The Speakers by Heathcote Williams (Grove Press 1964)

The Park

The large group under the trees have not noticed that there is no one speaking at the centre, until two pairs of policemen enter the park and start to break up the meetings.

Lomas observes that they travel in pairs because they are neurotic. If they travelled alone, they would start talking to themselves.

Freddie Kilennen walks up to a pair and asks them whether they would like to take part in the premiére trial run of his pneumatometer, which is a machine for measuring how much of the Holy Ghost there's left in a man's soul, and he belches.

One of the policemen says: Shut your mouth and clear out of the park . . . because I say so; and Cafferty observes that if you have a hat shaped like a bomb, egocentricity is rather out of place.

The police close Cumberland Gate and herd the people towards the other. Harry, Norman and the man with feathers in his hair wander about the tarmac unconsciously repeating themselves: the unconscious repetition which leads to neurosis. The neuroses will be sold to the tourists the next day.

The man with the silent message has left his platform, on which he stands saying nothing at all, and sits in the mirrored section of Fortes studying form: . . . to spot a winner, he says, demands a rare constriction in the mind, a constriction in the colours in the street, a constriction in the typography of the Sporting Life, a constriction in the air you breathe . . .  never change your mind once you have, through your training, lapsed into this constriction, and you'll win . . . you'll surely win.

Lomas comes over to him and observes that Saturday night in winter in the park, when only the regulars are there, is like the service of compline in preparation for communion next day.

The man with the silent message says: As Aristotle, the great Italian sculptor said, a man is a man for all that.

Harry goes back to Chiswick, Norman goes back to Shepherd's Bush, Lil goes back to Stepney, Aggie wanders through the streets buttonholing people until she comes to the tea stand at the end of Hungerford Lane, Solly Sachs takes his dog back to Notting Hill; a man helps the woman from the Catholic Evidence Guild to fit her platform into the platform rack behind the New Inn, the man with the silent message goes back alone to the North End Road, and Lomas, Cafferty and Freddie Kilennen walk back to Kilburn.

Dangerous in Love by Leslie Thomas (Penguin Books 1987)

There were moments when it seemed to Detective Constable Dangerous Davies that mayhem moved into his path, marking him purposefully out, isolating him, and then engulfing him, like those small individual whirlwinds that travelled around in parts of America and which he had seen on television. It was so on this ordinary damp night in early October as he and Mod Lewis, the unemployed Welsh philosopher, were walking to their lodgings at 'Bali Hi', Furtman Gardens, London NW, from an evening at The Babe In Arms public house. They were humming as they walked.

At the Neasden end of Power Station Lane, under the drizzle of the cooling towers, they heard the distant but unmistakable sounds of a fracas. Davies halted like a troubled dog. 'A punch-up,' he said. Mod stood, his face damp and moon-pale in the drizzle. His heavy head rolled to one side as he listened.

'Singing,' he ventured. 'They're only singing. Tuesday's not a fighting night.'

A crash like cannon fire came from the far end of the street. 'Somebody going through a door,' said Davies.

At once, the singing became louder, less enclosed. 'Irish,' he added. 'I suppose we'd better have a look.'

'You're the policeman,' said Mod, standing still.

Davies sighed: 'All right. I'll go. You ring the law. It sounds like a three-dog job to me.'

'Do you happen to have ten pence?' asked Mod.

'You have to ring 999,' Davies said. 'It's free.' Mod went off into the windy drizzle. Tentatively, Davies went along Power Station Lane to where he could see the riot . . .

London'ish

My last three reads have all related to London in the interwar years. I think my inner reading pixie is telling me something . . . and it would explain the twin monocles I'm currently sporting.

Journey Through a Small Planet by Emanuel Litvinoff (Robin Clark Limited 1972)

I drifted into Communism when I was about eleven under the influence of a militant boy called Mickey Lerner. He was thin and undersized, with a chronic cough, and suffered many indignities at the hands of bullying masters and pupils. His father, a presser, also coughed because his lungs had been rotted by the steaming cloth he pressed ten hours a day. In fact, the whole family coughed. They lived in the sooty air of a Brick Lane alley overhung by a railway bridge and had a habit of blinking like troglodytes in full daylight. This made them seem puzzled and defenceless when, in reality, they were tough and stiff-necked tribe. I was led into Communism more by the misery and toughness of the Lerner family than by anything in my own predicament.

Bright Summer - Dark Autumn by Robert Barltrop (Waltham Forest Libraries and Arts Department 1986)

And, in the height of the summer, the 'red' air-raid warnings began in the daytimes. There was a siren on the island in the road junction near us, at the top of a very tall grey post. At the shop we heard the deep metallic growl as it started up, rising to the harsh wail which went on for a couple of minutes. People scurried away, and the shops closed; the streets were nearly empty by the time the siren finished sounding. Nothing happened. As a reminder that it was not a meaningless warning, bombs were dropped on Croydon and killed sixty-two people. Sometimes on cloudy days when the warning was on we would hear the throbbing of an aeroplane engine, hidden and persistent as if hovering not far away.

Yet, in this threatened state, normal activities and recreations went on. On their afternoons off the shop assistants were going to the West End to see Gone With the Wind (they said it was too long - we were used to films which lasted an hour and a half). The dance bands and comedy shows on the radio: Jack Warner playing the Cockney soldier in 'Garrison Theatre', Robb Wilton, 'Itma' with its fund of catchphrases; Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters singing 'Bei Mir Bist du Schoen'. Pubs flourished, as did dance halls. There was said to be a boom in reading the classics of English literature, and I suppose the black-out nights were an opportunity which many people had previously lacked for reading. The book I remember from those weeks before the Blitz was a paperback novel called This Bright Summer. Several of my friends were reading it; it was well written, and passionate in places, and in my mind it belongs to the summer of 1940.

Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall by Luke Haines (William Heinemann Ltd 2009)

Colonel Klutz

December 1993. End-of-year round-ups in the music press. American bands still holding up – all polls feature Nirvana, Lemonheads, Belly and the Juliana Hatfield Three. Tindersticks by the Tindersticks is album of the year in Melody Maker. New Wave is at number 19. In the NME Writers' Top Fifty Albums of the Year Bjork's Debut is number one, and New Wave comes in at 18. In Select magazine New Wave is voted the seventh-best album of the year. And the best album of 1993 as voted for by the writers of Select: Giant Steps by the Boo Radleys. Suede lurk around the top three of most critics' polls, and Mr Blobby gets the Christmas number one in the singles chart.

The singer – who could now pass for an East End villain – has me pinned against the wall. After our, ahem, early-evening opening slot there had been an ominous knock on the dressing-room door.

'Can I have a word – outside?' says the singer, gesturing grimly towards me. Drunk and stoned post-gig, I follow obediently. I know what's coming. I orchestrated it so I'm looking forward to it. Quick as a flash the headline act pulls off some nifty pugilistic footwork and squares up to me. Jesus, what a knucklehead. I hadn't imagined his reaction to my onstage comments would be quite as physical. True, last night, with righteous anger and adrenalin raging through my veins I had been spoiling for a fight, but now I just wanted to be sacked – minus pasting.

'How much of a fucking prick are you gonna look when I kick the shit out of you onstage?' the singer asks unreasonably. It's a good question, and one that I assume is rhetorical. I drift off into a vision of myself being chased around the stage by a man in a gorilla suit, the gorilla's clumsy paws finally managing to grab me by the scruff of the neck before drop-kicking me high into the air to the whooping delight of the audience. Oh man, that would be entertainment.

'Well, answer me, you fucking cunt.' Not rhetorical then. I snap out of my reverie and slump back against the wall. I'm back in the playground about to take a hiding from a dim bully. There's nothing to do but let the scene play out. Shouldn't take long.

. . .

On paper it was unpromising. In real life it looked even worse. The Auteurs are booked to support Matt Johnson's band The The on a UK tour. All of this organised months in advance, before the recent setbacks, when life was a breeze and I would skip over lawns of freshly mown grass without a care in my head, laughing and doffing my hat to a cartoon bluebird as I bent down to pick a buttercup.

Tour with The The? Sure, if it keeps everyone happy and it sells some more records, why not? My levity lasts for about a day and a half. Reality dawns. The truth is, I don't care too much for Matt Johnson. He's some guy who sold a ton of records in the 80s, and now he's got some new dreck he's trying to flog. Coincidentally, some of the work on the new Auteurs album has been done at a recording studio owned by one Matt Johnson. The studio walls are covered in terrible paintings: some recognisable originals of The The album sleeves, others perhaps specially commissioned. The theme of the paintings seems to be ghastly men and ghastly women giving in to all manner of bodily functions with grim abandon. Oh, and imminent nuclear destruction. A clear indication of Johnson's faultless yet simplistic world view. Human race: awful. Never mind, will probably be extinguished in some sort of self-inflicted Armageddon. Told you so. The bastards deserved it. As I said, sold a lot of records in the 80s.

On no account attempt to tour the UK in December. Your limbs will become brittle with cold as you trundle up and down the country in a freezing tour bus and no one will come to your gigs as they are attending Christmas parties. Christmas parties in your hotel. Oh yes, the late-night bars of the Holiday Inn, Ibis and Radisson hotels Рthe apr̬s-gig drinking stations of the lower- to mid-level rock band. Every nook and cranny of these corporate flophouses taken over by drunken reps and violent drones from the frightening world of real honest work. Civvy Street Рpissed up, embittered, trying to get over another empty year and on your fucking case.

Dupe by Liza Cody (Charles Scribner's Sons 1980)

'I don't know that thieving's ever classy,' Anna said. It was wonderful to be able to talk without feeling her lips puff flatulently in thin air.

'All I'm saying is that London had to be a better place to live in when even the villains had style,' the driver said looking disgustedly at the Knightsbridge clutter. 'Look at it now. I ask you. It's all sand in your shoes and out for the easy bunce. No wonder there's no standards no more.'

'You can't blame foreigners for that.'

'Don't get me wrong,' the driver said, 'I'm not saying they ain't colourful. Me, I wouldn't give a monkey's who came here as long as they went home again after. But they don't, see? Makes you feel a tourist in your own home. Some of 'em spend money like there was no tomorrow and buy up property or what-not. And there's others just live on the state. I mean, what does it look like to a young bloke just married and can't get a council house?'

It sounded like a favourite grudge, a well-rehearsed routine that the driver liked to launch into at the slightest opportunity.

'It's what the young people see as worries me,' he went on. 'Other people getting what should be theirs by rights. And without lifting a finger. That's what gets me. It's a wrong example. Makes 'em think they should have a bit of the cream, too, without having to work for it.

'Makes 'em want to take advantage,' he added elliptically. 'That's why there's so much crime about today.'

Anna didn't want to argue, although most of what he said offended her own creed of self-determination. He was obviously well-practised in his own argument, and besides, taxi-drivers, she thought, were all too dogmatic. It was something about the nature of their jobs that led them to half-cocked theories. They saw too much out of the front window and too little of the people they were talking to behind them.

London's Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976-1977 by Dave Thompson (Chicago Review Press 2009)

Somebody—I don’t know who, but they didn’t look impressed—pointed out Siouxsie Sioux, the dominatrix-clad queen of a gang of fashion horses known to themselves as the Bromley Contingent, über-followers of the Pistols machine, who were fast garnering as much notoriety as the band itself. Someone else nodded pityingly toward a beanstalk by the stage, leaping up and down on the spot and clearly in danger of crashing through the ceiling. Muted by the din of the band, you could lip-read their contempt nevertheless.

“Look at that idiot.”

I looked. I knew him. Bev . . . John Beverley . . . lived in Finsbury Park, close by the station where I swapped my bus ride for the tube. A total Bowie nut, which is why a mutual friend introduced us, he enjoyed nothing better than a lager-fueled argument over which of the master’s songs was the best. Neither, at the time, did I. But whereas I was willing to change my opinion, depending upon what kind of mood I was in, Bev was unyielding.

“‘We Are the Dead’?” I would suggest.


“Fuck off! ‘Rebel Rebel.’”

“‘Drive In Saturday’?”

“‘Rebel Rebel.’”

“‘Cygnet Committee’?”

“I said, Fuck off!” And so it would go on until Bev fucked off, usually lured away by one or other of the pimply weasels who’d renamed him Sid, but who themselves were also named John: Wardle, who was sufficiently pear-shaped to be rechristened Wobble; Gray, who was anonymous enough that his surname already suited him; and Lydon, who was now up onstage with the Pistols, flashing the teeth that first gave him his nom de guerre. Sometimes you wondered what Bev saw in them. He hated it when they called him Sid, he hated it even more when they added the surname Vicious. And it was pretty obvious that his main attraction to them was to see how many outrageous stunts they could prompt him to rush into, simply by reminding him what a “great laugh” he was, and letting his overdeveloped need for attention to take over.

But he never shrugged them off, and you saw less and less of Bev these days, and more and more of Sid Vicious. One day, a few worried friends prophesied, Bev would vanish altogether and Sid would take over completely. Tonight, for sure, Sid was in total control, bouncing up and down on the dance floor, grinning wildly at the noise that his mates were making, and utterly oblivious to the fact that whatever rhythm he was hearing in his head was inaudible to everyone else in the room. Somebody said it looked like he was riding a pogo stick. Somebody else thought it looked like fun. The next time you saw the Sex Pistols, half the audience would be doing it.

Cowboys and Indians by Joseph O'Connor (Sinclair-Stevenson 1991)

Underneath him Eddie felt the churn of the sea, far below the car deck. He imagined the cast cold hulk of the mailboat ploughing through the water in the darkness, an explosion of white metal and froth. He could almost see it, rearing into the air, smashing down into the waves, hammering the water like a weapon. And for some reason that brought a hot tingle to Eddie's face.

It was a good-looking face, there was no doubt about that. Eddie's face looked like something out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, or so Jennifer had once told him, the fucking pseud. First-year History of Art in UCD and Jennifer thought she was Melvyn sodding Bragg or something. Still, no matter what she said, Eddie knew he was a looker. He said looks weren't important. He said it every morning when he preened himself in the mirror and every night too, when he brushed his gleaming teeth. He said it at every available opportunity, to anybody who'd listen. But extremely good-looking people always says that, and they usually look particularly good when they're saying it. Eddie was a head turner. He always had been, he was now, and with just a fraction of the good fortune that always goes with good looks, he reckoned he would probably would be till he dropped. And even then, like his hero Sid Vicious, Eddie'd be a good-looking corpse.

Any Chance of a Game? by Barney Ronay (Ebury Press 2005)

We line up for kick-off and I look at the opposition for the first time. From a distance all teams look the same, a collection of figures yet to separate out into recognisable types. You make the calculations of weight, height and speed. You look for weak links and familiar giveaways. Just for a moment football feels a bit like fighting.

Today there are no obvious signs of weakness in the opposition, no pale camel-like figures fretting in the unaccustomed strip. You get a good idea from the boots (worn in?), the amount of faded white strapping on knees (sign of the seasoned player), and even from the nicknames. Beware of the bantering team. This lot look as though they've shared the same playground, clubhouse, family Christmases and shrinking gene pool for the last thirty years. Proper pub teams are rare these days. When you do meet one you know you're going to get a game.

Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now, As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It by Craig Taylor (Harper Collins 2011)

LUDMILA OLSZEWSKA

Former Londoner

She has recently returned to Warsaw after spending a year working in a pub in Kilburn. Her voice through the telephone is raspy, and I can hear her daughter playing contentedly behind her.

I REMEMBER THE ENGLISH WEATHER, English cigarettes, gray skies, but sometimes beautiful skies, Oxford Street, Topshop. Irish men in my pub all day. They were so sad but also very funny, and also very respectful. They ask me what I was in London for. I said to them: money. I asked them what they came to London for. They said: money. They sit still for so long, all day, and some tell you things at the end of the night that you don’t want to hear. I remember the music, the light of the pub, the Guinness, the waiting for the Guinness. That was one of the first things I learned in London: to wait for the Guinness with them.

I would make time each day to call my daughter, Alexandra, who was four and living with my mother in Warsaw. I would text my mother to make sure it was a good time. It was hard to hear my daughter from so far away. She comes on the phone, she doesn’t always speak to me, and I said, “Come on, say something,” and there was her breathing and other small sounds but sometimes no words, and that is so hard to hear. Just sounds. It made me wonder if she knew it was me. She did. That is when you think, what am I doing in London? How much do I make? What do I have to do before I go home?

I remember the old churches, the London Eye, Shoot Up Hill, and many women who are well-dressed, though not in Kilburn. My money, my toothbrush, my mobile phone, my sim card, my makeup, my shampoo, some clothes, some clothes I never took out of my bag. Primrose Hill once for an afternoon. I ate my lunch there. The buses. Always listening to Polish people on the buses. They think that no one understands them.

“Where are you going?” they asked at the pub when I left, and I said, “I am going home.” They knew about my daughter because they sat in the pub all day. “Don’t leave us,” one man said t

GEORGE IACOBESCU

CEO, Canary Wharf Group PLC

The Tower of London, that is the dividing line. William the Conqueror created the Tower: to the west was money and pleasure, and to the east was poverty, and it is still here. It tells the story of London, that for so long all this area had no transport. When we started building Canary Wharf in 1987, the Jubilee Line didn’t exist, and the DLR was just one line here and a bit of line going to the Isle of Dogs. That was the whole transport. How could it be that a city as rich as London has the whole eastern part of the town with no transport? How could you expect all these people to go to work? I mean it was a reservoir of cheap labor, but you didn’t even give them the opportunity to be slaves.

Today Canary Wharf is 15 million feet and there’s another 10 million feet to go. So it’s two and a half times the size that we looked at the first time. Canary Wharf is the most important thing to happen to London in the past one hundred years, and probably Crossrail is going to be the next one. It has an extension that goes to London Bridge, which makes a big difference; it starts creating the network of transport. We designed the Jubilee Line in such a way that it intersects with every other line. It is just two steps to come to Canary Wharf. Crossrail will change London forever, because a lot of the companies in Canary Wharf or in the City would like to use a lot of the manpower coming from the east. They are more economical, not having to pay the rents of Kensington, Chelsea, and Mayfair. And those areas have different salary expectations. So the labor force coming from the east is cheaper. The east of London will become the dormitory of London, because what London is missing is the Queens and the Brooklyn of New York. You don’t have a place where the nurses and the teachers and the policemen and the firefighters can live very close to the city. If they all have to travel two or three hours to get to work, how productive are they and how tired are they by the time they get home? So the east of London is going to be where all these things happen.

The People of the Abyss by Jack London

These people who try to help!  Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures.  In the nature of things they cannot but be failures.  They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.  They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.  They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants.  They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers.  They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.

As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their backs.  The very money they dribble out in their child’s schemes has been wrung from the poor.  They come from a race of successful and predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him.  Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along?  This violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings for three farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage of ninepence.  She is being robbed.  Somebody is on her back, and a yearning for the Beautiful and True and Good will not lighten her burden.  They do nothing for her, these dabblers; and what they do not do for the mother, undoes at night, when the child comes home, all that they have done for the child in the day.

And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie.  They do not know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth.  And the lie they preach is “thrift.”  An instant will demonstrate it.  In overcrowded London, the struggle for a chance to work is keen, and because of this struggle wages sink to the lowest means of subsistence.  To be thrifty means for a worker to spend less than his income—in other words, to live on less.  This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living.  In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard.  And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry.  And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till it balances their expenditure.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (Harbrace Paperbound Library 1933)

You can have cartoons about any of the parties, but you mustn't put anything in favour of Socialism, because the police won't stand it. Once I did a cartoon of a boa constrictor marked Capital swallowing a rabbit marked Labour. The copper came along and saw it, and he says, “You rub that out, and look sharp about it,” he says. I had to rub it out. The copper's got the right to move you on for loitering, and it's no good giving them a back answer.’

. . .

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? — for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.