the pavement in a garden. It is a pavement garden, for the florist puts her plants out here, disciplined ranks of them, but hopeful plants, aspiring, because it is bedding plant time, in other words, late spring. A lily flowering a good month early scents the air stronger than the stinks of the traffic that pounds up this main route north all day and half the night. It is an ugly road, one you avoid if in a car, for one may need half an hour to go a few hundred yards.
Not long ago just where I stand marked the end of London. I know this because an old woman told me she used to take a penny bus here from Marble Arch, every Sunday. That is, she did, ‘If I had a penny to spare, I used to save up from my dinners, I used to look forward all week. It was all fields and little streams, and we tookoff our shoes and stockings and sat with our feet in the water and looked at the cows. They used to come and look at us. And the birds-there were plenty of those.’ That was before the First World War, in that period described in books of memoirs as a Golden Age. Yet you can find on stationers’ counters postcards made from photographs of this street a hundred years or so ago. It has never not been a poor street, and it is a poor one now, even in this particular age of Peace and Plenty. Not much has changed, though shop fronts are flashier, and full of bright cheap clothes, and there is a petrol station. The postcards show modest self-regarding buildings and the ground floor of every one is a shop of a kind long since extinct, where each customer was served individually. Outside them, invited from behind a counter to centre the picture, stand men in bowler hats or serving aprons; if it is a woman she has a hat on of the kind that insisted on obdurate respectability, for that is a necessary attribute of the poor. But only a couple of hundred yards north-west my friend sat on Sundays with her feet in the little streams, while the cows crowded close. ‘Oh, it was so cold, the water’d take your breath away, but you’d soon forget that, and it was the best day of the week.’ A few hundred yards north there used to be a mill. Another woman, younger than the first, told me she remembered the Mill. ‘Mill Lane-the name’s because there used to be a mill, you see. But they pulled the mill down.’ And where it was is a building no one would notice, if you didn’t know what it replaced. If they had let the mill stand we would be proud of it, and they would charge us to go in and see how things used to be.
I enter the station, buy a ticket from a machine that works most of the time, and go up long stairs. There used to be decent lavatories, but now they are locked up because they are vandalized as soon as repaired. There isa good waiting room with heating, but often a window is smashed, and there is always graffiti. What are the young people saying when they smash everything they can?-for it is young people who do it, usually men. It is not that they are depraved because they are deprived, for I have just visited a famous university up north, where they have twenty applications for every place, where ninety-nine per cent of the graduates get jobs within a year of leaving. These are the privileged young, and they make for themselves a lively and ingenious social life their teachers clearly admire, if not envy. Yet they too smash everything up, not just the usual undergraduate loutishness, boys will be boys, but what seems to be a need for systematic destruction. What need? Do we know?
At the station you stand to wait for trains on a platform high above roofs and the tree tops are level with you. You feel thrust up into the sky. The sun, the wind, the rain, arrive unmediated by buildings. Exhilarating.
I like travelling by Underground. This is a defiant admission. I am always hearing, reading, I hate the Underground. In a book I have just picked up the author says he seldom uses it, but when he did have to go a few stops, he found it
Not long ago just where I stand marked the end of London. I know this because an old woman told me she used to take a penny bus here from Marble Arch, every Sunday. That is, she did, ‘If I had a penny to spare, I used to save up from my dinners, I used to look forward all week. It was all fields and little streams, and we tookoff our shoes and stockings and sat with our feet in the water and looked at the cows. They used to come and look at us. And the birds-there were plenty of those.’ That was before the First World War, in that period described in books of memoirs as a Golden Age. Yet you can find on stationers’ counters postcards made from photographs of this street a hundred years or so ago. It has never not been a poor street, and it is a poor one now, even in this particular age of Peace and Plenty. Not much has changed, though shop fronts are flashier, and full of bright cheap clothes, and there is a petrol station. The postcards show modest self-regarding buildings and the ground floor of every one is a shop of a kind long since extinct, where each customer was served individually. Outside them, invited from behind a counter to centre the picture, stand men in bowler hats or serving aprons; if it is a woman she has a hat on of the kind that insisted on obdurate respectability, for that is a necessary attribute of the poor. But only a couple of hundred yards north-west my friend sat on Sundays with her feet in the little streams, while the cows crowded close. ‘Oh, it was so cold, the water’d take your breath away, but you’d soon forget that, and it was the best day of the week.’ A few hundred yards north there used to be a mill. Another woman, younger than the first, told me she remembered the Mill. ‘Mill Lane-the name’s because there used to be a mill, you see. But they pulled the mill down.’ And where it was is a building no one would notice, if you didn’t know what it replaced. If they had let the mill stand we would be proud of it, and they would charge us to go in and see how things used to be.
I enter the station, buy a ticket from a machine that works most of the time, and go up long stairs. There used to be decent lavatories, but now they are locked up because they are vandalized as soon as repaired. There isa good waiting room with heating, but often a window is smashed, and there is always graffiti. What are the young people saying when they smash everything they can?-for it is young people who do it, usually men. It is not that they are depraved because they are deprived, for I have just visited a famous university up north, where they have twenty applications for every place, where ninety-nine per cent of the graduates get jobs within a year of leaving. These are the privileged young, and they make for themselves a lively and ingenious social life their teachers clearly admire, if not envy. Yet they too smash everything up, not just the usual undergraduate loutishness, boys will be boys, but what seems to be a need for systematic destruction. What need? Do we know?
At the station you stand to wait for trains on a platform high above roofs and the tree tops are level with you. You feel thrust up into the sky. The sun, the wind, the rain, arrive unmediated by buildings. Exhilarating.
I like travelling by Underground. This is a defiant admission. I am always hearing, reading, I hate the Underground. In a book I have just picked up the author says he seldom uses it, but when he did have to go a few stops, he found it
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