dark eyes treacherous behind fashionista glasses.

Newly Risen Jordhana Rempel Jordhana Rempel is from Alberta, Canada and has been interested in writing and fiction from a very young age. She earned her BA in English before traveling to London for her MA in Creative Writing. “I didn't think it would look like that,” she said, a little uncertain. “It's the mummification process,” the deliveryman explained. “The skin darkens from dehydration. Nothing out of the ordinary.” “Right,” she said. The deliveryman finished unpacking the supplies and handed her a clipboard. “Just need you to sign this.” She did, leaving a long, sweeping ‘Mrs van—’ that ended in an indecipherable scrawl. The deliveryman bowed unnecessarily and left. The thing was left standing in the doorway. Tilda wasn't sure what to call it. It was certainly male, so she supposed she could call it 'he,' but it wasn't a person, was it? And she couldn't call it ‘it’ either. She wished such things had been around when she was a girl so they could be covered in her etiquette classes. For lack of any other ideas, she fell back on her training. “Hello,” she said brightly. “Welcome to my home. Make yourself comfortable. The parlour's this way.” The thing turned towards her when she started speaking, but made no other movement. It simply stood there, the same mahogany colour as the coat track beside it, and nearly as tall. “Follow me,” she said. The deliveryman had said something about direct orders for the first few weeks, until it got used to a routine. The thing took a step forward. The manufacturers had fitted it with loose linen trousers and a long linen shirt, but no shoes. Its bony feet clicked against the hardwood as it followed her. It was a bit disconcerting; she wasn't sure how it could even see. She had seen the old-fashioned ones at the British Museum, and thought that they looked quite rough and unpleasant. But these new ones were more elegant, retaining their facial structure and teeth. The manufacturers had managed to prevent the lips pulling back in a grimace, but not the loss of—she shuddered—the soft ocular tissue, hence the necessity of the closed eyes. It stopped just inside the door to the parlour. She gestured towards one of the armchairs. “Sit,” she said, adding, “please.”

It walked to the chair and sat with perfect posture at the edge of the cushion. She had half-expected it to creak at the knees. She dawdled a bit, not knowing what to do, before she made up her mind to simply get on with her day. “Stay here,” she said, feeling a little foolish. It gave no sign that it had heard. Tilda spent the next few hours catching up on little jobs that needed to be done but were always put off. She found that she was passing by the parlour whenever she could, to make sure that it hadn't moved. It hadn't so much as twitched a finger, as far as she could see. It was as silent and still as the furniture it sat on. Eventually, she unpacked the box that came with the thing. There was a booklet detailing care instructions and socialization techniques, as well as a large bottle labelled ‘skin conditioner’. At the back of the booklet was a handwritten page detailing the thing's former state. ‘Mr Henry Oliver Bennett,’ it read, ‘died in 1982 of meningitis, aged 41. No living relatives. Model #C14530.’ Tilda walked back to the parlour and called out, “Henry!” It didn’t move. “C14530!” Nothing. She glanced back through the booklet. There was a section called ‘Personalisation’ that gave tips on how to make your Newly Risen your own. ‘Do,’ it instructed, ‘address it clearly and frequently by name, if a name you wish to give it. Always couple its name with a command until it responds to the name alone.’ Right. Tilda thought for a moment. She didn’t want to call it Henry; it was no longer that person. She might as well call her car Henry. She briefly entertained the idea of calling it after her late husband Wilfred, but decided that it was too morbid. People might get the wrong idea. She eventually settled on calling it Thomas after the maker of Wilfred’s favourite Chippendale cabinet. Time to take it out for a test run. “Thomas, stand up,” she said. It rose slowly. “I’m going to the shops, and I want you to accompany me.” She looked at its bare feet and consulted the booklet again. ‘Shoes are not necessary as the Newly Risen do not feel pain, but if you want to take it over rough terrain, a soft pair of moccasins will prevent damage.’ Tilda doubted that the streets of Kensington counted as rough terrain. “Follow me, Thomas.” She gathered her coat and bag, making sure that Thomas was behind her. She caught a few people staring at them as they walked, mostly tourists. Risen weren’t that common yet, save for the intermittent display of extravagance. Occasionally an actor or footballer would 10

be photographed in public with his own Risen, after they had lost their ghoulish reputation. Newspapers reported that within twenty years, the majority of the population would have their own Risen. Tilda didn’t let the stares bother her. She was not flaunting her affluence; simply taking advantage of it. Dear Wilfred would have wanted her to be comfortable. This was the same as when he’d bought that fax machine so long ago. “Must keep up with the times, my dear,” he had said. “Can’t be seen slipping behind the younger generation.” Tilda held her head high and did not look behind her to see if Thomas was still there. She could hear its steps on the pavement; not shuffling or shambling but smooth and fluid. Tilda was struck by the thought that it was similar to taking a dog for a walk, except she didn’t have to stop to allow it to piddle. Once they reached the high street, she began to talk to it. “Here’s the post office, Thomas, I have to drop off thank-you notes to the Winchesters and the Turnbulls.” “To the florist’s, Thomas. I need to refresh the lilies.” “Here, Thomas, be a dear and hold the dry cleaning, don’t let it drag on the ground.” For the most part, no one commented on her companion; they only flinched lightly if they happened to touch its dark leathery skin. Tilda was nearly finished, having given some of the heavier grocery bags to Thomas (she had eyed its thin arms with misgiving, but both the deliveryman and the booklet promised that it was stronger than it looked) when she saw someone she recognized. “Oh no,” she murmured. Tilda had known Mrs Bishop since before she was Mrs Bishop, and she always seemed to be in competition with Tilda. She would take this as an attempt to one-up her, and would be insufferable until she figured out a way to balance the scales. Tilda didn’t care one tit about it, a fact that Mrs Bishop never seemed to pick up on. Tilda was considering ducking into the W.H. Smith to avoid her, but Mrs Bishop had already spotted them. “Tilda!” she shrilled, lightly embracing her and giving her a peck on each cheek. “How lovely to see you.” “Yes, you too, Betty. How are things?” “Oh, you know, same as always. Our Jamie got into another fight at school, the scamp. Takes after her grandfather. I keep telling her mother to put her into sports, work off some of that aggression, but does she listen to me?” Mrs Bishop threw her hands up in a dramatic gesture of surrender. “But I don’t want to talk about me, what’s this new feature you have?” She appraised Thomas like a table at an antique shop. “This is—” Tilda faltered. “I just got him—it. It arrived this morning.” 11

“How exciting!” Mrs Bishop said. “Must have cost you a pretty penny. Most of the people you see with them, well, they just like to flash their money like it’s an accessory. Good to see there’s still some class left in the world.” Her smile told Tilda how much ‘class’ she thought she had. “Thank you,” Tilda said, unsure what she was thanking her for. “I thought I could use more help around the house, and this seemed more financially secure than paying someone week after week.” “Indeed.” Mrs Bishop leaned to whisper; “I heard there was quite a waiting list for one. However did you manage it?” “Luck of the draw, I suppose,” Tilda hedged. “I hope you don’t mind, Betty, but I must be getting home. These lilies won’t keep in the heat.” “Of course, don’t let me delay you. You must come round for tea one day; let us catch up properly.” “Yes, one day. Thomas, follow me. We’re going back to the house.” Tilda turned sharply, ignoring Mrs Bishop’s rather shocked look that she had named it already. She kept watching them until they turned the corner. All the way home Tilda muttered about Mrs Bishop: “...and what was she implying with that waiting list comment? Something salacious, no doubt...” and it wasn’t until they reached the front door that she wondered how much of this Thomas was taking in. She turned to face it and look it in the eye, or close enough. “Thomas, pay attention. This is very important. Do not leave the house without me, ever. Do you understand?” She said the last words without much hope. The booklet said that it took weeks for a Risen to respond to anything except direct statements. But it appeared to incline its head, and that was good enough for Tilda. “Good,” she said. “In you go.” She put Thomas in the kitchen as she unloaded all the bags and put the lilies in a vase. It was perfectly attentive, and she found herself talking to it again, not just about Mrs Bishop but also about other things. Yes, she had her Women’s Club, but half of them were only there to be seen with the right people and improve their own social standing. Thomas listened, or at least appeared to, and never interrupted; it was soothing to talk to him and not have to watch out for who overheard what. Tilda was also glad that she didn’t have to alter her routine too much. She didn’t have to cook for more than one person, nor did she have to make up the guest bedroom. Thomas didn’t comment on what shows she watched or what sort of wine she drank. It was easy to become accustomed to it, even after so short a time. At one point, she even reached out to gingerly touch its wrist, feeling the dry tight leather of its skin. She had become quite fond of it by the end of the night, and since it had been following her all day, she thought nothing of Thomas following a step behind her as she retired to her bedroom. It paused at 12

the doorway, as Tilda noticed had become its habit, and she thought about the two of them in town earlier. It really was like having a pet, she decided. “Sit there, Thomas,” she said, pointing to the floor at the foot of the bed. It followed the direction (how did it see?) while Tilda got under the covers. She could see the top of Thomas’ bald head over the edge of the duvet. Having spent so many years on her own, it was comforting having another per—creat— being in the house again. People like Mrs Bishop wouldn’t understand. They thought that Risen were trendy. She would show them how useful they could be. “Goodnight, Thomas,” she said as she turned off the light.

Minicab Elsewhere Evelina Anissimova Evelina Anissimova is a multicultural playwright, poet, polyglot & writer. Her play ‘Body Odours’ has premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. One of her favourite themes is cultural difference.

I had never unpacked my bags, never dared to see it as home, your roomful of sweet air that swelled and beat whenever I came and hung like an old man's skin when I closed the door. Today you helped me lift my bags into the trunk of a minicab. The driver stood by as we ran up and down the stairs. He drove, his eyes dripping questions. I asked to stop a mile up the road. The landlord wanted a cash deposit, as if cash can't be torn, can't be burned, faked, bummed, smeared with sweat or blown away under the London winds. I had come that summer from a country with an ATM around each corner, vomiting, vomiting money and here it just spat out my card. A man sat under the dispenser. I thought he was resting his legs but then I saw the habit in his eyes, and then the hunger. When I was away, you later told me, he spoke. How we met, he wondered, and where. Why we came here. How long we’d been ‘us’, he wondered, and how long we’d stay. But when I sat back down he drove silently on. We pulled up before a box of brick and I rang the bell. The room had four walls, nude like a whore’s skin but in the mould by the bed I could make out a bulldozer or the Eiffel Tower if I squinted and believed.

You didn't want to keep the driver waiting so you left and I sat down on the bed. Mister, but why, the driver asked as you drove away, is she here and you there? You never told me he said that but I swear I heard.

The Hillâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Burden Evelina Anissimova

Promised Land upon the Stamford Hill so modestly you lie on London ground. Your arms wrapped tightly round your People's minds, you cast blue glances at the city down below.

Barbarians live there! The people of the steel! You weep onto them, hoping they come clean, that they'll admit against your heaving chest their soldered future will corrode, cave-in.

Within your reach, each woman is a source, each egg a prophet, moulded in a womb of hope, and hope is what the city down below has pressed and moulded into metal blocks too heavy to be carried on the back so they're set down and never looked at anymore.

Something that Happen Today to Me Evelina Anissimova

Every Sunday I stand in Brick Lane market. I make print to people who want buy print of their face black on white card. I don’t know why someone want this but it give me my bread so what I can do not give it to them, or? To forget time I listen music, I listen the times they are change and answer blowing in wind and I draw with my hand black face and cut from paper. Today boy with jeans is tight like woman, he come he say nice music man. He smile. I say to him boy why you say to me nice music? Is not my music is Bob Dylan music. People in England they so polite. Someone push Englishman in Tube Englishman say sorry. Child in bus scream Englishman come he say ‘Dear can you be quiet please?’ 17

In my country curse at mother. Is why I live here. But I say thank you only when someone give me something.

The Divine Right to Rebel The very un-Civil Wars and the Execution of Charles I Anne Reynolds Anne Reynolds graduated with an MA in Creative Writing in 2013. She chose the University of Westminster because the focus of the MA was not simply on different genres of writing; at its heart lies London itself in all its magnificent, whimsical, and monstrous guises.

‘What is a Rebel? A man who says no.’ Albert Camus I feel frustrated when people assume I have a rebellious nature just because I ran away from home at the age of seventeen. It seems to me the obvious, non-violent response to injustice and emotional abuse. In a similar vein, I can recall regularly walking out, or remaining seated, as the national anthem was played in the Gerrards Cross ‘flea pit’ at the end of a film. It was ridiculous to expect people to stand to attention like puppets just because of a bit of music, and anyway, why should I? Just because the famous ballet dance mistress, Madame Vacani, had taught me the royal curtsey, it didn’t necessarily mean I was ready to use it. Class discrimination and deference were departing from postwar Britain faster than a slug in a stream of salt, but there were also some entertaining skirmishes between ardent monarchists and those of us who were burgeoning socio-political protesters. Bob Dylan echoed this sense of turmoil in his 1964 album title track, The Times They are a-Changin’: ‘As the present now Will later be past The order is Rapidly fadin’ And the first one now Wil later be last For the times they are a-changin.’ This is the salutary tale of what can happen to you when you listen to your own hype and 19

ignore the winds of change – even if you are a King. Three hundred and sixty-three years ago, on a bitterly cold January day in 1649 when even the river Thames had frozen over in protest, we, the people of England, cut off the head of King Charles I in one swift sweep of the executioner’s axe just before 2pm. I must confess that I feel really queasy when I write that; if you think about the reality of what it involves, it is unarguably gruesome. In historical terms, it’s not that long ago and even though public executions were fairly commonplace in London at that time, the despairing groan from the crowd as his head was held up for inspection was in sharp contrast to the usual loud cheers and jeers. And this was despite the Cromwellian troops deployed around the temporary scaffolding set up outside the Banqueting House, in order to prevent unseemly outbursts from the spectators. The usual ‘behold the head of a traitor’ was left unsaid, although he had been convicted of ‘High Treason and other high Crymes’ by what can only be described as a highly-tampered-with jury; all those who would have opposed such a verdict having been expelled from the High Court of Justice beforehand. Some of the fifty-nine signatories to the death warrant would pay with their own lives on the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Those who had died in the interim did not escape as they were exhumed and executed nonetheless. Can you spot the surname of one of your ancestors in this list of regicides? Jo Bradshawe; Tho. Grey; O. Cromwell; Edw. Whalley; M. Livesey; John Okey; J. Da[n]vers; Jo. Bourchier; H. Ireton; Tho. Mauleverer; Har. Waller; John Blakiston; J. Hutchison; Willi. Goffe; Tho. Pride; Pe. Temple; T. Harrison; J. Hewson; Hen.Smyth; Per. Pelham; Ri. Deane; Robert Tichborne; H. Edwardes; Daniel Blagrave; Owen Rowe; Willm. Purefoy; Ad. Scrope; James Temple; A. Garland; Edm. Ludlowe; Henry Marten; Vinct. Potter; Wm. Constable; Rich. Ingoldesby; Willi. Cawley; Jo. Barkstead; Isaa. Ewer; John Dixwell; Valentine Wauton; Symon Mayne; Tho. Horton; J. Jones; John Moore; Gilbt. Millington; G. Fleetwood; J. Alured; Robt. Lilburne; Will. Say; Anth. Stapley; Greg. Norton; Tho. Challoner; Tho. Wogan; John Venn; Gregory Clement; Jo. Downes; Tho. Wayte; Tho. Scot; Jo. Carew; Miles Corbet. An extract from The Death Warrant of King Charles I in the House of Lords Record Office, Memorandum No 66. Of course, being answerable only to God, Charles did not recognise the legitmacy of the court and refused to defend himself or remove his hat. The judge, John Bradshaw, didn’t remove his hat either but that was because he feared for his life. In rather Ned-Kelly-esque 20

style, he had metal inserted inside the hat and wore armour under his clothes to protect himself from attack. That this period in history is still of great interest was confirmed when a rare 1651 ‘wanted’ poster - issued for the capture of Charles II - sold at auction for £33,000.00 in March 2012, well in excess of the guide price of £700-£1,000. The poster declared that a reward in the princely sum of £1,000.00 would be paid: ‘FOR THE Difcovery and Apprehending of CHARLS STUART, AND OTHER Traytors His Adherents and Abettors.’ Trafalgar Square: The Heart of England At the curve of the river Thames, where today the Strand meets Trafalgar Square, a natural junction emerged, which came to be known as Charing Cross. On the site where the Charles I equestrian statue now stands on its own traffic island - South of Trafalgar Square - a memorial cross was erected by King Edward I to his beloved Queen Eleanor who fell sick and died in 1290. Many years afterwards, Edward referred to Eleanor as she ‘whom living we dearly cherished, and whom dead we cannot cease to love.’ The Eleanor cross was demolished during the Interregnum in 1647 for being ‘idolatrous’. A replica of the cross was erected in 1863 outside Charing Cross station. As I move through the milling crowds in Trafalgar Square on an unseasonably sunny February day in 2012, I am aware of the spirits of the past moving in sepia outlines between the tourists who are oblivious to their presence. I have conjured up the children enthralled by the punchinello shows, the pickpockets, pillory, carts and carriages, flower sellers and, of course, the noxious stench of a growing, bustling City. This is the place where several of the regicides were hanged, drawn and quartered at the Restoration of the Monarchy. Did you know that all road signs showing the number of miles to London are measured to the statue of Charles I? This makes it the heart of England and a place shimmering with the past, as unseen threads from all over the country link to this one spot. It is unsurprising then that it is also the meeting point for several ley lines and is the perfect place for a spot of dowsing.

However, as Niccolò Machiavelli accurately observed, ‘history is written by the victors’ and I think that this is the ‘elephant in the room,’ as far as the history of the Charles I statue is concerned. I watched confused tourists scan it for a narrative plaque and walk straight over the uninformative one set in the pavement. Some even bent down to read the card attached to the wilting wreath ‘From the officers and members of the Royal Stuart Society, Aymez Leyaulte’ (‘love and loyalty’), but looked just as baffled afterwards. These wreaths were laid on 30 January 2012, the anniversary of King Charles I’s execution. It is no accident that the white rose of the Jacobites is included in all three of the wreaths. (The term ‘Jacobite’ is derived from the Latin word Jacobus, meaning ‘James,’ and was coined during the reign of King James I & VI.) The Jacobites supported the Stuarts’ claim to the English throne after James II was replaced by William of Orange and Mary. Franz, Duke of Bavaria, is the current Jacobite heir. On his death, the ultimate heir will be Prince Joseph Wenzel Maximilian Maria of Liechtenstein who is currently attending Malvern College in Worcestershire. He is the first ‘pretender’ to have been born in England since James II left the country in 1688. The website of the Royal Stuart Society declares that: …‘It should be noted that none of these representatives of King Charles I since 1807 has attempted to claim a British Throne…Under the terms of the Act of Settlement (1701) they have all been excluded from the de facto line of succession, which vests in the present House of Windsor…’ http://www.royalstuartsociety.com. Two important strands in history have become entangled here: (1) a growth spurt in the development of democracy in England (the origins being Magna Carta in 1215) and the consequent shift in the balance of power from monarch to government; and (2) the execution of a Stuart monarch, followed in due course by a permanent change from the Stuarts to the House of Windsor. I’m not suggesting there is an active conspiracy, but over generations, if certain things are not discussed, they vanish from the collective memory. James I 1603-1625 I Charles I 1625-1649 I 22

Cromwell’s Interregnum 1649-1660 I Charles II 1649 (or 1660)- 1685 I James II 1685-1688 (fled to France) I William of Orange & Mary 1689-1702 The statue’s plinth has two plain sides and these show signs of what appear to be dowel holes that would probably have supported a descriptive tablet. My guess is that it would have said something along the lines of ‘Stuarts for ever!’ All my efforts to locate the wording have failed, and after initial frustration, I now accept that my requests are unlikely to be met with any enthusiasm. I did have one breakthrough when I located a drawing of it at the British Library, dated 1740. Text of some kind was clearly indicated on the plaque. My instinct tells me that in an age where printed communication was limited and there was neither television nor the internet, public symbols really mattered. In 1660, bonfires blazed across London in celebration of Charles II’s return to London and the words ‘The last tyrant of kings died in the first year of liberty of England restored’ were removed from a bust of Charles I. As Samuel Pepys – who had witnessed the death of Charles I as a schoolboy - recorded: ‘The writing in golden letters, that was engraven under the statue of Charles I, in the Royal Exchange was washed out by a painter, who in the day time raised a ladder, and with a pot and brush washed the writing quite out, threw down his pot and brush and said it should never do him any more service, in regard that it had the honour to put out rebels’ handwriting.’ That’s all fascinating stuff, but I think I can safely say there’s no imminent threat of a counter-claim to the British throne, so why not tell passers-by the fascinating story of the statue? It’s the oldest one in London, having been cast in bronze in 1633 at a cost of £600. 23

The metal is half an inch thick and took 8 months to create. The horse, a Flemish long tail, is 7’8” high riderless. The King is shown as being 6’ and that is about 1’ taller than he was in reality. Over the years, it has lost numerous swords, buckles and straps and the ‘George’ (Order of St George) disappeared in 1844. It was entirely encased in sandbags during the Great War and removed for safekeeping to Mentmore Towers, Buckinghamshire, during WWII. I can’t help feeling a little sorry for him as he perpetually stares down Whitehall towards the scene of his death outside Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House. Lovers kiss, oblivious to the history swirling around them. A jogger runs over the crossing while the 453 to Marylebone waits for the red light to change. The statue was made in 1633 for Lord Treasurer Weston by Hubert Le Suer and was displayed in his garden at Roehampton. It was confiscated by Parliament in 1644 and subsequently sold for £150 to parishioners of the Church of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, who erected it in their churchyard. In 1650, the Council of State ordered all owners of royal statues to destroy them, but no owner could be traced for the statue in St Paul’s, so Parliament sold it to John Rivett, a brazier of Seven Dials. He was ordered to melt it down and subsequently sold knives whose handles he claimed to have been made from the statue. Commercially, he couldn’t lose, because monarchists would have valued the items as mementos and puritans would have viewed them as symbols of victory over a tyrant king. The truth was that he buried the statue, and all the knives sold were fakes. His motivation is lost in the annals of time, but at the Restoration of the monarchy, Rivett dug up the statue and was appointed to the Office of King’s Brazier. The statue was eventually purchased by Charles II in 1675 when it was erected on the site of the old Eleanor Cross. Art for Art’s Sake? Charles I gathered together one of the finest art collections ever seen in England, but it’s also clear that, like many of his predecessors, he was acutely aware of how important image was in the public relations of the time. It was his engagement of Anthony Van Dyck as ‘principalle Paynter in ordinary to their majesties’ that allowed him to indulge in the spindoctoring necessary to inflate his image. A diminutive figure with a pronounced stammer and a strong Scottish accent, he needed to reinforce his kingly status by demonstrating his power and importance. His older brother, Henry, had been a charismatic and popular figure who died of typhus in 1612. It would be difficult for this unimpressive younger brother to 24

step into his riding boots. The Final Hours The night before his execution, Charles slept at St James’ Palace with his faithful attendant, Thomas Herbert, on the floor beside him. The next morning, Bishop William Juxon prayed with him and administered the sacrament in the Chapel Royal. Accompanied by Juxon and Herbert, he walked across St James’ Park along a route guarded by two companies of infantry. After passing over the upper floor of the Holbein Gate - where they would have seen the black-draped scaffold - they entered Banqueting House. In 1649, Parliament proclaimed that ‘the office of the king in this nation is unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the liberty, society and public interest of the people.’ He had requested two shirts to protect him from the cold, so that people would not attribute his shaking to fear. As I followed in his footsteps, I wondered if he had any last-minute regrets. If he did, I suspect he kept them to himself. Although the manner of his death was out of his hands, he was able to choreograph the public face of his departure. He would have been gratified to know that Andrew Marvell, a Parliamentarian at heart, wrote ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ in 1650, which included a reference to the dignified way in which Charles met his death the year before: ‘That thence the royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn, While round the armed bands Did clap their bloody hands. He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene, But with his keener eye The axe’s edge did try; Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite To vindicate his helpless right, But bowed his comely head 25

Down as upon a bed.’ There was a delay before the execution took place, as the Hangman, Richard Brandon, refused to carry out the sentence. When the executioner and his assistant finally appeared three hours later, they were in disguise and masked in order to avoid identification. Some say Brandon did carry out the execution, but no one knows for sure. What is certain, however, is that whoever dealt the fatal blow was highly experienced in his trade. The King was calm and composed. His short speech was taken down by a couple of shorthand writers and you can read the full text here: http://anglicanhistory.org/charles/charles1.html. Juxon helped the King to tuck his long hair into a cap so that it might not impede the axe. Charles replied, ‘I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’ He then passed his diamond-encrusted George to Juxon and said one word: ‘Remember!’ The King's embalmed body, with the severed head stitched back on, lay on display in Whitehall and the Royal apartments at St James' Palace for several days. It was important for people to know that he was truly dead. On the other hand, Cromwell did not want his burial place to become a shrine and refused permission for him to be laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. Eventually, it was agreed that the body would be released to Bishop Juxon and other supporters for a private burial in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. It was decided to lay him to rest in a vault containing the remains of King Henry VIII, Queen Jane Seymour and a stillborn child of Queen Anne. The white snow that fell in a flurry as the funeral party walked to the chapel was interpreted as a sign of the King’s innocence. There, in a plain lead coffin, covered by a black velvet pall, he finally escaped the machinations of religion and politics. Shortly after his death, and much to the chagrin of Cromwell, copies of Eikon Basilike - the story of the King’s life - went on sale. The book became an instant best-seller, going into sixty editions throughout England and Europe. Its appearance so soon after his execution indicates that it had been largely written while he was still alive. It portrayed him as a pious Protestant committed to his duty and his family and did much to further the monarchist cause and the late King’s reputation. However, it is likely that it was ghost-written by John Gauden, the King's chaplain. 26

Why Did the King Have to Die? Until the installation of the magnificent Rubens ceiling in Banqueting House, sumptuous royal masques took place there at regular intervals. The most popular of these were written by Ben Johnson and the costumes and scenery were designed by Inigo Jones – both class acts. The problem was that these masques were not just entertainment; the King saw them as blueprints for Kingship. The basic plot was that chaos and violence would be vanquished by the intervention of the wise and just King, with the Queen embodying pure love and beauty pretty boring, really. His life as King was one long masque with a lot of re-writing by others towards the end. The people of London were probably not greatly impressed by all the pomp and circumstance as they were interested in freedom and justice for all – except the Catholics, of course. And therein lay another serious problem. Charles had married Henrietta Maria, the youngest daughter of King Henry IV of France, by proxy on 11 May 1625, and again in person in Canterbury on 13 June, the same year. This allowed no time for Parliament to object and there were certainly many ensuing objections, as she was a practising Catholic. Although initially problematic, theirs was a happy marriage and they had seven children; three daughters and three sons surviving infancy. Henrietta Maria was not backward in giving Charles her opinion. Unfortunately, she was usually wrong, and her interventions just made matters worse. Those who tried to bargain with the King soon discovered that he was a fickle negotiator who would basically promise anything to anyone in order to achieve his own ends and would then fail to deliver. His reputation suffered gravely as a consequence. His execution wasn’t inevitable and he had many opportunities to compromise, but in the end Cromwell got fed up with him and decided that death was the only way to shut him up. Leaving London and setting up court in Oxford was another mistake. However, Charles had earlier shot his bolt when he entered the House of Commons in 1642 with a warrant to arrest five of its members who had already made good their escape. Speaker William Lenthall drew a line in the sand that has never been erased when he told the King: ‘May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but 27

as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.’ Martyrdom and Sainthood When the Church and the Monarchy were restored on 29 May 1660, the name of King Charles I was added to the ecclesiastical calendar in the Book of Common Prayer, for celebration on the anniversary of his death. During Queen Victoria’s reign this was removed. The Feast was later restored to the calendar in the Alternative Service Book of 1980. However, it has not been restored to the Book of Common Prayer and, frankly, I doubt that it ever will be. For example, it refers to the regicides as being ‘cruel and unreasonable’ in their treatment of the King, and also to the throne being legitimately claimed back by Charles II, which doesn’t quite fit current circumstances, does it? No doubt Charles II felt he had a good case when he asked the bishops to declare his father a martyr saint. There were many claims that the late King’s blood (witnesses paid to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood) brought about miracles. One example was that of the teenage ‘Mayd of Detford’ who suffered from ‘The King’s Evill.’ A woollen draper called John Lane, who possessed such a handkerchief, gave a piece to her and this was said to have cured her. On 30 January each year, a service takes place at Banqueting House, which anyone can attend. It is organised by The Society of King Charles the Martyr (www.skcm.org). Despite being an atheist, I decided to attend and found it very ‘high church’ (Catholic Anglican). The hymns were graphically specific: ‘O holy King, whose severed head The Martyr’s Crown doth ray With gems for every blood-drop shed, Saint Charles! For England pray.’ At the end of the service, members of the congregation were invited to venerate his Holy Relics – an invitation I did not take up – and stood in line to kneel and kiss the silver-framed mementoes of his death. Having read the SKCM magazine, it is my feeling that this society is a reactionary faction, which disapproves of women bishops, gay clergy and abortion. 28

Restoration of the Monarchy Oliver Cromwell’s son, Richard, inherited the title of Lord Protector briefly on his father’s death in 1658, but he did not inherit his father’s steel will, political nous or military ability and soon took off abroad. Cromwell had earlier declined the opportunity to be crowned King; it would have been rather hypocritical of him, wouldn’t it? We English never really had the stomach for regicide and soon General Monck was paving the way for Charles II’s return to London. When the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, returned to a Royalist London, she took a detour to gaze at the posthumously decapitated head of Cromwell which was displayed on a spike outside Westminster Hall. It remained there for twenty-five years before collapsing altogether, and was finally buried secretly at his old college, Sidney Sussex, in Cambridge. The King was back, but his powers had been rigorously pruned and it was now Parliament that held the upper hand. Samuel Pepys sailed back to England on the same ship as Charles II. His diary entry for 25 May 1660 reveals a more human side of the monarchy: ‘I went, and Mr Mansell and one of the King’s footmen, with a dog that the King loved (which shit in the boat, which made us laugh and me think that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are).’ Queen Elizabeth II These days, Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the state opening of Parliament in a horse-drawn coach to deliver the Queen’s speech. She does so from the throne in the House of Lords to members of both houses. But her role is largely ceremonial and her speech has been written by ‘her’ Government. There have been 12 Prime Ministers during her reign: Winston Churchill, 1951-55 Sir Anthony Eden, 1955-57 Harold Macmillan, 1957-63 Sir Alec Douglas-Home, 1963-64 Harold Wilson, 1964-70 and 1974-76 29

Edward Heath, 1970-74 James Callaghan, 1976-79 Margaret Thatcher, 1979-90 John Major, 1990-97 Tony Blair, 1997-2007 Gordon Brown, 2007-2010 David Cameron, from 2010 In that time she has signed more than three and a half thousand bills and must be one of the best-informed people on religious, constitutional and political matters in the United Kingdom. Yet, she is able to say little in public. If history had gone differently, we could have been preparing to elect our next president. I still don’t want to curtsey to anyone and I reserve the right to chain myself to the railings if I want to, but over the years, perhaps, I’ve mellowed a bit. I’ve grown to admire our Queen who has a difficult job to do and will probably carry on doing it until the day she dies. There are a number of constitutional issues that need to be sorted out before the next monarch is crowned, so the longer she is around, the better. She recently said: ‘we should remind ourselves of the significant position of the Church of England in our nation’s life…Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.’ Charles I died because he believed in the Divine Right of Kings. Time has shown him to be very mistaken but that does not detract from his courage in saying ‘no’ and joining his own rebellion.

Black Market: 1796 Anne Reynolds

Captain Robertson set sail from Hell bound for everlasting damnation. Sapless bones make music; distant drums echo, decomposition freed slaves inchmeal from the manacled embrace; living cargo breathing down below. Currency’s demise as cold water floods the straining nostril’s flare of hope. Twice five score years the whispers swelled to howls of outrage, shame and grief. Ebony flesh decays to white ivory as, accusing, sightless skulls confront the persistence of the impartial tides; Rapparee Cove, the makeshift grave for sixty heathen souls that night. Silver and gold in shifting sands survived October’s dusky chill, the ‘London’ dashed against the rocks spewing out its treasures as the greed died in the captain’s eyes.

Sixty slaves died, fettered to the ship’s timbers, aboard the ‘London’ in the charge of Captain Robertson on 9 October 1796. They were part of the prize money won from the French in the Caribbean Campaign. The black slaves were not given a Christian burial in consecrated ground but were buried in the sands like a guilty secret.

On the Run Anne Reynolds

That summer we took the boat out and harvested sea urchins from the baskets. The salt breezes caked our hair and clothes as we gutted, bleached and rinsed them and left them to dry in the Cornish sun. Later we watched the colours magically appear with each brush stroke of varnish ready for sale as tourist lamp stands. I knew from the moment you crossed the room to take my hand in yours, that this was for forever. You were hazelnut fudge in plain chocolate deliciously melting in my arms. Our kisses new and addictive. Touch and tenderness as deep as midnight blue. You packed away your summer clothes and left them in Penzance and I tiptoed out in the early hours from a stuffy Chiltern town On the run… Lying together in colourwash, looking for rainbows in the sash window of the shared house in Earl’s Court. Your pen and ink drawings more real than our hazy dreams which slipped into the psychedelic slipstream of London. Maybe I’ll find you again under that bush the one we slept under that first night just round the corner from The Troubadour. Or perhaps we’ll march again in protest 32

against the napalm and Agent Orange that illuminated everything and you my first love, my beautiful Cornish love.

Secret Rivers Anne Reynolds

Draw near and hear the tale of Effra the Queen of Snow Island, born in the storms off Falcon Edge in the year of the ghostly octopus. Beloved by all her people, she danced with the seven-pronged starfish and bathed in the icy waters of Beverley Brook. One black day the hot springs opened up spewing boiling plumes from the centre of the earth into the Antarctic sky condensing into icicle fireworks before swallowing Effra into the lost world of Black Ditch. The evil Lord Vidin had only to look once on her chilled loveliness to know that she must be his for all time. Under the London streets the secret rivers flowed through Stamford Brook, Parr’s Ditch and Walbrook. Vidin’s galleon powered by the beating of a thousand butterfly wings en route for Westbourne. ‘What now my love, do you weep tears of joy?’ he cried as they neared the muffled bells of Wandle Church where they would be wed before the clock struck Noon. He wrapped sweet Effra in his arms and held her close as she dissolved in the heat of his passion drop by drop, into Ravensbourne until there was nothing left of her at all. 34

Then, from the rushing icy waters of the longest night an iceberg flowed up Fleet and Peck that fateful day and Vidin watched as it approached and dived below and rose transformed into an icy throne where Effra sat in regal chill crowned with sea anemones. ‘My love don’t go, I cannot live without you’ he screamed above the frozen winds. She turned to look him in the eyes ‘but I die if I stay with you’ her frozen lips replied. Then looking neither left nor right She fled to her frost-bound home to the barnacles, clams and the krill. Down Counter’s Creek he steered stone faced past Neckringer Cove heading south at Tyburn in pursuit of his diamond-eyed maiden. Now travellers talk of a ghostly ship stuck fast in deep ice drifts of butterfly wings that lie untouched of a stranger who died for love. She heard the tales and found him there inclined against the mast then curled into his chilled embrace and covered his face with a thousand brittle kisses.

The 99% Anne Reynolds

There’s something about the giant tureen lid of St Paul’s that makes me want to lift it at one edge to release the steam of protest. Siiiiisssssssssssssss! I read the hand-outs at Tent City they said that capitalism is stifling creativity and I’m one of the oppressed 99%. But it’s human nature to pay with tokens because you can’t transfer a cow online and cash is as likely to produce a cure for AIDS as the next ‘I-don’t-know-what.’ Lead us, oh great Moloch, lead us through the market’s brouhaha. The suits belong to a pious sect doomed to roam the square mile playing finger cymbals and chanting time is money, time is money time is money, time is mo-o-ney. False purveyors of hope speak of a social economy while workers are crucified on the hands of the factory clock as currency lubricates the cogs and wheels of an automaton, pre-programmed to write Carpe Diem until the meteors strike or we vanquish the paltry 1%. 36

White Sound Anne Reynolds

A swirling haze of choking fumes catches my throat on Euston Road as stuttering streams of cars and trucks negotiate the flow, where wailing sirens blend with roaring combustion engines and pallid trees nurtured in the din of metal and rubber exhale oxygen and then, that certain sound – the urgent hssssswhhha fuuuhhhh of the sea in retreat, silent beats then rising, rushing forward to crash down on Chesil Beach and spill from speakers across the pavement as the edges of reality smudge nudged from City purpose to ozone-drenched winds where the rhythm of tides tumbles flint and chert in froth and burble rolling them smooth as worry beads pulse slowing, muscles slackening an outlander dissolving on the streets of London.

‘White Sound’ was a sound Installation by Bill Fontana at the Wellcome Institute on the Euston Road 22.09.11-16.10.11. The live sound of waves crashing onto Chesil Beach was fed through speakers fixed to the building. 37

An Incompetent’s Guide to…Peckham Erin Lake Originally from Cambridge, via Norfolk and Peterborough, now settled in the suburban nest of Ealing, I am currently finishing my final year of part-time MA at Westminster. Outside of writing and thinking about writing and being anxious about writing and weeping over writing, I enjoy long walks, attempts to watch TV online, 19th-Century female - and some male - novelists and chicken wraps. Special skill: being able to articulate in 61 words pretty comprehensively who I am as a human woman.

Peckham, despite those rumours, and the looks people give when you mention you are moving there, is a pleasant district in the South-East of London. The South, in general, has the reputation of a slightly embarrassing and violently eccentric family member who you stopped sending Christmas cards to years ago. Best just avoided. But buried beneath Old Father Thames’s Underskirts, where traditionally vice and various degrees of licentiousness have been permitted and encouraged throughout the years, are many delights equal to that in the hoity and sometimes toity villages of the North. This permissiveness was not the only reason I moved there in 2011, and in fact, in the few months I stayed there I failed to do anything remotely illegal or frowned upon, or had anything of that ilk done to me (aside from getting pick-pocketed in Brixton, but I adamantly deny the miscreancy there, maintaining it was an honest mistake and the sticky-fingered reveller assumed they were rummaging in their own purse as they danced to Whitesnake. Easily done). Of old times Peckham was a famed market town, and still retains that trope of young men flogging their fruits and fishes to the good public, even if the produce may be a tad more exotic than the days of yore. There are very likely more yams than in the days of yore. And probably more mooli - that giant white radish so full of yummy Folate. Vegetables aside, arriving at Queen’s Road Peckham, you might be forgiven (depending on the nature of the forgiver) for thinking, “gah, I meant to get off at Dulwich, yikes!” and swallow all your valuables. But no, fear not (or less) and stay a while in the new hip postcode of London. SE15 coming at you. Not with a gun, necessarily. In fact, the only phallic shaped weapon you might get assaulted with is a good old plantain. And they are very tasty.

10 THINGS TO DO IN PECKHAM. (Before it becomes "The Next Shoreditch" - heavens forbid, and Evening Standard forebode). 1. Eat Jerk Chicken. Aside from Big Mama’s House in Norwich (lovely grub, rather indifferent staff. Tended not to have cooked much of what was on the menu, but were very chilled out about the fact) I never really had much of a taste of the Caribbean until moving to Peckham, where Caribbean flavours are part of the culinary landscape, and can often be found and enjoyed under an illuminated neon palm tree, or hidden in the belly a dark railway arch (making it both hard and rather intimidating to enter, occasionally leading to a swift head-down shoe shuffle past and onwards to Iceland for dinner). Patties, curried goat, oxtail (what does happen to the rest of the ox? There is a lot of ox to use there. They are infamously bulky. Is all the tastiness all focused in the tail? Right at the tip of the ox? And is that the same with all animals? Is there a wagging to morishness math here?) But best of all, you can get a good Jerk Chicken and Peas. The finest of all belonging to Five Star Jerk, the place that prides itself on its jerkiness. Full marks for their jerk. I love a good jerk. I could go on. I won’t.

The High Street and the Palais – scorch marks and shattered glass not photoshopped out. Looking good!

2. Go to the cheapest cinema in London. £4.99! You can’t get a thawed frankfurter in a seedy bap for that over the River (I am now using the river as a division of class, culture and street-food 39

pricings. I still feel that if you sell food out of a van, you should expect an initial price-handicap, however darned fusion it may be. Falafel, from a mobile shack, by a bench, and a man pretending to be in a cat-basket, should not be £6.50. I'm sorry.) The entrance of the Peckhamplex looks like a clip from Dawn of The Dead: litter, vegetable skins and clumps of hair from the barber-shops blowing in the abandoned, battered-looking walk up to the glass doors that close behind you like an ominous automated sentencing. But once you are inside, and get that whiff of corn popping and hear the faint sounds of the Digital Cinema Media indent whooshing through your anticipating eardrums, you are swept along with the magic of the movies. Even if you are the only one there at three o’clock in the afternoon. Perfect movie-going hour, as long as you aren’t afraid of THE DARK. And that person who followed you in, in the hoodie, a few rows back. At least, you thought they were a few rows back, but now they seem to be behind you, their nacho breath on your neck, saying something along the lines of “give me your money” or “is that salted?”

3. Try out the richest hot chocolate in the universe: Melange, a chocolate lover’s dream, and the poor chocolate lover’s nightmare. Gourmet cocoa goods, created by a professional chocolatier, a real French one, decking out this petite little store. They even have chocolate making classes, for those who don’t just want to buy their Toblerones from the 99p Store, imagine they're in the Alps, and be done. For those who crave something a bit rarer, you can go in and have a sample of their wide range of eclectic and curious flavours: raspberry and lime, vanilla and cumin, moss with asp venom. Quirky stuff. Delicious, and deadly good. That hot chocolate really did almost kill me, and I’ve eaten a whole yard of Jaffa Cakes in one day. Very true story. Also, great for Christmas prezzies, even if you do find the chilli and talcum powder slab you gave your father in his cupboard a year later. You get over it. And eat it in revenge.

4. Roam Bellenden Road and make Bell-End jokes about the hipsters. It kept me amused for a while. And then I wanted to join them. Hip-notised, I wanted them to place a little woollen hat on my head, crown me with a pair of non-prescribed, black rimmed glasses, squeeze me in to a pair of funky coloured jeans with a shoe-horn, drape me in an oversized vintage coat, and let me drink an alternative tea with them. It never happened, sadly. I left them to their little moots beneath the awnings with no name. (Tip about this road, it is not always clear what the shops are about, as there are few signs, or indications, but many tables outside where youthful Fleetfox doppelgängers loiter and drink tea in mismatched china cups). Also, dive into one of the best little independent bookstores (a sentence I love to be able to write!) around, Review Bookshop, where they have 40

books you don’t have to read on a screen, but can sniff, stroke, use as weight lifts, flick through pages, get paper-cuts, and bleed into the spine. It’s a beautiful thing.

5. Go to the Bussey Building, look uncomfortable, and then leave for Cottage Chicken. The Bussey Building is an old cricket-bat factory. The kind of place that as you go by on the train you would imagine an old person in a pub saying to you “you don’t want to be going in there, lass, there be ghosts in there, ghosts of cricket-bat-makers past, arrr”. For some reason the person telling you this is from Bristol and they don’t have many of their teeth left. I don’t know why. But then all the other more reliable indicators are telling you to go there. So whom do you trust? Those sources, or that paranoid fisherman in your Ram’s Head? Well, you end up going with the majority and attending an odd evening of whalish opera based around the emotional press-blitzed relationship between Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, of course called Timberbrit (Timbershit). This might not always happen, and you won’t always leave feeling you have participated in a chilling experiment between Milgram and the Atonal Acapella Soc. There is dancing space, but it’s, like, a metaphor for dancing space, it’s basically, just a space. The majority of people will stand, clutching bottled beers, and occasionally nod a slightly permed head (there has been steady migration of curly-haired boys in top-buttoned shirts from Shoreditch, according to latest Home office stats). Being weighed down by unfortunate cardigan and backpack of volumes, I understand dance-amnesty, but not the too cool to flex attitude of the hipster. Go dance in their faces, people, leave your cardigans and Seventeenth-Century discourses on liberty at home! Next time, I be bold, and boogie.

Alternatively, you can go to the Bussey-stop for a bit of drama, as they also do THEATRE at the Bussey. I saw a very good production of The Vagina Monologues, which actually, was not a Jim Henson puppet show of nattering vaginas, but women talking about their vaginas lots and other women laughing in response going “yes, yes, I understand that. I have a vagina” and men going “yes, I understand, because I am in touch with the soul of women and I understand what it might mean to have a vagina, even though I am mostly scared right now and want to protect my genitalia with my hands.”

6. Go to Peckham Rye Park. A historical park, where Blake once saw an angel in a tree. I went to go find this tree, and asked various people where this tree was, and either I was looking at the 41

wrong tree or the angel had upped and gone - due to some council problem or complaints from neighbouring nesters - but I did not have the same seraphic encounter as our prophetic poet of the Romantic Age. That may be because I don’t believe in angels, was not on the same dosage as Will, or was simply distracted by the prospect of those muffins in the café (the main obstacle between me and enlightenment), but it became clear to me that the religious quality of my ramble in the park was not of the same calibre as the great crazy rhymer of London. I did see some coots though and I thought they were boot…iful. Good enough to shoot. Or make into a boot, and loot, for a hoot, the… yep, will work on the versifying, and divine susceptibility.

7. Try the dining spaces. If you want to bypass the various fried chicken huts and jerk-houses, with condiments in jars not sachets, and atmosphere lighting and minus the small worry of why there is bullet-proof glass between yourself and the server, there are a few options for such nit-pickers. In no discerning order, there is: Ganapati restaurant. Yes, the lack of Indian staff and profusion of nice white youths with dreadlocks or nose rings might not holler authenticity. But then you get past the iffy suspicion that you’re in a gap-yah enterprise and try the food and it is darned good, and you get less uppity about it not feeling “real” (like you’ve been to Delhi and can compare.). Elsewhere, the Gowlett does truly scrumptious pizzas, with such delightful toppings as fennel, and thin Italian meats, which when not accompanied with stuffed crust and plastic pots of dip, read YUMMY+CLASS in my books. If you want something more slap-up, and I might mean that in a number of ways, try Jenny’s Diner by the station, where you can get a cooked brekkie, cup of tea, and a catch up with The Sun for under a fiver. Bish bash bosh, as I like to say, before I turn to page three and blush, like a little schoolgirl. Extra special mention to M. Manze’s Eel and Pie Shop, the best Eel and Pie House I have ever been too! It had the status throughout my stay in Peckham as being “that weird Eel and Pie house that was never open. Seriously, when does this place do trade? Are there secret laws regarding the transactions of eel and pie? These opening times make no sense!”, but then one day, there it was, open doors, welcoming actual custom into its gravy-stained bosom, declaring, “eel is actually a bit scarce at this point so maybe lay off the eel for now and just have a nice bit of pie, eh?” which I did, feasting on two dollops of fine stodgy mash, a generous meat-packed pastry-pot of pie, and a small jug of gravy and liquor, washed down with a good builder’s brew. I felt like a real pearly queen.

Life Of Pie And Eel, where a young woman is shipwrecked in Peckham with only some mashed potato, and a tiger rug from Wandsworth.

8. Loot! Just kidding. There is actually a shop called Loot, which I think survived the riots unharmed, despite the obvious rallying call. Elsewhere on the high street you can go to all kinds of style emporiums, where they are forever in a sale, or closing down state of “TAKE NOW, 50% off! NO, NOW 70%! WE REALLY ARE GOING SOON…. 90% OFF, COME ON, WE HAVE TO VACATE THE PREMISES BEFORE THE NEW SUPERDRUG ARRIVES!” You can find everything you need in this street of limited-funding-based dreams, barely requiring money that folds (which is handy when you are basically substituting your debit card with a tin of coppers you now carry at the bottom of your discount tote bag) As a fashion-conscious woman of the world, it was ever a relief to know that should I have an ensemble mishap, like, say, theoretically wearing black wool, lots of black wool, in mid-July, I could find an alternative look, on budget, in five mins. That look may have been studded-shoulder-pad cropped cardi and patterned pink leggings, but somehow it just worked, and I felt swish.

If you don’t fancy the independent branches of style, there is always the forever buzzing Primark, where you can supply all your bedroom furnishings from, and keep you in constant supply of cute novelty socks (yay!). Or you can amble through the little arcades, where whilst you are waiting 43

for the man to cut your keys, or photocopy your Curriculum Vitae, you can peruse the stock of the tiny alcoves entrenched in the very walls, browsing the Nigerian DVDs and wondering what you would find if you unlocked your mobile phone, and try on those cotton and pleather leggings that will save you from a winter of skirted discontent (I realised sometime in August that I owned no trousers, and maybe this was the year I should commit to some leg-gloves. See, I even forgot what they were called. Pin-swaddlers? Stalk-sheaths? Denim pantaloons?) After this discovery I avowed, that every woman, must own at some point a pair of Peckham Pants (artificial buttocks, despite what the lovely saleswoman says, are not entirely compulsory. If you do not have the natural booty, never fear, additional padding only requisite when attending extreme sports days or musical bump classes).

9. Go check out the railway arches. In the great new fashion of recovering derelict industrial spaces and turning them into bohemian conclaves, go suss out what is underneath your local alcove! In Peckham they have utilised this room for artistic and drinking purposes, always a good double-act, for most art makes more sense whilst a trifle pissed anyhow. Bar Story has the advantage of being a renowned cocktail provider, and promoting the creations of local art students. So, you can go chill out of an eve with friends, have a pizza, drink a Cosmo or two, and then buy a nice handmade notebook made from recycled napkins, or a lovingly made one off impala salt shaker. It makes commercial sense, at the time, while you are drunk ("ÂŁ35, and this crockery wind-chime is mine forever! I can eat soup and hear the music of the breeze at the same time") but might make less sense, when you wake up, and find a set of papyrus Hummingbird-themed notelets and a handwritten receipt.

10. Go watch a film at The Montpelier. The Montpelier, not, sneakily, on Montpelier road, but on another road, not called Montpelier, is a nice modern pub where aside from having the prefix Gastro to its name, and the largest chips in the words (basically potatoes, from the field, put in a bowl with mayo) also has a little back room cinema. Best idea ever maybe? What are three of the best things in the world? Beer, chips, and obscure movies. They show a diverse range of recent films that were not widely seen upon initial release, including documentaries and foreign flicks that never entirely translated to mainstream venues. It is like a cinema, but with draughts, less comfy seats, ninety minutes of art-house fun with no obvious interference from producers demanding less clothing and more robot-oil doused cleavage, and no people thrusting 3D glasses 44

at you (which you can never see through anyway because your eyes are slightly wonky). You can catch up on your cine-history, weekly units, giant chip binging and â&#x20AC;&#x153;evenings spent out of the houseâ&#x20AC;? quota all in one. Peckham, I salute you.

Can You Hear My Hands? Iranian Voices of London and Beyond Betsabeh Kamali I had nearly passed the Centre. Twice. The gentleman on the phone said it’s only a five-minute walk to the Centre from Holloway Station. Everything is a five-minute walk for these Londoners. This five-minute journey took a good twenty minutes. I was beginning to worry I may have passed it, so I crossed the street. Perhaps a bird’s eye view could help me find it. No luck. My frustration was mounting and I was about to give up. “Ok, Bets,” I thought one last time, “cross the street and start over again, but this time look for Farsi writing.” I was surprised to have even found it. The Iranian Community Centre was on the third floor of a dingy, rotting old building squeezed between a discount luggage store and a small, reasonably priced, family-owned coffee shop. It was the Neale Harper Building, # 266-268, except the first ‘2’ was missing. Next to the luggage store there was a pizza shop. You could buy a slice for £1.00. What a steal. Across the street were a Sainsbury’s Local and a hidden athletics store. And past the bridge was the London Metropolitan University. I didn’t feel like I was in London, though. This early in the morning and I saw drunks on benches and young men trying to pick up ‘hoochie mamas’ at bus stops. One elderly woman with a walker simply lifted up her dress and urinated right on the sidewalk. With the wind blowing it was not a pretty sight. She didn’t even bother to crouch. The law on Holloway Road wasn’t the same as in the rest of England. I pressed the ICC button and the door made a horrid buzzing sound that I bet even people at Sainsbury’s could hear. I pulled open the metal door and entered a long, narrow and dirty hallway. It smelled of urine and sweat and old cooking oil. It smelled of hell. I couldn’t tell whether I was inside or outside. It was 10:00am and my shaking hand had a hard time pushing the ‘up’ button. I was freezing and my hands felt clammy. “Oh my God, I’m gonna screw this up.” I just wanted to turn around and go back to the Tube, back to my horrific accommodation, pack, and get on the earliest flight back home. I wasn’t cut out for university life. I couldn’t keep up in the cold. What if they wouldn’t help me because I wasn’t one of them anymore? Maybe I was a traitor to them now. Maybe my name was too disturbing for them. Maybe growing up in Tehran was not acceptable. Maybe not being a great Farsi speaker was embarrassing to my ancestors. Maybe not knowing Iranian history was something to be ashamed of. Too late. The elevator doors opened and a soft lady’s voice said: “Ground floor.” The doors closed sharply and opened just as sharply again. Oh my God, we hadn’t moved. The elevator was broken. The

door slammed again and the voice said: “Third floor.” Again the elevator ferociously opened its doors only to slam them shut. “That’s it,” I thought, “I’m gonna die in this vile elevator.” But before I could panic, I remembered a scene from a movie: when the elevator got stuck, they jumped up and down. I jumped. I didn’t have much of a choice. It moved and I made it to the third floor, with the doors of the ICC right in front of me. I walked in. A small gentleman with glasses bigger than his head welcomed me. He looked dishevelled but very smart and humble. “Can I help you?” “Hello. I am the Iranian girl who called you on Friday…” “Oh, yes. I remember you. Come into my office and I’ll see if I can help you. I don’t think so, but I will try. Do you speak any Farsi?” With ego and gusto I said: “Oh yes!” “We are here to help refugees in any way we can,” he told me in Farsi. “We help them apply for visas, get immigration lawyers and find employment. We help pay their electricity, phone, and whatever other bills they may have. We even help them with law violations.” I was surprised about the law violations. Before I could ask him why, he told me that the majority, some 90% of the refugees, couldn’t speak English. I would be faced with a huge challenge. I was impressed. But I didn’t know how to ask him the all-important question: do you have any stories that you want to share with me? I was relieved when his phone rang and he had to excuse himself to answer it. “Come on, Bets, think. Think. Think. You’ve got to tell him what you really want. This isn’t hard. Remember when you interviewed Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton? This is a walk in the park for you. Rely on your old journalistic instincts. For God’s sake, Bets, you worked as an intern at the WUSA in Washington DC. Shit, you were chosen out of thousands of applicants. You’ve gone to murder scenes and court hearings. You’ve interviewed prosecutors and judges. You’ve seen local news celebrities interview congressmen and senators. This is nothing. You can do this. How shameful that you can’t ask this man a simple question.” Mr Shirinpour was a good man. He really seemed to care about the Iranians who came to the Centre. He seemed to be a man with a great deal of passion for helping others. I could see it in his eyes through his over-sized glasses that kept sliding down to the tip of his nose. He told me he was married with two kids: a thirteen-year-old boy and a baby. His wife stayed home and took care of the baby and he worked at the Centre as a coordinator-director. He also devoted every Saturday to the Bounds Green Farsi School. He chuckled as he told me he hadn’t had a weekend to himself in over ten years. He sat down in his chair for just a second before he got up and began to look over his files. His office looked like a scene from the movie ‘All the President’s Men’: papers everywhere and files of 47

everything you could imagine. At times, it was hard to find him among the mountains of files on his desk. When I asked him about all the papers, he just smiled: ”What can I say, I can’t say no to anyone.” He told me that the Centre was the oldest in the city, established in 1983. The borough of Barnet held the largest Iranian community. But good luck finding them; most of them blended in with English society. He further educated me on the mass migration out of Iran, which began about 30 years ago. This I knew to be true, because my family was one of the early ones who took part in it. We moved to South Jersey, about forty-five minutes from Manhattan. “Listen, it’s almost 11:00am and you’ve come on the perfect day. There is a man whose story could be of interest to you.” What perfect day? I was excited, anxious and worried at the same time. I stepped out into the waiting area to give Mr Shirinpour time to do his work and wait for this mysterious man to arrive. I saw that a few more people had arrived. A couple of elderly men with what looked like their grandsons. They were complaining to each other that they were waiting too long. I caught one of their names: Mohsain. They smiled at me and stood up to say hello. They thought I was another visitor and were just trying to be nice. They asked me if I was before them. I said I wasn’t there to see anyone. They were happy to be next. They began to complain to me about the weather and the frigid wind. They both hated England but knew this is what they were forced to call home. They complained about the government and how the rich always ate from the poor. They looked helpless and angry. I wished them well as they went in to see Mr Shirinpour. A lady kept pacing back and forth, back and forth. It was driving me mad but calming her down. I wanted to approach her but she seemed to be in such deep thought. The Centre was in desperate need of repair. It looked like a war scene. The waiting room had a wonderful skylight that was hard to miss. Nevertheless, it brought about a cold, alien feeling. A Persian carpet was the centrepiece of the room, but with all the dirt and stains on it, it looked as sad as some of the souls sitting around it. A large table covered with business cards and Iranian newspapers stood across the room. There were also a lot of brochures on mental health clinics and doctors. Most of the business cards were from immigration lawyers. The pamphlets were for English classes and cheap computer courses. The room had a small library of books in Farsi, all for borrowing free of charge. But it opened with a key. I’d only seen it opened once. There were two other people working at the Centre. Mrs Simin, like Mr Shirinpour, was a paid consultant, and the other was a middle-aged woman who volunteered her time every day from 9:30am until 5:30pm. She’d help with translations, although her English was poor; with counseling, although she was mentally troubled; with paying bills and any minor refugee issues. Mr Shirinpour never complained about her. In fact, he had a tremendous amount of respect for her. She was very kind and always ready to help. She didn’t smile much, though. Maybe she had no reason to smile. I looked at her with such 48

keenness that I found myself lost in her thoughts. She wore overly baggy jeans and an even baggier sweater. I found out later that she had never taken a sick day and was always on time. Mrs Simin saw almost all the refugees. She was a petite, spunky lady from Abadan, loved by all; especially the men. She laughed constantly and moved about with such speed and cautiousness that I thought the men would sometimes just come in to sit and watch her move. The refugees entered, signed their names on a clipboard, took a seat and waited to be called. You could sometimes see them give up their turn if they were in a heated discussion over life and liberty with other visitors. At times, the conversations turned into such heated debates of ‘he said, she said’ that even the director would come out to see what all the commotion was about. And soon he’d find himself caught in the debates as well. I, for the most part, sat back, listened and felt like I was in my father’s living room having the same debates about politics, religion and condemnation. Within minutes, the heavy door of the Centre opened and a stately old gentleman walked in with a pearly smile and a mountain of newspapers and magazines under his arm, clutching it with all his strength, as if he had a secret and was excited to share it with us, the very special few. I knew instantly that this was my mystery man. He stood erect, like a twometer monument. He put his large pile of papers on the information table and began to lecture the poor gentlemen waiting to see Mr Shirinpour about the poem he wrote in the newspaper and the disgusting Islamic Republic of Iran. He was Iran’s version of Martin Luther King, Jr. He had a robust voice. A dictator-like passion flamed through his eyes and poured out from every pore in his body. Mr Shirinpour came out, took the gentleman into a quiet room and told him what I was doing. The man was feverishly excited to talk to me. “Mr Issa, this is Madam Betty. She is interested in your story.” “Doorood. Doorood. Madam Betty, do you understand what I just said?” “I’m afraid not.” “I said welcome. Welcome.” He kissed my hand. I was in for the ride of my life. An elderly man who was the same age as my father made me blush. Why didn’t he just say our traditional “Salam?” Why did he say a word I’d never heard of in my life? I was about to get myself entangled in a world I knew very little about. I wasn’t sure I was prepared. The room was cold and smelled musty. The one large window had a soft pink curtain patterned with dust. The ledge of the window had never been cleaned and mould was clinging to it like black ivy. There were many dead creatures, big and small. It looked as if they had been there for months. I wanted to give the Centre a big hug and tell it that I would do whatever I could to save it and bring it back to life. It became part of my mission. Mr Issa made himself a cup of coffee. He placed it on the wobbly table and the steam drifted into my nose. I was in desperate need to get warm. He noticed me staring at his steaming cup. 49

“Would you like a cup? It’s going to be a long day.” “Oh no. I don’t want to inconvenience you.” “No way you could. I’ll be right back. It’s too cold.” I had a moment to breathe and get my tape recorder ready. Then he placed a steaming cup of coffee in front of me, sat down, and took in the same oxygen I was so desperately trying to breathe. He removed his black coat and placed it gently over his blue rickety chair. He did that with such precision, that I sensed he was a compassionate man. His hands began to wave. They were a mystery to me: taut and stiff, full of wrinkles and stories. The wrinkles made his skin so tense. His sea-blue eyes were bulging with excitement and terror. Tears rolled down his face. I tried to follow them all the way down, but they came to rest in the cracks of his face. I took a deep breath, pressed the recorder button and sat back. He took a deeper breath and sucked up all the oxygen in the room. I gave him time to remember. He looked everywhere but at me. He kept rubbing his hands and it sounded like rough sandpaper against aged skin. I tried not to stare at the many holes in his argyle sweater, but with every wave of his arm, the huge holes under his left armpit revealed a scary part of his life, his memory and his despair. The scarf around his neck left me dumbfounded. It wasn’t a real scarf. He’d cut out the sleeves and neck of an old sweater to make it. Money was tight. Money would always be tight for him. He repeatedly said: “Everything comes back to money, Madam Betty.” “Maaziraat mekhum.” I felt the need to apologise for the disturbing world we live in. I felt responsible for the feelings of this aging testimonial of history. I was ready to take on the world’s mistakes and carry them on my shoulders. “It’s not your fault.” He smiled. “It’s just what the sad world we live in is like now.”

An Englishmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s England A. Naji Bakhti I am a graduate of the University of Westminster with an MA in Creative Writing.

If I were English and this were my country, I would run down the street half-naked and pause, only to point out to strange tourists with turbans and disposable cameras and camels, that the bulge in my pants and Big Ben have an adjective in common. I would march towards Buckingham Palace and bow and curtsey and demand a dance with the Queen on the grounds that I pay my taxes and wash my dishes and kiss my kids, and mistress, goodnight, and have sung God Save the Queen more times than He or I care to remember. I would climb onto a bus and walk all the way to the very back where a drunken man sits and snores and wakes up only to speak his mind about politics and immigrants and the flailing economy and his wife, the whore who had an affair with a cheating Arab and cheated on him with a god-fearing Englishman. And I would shake the hand of every passenger who is not white or freckled or blond and say to them welcome, 51

welcome to England. But we’re English, they’d object and I’d smile and nod Maybe one day, if you’re good.

Oral History Aparna Narayanan Aparna Narayanan is a writer and editor in New York City. She enjoys exploring cities. Twitter: @aparna_2012; Instagram: @itchforscribbling.

I came to London with 300 pounds and a suitcase that rolled. I had worn a thick shirt to keep warm. It was October, and I was freezing. I knew no better, could you imagine? The agent who met me at the airport said, we're going to Leeds. The name meant nothing to me. What I remember of that bus ride from Heathrow is fields of yellow. Yellow as far as the eye could see. Whether leaf or flower, I have no idea. I passed many beautiful houses, lovelier than any I'd seen before, but the yellowness captured my mind. At the bus stop in Leeds, we got off, myself, the agent and a third man some hopeful, godforsaken wretch like me. The agent told me: sit in this bus shelter; we'll come back for you. I sat there and waited and waited. I'd look around but I was too afraid to get up and approach anyone. Besides 53

I needed to pee so badly. I rocked as I sat there. The pain was burning. When it was five, the sun began to set and the shops started to close. I was out of my mind with worry. A storekeeper pulled the shutters down and, bless him, came over to talk to me. I've seen you sitting in this bus stop the whole day, he said. Where are you from? Malaysia, I replied, telling him my story. He looked at my passport and finally said: You can never get work on a tourist visa. He was Pakistani. All the shops around the bus stop sold Punjabi suits and sweets. I'll never know what made him do it, but he took me home to his wife and kids. That night I cried like I've never cried. She taught me to sew, he helped me learn computer skills. I'd never held a mouse. I soon got a factory job, but wanted better. An agency got me nannying work in Dublin. Nothing had prepared me for the cold. Those girls grew to love me. The eldest would get jealous if I hugged her sisters. Their mother sucked my blood with work but she was good. I burned her kitchen once and she said: Are you and the kids okay? I'm married to an Englishman now. 54

I'm a nanny in London, have an NHS number. I've put four children through college, bought a condo in which they live, and talk to them every single day. That day I had no choice but to trust the Pakistani shopkeeper, Mr Ahmadullah. But what made him help me? The world stinks. Never doubt that. But here's the thing: It isn't as hopeless as you might think.

Milk Sachets Aparna Narayanan

She cradled it with one hand, snipping a bit of the top corner off. Quickly she tipped it into a vessel, pouring the milk out just so. The Indian milk sachet confounds: it wobbles every which way, spouts milk no matter how you try to make a clean job of opening it. Except in my mother's deft hands there was not a wasted drop anywhere when she was done. Let me tell you: this takes some artistry. Not that we knew it then. We only saw that the empty sachets, slick to the touch with fats and oils, were not discarded in the dustbin. Instead, with infinite care, she rinsed each cover - "cover" was her word and slapped it on the kitchen tiles, where it bloomed and spread like mould. What a collage! As her handiwork grew, so did our rage. How ugly it was, and how uncouth. How not to be ashamed of house and mistress? So we had our say. 56

We peeled the sachets off the walls and held them at the very edge, like coins dropped into a beggar's hand, to toss them on a public rubbish heap. On learning this, my mother blinked, then her eyes turned guiltily away. Plastic, she muttered, too much of it, drowning the earth and clogging seas. She was drowning too. And mother don't you see? So were we she tried to assert control. We too, burying her by chance, with our grief.

The Battle of Goldhawk Road Brian Harrison Brian is from Liverpool. He writes: "My father worked in the city so never loved it, but he could outwit it and showed me how to use it. He proved that short routes were not the fastest and obvious routes were not the most interesting. In the city could be found winding lanes, short cuts through buildings, ships to be boarded, and people that worked in strange places. He showed me how there is so much more to know about a city than what you can see from its buses."

Bill Everson was killed outside his pub on the high street. He lived for that place, but he didn’t expect to die for it. It was nearly 30 years ago, but those who remember him can still sense his presence as they pass by. There were at least a dozen pubs on the high street back then, every 50 yards or so and each with their own regulars and reputations, but today there are only a few left. Bill had been a police sergeant before he took on the pub tenancy. If you have any idea of what an old-school post-war copper was like, then you’d know Bill. He took a robust stand on public order and was more inclined to administer a clip around the ear than complete the necessary paperwork. His beat was his fiefdom, and there were people who respected what he stood for and would tell stories about situations he’d sorted out. He wasn’t bent, but he knew his time was up. Old-style policing was on the way out; patrol cars and riot squads were becoming the new face of the Met. Plenty of retired coppers took on pub tenancies, but not many did so in the areas they used to patrol. The prosecution argued this explained the severity of the attack, but the charges were brought in the context of the Prevention of Terrorism Acts. Mickey Corrigan was sent down, but a lot of us thought there were still unanswered questions concerning Bill’s death. The defence had claimed that it was just supposed to be a warning, a punishment beating, but it didn’t seem like that. Whatever it was, it probably would have remained just an unsavoury memory if I hadn’t called round at Jack and Daisy’s place on my way back from work one night. ‘I was down the Goldhawk Road today,’ said Jack. ‘Before you ask, yes, I called in at The Keys.’ ‘I can’t remember the last time I was in there; it must have changed a bit,’ I said. ‘Not as much as you might think. Most of the other places have gone to the wall, but The Keys is pretty much the same. Dave van Eker’s still drinking in there, though he looked a bit lost without a dartboard to look at.’ ‘Van Eker…Was he sober?’ 58

‘As a newt. Of course not. He knew who I was, but didn’t seem to realise it was over 20 years since we’d last talked. Still, every conversation with him seems to turn to football or the price of beer, so there were no awkward gaps.’ ‘He’s still on about Sparta Rotterdam, and London beer being a bargain compared to the prices charged in Holland?’ ‘Of course. In vino veritas an’ all that. He didn’t seem quite as addled as usual. He seems to have lost a bit of weight from what I remember, but he’s still a big lad. He talked about the old days and mentioned one thing I hadn’t realised.’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Mickey Corrigan. He’s out and about. He would have been out by now anyway, but the bloody Good Friday Agreement got him released a bit sooner. He was still a classified “political” prisoner.’ ‘That old chestnut?’ I said. Mickey was about as political as a London bus: he’d pick up any old idea as long as there were a few quid in it for him. He got it into his head that he was part of the Irish diaspora and should collect for “the cause” – as if Shepherds Bush was somewhere between Brooklyn and South Boston. Bill took a strong line on collections in his pub: it was said that he’d even asked the Salvation Army to leave on one occasion. Mickey’s futile attempt to use the collections as a money-spinner led to the attempt to enforce compliance within a less than sympathetic community. Bill was a big man but he was old, and not many younger men would have survived such a battering. Bill ran his pub with a few simple rules, but ones that were strictly enforced. In addition to the “no collections” rule, for example, betting stakes were limited to no more than the price of a pint. There were other pubs on the high street where you could play the fruit machines or cribbage he used to say, so his pub remained a place for a drink and a chat rather than a refuge for cardsharps and hustlers. He couldn’t really enforce these rules across the whole pub from behind the bar, but the threat of being challenged by Bill was enough to keep the place respectable. It was in one of those other pubs that you’d usually find Mickey. I’d been at school with him and he was a vicious little toe rag, bullying and terrorising younger, smaller kids. Mickey himself was a pretty sad case, but the problem was his family: if you valued your life, you didn’t cross the Corrigans. He was the youngest, and a scrawny underweight runt compared to his older brothers. Officially they were in the scrap metal business but that was just a side line; the money came from selling stolen goods, some of it in boxes ‘fallen off the back of a lorry’ but probably nicked from your neighbours’ homes the night before. There were suggestions of other scams but it was wise not to be too inquisitive. The Corrigans liked their booze, were handy with their fists, and disposed to using whatever came to hand if they found themselves in a corner. It was safer to console their victims and help 59

them make up their losses rather than confront their aggressors directly. We just wished that someone like Shane would ride into town like he did in the old movie on TV. We’d never imagined that Bill would claim that role, even if the story didn’t pan out like it had in the film. I can see him now, polishing glasses, a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face when he saw you coming through the doors. Each welcome was as hearty as the first, and the first welcome was like a reunion of old friends. Jack and I had been regulars in The Cross Keys until about 20 years ago but we’d gone our separate ways; The Keys and us that is, not Jack and me. You grow out of places like you grow out of things. Other things, places and people capture your attention and you get older, you grow up, you move on. Our little gang back then had been Jack, Mack, Nev, Trev, and Ash: that’s Jack Daniels (yes, really), me – Charlie MacMillan, – Neville Burton, Trevor Lumb, and Ashish Desani. Now it’s Jack and Daisy, me and Alison, full stop. We live within a few miles of each other, further west from where we grew up, and see each other every few weeks or so. Nev qualified as a doctor and manages disaster emergency teams in the Far East, Trev teaches English in Germany, and Ash is up in Durham where he stayed on after uni; Jack and I don’t see much of any of them. ‘Did Dave say what Mickey was doing?’ ‘He didn’t really know; he was rambling a bit,’ said Jack. ‘Old man Corrigan died while Mickey was inside. When he came out, his brothers had carved up the businesses between them. They gave him a few odd jobs. I think he drives a mini-cab these days.’ I noticed he was getting louder and more excitable. ‘Pity we don’t know who for,’ I said. ‘I’d be sure not to call them.’ ‘Is that all?’ said Jack. He glared at me. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘This guy beat an old man to death. Are you happy he’s now picking up drunken teenagers for a living and driving them off into the night? Get real, Mack, the guy’s a psycho.’ I backed off from the confrontation and didn’t hang around to socialise. As I drove home I was dazed by Jack’s anger. I realised I’d forgotten why I’d gone to see him, and I drove around aimlessly to calm down before heading home. Allie said she’d never seen Jack angry in all the years she’d known him. For both of us he personified the notion of “legal cool” that you’d expect from a successful barrister. Jack had once told me that it didn’t matter whether he thought his clients were guilty or innocent; it was what the courts thought that was important. As a journalist, I thought I was cynical, but Jack could top that with ease. He was right to be angry, but letting it show was what surprised me; I suppose that is what friends are for – being able to wear your emotions on your sleeve. He was angry because Mickey had been classified as “political” and that meant his release wasn’t subject to the stringent parole conditions imposed on mere “criminal” killers. There was neither supervision nor bail conditions: nothing that might 60

require him to modify his behaviour under threat of having his licence revoked and whizzed back inside. My paper had run a big feature on this policy in a Sunday analysis piece, although our focus had been on the problems it was causing in Northern Ireland rather than west London. The next day I rang the Fulham Chronicle. There was someone on the news desk I knew; I mentioned the article we’d published about the release of prisoners in Northern Ireland. ‘Have there been any problems in west London, Sally?’ ‘I don’t know, Mack. What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Didn’t someone get sent down for the murder of a publican? What was his name…? Mickey…? Mickey… Mickey Corrigan it was. He was in Belmarsh for killing a guy on the Goldhawk Road? It was linked to one of the Irish paramilitary groups.’ ‘It doesn’t ring any bells. Most of us here read your piece on what had happened in Belfast and Derry, but no one linked it to anything happening locally. Maybe he doesn’t live around here anymore.’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘I’ve got a contact at the nick in Shepherds Bush; do you want me to follow it up?’ ‘No, it’s OK, Sally. I was just flying a kite and wondering if there was a pattern.’ ‘Sorry we can’t help. But hey, if you need an assistant, there are people here who would step up. You’re still our local boy made good.’ Sally was right that I could use another assistant, but the paper wasn’t hiring and things were tight all round. I knew that if a Sunday broadsheet were feeling the pinch, then things would be really tough for the local papers, even if they still had estate agents and classified ads to rely on. But I’d learned nothing more about Mickey; if he’d been the raving psycho that Jack imagined, then he should have done something that would have attracted attention. It was a few months later that I got a call from Jack. He was in a state again, and again Mickey featured as the source of his distress. The previous day Daisy had been at a meeting in Richmond that had gone on late into the evening; she works with a foundation that supports homeless youngsters and the meeting had over-run. They’d booked a car to take her home and Daisy, who had been expecting a serviceable Toyota, was surprised to be collected in a new luxury saloon. She fell into conversation with the driver on the way back and the small talk was easy until he asked if the address he was taking her to in Ealing was where Jack Daniels lived. He went on to say that he’d gone to school with Jack but they’d moved in separate circles; he’d been a bit of a tearaway and had left school at 16 while Jack and his mates had stayed on into the sixth form. As she was getting out of the car the driver said ‘Remember me to Jack. Tell him that Mike Corrigan has been driving you.’ On hearing this from Daisy, Jack called me immediately. ‘He knows where we live, Mack. The guy knows we stood up to him; he’s bound to be planning 61

retaliation. I think we should go to the police.’ ‘Jack, calm down. If he’d wanted revenge, he could have done it a long time ago. He’s been out of prison for about 10 years and you’d never even thought of him until a few weeks ago. If he was the criminal mastermind you think he is, do you think he’d be working as a cab driver?’ ‘Sutcliffe was a lorry driver.’ ‘Listen to yourself for a minute. You want to take this to the police? What exactly would you say? And what would they make of one of the hottest silks in town claiming he’s being terrorised by an ex-con he’s never met in court, and who has been going straight since leaving prison ten years ago?’ ‘You make me sound unreasonable.’ This went on for a few more minutes but I think I managed to calm him down by promising to pull a few strings to see what was actually going on with Mickey. I didn’t have any strings to pull but I wasn’t prepared to tell Jack that, I just had to get him to calm down. One thing I could do was return to The Cross Keys as Jack had. A few days later I made a diversion from my normal way home and found myself on the threshold. It felt strange to be back. There were two blondes behind the bar wearing uniform white shirts, black trousers and black ties: the guy was in his early thirties and looked more like a harassed currency trader than a barman; the woman, in her mid-twenties, just looked bored. My presence in the doorway was not enough to prompt either of them to look my way and they continued their conversation. At the bar I ordered a pint of bitter. The service was prompt and would have been fine on a busy night when people just wanted to be served quickly with minimal fuss. As Jack had said, there was a giant at the end of the bar: Dave van Eker was perched on a narrow bar stool that was eclipsed by his wide shoulders and broad hips. He was watching golf on the big-screen TV. I sidled along the bar and stood next to him. ‘Dave? Long time, no see.’ He swivelled slowly to face me, expressionless. Then one side of his mouth curled and he grinned. ‘Mack? It’s Mack?’ ‘Sure thing, buddy. You look good. What have you been up to?’ ‘Mack.’ He clasped my hand between his giant palms and pumped my arm up and down. He looked better than I expected after a lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking. He said he’d cut down on the booze and had stopped smoking too. He said that Jack had been in a few weeks ago and then asked about Trev, Nev, and Ash – there seemed to be nothing wrong with his memory at all. I asked after some of the other people from the old days: some had died and others had moved away or just stopped coming in. Dave bought me a drink, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘you stopped coming after Bill was 62

killed.’ ‘I know, Dave.’ I shuffled uncomfortably. ‘We stood together, but it wasn’t enough. Bill went down. We couldn’t stop it happening.’ ‘But we did stop them, Mack. We stood together when it mattered. It was something you should have celebrated and you weren’t here to do it.’ He went into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He took out a strip of paper and carefully unfolded it. There were a few tears along the fold lines and he pushed it towards me. It was a cutting from the front page of the Fulham Chronicle with a photo of The Cross Keys and the story of that evening in 1988. ‘I carry this because it reminds me that we were a community. We were still a village and we stood together,’ said Dave. ‘Even Fat Pat and Lil from the betting shop joined in with their brollies. These days we don’t know people as well as we used to; they’d get away with it now.’ I’m not sure I would have done it today, but then it seemed right thing to do. Nothing had been planned: today it would have been called a flash-mob, but it was just a coming together of me, Jack, Nev and Trev, students on our way home from college; the postman; Danny from the chemist’s; a few builders from the big development down the road, including Dave; Steve from the garage; and a few people from the council. It was a cross-section of west London working people on their way home, planning a cheeky pint after work. I skimmed the article although I could have recited it word for word: “ A man was killed in a clash between demonstrators outside a busy pub on the Goldhawk Road yesterday as community relations in Shepherds Bush took a major turn for the worse. Local people say that The Cross Keys public house had been targeted by an Irish Paramilitary organisation that was raising money for its cause through public collections. These fundraisers have been seen on the streets of Shepherds Bush for the past three or four weeks and are reported to have made collections at other pubs in the area. The licensee of The Cross Keys, Mr Bill Everson, refused to allow these collections and the pub was targeted by people claiming to be supporters of INLA, the Irish National Liberation Army. On Wednesday afternoon, passers-by were startled to see at least 15 men in balaclava helmets and black nylon jackets form a picket line across the doorways of the pub just before it was due to open at 5.00pm. A number of people forming the blockade carried pickaxe handles or baseball bats. 63

By 5.15 a group thought to be customers had gathered opposite and there was some shouting. Members of this group ran across the road to confront the picket line and fighting started. Witnesses estimate that over 40 men and women were caught up in the brawl at one time. Police had arrived by 5.25 but it was not until 5.45 that sufficient officers in riot equipment arrived to quell the fighting. It is reported that Mr Everson was inside the pub and came out when the fighting started. It is claimed that several of the armed men attacked him as he tried to talk to the rioters. Fifteen people were taken to hospital and a police spokesman said that a total of 24 people had been arrested. The police would not release the name of the deceased until next of kin had been informed. Patrick Malloy of the Hibernian Association said that Irish people in London abhorred the actions of INLA and that violence had no part in any aspect of Irish political culture, but Colin Higgins of the Fulham BNP rejected this conciliatory line saying British people were sick of (Cont. on page 3). ” ‘What about Mickey Corrigan? What happened to him?’ ‘He was a nasty man then, but he’s changed,’ said Dave. ‘The Corrigans weren’t political. He used that Irish stuff as a front for a protection racket. His father and brothers had most of the scams round here tied up and Mickey needed to prove he was as tough as they were. The brothers provided the muscle because they knew Bill was feeding information about them back to his friends in the Met. I don’t think they meant to kill him, but they needed to silence him before the cops had enough information to bring them down. By exaggerating Mickey’s phoney Irish solidarity campaign, the brothers made sure that Mickey would be the fall guy if it all went pear-shaped. You don’t think Mickey could have come up with the idea of a picket line, do you?’ ‘I suppose not. But you say he’s changed?’ Dave went on to tell me that the Corrigan family moved on without Mickey while he was inside. The family’s lawyers hadn’t denied the political dimension of what was done, so he would end up in Belmarsh instead of the Scrubs and be cut off from routine contact with his mates. While he was inside, the brothers carved up their dad’s empire among themselves and left Mickey out in the cold. It turns out to have suited him. He scrounged enough cash from his brothers to buy a few big cars and set himself up as a mini-cab operator well away from Goldhawk Road. 64

‘Does he ever come back to these parts?’ I asked. ‘Not that I know of. I think he used to drink in The Crown, but I don’t know if he ever goes back there now.’ I bought a drink for Dave and was surprised when he only asked for a half because he was on his way home. That was a first. We talked for a bit longer about Rangers, and he updated me on the fortunes of his beloved Sparta. We left at the same time, about 7.00, and before heading off in a different direction Dave asked if I’d be back any time soon. After a moment I said I might. And I meant it. I hadn’t got any closer to finding Mickey and it left me in a fix. I still had this feeling that Jack was freaking out over nothing, but at the same time there was no satisfaction in suspecting that my instincts had been right. It was the absence of doubt that made me uneasy. I brooded on it for a few days until the day we were tidying up the office and assembling the files to be archived. In the bundle was the background material for the feature we’d done on Northern Ireland and I called over one of the juniors. ‘Before this goes away, can you chase up a loose end for me?’ ‘Sure, Mr MacMillan, what do you need?’ ‘It’s probably nothing, but there was a case like this in London. A guy called Mickey Corrigan was released and seems to have disappeared, even though he’s probably still in London. Remember those searches we did? Can you go back to the datasets for any businesses owned by a Michael Corrigan? Try car hire or taxi services. Just give it a few hours and, if you’ve not found anything by the end of the day, then drop it. I just wondered if it was a loose end we should have tied up.’ Joanna might be the youngest kid in the office but she’s a lightning-fast researcher. About 90 minutes later she came to see me with a scribbled memo pad. She’d got addresses and phone numbers for a Michael Christopher Corrigan in Stratford with Olympus Cars, a Michael John Corrigan in Finchley with Euromotors, and a Michael Patrick Corrigan in Richmond with Executive Car Services. ‘You’re a star, Joanna. I’ll check these out and we can archive the file tomorrow.’ I made a couple of token phone calls to bemused receptionists in Stratford and Finchley with some hokum about small businesses, asking how long they had been in business and whether they felt their prospects were improving. I scribbled notes on the file to the effect that their start-up dates didn’t match the time of Mickey’s release. I checked the address of Executive Cars in Richmond and saw they weren’t far from the station and at the end of the day took the tube to have a look at Mickey’s business. The registered premises turned out to be a small shop converted to a typical 24-hour mini-cab office: neon lighting, plastic chairs in a waiting room, a big map of west London on the wall. There was a pub down the road and I went in for a drink. It wasn’t very busy but there was no one in the early evening crowd who resembled what I imagined Mickey might look like. I was thinking about leaving when I heard a guy further down the bar ask his companion what time Corrigan had told them to be there. ‘Twenty minutes 65

ago’ was the growled answer. I pulled the Evening Standard out of my pocket and took an interest in the crossword on the back page. After a few minutes a slight figure came into the bar and headed towards the two guys behind me. I heard one of them greet Mr Corrigan. Even though I’d kept an open mind about what he might look like when I scanned the pub earlier, I don’t think I would have recognised him. I would have noticed him, though. He had a grey pallor, grey wispy hair in a comb-over style and a scrawny neck. There seemed to be no weight on him at all. He was, however, dressed in an immaculate navy coat over pin stripe trousers with a razor sharp crease, and bright, shiny black shoes. At his throat was a turquoise silk scarf. I gathered from the conversation that the guys were enquiring about the possibility of work with his company and Corrigan was outlining the relevant terms and conditions behind any offer that might be made. To be honest, I was impressed; he was demanding high standards - references and a Criminal Record check - and there would be a dress code. Compliance was mandatory. I’d been in mini-cabs that would have failed a food hygiene check, never mind an MoT, but this lot were clearly way above the industry average. He told them to go over to the office to collect the application forms and mail them to him at the office address so everything was on paper and above board. I continued to eavesdrop and completed a few more crossword clues. As the two drivers left Corrigan suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Excuse me.’ I turned to look at him. He said, ‘I’m sorry if I’m mistaken, but aren’t you Charles MacMillan, the journalist?’ ‘Yes?’ I wasn’t sure where this was going and tried to feign innocence. ‘We used to be neighbours many years ago.’ He extended his hand. ‘I’m Mike Corrigan.’ I shook his hand. ‘I used to be called Mickey Corrigan, but Mickey doesn’t exist anymore. I nodded in recognition of his name. ‘Mack. Most people called me Mack in those days, and still do.’ The next ten minutes were quite surreal. Without mentioning prison, and as if it were just light small talk, he outlined how he was a changed man who wanted nothing to do with his previous life. He described how he’d met Daisy recently and that he had been vaguely aware of our gang’s career successes. He even mentioned a new project Nev was now leading in Cambodia, while I thought he was still in Indonesia. I offered to buy him a drink but he said he never drank on a working night, as he might have to take a car out. He gave me his card and said that if I ever needed something special, I should call him so he could offer a discounted rate. Then he left, leaving me stunned. Later that evening I phoned Jack. As soon as he picked up the phone he pounced, saying it had been over a week since we’d last spoken. I explained that I still had my day job but the sarcasm was lost on him. I told him I’d made some progress. I made no mention of my visit to The Cross Keys and my conversation with Dave van Eker because it was so out of kilter with Jack’s view of Dave’s credibility 66

that we’d get into another argument. Instead I talked about the work done by Joanna, the lead she had found, and then cautiously described my visit to Richmond. After I’d finished there was a silence on the line. ‘I find all this very hard to believe, Mack,’ he said. ‘What are you holding back?’ ‘Nothing, Jack. Absolutely nothing. By chance, I met the guy. I don’t think you’d recognise him. He dresses sharper than a Tory cabinet minister, drives a new Jaguar, and runs a seemingly successful business. The only thing that’s out of place is a Shepherds Bush accent that you could cut with a knife.’ ‘Don’t you think it’s a front?’ ‘For what? Cheap taxis to Heathrow?’ ‘Drugs. Money laundering. Extortion. I don’t know – you’re the hot-shot investigative reporter, isn’t it your job to work that out?’ ‘Jack, be reasonable. I can only investigate if he’s done something wrong and there’s no evidence of that. You’re the lawyer, for God’s sake. You’d be first to shout if the Met were trying to stitch up one of your clients.’ The conversation see-sawed for another twenty minutes before I persuaded Jack that there was nothing that needed to be done and that Mickey should just be left to get on with his life. Things seemed to quieten down after that. I kept clear of Jack for a few weeks and buried myself in my work: we picked up a story about jihadists who were shifting the focus of their targets from individuals to infrastructure. Allie asked Daisy if she was interested in a West End shopping trip one Saturday. I met Jack for a lunchtime drink at his golf club and things went well; Mickey wasn’t mentioned once and I thought everything had blown over. About three months later I got a call from Jack just after midnight. He was in a state again. ‘Mack, is Daisy with you and Allie by any chance?’ ‘No, why?’ ‘She’s not home yet; she should have been here hours ago.’ Daisy had been at her regular meeting in Richmond and it had over-run again. She had rung Jack at about 9.30 to tell him she was on her way in a car booked by the Foundation, and the journey would take twenty minutes. Jack had tried calling her back but her phone went straight to voicemail. He’d rung the Foundation, but there was no one there to take the call. He didn’t know what to do. ‘It’s that bastard Corrigan. He’s taken her; I’m convinced of it. It can’t be a coincidence.’ I told Jack to stay by the phone. I rang Mickey’s number but there was no response. I called the main number for Executive Cars and enquired about the booking. ‘Oh yes, we have a contract with the Phoenix Foundation and Mr Corrigan said he’d deal with the call personally… No, we haven’t been able to speak with Mr Corrigan… There seems to have been an incident in Chiswick and there are severe traffic delays in the area.’ 67

With mounting apprehension I called the news desk and asked about Chiswick. ‘All hell seems to have broken loose, Mack. There’s a security alert but nothing has been confirmed. Various stories include a bomb in a truck under the Chiswick Flyover, gunmen holed up somewhere, a single gunman with a hostage; all complicated by traffic from a football match. The military are on standby and it looks as if they’ve deployed some new gizmo that can block all mobile phone communication within a small radius. We’re guessing it’s to prevent any bomb in the area being triggered remotely. Who’s behind it? We haven’t a clue, but we include the usual suspects.’ So was it coincidence? Was the car just caught up in the gridlock? If so, why couldn’t they walk away? Were they terrorist gunmen? Or was it a single gunman with a hostage? Was the gunman a paramilitary soldier of sorts? Or was it a deranged mini-cab driver? Or had they spontaneously driven to Heathrow and taken the first flight to Rio together? I half-hoped for the last option as it seemed to offer fewer problems. I called the press office at Scotland Yard for an update and got an earnest PR who told me in great detail significantly less than I’d learned from my own news desk. Finally I rang Jack back and updated him on why he couldn’t contact Daisy and why she couldn’t contact him, leaving out all the speculation. At least my conversation with the Yard had provided me with enough euphemisms and evasions to satisfy even a forensically minded lawyer handicapped by stress. I toyed with the idea of going down there but knew that I wouldn’t be able to get close because of the inevitable police cordon. Despite that, after bringing Allie up to speed on what had happened, I got my bike out of the garage and ensured I had enough lights so even the most officious policeman couldn’t object. By the time I got there, it was all over. The news desk called me to report that shots had been fired and at least four people were dead; all the casualties were male. There had been a bomb in a parked truck under the flyover. It was seen by an off duty Community Support Officer on her way home after the football match earlier that evening. She reported it and a rapid response unit was there in minutes. The bombers wanted a fast car for an escape and spotted the Jaguar. Mickey told Daisy to get in the back and lie low. He refused to give the car keys to the bombers and one of them shot Mickey. The cops started shooting before anyone else was shot, and the electronic gizmo prevented the bomb from being detonated, even though at least two of the bombers tried to trigger it as the bullets started to fly. Poor old Mickey. He’d been born within spitting distance of QPR but had never been interested in football. If he had, he might have thought about the match in Brentford, and gone through Osterley rather than Kew to avoid the traffic. For a lawyer, Jack showed a reasonable degree of humility and contrition: he admitted that his loathing of Mickey derived from the beatings he inflicted on his younger brother in primary school, and then on Bill. On both occasions Jack had felt helpless and afraid to intervene. However, he conceded that 68

Mickey had acted selflessly to ensure that Daisy came to no harm. It was Allie who noted the irony in Mickey being sent to prison for hanging onto the coat tails of the IRA, and meeting his end at the hands of some guys riding the coat tails of the Jihad. Mickey’s funeral was in Richmond. I went back to The Cross Keys and told Dave about my meeting with Mickey and the events in Chiswick. He attended with a few others who had been part of, or remembered, our Battle of Goldhawk Road. I don’t know what their motives were. Perhaps they acknowledged that Mickey had changed; perhaps they came to spit on his grave. I think Mickey’s partner realised that he had touched more people’s lives than she had imagined.

As Seen on TV: Portrayals of London and its People Peter Raynard After managing a betting shop, I studied International Politics (BA), then African Studies (MA), and worked as an advisor and writer on organisational accountability for a charity. For the past six years I have been a stay-at-home father of two ever-expanding sons, as well as a freelance writer and editor. Just completed an MA in Creative Writing: Writing the City.

From Black and White to Colour The London scene up to the early 1960s was a dour black and grey, to the point where the city branded itself as foggy, the setting for Sherlock Holmes to investigate, his distinctive profile recognisable through the haze. The reality, however, was deadly smog that killed some 4,000 in 1952, and even in 1962 consigned 750 Londoners to their death. The Clean Air Acts of the ‘50s and ‘60s took the grey miasma out of London’s air and put colour in the cheeks of its residents. The streets were quiet by today’s standards: small cars, small shops, even the people looked smaller. But, by the end of the decade, London was said to be swinging, replete with sweetshop colours, free love and ban the bomb. London even changed shape, growing in size to become Greater London, although greater than what was unclear. The programmes of that time also started out grey, both in vision and theme. Hancock’s Half Hour was an unlikely groundbreaking show, centred on the tribulations of an out-of-work comedian with intellectual pretensions but riven by class anxiety. It mostly showed him sitting on his sofa in a bedsit (a recurrent setting for London programmes) failing to make headway with philosophers such as Bertrand Russell. “Work?” he says, “Well, not at the moment. Just so happens I don’t agree with the social system. As it is I’ve contracted out. I just sit here and contemplate.” Set in Cheam, a down-at-heel suburb in the south-western borderlands of what was to become Greater London, it was one of the first programmes to make the successful journey from radio to TV in the late fifties. It grew in popularity over the next decade and set the trend for sitcoms featuring feckless, male cynics who saw London as a failed opportunity to flex their cerebral powers. But more importantly, the show premiered an important characteristic of London life: the misfit, and lonely individual – from Bedsit Girl in the 1960s (starring the young Sheila Hancock) to the flat-sharing of Bottom, Crapston 70

Villas, This Life, Spaced and most recently Peep Show. If you want to know where the ‘odd bods’ of London end up, look no further than the myriad bedsits and flats occupied by strangers. The writers of Hancock, Galton and Simpson went on to greater success with the equally feckless and (as some would say) monstrous Steptoe and Son – a pair of West London rag-and-bone men. As with their first show, the situation and much of the comedy rested on Britain’s class system, which has always been seen at its most exposed in the case of London – with single streets serving as the dividing line between some of the most wealthy and most deprived sections of the country. At one point, half the adult British population watched the programme, which for some was a worrying development; in 1964, with an upcoming election, the Labour leader Harold Wilson, nervous about the working class vote, persuaded the BBC not to show the programme on Election Day. Given that he eventually secured an overall majority of only four seats, this may well have been his shrewdest political move.

Adjusting the Tracking Although the air in London may have got brighter as the sixties progressed, its televisual subject matter didn’t. Out of the confines of the bedsit or the knacker’s yard, the colour brought with it grittier shows, in particular crime to get excited by. Up to that point, your ‘ordinary copper’ Dixon of Dock Green was the face of comforting and comfortable TV cops, starting each programme with a short speech as though he had just knocked your door with a piece of advice. He even sung his own theme tune, as would Denis Waterman for Minder. He appeared to single-handedly deal with the misdeeds of Londoners in the East End from the mid-50s up until Regan and Carter (of the Sweeney, not the White House) took over. Dixon and his squad would have been appalled by the antics of the heavy smoking and drinking Inspector Jack Regan (played by John Thaw) and Detective George Carter (by Denis Waterman) of Sweeney Todd the Flying Squad. This was what crime in London was really about: gangsters, corruption, bank jobs, and ‘getting it done’ not exactly by the book. As a teenager it thrilled me how they said, “baarstards”, how they always had a woman on the go but never managed to keep her, and how the criminals on the odd occasion even got away with it. They burst into flats first thing in the morning having been up all night drinking, kicked open the bedroom door and shouted at the geezer in bed with his bird, “Get your trousers on, you’re nicked.” Both programmes, and those that followed, most notably The Bill, were always being compared to ‘real life’, as though the key to a police drama lay in its level of authenticity. But this is not what I wanted, 71

nor any of my friends. With The Sweeney, it was the grit and roughness of the coppers that had to match up to their criminals. Put them all in a police line-up and you would have been hard pressed to distinguish the copper from the con. And then we come full circle in this mini story of crime in London, with the most recent programmes haunted by the continued fetishist fascination with Jack the Ripper, Whitechapel (ITV) and Ripper Street (BBC). Psychogeographers must be smiling wryly, as they soak their walk-torn feet, at the continued link of place and action. And as with most things, the media is to blame. ITV itself admits, Writer and filmmaker (and king of the Psycho-G’s) Iain Sinclair, summed it up when reviewing the Hollywood version of Alan Moore’s From Hell: “Jack the Rip Off,” he called it.

A Middle Class Interlude London also features as the setting for a number of long-running sitcoms. The Good Life and Terry and June were the (brown) bread and (unsalted) butter of early evening programming, which a new wave of angrier comedy would rail against in the 1980s. They showed a London that could actually be anywhere (well, anywhere in Middle England at least). The Good Life put together two middle-class couples; the counter-culture Goods and the conventional Leadbetters. The Goods let a make-do-and-mend self-sufficiency inform their allotment smallholding in suburban Surbiton. The show used them as a vehicle to satirise avaricious middle-class mores, with Margo (Maggie Thatcher’s TV twin sister) being its main target. But like Alf Garnett, Margo’s character took on a life of its own and elicited great empathy from its audience.

It’s a Knock Off Margo Leadbetter was a character the nation took to its heart, but she would have wrinkled her nose at the others found there. These were the type of criminal that George Dixon would put in the cells, but only overnight as a warning; Arthur (Arfur) Daly and Derek (Del Boy) Trotter personified the wannabe wheeler-dealers, the modern-day costermongers ducking and diving their way round their own patch of the big city. Arfur took to the streets with long-suffering Terry (who left the Sweeney to work on the other side of the tracks), his eponymous Minder in tow. The show is merited with popularising the term ‘minder’ to mean personal bodyguard, although today the term has taken a dip in popularity because of its negative association with ‘bouncer’. But it was Arfur’s malapropisms, such as ‘the world is your lobster’ that got 72

a lot of the laughs. Like his unrelated son Del Boy, Arfur was always optimistic about where the next skydiver, score, pony, monkey, or grand was coming from. Minder mixed the comical with London’s gritty criminal underworld, and took you to locations (derelict sites, warehouses, men’s drinking clubs) that were way off the Tourist Board’s list of city attractions. And Only Fools and Horses (OFAH) applied the same comical grit to its different format. If you were to do a survey asking people what they associated with Peckham, I reckon the majority would say Del Boy and Rodney. John Sullivan, the writer of the series was “sick to death of the kind of comedies I saw on telly…Now we had a modern, vibrant, multi-racial, new slang London where a lot of working-class guys had suits and a bit of dosh in their pockets and that was a very different thing. That’s what I wanted to write about. It would be more aggressive and feature the pubs, clubs and tower blocks.” The Trotters (Del Boy, his younger brother the gangly, awkward Rodney, and firstly their granddad, then Uncle Albert) lived high in the air in Nelson Mandela House, a delightfully unsubtle reference to the emerging multi-cultural London, and the so-called Loony Left councils of the time. Despite the show’s strong ensemble cast, Del Boy stole the show. Like Arfur Daley, he had his own way of using language, which mainly consisted of misusing foreign phrases: mange tout (for my pleasure) ménage a trois (as an expression of surprise), or if events really took a turn for the worse, plume de ma tante (as an expression of great surprise). On the surface TV’s spivs, minders, and wheeler-dealers showed a more light-hearted side to London’s underbelly -- one where you could be a voyeur but not feel voyeuristic. But a few more Leagues down, Arthur Daley and Derek Trotter showed a way to survive and be happy in a London that was forever changing. Their cheeky, quasi-legal, yet benign actions sought to show how ‘real’ Londoners faced up to life’s woes.

Changing Faces Early attempts to show the changing face of London’s multi-cultural community, such as the ‘comedy’ show Mind Your Language, tried to use the classroom as a metaphor (in this case an English language course with students/immigrants from all over the world), but really were just crude devices to mock the attempts of integration. If Mind Your Language was crude, Love Thy Neighbour made you cringe. However, like our old friend Alf Garnett, many of his prejudices, and those of Jack Smethurst (the white neighbour of a newly arrived black couple) were quietly embodied in the programmes’ viewers. For many years, ironically like the white working class itself, black people on TV were only identified by the colour of their skin. Not 73

until The Cosby Show, an ‘80s American sitcom -- and then Desmond’s in the 1990s -- did viewers manage to see the ordinary goings-on of ‘others’. The Desmond family, in fact, played a game of cricket with the Cosby’s in a special episode of the US show. As with OFAHs, Desmond’s was set in Peckham. Although you would not have thought any black people lived in Peckham by watching OFAHs, it had much in common with its regional counterpart: it featured intergenerational conflict, lots of banter, and most importantly a strong character, played by Norman Beaton -- the ingredients for any successful comedy. It even had its own wheeler-dealer, Lee ‘The Peckham Prince’ Stanley, who tried to sell his dodgy gear to those only wishing to get their hair cut. It lifted black people out of the realm of stereotypes and sidekicks. As the academic Sarita Malik says: “The series depicted a myriad of types, spanning across generations, lifestyles and politics and thus deconstructed any notion of there being an essential black British subject. Indeed, generational and other differences among characters often triggered the hilarity.”

Before the Test Card What all of the above had in common -- from Hancock to Desmond’s, from Dixon of Dock Green to The Bill -- were the portrayals of ordinary lives of Londoners in the second half of the 20th century. They were crude and overburdened by double entendres and stereotypes, but they showed that class wasn’t confined to the mills and mines of the North of England or Wales; and that London was fluid and people struggled to keep up. When the then-new controller of the BBC, Danny Cohen, took on his role at the end of the 2000s, he questioned the predominance of middle-class sitcoms. Like the writer John Sullivan, who was driven to get more working-class drama and comedy on TV, Cohen highlighted the way in which we seem to have come full circle: TV sitcoms and dramas have once again become too middle class. One commentator joked in response to this: “If there were a working-class sitcom for our times, I wouldn’t understand it. It would be in Polish.” (I guess he didn’t realise that there is, in fact, a Polish programme set in London called Londonczycy, a type of Polish Hollyoaks, which has come under fire from The Federation of Poles in Great Britain for portraying the expats as drunken, promiscuous criminals). However, as with politics, the media has devolved. The BBC is no longer centralised but is part of a regionalised, cultural regeneration project, in which places such as Salford Quays become one of its broadcasting hubs. There are successful working-class sitcoms and dramas; it’s just that they’re no longer in London: Royle Family (somewhere near/in Manchester), Shameless (kind of the same area), and Gavin and Stacey (Barry in Wales, although the in-laws live in London). 74

Gone from the TV map of London are the likes of Peckham, taken back by the Absolutely Fabulous PR world of west or central London, or quasi-suburban streets of Our Family (taking its lead from Butterflies, with Zoe Wannamaker replacing Wendy Craig), Miranda, or The Peep Show. Inner city London on TV is a microcosm of Little Britain (yes but, no but, surely not but), where the underclass is confined to the estates because when they do break out they only go and riot. Modern dramas, such as Top Boy, centred on rival black gang culture in Hackney, personify this attitude. But what about the soap opera Eastenders? Of course, one can’t forget our perpetuation of that mythical part of London that still hosts cheery costermongers, laundrette attendants who know everyone’s business, pub landlords and ladies, local gangsters, and large families at war with each other (don’t think there are any serial killers any more, thank god). Keep them out there. Like Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights, the first home of the Chinese, and where the ghost of Alf Garnett resides in the hearts of the BNP or their usurpers the EDL, the East End of London is ‘another place’, a foreign country, where you might visit (if you dare). Otherwise, best watch it on telly.

The Flat Screen City The media shapes the way that cities are seen, and how city dwellers view each other and themselves. They brand themselves with their city identities, their accents and their careful knowledge of their own patch. When they go to New York they might feel like they are in a hundred movies, in Paris they see themselves in black-and-white photos, in Washington every corner they turn feels like walking into a news report. London of course is very different from those cities; it is not dominated by a Manhattan, nor is it a political hub adorned with museums. London is a series of villages and towns that bleed into each other – Kentish Town into Camden, Stockwell into Brixton, Camberwell into Peckham, and Fulham into Chelsea. Regions are defined geographically by their tube stations, but culturally by their fictional characters. And in each area there are your local characters that somehow personify the place. Peckham is Del Boy, Fulham is Wolfie, Surbiton is Margo Ledbetter, West Ham is Alf Garnett, and Grange Hill is Tucker Jenkins. Not all the programmes use London as more than a generic urban setting; however, many portray characters and events specific to the capital, whether it is the mythologised crime of Whitechapel or the political shenanigans in Westminster. In essence, London is a character, as seen on TV.

Four Hundred Quid Vritti Bansal Vritti Bansal is primarily a nonfiction writer with prior experience as a food journalist. Her fiction work and poetry are mostly born out of reality, too. Apart from cuisine, she likes new places and people. She feels strongly about animal welfare and women's rights.

Two girls sat on the bench in front of Kathy, giggling away about something she couldn't be bothered to overhear. One of them was slightly taller than the other, and reminded her of Kim. She felt sorry for the girl sitting next to the taller one, who was looking at her with affection in the middle of her laughs, just the way anyone would look at a person they trusted and adored. Kathy couldn’t help her thoughts: She doesn't care about you as much as you care about her. Oh, she'll call you tomorrow to cancel your shopping date. Even worse, she'll text. She'll disconnect your call to speak to her boyfriend of one week. She'll leave you crying in the middle of the night. Even when your granddad passes away. The walk home was a blur for Kathy. She usually stopped to play with dogs being walked by their friendly owners but today they all seemed invisible to her. Not until she reached the front door did Kathy realise that she had forgotten to pick up the milk that her mother had asked for. Her parents’ house was a classy, yet modest structure in the quieter part of Maida Vale. It appeared even more idyllic than usual, if seen from the mid-point of the imaginary line that joined the only two parallel trees on that street. She walked in and threw her coat on the chair beside the TV cabinet, jumping slightly as the door closed behind her with an unexpected bang. Stupid fucking door. She gave up trying to avoid her phone and as she turned it around to look at the screen; there were no six missed calls from Kim, or three texts. Fine. Absentmindedly staring at the curtains, she saw images of the two girls she had seen in the park. Everyone needs a best friend. I can't overreact. Kathy took a deep breath and dialled Kim. Her reflection in the windowpane revealed an expectant face, and she played along. She's going to pick up with her usual enthusiastic ‘hello’. She must've had something serious on her mind. I need to have more control over my temper. Maybe she's working and the phone is in the living room. Maybe she's... "The person you're trying to reach is not answering". *** "People who walk out the door when your life's about average shouldn’t be allowed back in when it's going fabulously well, just because they want to be part of your life again, when you have better 76

people and experiences surrounding you. Save your affection, time and second chances for people who have cared enough to treat you well throughout, for they are the ones who deserve it." David had a way with words. Kathy nodded thoughtfully, and he smiled. “Now she writes to me. Almost a year later. Where was she when I needed a friend? Her apology seems so fake.” She left her father sitting in the living room to go to the kitchen. If there was something other than talking to her parents that calmed her down, it was tea. She measured water for two cups and put it to boil in a saucepan. Her brother, Brandon, never understood why she ignored the presence of an electric kettle in their kitchen. He didn’t realise that burnt, metallic-tasting water was too high a price to pay for convenience. "Dad! Earl Grey, or shall we try the new pack of Pekoe?" "Let's try the Pekoe," David answered, his voice momentarily drowning out the bubbling of the water. She pulled the top of the foil tea packet apart. "Oh my. Remind me to tantalise mum with a whiff of this." Simple pleasures would be the answer if ever anyone asked about the core philosophy of Kathy’s family. She had always been proud of their attitude, but it also made her feel uncomfortable. Not because it was embarrassing but because it rendered each one of them vulnerable. Especially in a society that was increasingly beginning to value the price tag of a perfume more than the fragrance of tea leaves. Maybe she was a hypocrite, then, to have fallen for a man who had LV monogrammed all over his possessions. *** Chris emerged from the kitchen with two glasses of wine, one filled with red and the other with white. He had poured them to the precise point that Kathy normally would. She smiled, looking at them and took the glass of red. He held it so that Kathy had no choice but to brush her fingers against his. She continued smiling, looking at her glass. When she finally looked up at him, he was staring at her, but so tenderly that a warm glow spread through her. "Cheers," he said softly. "Cheers." She sipped slowly. Still watching her, Chris spoke again. "Kathy. I've written a poem for you." "You have?" "Yes." She looked away from him again. "Why do you always look away whenever I try to make you fall for me just a little more?" 77

"That’s exactly why." They stayed silent for a minute or two. "May I read it to you at dinner on Saturday?" "On Saturday? In front of everyone?" "Not exactly." "You mean in private then?" "Almost." "Ambiguity. You're being ambiguous, I see." "See. Everything you utter is poetry. I told you." He set his glass next to where Kathy was leaning on the cabinet and moved closer to her. His fingers slowly ran through the flick that fell over her forehead and gently swept it aside. She couldn't move, even though he wasn't holding her. His lips felt like warm marshmallows on her eyes, and his nose fitted perfect beside hers. She didn't want him to ever go away. His nose softly trailed along her cheekbones, over her earlobe, the hair next to it, and then behind her ear. Kathy was afraid he'd be startled with the heat of her skin. His hands slowly came up and rested on her waist. She placed her hands on the familiar fabric of his deep blue polo shirt, right where she could feel his biceps. He pulled her closer. Kathy knew that Chris was very different from the men she had found herself attracted to in the past. She felt like she had ordered Chris from a catalogue and received exactly what she hoped for, with no exceptions. *** Chris knew that Kathy wasn’t one of those girls who believed that a fallout with a college boyfriend had shaped her current existence. He loved that she didn’t shroud her unpredictability with the pretext of having been deeply hurt. Her unapologetically erratic behaviour had been one of the things about her that he couldn’t help but love. She surprised him, angry one minute, hugging him the next. Kathy couldn’t hold a grudge and he knew better than to take advantage of that. Showered and smelling of cologne, Chris sprinted out of his house with two sealed red envelopes in his hand. He turned right at the first corner, and entered a dingy doorway. His shoes made little noise as he went down the stairs into the basement, and walked through another door that led to a dimly lit room. A big, dusty trunk occupied the centre of the room, on top of which was a thick, white candle and a few scattered papers. A bald man sat on a chair, leaning both elbows on the trunk and holding a pen in his right hand. He looked intently at a bundle of papers in his left hand, through thin-framed brass spectacles. The lines on his forehead had become permanent, and were not merely the result of concentration, as they had been some years ago. 78

“Excuse me?” The old man looked up at Chris. “Hello there.” “Hi. I had called earlier. About the – “ “Ah, right. Come in.” Chris walked towards the trunk. He looked around to see if there was another chair but saw no other furniture except a steel cupboard in a corner. “Whatsyo’ name, young man?” “Cristoforo Marino,” Chris answered, handing the man both envelopes. “Italian?” “Yes.” “I like that, kid. Mosto’ em Cristoforos become Chistophers when e’ get here.” He extracted an instrument from what seemed to be a compartment on his side of the trunk, and loudly stamped the first envelope with it. “My wife was Italian. Beautiful woman,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “Wer’ ye named after Colombo? Or as these new kids call ‘im – Columbus?” “I’m not sure.” “Nevertheless, yo’ English is marvellous! If I didn’t see you in person, I’d have never guessed. Your accent on the phone sounded perfectly British.” “Well, I’ve lived in London fifteen years now. My mother’s English.” “Ah.” He stopped at the second envelope, turned it around back and forth a couple of times, and finally placed another loud stamp on the bottom right corner. “‘Ere you go. All done.” “Thank you very much, Sir. Have a good day.” “Cheers!” Chris placed the envelopes in the inside pocket of his coat and went back up the stairs. The sky was grey but it hadn’t rained. He walked for five minutes before he spotted Kathy standing outside a café called Bon Bon. She was dressed in a red coat and her hair was done up in a tight bun. He beamed. Kathy had just only said “hi” before Chris lifted her off the ground with a hug. He kissed her and brought her back down. “You look stunning.” “Thank you. You look yummy yourself.” He laughed, and took out the two envelopes to hand them to her. She clapped her hands quickly with excitement. “Oh yay!” 79

Kathy stared carefully at the two circles on the bottom right corners of both envelopes. They were thinly outlined in black ink, with an intricate pattern inside. “I can’t believe they approved the design!” “They had to. It was too beautiful.” “Did you have any trouble at all?” “None whatsoever. I did expect a big office, though.” “Yeah, it’s a small place. And Mr Simpkins is an adorable old man, isn’t he? Who would’ve thought that London had a stamp parlour? It’s so wonderful. A tiny room dedicated only to ornate stamps, where you can dress up your letters and cards.” “Well, at least the kind who still care about making an effort with handwritten letters. It’s a rather charming idea. I’d like to see their stamp collection if they allow it.” “Oh, I’m sure Mr Simpkins would be happy to oblige.” “Nan is going to love this. So is Stacy. Especially when I tell them who designed it.” “I sure hope so. Now let me buy you some lunch.” *** The smell of turpentine wafting to Brandon’s room made him take his headphones off. He walked to Kathy’s room and knocked on the half-open door. “C’min!” “Hey.” “What do you think?” Brandon stretched out his hand with his thumb upheld. “I’d say that the colours lend it a surrealist feel but overall it seems to be a very real depiction of Chris.” Kathy threw a cushion at him. He chuckled. “What? He wears blue a lot. And you shouldn’t be asking me about modern art. Or art at all.” “He does not wear blue a lot. He’s probably in blue by chance, whenever you’ve met him.” She added a few careful strokes to the sixteen-by-sixteen canvas and wiped her hands with a crumpled grey cloth that had been made colourful with specks of different paint. Brandon seemed uneasy. “Oh, umm. I meant to tell you something.” “What is it?” she said, tilting her head to examine her work. “I bumped into Jon.” Kathy straightened her head. “So?” “He asked me about you.” She turned around to look at Brandon. “And you stopped to talk to him because?” 80

“I didn’t stop! I was at the pub with my friends and he came over to me. He asked how I was doing, and then about you.” “I really could not care less, Brandon.” “He was your world at one point, Kathy. I’m happy that you’ve moved on. Really happy. Chris is a great guy. But you’ve got to stop running away from Jon.” “Do you expect me to be friends with him?” “No, I don’t mean that. But maybe, you could forgive him. Not for him, but for you.” “You kids read too much crap on the internet these days.” “You know you haven’t still forgiven him. And it makes you doubt that Chris might – ” “I don’t doubt Chris.” “Really?” Kathy fell silent. “Kathy, Chris and you are wonderful together. Don’t punish him for what Jon did. I know Chris’ family loves you but even if they didn’t, I’m sure he’d have the balls to stand up for you.” Gabrielle knocked on the door. “Am I interrupting?” “No, mum,” Kathy answered. “I overheard something about Jon and Chris.” “Brando-doodle-doo was subjected to the blasphemy that is Jon Davies. That’s all.” Gabrielle sighed. “I’ll leave you two to it.” As soon as her mother left, Kathy turned to Brandon and said, “Don’t even compare Chris to Jon. Jon’s a coward. I would’ve given my life for him. His family had always been hypnotised by the green stuff. They thought I couldn’t afford a Dior or whatever just because I chose to spend my money on a meal or a trip. But I thought that he was different, despite his willingness to spend four hundred quid on a belt. And I was proven wrong. He did end up getting married to his father’s best friend’s daughter. Who lives in a mansion that’s five times bigger than his? Hah. What a bloody cliché!” Brandon stepped towards his sister and gave her a hug. “This is what you should let go of. The bitterness. Let him actually not matter. And that will only happen the day you forgive him.” “I don’t see any form of abandonment as forgivable.” *** Twenty people had gathered in the Smiths’ living room to celebrate Gabrielle’s fifty-fifth birthday. Chris had been trying to get hold of Kathy since he had arrived. She was shuffling in and out of the kitchen, serving the guests freshly prepared canapés. Chris scooted up to her and lifted a mini ricottamushroom-and-spinach tart off the tray. 81

“Thank you,” he said grinning. “I’m so sorry. This is the last batch, I promise.” “Come quick. I don’t want your dad to pour me a sixth glass of wine. It’s only 9pm!” They both giggled and Kathy went off to hand out the remaining tarts. She returned to Chris a few minutes later, and slipped her arm through his. “Hello.” “Finally. Let’s go outside.” They walked into the garden. Chris gently moved Kathy to face him and extracted a folded paper from his pocket. She looked at him lovingly. He cleared his throat. “Her brown hair settles on soft cashmere like snow on flowerbeds outside a window. Her lips spread to reveal a glittering smile like soft pink curtains drawn to morning light. Her eyes look at me with silent expectation. I’ll fulfil every expectation, every whim; take her to white beaches and green mountains, hold her before she can think of wanting to be held, in the midst of fog, hail or even sunshine. I’ll stay up when she wants to paint until 6am refilling our matching pair of teacups every hour, put a pillow under her head before it touches the bed. An hour without her is difficult, a lifetime unimaginable. She’s the wine every connoisseur has a soft spot for. She’s mine, like sand inseparably belongs to the sea” He paused. “Will she spend the rest of her life with me?” Kathy’s mouth opened slightly and stopped mid-way to a smile. Chris lifted his eyes to look at her, his head still bent down to the paper. “Katherine Smith, will you marry me?” he said. “Say yes!” Brandon and Stacy shouted in chorus. They had come out to check on the neighbours’ house because they were away for the week. “I never thought my brother had it in him,” added Stacy. Kathy was too stunned to speak. She looked at Brandon and Stacy, and then back at Chris. “You… want to marry me?” “That’s what the question usually means,” Chris said. 82

She hugged Chris so hard that he almost toppled backwards. “Yes!” Brandon and Stacy cheered. It took a while for Kathy to believe what had happened was real. Since she always found herself falling for the wrong men, she had prepared a little test in her mind two years ago. She had told herself that she would not doubt the sincerity of any man who would compose a poem for her. It was to be an indication for her when a man was the one. As soon as she recovered from the surprise, Kathy hugged Brandon and Stacy, who in turn hugged Chris. When she and Chris were left alone again, they sat on the steps outside the front door. His head was on her shoulder. She took out her phone from her pocket, and erased the unsent text message to Jon that said, “Stop trying to get in touch with me. Please stay out of my life”. She had finally worked out that it wasn’t only her who had lost him; he had lost her too.

So Cold Vritti Bansal

Along ornate rectangular walls, colonies of low brick houses, rustic Brick Lane and Tooting Broadway; all the way to the glorious West End, she bundles herself up near Marylebone. Her shivering echoes the fluttering brown leaves above. Her words loud yet incomprehensible; her plea would be incomprehensible only to a being void of soul. A hankering resides in her practiced eye, to attract an object out of a bulging Tesco bag, like a magnet would expect of a nearby nail. Grey fingernails peep from beneath a shabby shawl, when they should be brushing grey strands off her face. Even the plain organic walls of the home she fled were more comforting to glare at when a man with a macho purse or a lady with a flowing skirt passed not noticing or plain neglecting.

A Southwark Latte Crystal Hollis Crystal Hollis recently received her MA in Creative Writing, and studies the history and legends of the UK. She loves bringing London's immense fabric of weird and wonderful stories to life.

First you must take the words of Dickens, Chaucer and Shakespeare and grind them all up into a fine powder. Take two large scoops of the stuff for a double shot and mash it into the bottom of the brew basket using an old lock from a rusty-red gate. Next, force hot pressurised port and mead through this mixture. If done properly this will draw the wisdom off the shreds converting it into days in Borough market. The topping for this mixture is simple. Take an old used chalice, pour in gin and forgotten bones and use steam to heat. For a different texture tip the chalice and let the blend bubble and seethe. Once warm, skim the top of newly mixed nostalgia and if it tastes like cheesecake you've succeeded. Pour the frothy street art on top of the old market, and there you have it. For a more traditional approach serve this drink in a mug made of horn from Saxon times. (It should be noted that upon drinking this, the imbiber might be prone to fits of Seventeenth Century slang use. But the feeling is nice; it's warm and welcoming with just a touch of newfound quirkiness.)

The Tosher's Tale Crystal Hollis

I love this pub. Best selection of ales in London, the prices are low, and the company isn't terrible. Great place to come to after work, or before work, or both. Then again, my work ain't the best type of work in the city. It's not so bad I suppose, digging through whatever comes down into the sewers, I find some nice things sometimes. Just the other week Bernard found himself a fancy bronze pocket watch. Some poor old bastard must have dropped it and it made its way down here to the toshers. That's what we are. Toshers. Every night we come down here and look for all your lost goods. Bits of metal, watches, hairpins, jewellery, coins, anything we can sell or pawn. You'd be amazed how much finds its way into our hands, and ends up with the pawnbroker the next day. Bernard has been getting the best stuff recently, hopefully that's helping quiet his nagging missus. I usually get a decent haul of goods at the end of the week. But sometimes, you start to notice that some toshers are getting hauls that are, well, too good. Somehow, they get a smidge of gold or a lady’s jewelled necklace. Should you come down in our sewers, you’d best stay clear of these men. Like Tom. It all started out so well for the lad. Nice bloke, had alright luck with finding the good stuff. Had a gorgeous girl, name was Alice. Sweet little thing, always made him sandwiches to bring down to the river each night. He was planning on marrying her. Three weeks in with us toshers and things start to go all funny. He asks about how common certain things are, like the jewelled hairpin he found with gold and some pretty blue stones. More importantly, one night as I came out of the sewers I saw him with her. The stunning vision of a woman who walks this embankment at night, going from pub to pub, looking for unwary toshers, with her ruby red lips and one grey eye. Down here we call her Queenie. Before I even have time to warn him, he's buttoning his shirt up tight around his neck or wearing a scarf. He's finding more silver and gold than all of us combined. He's stopped bringing sandwiches down with him to the river. I ask him how Alice is and he just grumbles something under his breath. The rats down here seem to show up in greater numbers when he’s around. The rest of us know exactly what has happened. He's been with her; he's been with Queenie. That scarf is hiding a love bite from the queen of the rats, and her one grey eye should have been a warning to him. Few months later he's still down working with us in the sewers. Alice seems to have forgiven his dalliance and he has his sandwiches again. Still dredging up the best bits in the Thames sewers. But we can't get too angry with him, he's about to find out what all that gold and silver is going to cost him. You 86

see, Alice is pregnant. Tom is over the moon he's going to be a father, every bucket of trinkets is going towards this child, and the wedding he'll have after it's born. The days go by and we continue to work, sell our finds, and drink half of the profit at the pub. Tom is oblivious. Then one day he comes down into the sewers, shoulders are slumped and he's half-heartedly digging scraps of metal and bits of glass and coins out of the muck. I say to him “Why the long face, Tom?” knowing full well what is to come. “Alice had a girl.” “Oh bless, what'd you name her?” “Sarah.” “Pretty name then for a little girl then isn't it?” “She's got two grey eyes.” he said kicking over his bucket of goodies, I could hear a rat scurrying away. “Two grey eyes and she can't see out of either of them.” I didn't have the heart to tell him that in reality, it was a mercy. Grey eyes from Queenie mean that you see the world as a rat; blindness means you never have to endure that punishment. You see Queenie isn't some beautiful woman who rules over the rats, she's not beautiful at all. When the sun comes up on the banks of The Thames, if you’re lucky sometimes you will see a huge, hideous rat, with bristling fur and yellowed teeth and a horrible grey eye. That's Queenie in her true form. Tom left the sewers shortly after that day. I never see him at all, even above in the streets. Who knows where he disappeared to. All I can say is that toshing is wonderful, you work for yourself, you get decent pay on an average day and you can spend the rest of the time at the pub. But if you decide to venture down into our dark, stinking world, stay away from the beautiful woman with one grey eye.

The Ghosts of London Crystal Hollis

I am the bleeding heart in the yard, the flying monk in the rafters of his church, and the landlord in the pub, rocking back and forth and back and forth forever. I am the man who jumps off the bridge every thirty-first of December, and the boat below that fades, floating further and fainter and further and fainter till it's gone. I am the woman in The George, the dog looking for its tail, and the goose who calls every month, without fail, every month, they all come, every month, to the gates. I am the black dog of Newgate, the arguing wives in the churchyard, 88

and the woman in black asking where is my brother? Where is my brother? Where is my brother?

The Union Jack, My London Kaori Maeda I am from Japan but I’m a Londoner at heart. Fascinated by English lyrics, I started to scribble since I was a teenager. Those scribbles were transformed into poetry and led me to the world of Creative Writing. Apparently my writing reads like candyfloss.

The Union Jack means home to me. I would happily die wrapped in it although I am Japanese. I even want a tattoo of the Union Jack someday. When I mentioned this to a British person, he said, ‘Really? I would never do that. It’s not like you’re one of the BNP (British National Party).’ Peter from Coventry is in his fifties and has a sleeve tattoo that stretches from his wrist to his shoulder. He told me that he carefully planned the design and the timing for his tattoo. ‘I don’t like the flag (the Union Jack) because it reminds me of the discriminating British Empire and what it has done to people’, Peter said. To understand the depth of the Union Jack, what it means to others and what they think of its tattoo, I have asked a group of people of different ages and backgrounds including tattoo artists. The Union Jack has been flying for hundreds of years but how people feel about it does not seem monolithic. The Union Jack was first created in 1606, when King James VI of Scotland became James I and united England, Scotland and Ireland. Wales and Ireland were under English rule at that point. Today the Union Jack is comprised of three flags: St. George’s, St. Andrew’s and St. Patrick’s and it represents the United Kingdom of England, Scotland and Ireland since 1801. Although the Union Jack is officially addressed as the Union Flag, its appellation as the Union Jack came into use in the 17th century. In 1908, Parliament declared that the Union Jack should be regarded as the national flag. As a shift in power can change the discourse of a country, the United Kingdom has experienced many changes over the years. Although Wales is now independent from England, its national flag with the red dragon does not appear in the Union Jack. When each national flag, such as the Scottish or the Welsh, is heisted in its dominance, it is as if to inflame a feeling of nationalism, a counterforce to the unionist approach of the United Kingdom. This exposes the limitation of the Union Jack in this current political climate. When I asked forty-year-old Michael from Northern Ireland about the Union Jack, he rolled up his sleeve and pointed at a scar on his arm. ‘This is what they (the unionists) did to me. I got shot for being where I was not supposed to because I had a delivery to make for work. The Union Jack makes me feel sick!’ He also voiced his nationalist view by telling me that he is Irish and from Derry ‘where British 90

call it Londonderry’. Twenty-five-year-old Stephen from Galway would agree with Michael’s sentiment. ‘Do you have a tattoo?’ I asked Stephen. ‘Sort of.’ He replied and showed me his upper arm with scars all over it. ‘Are they letters? What does it say?’ I asked. He told me that he was walking down a street in Northern Ireland and he got caught by a group of the loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters who burnt rude words on his arm with cigarettes. Because the Union Jack was used by those loyalists, it prompts him to think of terrorism and oppression. For soldiers or any group of people who fight for the honour of the country under the Union Jack, the flag symbolises their beliefs or morale, views that are sometimes too strong for others to share. I was nineteen when I first visited London and it was December. I remember being surprised by the multicultural London and by the people wearing different styles of clothing: religious people with their cloaks and head bands, people wearing studded leather jackets and Dr Martins whom I’m now likely to see in Camden Town, and people wearing overcoats or cardigans or hoodies or just T-shirts. The length of skirts, shorts and trousers varied in as many ways as is possible. To me, London was so colourful and multi-shaped. This was also the first time I noticed many people with tattoos on their arms, legs or feet exposed in flip-flops… in December. At the same time, I saw many Union Jacks all over the city. I remember thinking that the Union Jack was the perfect symbol for London being vibrant and full of life. It felt like the multicultural city of London had a place for me too, for me to be whoever I wanted to be. This was my first impression of London. Inevitably, I got a souvenir with the Union Jack on it and brought a piece of London back to Japan with me. Ever since then, the Union Jack seemed to remind me of such vibrant images of London and perhaps also of liberty, and I found myself drawn to the Union Jack more and more. I have lived in London for around ten years in total. London is the city that I love and I relish its culture. English is the language I chose to speak; London has become my second home. I believe all these sentiments are especially strong because I am an outsider from Japan in London. Although Japan and the UK are similar in honouring traditions, Japan is not as multicultural as the UK. I especially find London welcoming and embracing, and I find this feeling reflected in the design of the Union Jack. It conjures up an image in my mind; a tree with its branches stretching out like wide-open arms. I feel as though I am under the spell of the Union Jack with its power that unites people. People from outside the UK have also used similar words to describe their impressions of the Union Jack; it makes them think of openness, freedom and ‘the country which shows an interest in other countries’. After learning others’ varied reactions to the Union Jack, I was curious to find out how the Union Jack was perceived as a tattoo design. I interviewed tattoo artists in London. One artist from Shoreditch said that the perception of a tattoo ‘depends on who wears it and how the person wears it’ in relation to its meaning and its purpose. Another tattoo artist from Soho warned me about the sensitivity of 91

the Union Jack in a political context. ‘Are you worried what people think of it? If you are worried about offending anybody even when your intention is good, don’t get it. It can stir up things. You know in Buddhism, swastika means peace. You know that. I know that. But not everybody knows that. There was an English guy who believed in Buddhism and got a tattoo of a swastika on his arm. But one day, strangers who saw his swastika confronted him, thinking he was part of the neo-Nazi. The guy said, “No, this means peace in Buddhism. I’m peaceful.” But the guy got beaten up. You can’t change the way people think.’ I found this story mind-blowing. In Japan, swastikas are called manji and they are a symbol of harmony in Buddhism and used as a symbol of Buddhist temples on maps. I grew up looking at the symbol without its association with Nazis. When I learnt the association, I was deeply offended. Although our swastikas have a longer history, swastikas now make people think of the Nazi emblem because it was used in such an extreme context and the image was too powerful to be forgotten. In Japan, it is a taboo to have a tattoo. If you have one, you are not allowed in public bathhouses, pools and some gyms. It is because tattoos are still associated with the tradition of yakuza, Japanese mafia. Although the younger generation tends to regard tattoos as part of fashion like piercings, the older generation still has the traditional image of Japan to hold on to. A local authority in Japan enforced a tattoo ban in 2010. I know that my parents and grandparents would definitely be against me getting a tattoo because of its association with yakuza. Also, they would say something like, ‘How dare you even think of damaging your precious skin on purpose just to get a stupid mark on your body that is a precious gift from your parents?’ I have already been through this once when I got my piercings at the age of thirteen. Since my first visit to London, I have been fascinated with people’s casual attitudes towards tattoos. A tattoo is like an accessory to spice up one’s look and show one’s unique character. With every tattoo I saw, I became more interested in them and started to wish to have one myself. But at first, I was not sure what tattoo I wanted. One day when I looked around my room, my eyes met the Union Jack. ‘Of course!’ I thought to myself. The Union Jack, that is so dear to me and that is now part of me. I would love to own the Union Jack but while I am unsure where I am going to live in the future, I must remain patient for now. The Union Jack can stir up controversy in the UK like tattoos can in Japan. The perception of the Union Jack is different from one person to the next and as personal to everybody as tattoos can be. History, politics, religion or culture affect the way we look at the Union Jack and how we feel about it. My Union Jack is strongly attached to London because of my life there. A tattoo of the Union Jack will symbolise my Union Jack. Just like I have personalised the Union Jack, others can apply their individual

perception to create their own images. Some may find the Union Jack dear to them or find that it does not accommodate their views. What is the Union Jack to you?

Storyboard of London Kaori Maeda

I, as one of those extras, scurry around you. Projectors reel films one after another, recording a seamless volume of your history. You, ever so still, stand there and watch fast-forwarded images, sometimes sickening, capturing every motion from east to west. Among the streams of blurs, blue round plaques appear; those of legends you have proudly raised. I know the other side of you. When the sun fades out, you nonchalantly smuggle in a herd of growling dogs hungry for food, ravaging your streets, smudging your name. In the dim light, they mark their territory, splashing paints, screaming their names; those under-exposed profligate squatters. Stepping on stubs smouldering danger, I, as a passer-by hurry home, a shelter I have put together; my past, my ambition, my will, my devotion. Locking up all of my yesterdays, I step out from home, into a scene where people stream in and against the current. 94

I screen your streets. I script your days. A dust in your lens I may be. Clips to be cut I may be. I, as I am, in Merry Old You, shoot my days with you.

I Will Remember You Kaori Maeda

Casting cheeky glances at a newspaper held in your wrinkled hands, I asked, ‘Do you know what time the game’s on tonight?’ That’s how our chum-hood first kicked off. I would go to the pub to hear your wheezing laugh, to have a chin-wag just about anything that kept us two as laughing drunks. I miss your pink kissable cheek, your big smile showing the gap in between your front teeth. I raise my glass to you, ‘Cheers.’

Blood Lies Ali Franks Ali Franks is a teacher with ambitions to be a professional snooker player, fly bachatero or writer.

It’s been five years since the Diamond Jubilee repainting, thought Colonel Fitzjames. The Great Hall of Buckingham Palace, times of austerity or not, deserved a lick of paint. Every morning he watched the housekeepers sweeping up flakes of cream emulsion underneath the portraits around the room. A month ago a great strip had alighted on George IV’s head, instantly restyling his hair into a peroxide quiff, until curators had arrived, removed the offending scrap and carefully cleaned the remaining white powder from his forehead. A flooded upstairs guest bathroom had left a sickly yellow stain growing out of the gold-leafed trim on the ceiling. Still, the room was magnificent. Three hundred years of monarchy slung in chronological order on vast canvases along the crimson walls. Capes and furs morphed across the centuries into uniforms dripping with heroism. Wigs and collars grew and shrank, gold and jewels came and went, the pendulum swung back and forth from dainty to macho, facial resemblances ebbing and flowing through the generations, a prominent chin here, deep-set eyes there. Occasional anomalies littered the walls, a portly prince from a line of string beans, a novel hair colour or a previously unseen proboscis. And still their descendants sat on the throne, popularity untouched by state cuts and unemployment, that great boon of monarchy – stability, more cherished than ever. The colonel’s secretary waited for him in his office in the south wing. Press clippings, a daily schedule and a stack of correspondence sat on his desk. “Anything special?’ he asked, hanging his jacket and wood-handled umbrella on their rack. “No, sir. Though one slight change of schedule, just come in. Fog over the highlands has grounded air traffic, so the heir will travel by car to the agricultural show.” “All well for the assent signing?” “Yes, sir, on schedule.” “Fine, fine. Bring me a coffee, would you?” He sat behind the old desk, pulled out the Telegraph, and began reading the Ashes reports. After a lunch of Duchy pork pie, they began the ceremony. The Parliamentary clerk arrived and waited patiently in the library for ten minutes, running his hand over his Brylcreemed hair and coveting the first editions. In his hands were two copies of the bill that would keep government running during a

time of financial apocalypse. Missing – Royal Assent. The queen arrived dressed in pale yellow, wide glasses and an entourage of canine sycophancy. “Ma’am.” “Good afternoon, Edward. Here for my autograph, I assume?” He chuckled. “Yes, Ma’am. The emergency budget. “ She sat gracefully at the leather-bound writing desk in the centre of the room. “Does it bear your name already?” “Yes, Ma’am. Readiness is all.” She pulls a fountain pen from the desk, pops off the lid and settles her elbows. Edward stands a discreet distance behind her, hands folded, silently reciting prayers that the ink cartridge does not explode again. Just as she lowers pen to paper, he hears a strange noise, something akin to a fart, behind him. He turns slowly, and follows the noise to the ceiling above them. A stack of paint and plaster rears down toward him. The cracks extend five paces, stretching across to the chandelier, where it is as if roots are being ripped from the brickwork. The chandelier drops spasmodically until it detaches from the ceiling and plunges through a glass-topped coffee table. He turns back to the queen and watches her inhale a billowing cloud of dust. He steps closer to her tentatively, shocked, yet still wary of violating Royal contact protocol. “Ma’am, Ma’am,” he says, as if trying to wake an elderly relative. “Are you okay?” She coughs once and gets slowly to her feet. Her hand drops to her thigh, and she begins to turn away from him. He looks on, terrified that he could fall under suspicion of committing a Capital Offence if things go awry. The colonel sprints though the door with surprising agility and goes quickly to her side. The dust has doused her in white; a hacking cough shakes her body. She removes her glasses and turns back towards the clerk, who surveying his queen, can think only of the panda bears he saw on TV last night. Edward averts his gaze and cringes with the embarrassment of a loyal subject. *** “And the final lot, auctioned today by our special guest on this, the opening of the largest cattle market in South-East Scotland, His Royal Highness, who will grab the gavel and get us underway!” The farmers roar their approval, and settle in for the spectacle. The prince mounts the podium gingerly and steadies himself on the lectern. Below lies a muddy ring, through which have plodded three hundred cows. But the best has been kept for last. “Good evening to you all, and thank you for….” A mighty crash cracks through the small arena. Willy the bull, possibly sensing that he is about to be put under the hammer has put his full, one-ton bodyweight into a tremendous kick.

“On you go, Your Majesty,” shouts a wag in the audience. “Don’t worry, he doesn’t hold grudges.” The bull settles down and the heir resumes his speech, dipping his chin to the microphone. “Thank you for welcoming me today to this marvellous new project. I believe that with organic sustainability, the farmers of Fife will go on from strength to strength.” The crowd, whose hip flasks are all now at low tide, applaud riotously. “So, Lot B34, Willy, Highland pure breed, nine hundred and seven kilograms, starting the bidding at five thousand pounds.” He looks up, and a purple-faced man in a kilt has his placard raised. The bidding shoots up to ten thousand, and then pauses. From below the pedestal the auctioneer offers up some sage advice, and a conference commences. Impatient chatter fills the arena and, through the din, their conversation is barely mutually intelligible. “SELL the thing,” shouts the grizzled auctioneer eventually and the Prince laughs unconvincingly. “Come on, bid up, chaps,” he says, and looks nervously down at his adviser. “Impeccable breeding has our Willy, and comes from the very best stock, with a proven record in multiple successful impregnations of many cows. Unimpeachable family history, bovine royalty!” The farmers scream with laughter. “Fifteen thousand” yells old purple face, and the heir, with a limp knock of the hammer, closes proceedings. Flushed, and accompanied by the local mayor, the party makes its way outside, where a small slice of the local press corps has gathered. Dopamine is rushing through his body; the conviviality of real rural life is a shot in the arm. A journalist drags her cameraman to the front of the crowd and indulges him with a huge smile. “Your Highness, could we ask you a couple of questions?” The mayor nods eagerly and almost pushes the prince out in front of them. “I suppose so, my dear,” he says, bending towards her. She holds the microphone close to her mouth, and asks, “Would you care to comment on today’s video publication?” “I’m sorry,” he says, shaking his head. By now, the others are intrigued and jostle to get closer. “A video claiming that…” But a camerawoman stands on her colleague’s foot, and the ensuing yelp drowns out the question. “Excuse me, could you repeat that, please, miss?” She waits for quiet and then repeats her words. The blood leaves the heir’s face, and the gaggle of media turns into a scrum. *** “Fitzjames, Fitzjames,” he called. “Come through to the Library, would you?” The colonel strode in and sat at the indicated end of the prince’s sofa. Pouring a cup of tea for his personal aide, the heir had 99

begun to speak slowly. “Doctor Wilcock-Dickens here was just explaining something to me, it’s a personal matter, and as you know, there is nobody I trust in these things more than you.” The men’s eyes met, and there was no further need for reassurance. The prince nodded gently to the old physician, who then began to speak in a low, raspy yet immaculately educated voice. “There is a new test, and I believe that the Family should have it. It could potentially save their lives and ensure their health for as long as their mortality remains intact. It will be subject to exactly the same restrictions of confidentiality as all medical records. It is the simple matter of a cheek swab.” “So,” said the colonel. “I am not sure I understand the problem, sir.” The heir and his doctor stole a glance, and Fitzjames’ forehead gathered itself in pompous impatience above his Roman nose. Ripples of fat squeezed over the top of his pinstripe collar, and he emitted a warble, half throat clearance, half indignation. “The test,” said the doctor, “is the complete gene sequencing of their DNA.” Silence enveloped the grand old space. “Not sure I understand,” said Fitzjames. “DNA’s for identification, police databases and so on. What’s it got to do with the royal family?” The doctor laid his cup and saucer carefully on the glass coffee table. “Well, none of us expected this to happen so soon, but during 2012 sufficient advances were made in the field to mean that the cost of the test has now fallen from three billion pounds for the very first genome to be sequenced, to a little over a thousand pounds, and with that we can establish an individual’s propensity to many diseases… MS for example, or Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, even the likelihood of certain cancers.” The prince studied the reaction of his closest adviser, sitting, cool as ever, alongside him. The scrunched up forehead was screwing up closer, tighter; he had grasped the prince’s concern. “There are other benefits too. For example, hereditary diseases can be isolated, Cystic fibrosis, for example. Long term, this test will guarantee a healthy line.” “Thank you, doctor,” said the prince. “Could you leave us a moment, please?” Fitzjames flared his nostrils and inhaled deeply. When he turned to his master, he faced the raised eyebrows that indicated he must now weigh in with the advice for which he was handsomely rewarded by the UK government. “In my consideration, you should do it, sir. These Harley Street doctors are terribly discreet. The family has had Wilcock-Dickens for years, thoroughly trustworthy fellow. His office is permanently staffed, terribly secure.” “I’m just wary of these new-fangled things, you see. What was wrong with the old ways? One’s idea of progress will always be a little different from the next chap’s.” “Sir, is there something, any reason why, perhaps, it may be inconvenient for the family to be…examined in this way?” 100

“Good God, man, don’t be ridiculous!” blurted the prince. “Well, sir, in that case....” Half an hour after the heir has been jostled out of the media mêlée, he is on a helicopter south to London. Having never been prone to airsickness, the feeling of having a porcupine burrow around his guts is new to him. Breath comes fitfully, stars flitter across his vision, the video shown to him on his PA’s iPhone comes back in fits and starts. A man in a mask, voice electronically disguised. “What does that mean?” asked the prince of his PA, pointing to the six-figure number displayed under the video. “Sir, that is how many people have viewed the video.” “Good God, I thought it was only released forty minutes ago.” “That’s correct, sir.” “Well, how on earth….” But his speech has reverted to a series of indecipherable mutterings. The masked man continues, they are hackers, he claims. The PA explains the new vernacular patiently. The family must declare in favour of a republic in time for the six o’clock news. Royal DNA records will be released for all to see. The hidden truth of the monarchy will be exposed. The princely head swims and then lolls backward. He wakes as the helicopter descends over north London. Below to his right, he sees Regent’s Park, stripped trees in a wilderness, just a couple of luminous dots braving the winter-ravaged parkland. Oxford Street appears to be besieged by his subjects. He imagines them, the chattering subservient masses with their little problems on dinky red buses. The acquiescent hordes converging on Green Park station to be ferried back to their dwellings in the suburbs. And then, Buckingham Palace, that monument to suzerain imperialism, reduced by some computer nerds to a cage of chimps in a lab. In the garden, the colonel is waiting as the prince eases out of the helicopter and walks toward the palace, one hand effeminately tucked into the front pocket of his tweed jacket. He offers the colonel no hand to shake. “Bloody hell, Fitzjames. How the hell did this happen?” The adviser stays a submissive half-pace behind, accelerating only to push open the rear entrance to the palace. “Sir,” he says, removing the royal jacket, “the Queen and the head of the Metropolitan Police are waiting in the white drawing room.” A navy blue outfit has replaced the Queen’s yellow one, and she sits facing Sir Nigel Browners in silence. The room has a view straight down the Mall, where the usual crowd of tourists has swollen, and TV trucks are clustered next to St. James’s Park. The Regency furniture creaks as the prince takes his seat and begins, stutteringly, to speak. “Absolutely, totally unacceptable, this whole bloody farce.”

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His language earns him a reproachful look from his mother, and the colonel interrupts, saying, “Do we have confirmation that the files have gone?” “Yes,” says Sir Nigel. “Extracted at nine a.m. this morning.” The prince bristles. “How on earth did they get into the building?” “They didn’t, sir. The files were, ummm…hacked.” “Hacked, what?” “Stolen electronically, Your Highness.” “Can’t you catch these deviants?” “We have all our finest people on the job, but they appear to have been very clever. The chances of finding them before the 6 p.m. deadline are extremely, extremely slim.” The prince snorts. The policeman begins to speak again, his voice high, unsure. “What if… perhaps…could…would it be so bad for the files to be released?” The prince turns crimson. “Absolutely. It is a matter of principle. It is a question of respect, a question of the integrity of the Royal House.” The Queen, her son and the colonel exchange frantic glances, and the atmosphere in the great room shifts. Panic engulfs them. After a minute of silence, the Queen asks, “How has the public reaction been, Fitzjames?” “Well, Your Majesty, obviously, they are utterly shocked by this demand. Appalled.” He knows it would be vulgar to mention the growing public curiosity that the BBC is reporting, all from sources in the baffling world of the ‘social networks’. “Mother, we must do something. Anything. That information absolutely must remain confidential.” There is a pitiful boyishness in the prince’s voice. It is about to break. His right hand is squeezing the upholstery so hard that it is white. “Some comfort, I suppose, that our subjects would support us in such a grave matter. In fact, such support could be harnessed perhaps.” She stands and tells the three men confidently, “Bring a camera from the BBC. I will address the nation at half past five.“ “Ma’am,” says Browners. “Could I enquire as to the nature of your announcement?” “Do not worry, Sir Nigel. My family has ruled this country for many centuries with considerable skill and diplomacy. I intend to resolve this situation myself.” For the next hour, the queen is locked in her study, drafting and redrafting while a camera crew prepares in the drawing room. A makeup artist touches up her face, and at a quarter to six, she is in her chair, serenely posed against the near darkness of the window behind her. Her advisers and son wait,

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apprehensive. The light on top of the camera pops up red, and she begins, slowly, deftly, to address the nation in elocutionary perfection. “Today, the royal family of this United Kingdom has been blackmailed in a despicable manner. To hold our privacy to ransom like this is an unprecedented and obscene act. We will not accede to these cowardly thieves, but rather we shall respond to them in kind. “The constitution of the country includes the provision of Royal Assent, whereby all parliamentary bills must be signed into law by the monarch. Under law, actions undertaken in self-defence are legal measures. For this reason, I will withhold Royal Assent on all bills, including the Emergency Budget law due to be signed today, until such time as the perpetrators of this crime against my family turn themselves in. God bless you all.” The red light on the camera is extinguished. “Ma’am,” says the colonel. “That was masterful.” “Oh, mother,” adds the prince. “Quite brilliant.” A bottle of sherry is opened, and the mood eases. Of course, such a promise from a head of state will have the intended effect. It is only half an hour later, when a low roar can be heard in the white drawing room, that the colonel gets to his feet and goes to the window. A vast crowd has gathered around the Victoria memorial. He relays the news to the glee of mother and son, and goes to refill their glasses. But when his young secretary knocks on the open door, delivers a stiff curtsy, and then requests a word with the colonel in a staccato voice, that triumphant atmosphere is tempered. “Sir,” she says, “bad news.” He pulls the door shut behind him. “The public haven’t reacted quite as planned, sir. In fact, it would be fair to say that opinion has gone against us. The number one trending hash tag on Twitter is ‘revolution’.” His knees give a little, his breathing fails him, and he reaches out to steady himself on her shoulder. “Fuck,” he says. “And the thieves?” “They have been rather emboldened. It seems the virtual community is overwhelmingly demanding they release the files. And they are going to do so. Maybe it’s time for some damage limitation, sir.” Fitzjames rushes to his office and dials Wilcock-Dickens’s number. He answers with a languorous “Evening.” “Doctor, Fitzjames here, the bloody files are coming out. What should we be ready for?” “How, exactly, do you mean?” “Come on, man, who are the bloody filii nullius?” “No, no colonel. All is quite in order, I assure you.” Fitzjames groans down the line, “Are you certain?”

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“Yes, yes, quite. You know, Fitzjames, I was rather baffled as to why nobody had asked me that question before.”

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The Amazonite Inci Kartal Hi, I’m Inci from Turkey. After having studied ‘ELT’ in Istanbul and worked as an English teacher for seven years, I wanted to focus more on writing. Discovering the ‘MA TESOL & Creative Writing’ programme at the University of Westminster was the key for my ultimate dream to come true!

“Your body feels heavy. Heavier than it has ever felt.” That’s what my friend told me on the day she turned thirty. I was twenty-four then and wondered what kind of feeling that would be. The last six years have passed in a flash and it’s my birthday today. Her words are ringing in my ears and, yes, my body does feel sort of weird. So, no crazy partying, and if it was up to me, I would just stay at home, put ‘Bridget Jones’ on, have a bottle of wine and get depressed under a blanket. What do we celebrate, anyway? Getting old? Why? If I were to celebrate anything, it would be having managed to stop smoking at the age of twentynine and a half. Now that is real success, which deserves ongoing, crazy celebration. But of course, nonsmokers, never knowing what and how much it means to a smoker, see you as a cleared-up substance who now deserves more respect, whereas the smokers skip it with a simple “well-done” and some envious questions like “how?” and “when?” Anyway. If you have friends around, staying in on your birthday is not really an option. You have to actually go out. So, the suggestion was the traditional pub we always go to, The York. A table was already booked. No need to dress up unnecessarily and uncomfortably, no need to slap on stagey make-up or pose around, or anything. I can still get my bottle of New Zealand pinot noir – the best of The York. Just before leaving home, I made sure my amazonite gemstone was in my bag. Mum’s twentieth birthday present to me, which is believed to make one’s dreams come true and so I take it with me everywhere. “Keep it always with you, Julia. Believing is good,” she had said, looking deep into my eyes. Though it hasn’t produced the desired effect so far, quite the opposite in fact, hope is hope and it’s always wise to remember. Perhaps today’s the day…all five of us met at The York at 8 pm, as planned. Thanasis immediately pinned a ‘30’ badge on my green, frilly cardigan, with a cheerful ‘Happy Birthday.’ “Come on, Thanasis, I’m sure this is not the Greek way,” I said, adjusting the badge without considering why I was even bothering to keep it there.

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“Well, Miss English. This is not my day and not my country. You’ll see the Greek way in two months’ time in Greek Street,” he said with a loud Mediterranean laugh. “So, I can’t pin a 26 on you, Mister? I need a clue there. Oh, hang on. I know! I’ll break some plates for you. What about that?” I sent him a cunning wink. Faye butted in impatiently. “Yep, that’s one thing we do. Go ahead, Julia – if there are no rules about it in London, of course!” We both laughed. “What about you two, guys? Anything specific for Turks?” I asked. Aysim and Mert looked at each other with raised eyebrows. “Nothing especially,” Mert replied, looking a bit disappointed. “We just give presents and party, really.” He looked back at Aysim as if waiting for his approval. “Like the English way,” Aysim went on, pointing at me with her open hand. Then, she reached for something. “Here is your present, pretty doll,” she said eagerly. Pretty doll? Well, yes I am, still. Thanasis said, “wait, let’s get some drinks first.” Finally, ‘forget-about-life’ time! “The usual, Julia?” “You know me, Thanasis,” I replied excitedly, as he headed to the bar. How come I don’t look any different from these four, or do I? I mean, I don’t feel any different from when I was twenty-five. They probably have more hopes than I do, seeing everything pink and bright. I don’t, anymore. When exactly did I become like this? After breaking up with Nick? Idiot, even after six fucking years. Got a chick and married her. I’m so sick of seeing friends walking around with their prams. And I’m doing a Master’s with youngsters from around the world, having no more English friends – well, single ones at least. These guys are all very nice but no career, no lover, nothing. And thirty, on top of everything. I miss you, Mum. “Someone is rolling in the deep again? Come on, Julia, open your present.” Mert broke into my thoughts with his voice, soft as velvet. I like guys with a soft voice. I wish he were older. I took a leisurely sip from my Pinot Noir, inhaling its wonderful aroma of black cherries. “Right. Before you open it, here’s some pre-info,” Faye said, pulling me back to reality. “We chose them because we know that you love symbols of luck from around the world,” she continued, as I unwrapped the present. It was a little pouch containing a transparent amulet and a bright ornament. The amulet was a dark blue bead with a smaller light blue circle and another smaller, dark blue circle on it. The ornament was a red pomegranate. 106

“They look beautiful,” I said. I loved my new toys. “This is a Turkish eye,” Aysim enlightened me. “It is believed to protect you from the evil eye. It’s very common in Turkey. People wear it as jewellery or keep it at home as a talisman. I Hope you like it.” “It’s beautiful,” I blurted out happily. The pomegranate was believed to bring good luck to a person in Greek culture, and must be kept at home. “Thanks, guys, they are both very sweet gifts,” I said with a smile, as I replaced them in the pouch. “To you, to your luck, and your birthday, Julia,” said Mert, raising his bottle of Heineken. We clinked our glasses. I reached for my bag, which should have been on the floor under Faye’s bag, but I couldn’t see it. I dug my hand deep into the coats lying there, but I couldn’t find it there either. “Aysim, is my bag on that side?” I asked anxiously. “Your bag? I don’t think so. There are no bags on this side.” She carried on chatting while I frantically looked for my bag everywhere. Suddenly, I remembered my amazonite and felt like crying. “Hey, my bag isn’t here!” I snapped, interrupting the easy chat around me. Only then did they realise that there was something wrong. “What?” “What are you talking about?” “Your bag isn’t here?” Everybody started to look around, under the table, stools, coats -- but nothing, nowhere. We were all stupefied. “It was right here,” I yelled, feeling at a loss. Just then, a guy from the next table called out: “Are you looking for your bag?” “Yes,” we replied in a chorus with a hint of hope, turning our heads towards the stranger. “I saw someone kick a bag out with his foot and run away from this door. I wasn’t sure whose it was. The barman ran after him,” he said, pointing at the door behind him. We looked at each other, appalled. *** I love London. This grey weather, this rain, gloom, smell. I don’t miss the hot, damp weather of Mexico at all. I love how you can be lonely in such a crowd here, how you can get lost, be anonymous. I don’t have anyone to long for back home anyway. People have their families, they miss them, and so they come and go. They get whatever they can out of this city and leave. Just like that. Getting attached, therefore, is a sin here. 107

I remember the first day I arrived here. It was after my dad died, the last one in the family after my mum and brother both died in a car accident ten years ago. I was twenty-two then. It’s been eight years since dad joined them in the rush of a sudden heart-attack at the age of fifty-three. Feeling numb and lost, I needed a new beginning, Tío Ernesto said. “Go to London, Cruz. It’s a city of opportunities. You can study psychology there, too. Isn’t that what you want?” It was what I wanted, he was right. Having nothing to lose anymore, the destination was loud and clear. I had enough money left to me by my dad, too. It was a cold winter afternoon when I arrived at Holborn Station to meet my cousin Lino. It had been years - seven, I guess - since I last saw him in Mexico. He left the country to improve his English and then get a job here. “Any job,” he said then. I never understood why he never had a close bond with his dad, Tío Ernesto, and his mum, but I guess he is a rebellious type. I lived with him, two Indians and an English man for four months in Golders Green, after which Lino suddenly decided to go back to Mexico. The answer to my “why?” was a “you won’t understand,” so I didn’t insist. “Don’t waste your life here, Cruz. It’s a beautifully painted city that fools you. It’s a hurricane that sucks you up.” These were his last words, with his little suitcase in his hand, years of memories crammed in the little rectangle. So, I was left with the other guys. I didn’t care much, to be honest. I had my own little room, a big world for myself. I spent some time looking for a job and a school to study psychology. It feels so long ago now, but I managed to get different types of jobs over the years and met some people - although not lots of them - but never could actually study what I wanted. It just didn’t happen. I don’t know why. My English improved, though, thanks to dealing with different types of customers. About friends, I’ve never had very many. Didn’t feel the need. Just one or two would be fine, has always been. The other guys at the pub, for example, are all nice and friendly, but I love my own world with no one in it. Well, with just one or two, maybe. Like, Alejandro is fine. Enough. And a girl. A girlfriend. Her. Haven’t felt this way in years. The first time I saw her was about two months ago. She came in with friends, sat at the table in the corner. Her eyes were looking miles away into the distance. Looking, but not seeing anything. She had a melancholy air about her, which makes me wonder why. That’s all I could do, I can do. Wonder. “A man has to be a hero, amigo. That, the girls fucking admire. Qué bien!”

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Being me is not always good, I know that. I don’t even know her name, even though she is a regular here. I’d love to, though. I’d love to talk to her, ask her what it is that makes her get lost in thought. I’d love to say how pretty she is, how beautiful she looks with her long, wavy ginger hair and pure white skin. I’d love to... I’d love to ask her out and get her wine and watch her for hours. “A man has to be a hero, amigo.” A la chingada, lo hare! Alejandro is right. I’m in! “Hey Ale, you know what? Let’s go for it.” *** “A man has to be a hero, amigo. That, the girls fucking admire. Qué bien! Are you going to sit and wait like that? Come on! You’re dying for that girl, right? Do something before I kick your ass.” Alejandro lit a cigarette. “What something, Ale? I can’t. I can’t even talk to her. Don’t you understand? This is me, it’s how I am. I know it is...” “Fuck how you are, then. I will, if you can’t. You are a man, for fuck’s sake! Want a fag?” “No, thanks. What do you mean ‘I will’?” “Amigo, I mean, I fucking will. Hey, listen, Cruz. I have a smashing plan.” “Hey, Aaron the runner! Not bad, mate, how’re you doing? Good, listen, I need you on Saturday night for a little dash. Are you around? What party, man? Can’t you go a bit later? Great! Can you meet me at Queen’s Head at two tomorrow? All right, I’ll tell you all about it then. Bye.” See? It’s done. Simple as that, Mr Hero! What do you say? “Wait! Let me think about it first. Okay? I’ll call you later,” said Cruz. *** Cruz came into the pub out of breath, with the bag in his hand, just after Alejandro finished his sentence. “My bag!” cried Julia, gazing in astonishment, as Cruz came into pub, walked over to her and handed her the bag. He then turned on his heed and left. All five friends were still speechless. “See if everything’s in it,” said Mert after a while. “My amazonite,” whispered Julia to herself as she opened the bag. Everything was there. She grabbed the gemstone, took it out and kissed it, and gently returned it to her pocket. “It was that barman,” shouted Alejandro from the next table, pointing at Cruz. Julia looked at him along with the others without any expression. With her bag clutched to her chest. 109

“I’ll buy him a drink,” she murmured. “Yes, Julia. I can’t believe he ran after the bastard to get the bag,” added Aysim, admiring the barman’s courage. “We don’t even know the guy. He really deserves a drink. Go.” Julia went slowly to the bar. “Hi, thanks for running after my bag. Please, let me get you a drink, will you?” Time stopped for Cruz. A moment dreamed of for so long was now real. It felt surreal. “Hey, no problem. Don’t worry about it,” he answered. “No, please. I really want to,” Julia insisted. “Well, a pint would be great, then,” Cruz added, timidly. His hands were shaking. Alejandro was peeking from his table with a secret grin. Cruz soon finished work and went out for a fag with his beer. Julia and her friends were still talking about the incident. Faye said, “Let’s go and talk to this guy again.” They invited Alejandro to join their group. “How did it happen? When, exactly? How come we didn’t see anything? Did you see the thief? “By the way, I’m Julia.” She extended her hand. She was finally back to life again. “Cruz,” he said with a soft smile, as they shook hands. He was happy that his hands weren’t shaking anymore. “Thank you very much. You gave me the best birthday present ever. I really appreciate it.” Julia put her hand in her pocket. She stroked her gemstone and wondered if this could be the man. “Happy birthday, Julia,” said Cruz, getting lost in her eyes. Alejandro raised his bottle.

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