Wednesday 19th October 2005
Today it is 11 years since my father killed himself. I woke up in physical pain, feeling guilty because I hadn’t called my mother for a while, and knowing how difficult she finds this day. I spent the first few hours of the morning swearing at everything; it was one of those days when everything seems to be conspiring against me. I dropped things as I made my kids packed lunches, I hurt myself opening their drinks bottles, and I felt under immense pressure because I had so many things to do. I had urgent shopping to do, I had to go to the doctors to pick up prescriptions for the kids and I had to be back by 12 for a meeting.
After the kids were dropped at school I came home to pick up what I needed, and then started leaving for the doctors. When I opened the front door I realised it was raining so had to hobble upstairs to find my umbrella. When I got to the bus stop I realised I didn’t have some paperwork I needed so had to walk back home again. It took a few minutes to locate it but I got there in the end. As I walked up a little side street on my way back to the bus stop my attention was drawn to a Budweiser can perched on the back shelf of a car parked in a front garden. Soon I was saying ‘Oh my God’ as I noticed torn rizla packets, large rizla papers and then a small paper bag whose contents of weed were spilling out over the shelf. It looked a bit like someone had been having a small party in the car and had forgotten to tidy up. Looking up I noticed a window was open on the house, and I went on my way. I wasn’t sure if I should have done something. I thought (very briefly) about whether I should have contacted the police, as a good citizen should do (?), but I couldn’t see what good this would have done. Perhaps I should have been a good neighbour and knocked on the door and suggested they be more discreet. It’s hard to know sometimes. I just walked on.
I just walked on again later. After I’d been to the doctors, picked up the prescriptions and filled in their survey I returned to another bus stop and was wondering whether to wait or walk to the next one when I heard screaming. Screaming which was going on and on and on, and it seemed to be coming from a particular house. I hate hearing screaming, especially if it sounds like a child, which this did. My head becomes full of pictures of children being hurt, and the many real stories I’ve heard about abuse. Then I think, well my kids scream a lot, and that’s not because they’re getting hurt but because they’ve been told ‘no’ or they’ve hurt themselves, or they’re playing some game. I wouldn’t like someone to call the police or social services on me! I hear a lot of screaming from my back garden. I think about all the dead kids where the news says that people heard screaming, but did nothing. I do nothing. I don’t know if anyone’s being hurt or not, and if they were I wouldn’t know which house the noise was coming from. I’m not an uncaring or disengaged person; I have got involved in ‘society’ in other ways – I’ve stepped in on the bus when a man was beating up a woman; I’ve called the police when I’ve seen young lads ‘tooling up’ in the alley; I’ve contacted the right authorities about discarded needles and syringes, and human crap around the streets, and I support friends who seek justice for themselves. It’s an uncomfortable feeling though, when you hear screaming and there’s nothing to be done, so again I walked on.
I like the 207, even if they keep changing things about it. The bus runs from Uxbridge in the far west of London, all the way into Shepherds Bush. When I first started using it in the 1980’s I used to get on at Brunel University, near Uxbridge, and most of the occupants were White people. Looking out of the window you saw the RAF base then lots of trees and nice semi-detached houses. After a while you reached Hayes and the scene became more urban, with shops, a bingo hall and lots of people walking around. Then you reached the dividing line, the bridge over the canal. The first time I came this far, the older students I was with pointed out the Hambrough Tavern, the first pub over the bridge and into Southall. ‘That’s where the riots started in 1979,’ they told me, ‘It was burnt down.’ I didn’t know anything about Southall at this stage of my life, and it was dark that evening as the boys took us to their rented house and cooked me and my friends a nice dinner. It was only later that I travelled into the town and experienced it in the day. Soon I was a regular visitor, seeking out fresh spices and interesting ingredients for the authentic curries I’d started making. As soon as you crossed the bridge you noticed the Asians, Southall was full of them. In fact, you had to look very carefully to spot a white person. Every man seemed to be wearing a turban, and the women all wore beautiful colourful Salwar Kameezes. The shops overflowed with vegetables of all sorts of colours and shapes, huge green watermelons, bright white moolis, brown pistachios and dark green coriander whose irresistible scent tempted me in. At first I felt on edge. I felt I had to tread carefully as I didn’t want to offend anyone. This seemed like someone else’s town, with someone else’s rules which I was unaware of. I didn’t want to eat on the street, or look too directly at people, especially men. I felt obvious, as if I was the only white person in town, which was not true. As time went by I became a regular at the Hambrough, and at Rita’s on the Broadway, sometimes I’d be in there two or three times a day. By now I was living on Ranelagh Road with a bunch of students, and Rita’s was a cheaper option than cooking for real. It’d be a really sociable place, I’d often meet friends. One time my hippy friend left his wallet behind which had a little hash in it, but it was returned untouched. The man that ran Rita’s was legendary in our circle. He was truly massive. Every time we went in he was sitting down eating his way through huge platefuls of fare from his menu. While we spent £1 each on an Alu Tikki Chaat we watched him gorge on pakoras, dosas, rice, naan and all sorts of other dishes. I didn’t go for a while, and then went in and found he had shrunk. He looked similar but much thinner, and instead of eating he was focused on using a computer. Behind his counter, pinned up proudly, was a newspaper article about him. He had achieved ‘weightwatcher of the year,’ having lost 22 stone! It was a really impressive achievement, and following on from this his restaurant became posher too, introducing a fantastic fish tank and a fast food counter at the front. But the next time I went in, about a year later, the slim manager had disappeared again, to be replaced by the larger version, and the prices had gone up too.
After Southall the 207 goes past Ealing Hospital and then through Hanwell and Ealing. These used to be fairly monocultural places, but now show a really good mix of people. You had to wait until you reached Acton and Shepherds Bush for another change in culture, as that was where a lot of Black people were based, and they would get on the bus here, filling it with patois and the clean smell of coconut. Now it’s all changed, from Uxbridge to Bush the bus community is mixed. Today I sat at the back with two middle aged Irish women who were sharing family stories, two Somali women who were chattering away to each other and also to other Somalis on the bus, a Black man whose nationality and culture I couldn’t ascertain, a white woman and her child who gazed wide-eyed at the Somali women, and an Asian male, who was probably a Sikh. This kind of mix happens all the way along the route now and I find it really stimulating.
People are still surprised to find an English person in Southall, because despite the larger numbers of white people around, many are Eastern European or Irish, but after 20 years of visiting, and 15 years of living here, I no longer feel obvious and strangely out of place, as if I’m on fire. I feel at home, and when I places that are pure white I suffer snowblindness.
