July 2005 Archives
I commuted to work in London in the mid-1970s. In California, sidewalks were laid out with the best symmetrical intentions, and cracks appeared as conspicuously jagged as seismic faults. Footpaths in London were built to subtly heave with the winters, their mortarless squares tilting and settling at the seams. No one in his right mind would pay such close attention to what was underfoot. But then, no one in his right mind would set off with one crutch and half a body to the Holland Park tube station, descending in a lift, then down flights of stairs to stand in a sooty tunnel and await the gritty arrival of a Central Line train. No one but an American desperate for a job.
This was, in essence, the conclusion of the Home Office, Britain's ministry of all things not foreign. I had gone through the traditional steps of applying for a work permit, and London friends and family had shaken their collective heads at my prospects. But there I was, turning up for my appointment on time and in a tie, only to meet with three chatty women who offered me a cup of tea, along with a wooden seat in a hallway in between massive file cabinets. Naturally, we talked about the weather. Tricky, the weather. One moment it was this thing, then it was that. I smiled and tried not to look too young. How was the job, one asked. I gagged, tea splashed about my cup, and I tried to think of some way to finesse an answer. But finesse, being a British invention, was in the hands of those facing me. The silence must have gone on a bit too long, because one of the women filled it. "Oh, we assume you're working," she said. I looked up at her, stunned. The rules were clear enough: first get the work permit, then get the job. But this was Britain, where, I would gradually understand, rules mattered less than an unspoken, collective understanding of what was fair.
I told her the job was fine. She asked if I was paid regularly. I assured her that, yes, the Students International Meditation Society of the famed post-Beatles Maharishi was coughing up 20 pounds, minus tax and National Health Service stamp, every week. We are very sorry about your shooting, she said. The work permit was a small booklet, she explained, which should be presented with my passport, and would arrive in the post. Chairs scraped, teacups disappeared, and after a moment of profuse thanks, which the women endured stoically, I hustled out the door.
I couldn't believe my luck. But in retrospect, the Home Office women probably couldn't believe that I considered anything about my circumstances lucky. Whatever could be said about the encounter, one thing was certain: I had a job. I was more than half paralyzed, but entirely employed. Now, I could join the rush hour without fear of anything, except falling. Which explains why I looked down, eyeing the ground, all the way from the steps of my rooming house to the floor of the waiting tube train. The thresholds of the Central Line trains all displayed their origins: Metro Cammell 1938. Built just before the war with indestructible plaid upholstery, they offered a seat just inside the door. Actually, a passenger offered it, for someone invariably stood and gestured for me to sit. I changed trains at Oxford Circus, then again at Victoria.
Somewhere, hundreds of feet above me, these were actual places. But underground, they were long tile-lined tubular hallways, arching and smelly. Someone in the Sunday Times travel section described Moscow's subway system as a series of mausoleums and London's Underground as a series of urinals. But I was concerned less about aesthetics and more about distances. My aluminum crutch clicked, and my metal leg brace thudded along the shortest route between the rumbling platforms. By global agreement, people riding subway trains do not look at each other. But being young and lonely, I couldn't help stealing furtive glances. It was the era of miniskirts, post-foppishness and early punk. Everyone seemed to know how to dress but me. Yet all this was forgotten by the time I reached the St. James tube station. The lift miraculously ascended from the platform all the way to the street.
On Sundays, I rode the Central Line through the West End, across the East End, through inner Essex, to the suburb of Buckhurst Hill. This was another world. The streets were quiet, the tube trains infrequent, and no one queued to use the station telephone. I dropped 10p in the phone and prayed for the best. With any luck, an aunt or uncle would answer and drive over to pick me up for tea. If I was unlucky, David, my Down's Syndrome cousin, would answer the phone and tell me that Crossroads Motel, the subject of a BBC soap opera, was full, and then he would hang up. I would call again, and he would answer again, telling me that he was Mrs. Pearce, motel proprietor, and hadn't heard of me. In the future, he recommended in brisk, sibilant tones, I should book in advance. Over the years of Sunday afternoon teas, I learned to have a pocket full of 10p coins ready for all arrivals. At my uncle's house, everyone sat down to a long, slow afternoon of drinking tea and pretending to be British. The older generation of German Jewish émigrés all spoke with noticeable accents, and my generation of public-school-educated twentysomethings sounded more British than Alec Guinness. Whatever the accents, the occasions were too loud, too disputative and too laden with food to be anything but Jewish. I generally took a midafternoon nap. They were exhaustingly extraverted, these people, but they were mine.
The trips home down the Central Line generally occurred at night. The tracks ran along the surface through the Essex suburbs, then slipped into a tunnel somewhere around Mile End. It was important to know about Mile End, for this was one of the few stations in the London tube system in which trains actually arrived on parallel tracks. One could change lines here, moving from the East-West course of the Central Line toward the southwest route of the Metropolitan Line, just by stepping across a platform. I had nothing but praise for Mile End and couldn't help asking my relatives why it was so convenient. The answer was simple enough. Mile End had been bombed into nonexistence, then completely reconstructed. The tube stations were, of course, London's most reliable air raid shelters during the war. What German bomb could possibly reach 100 or more feet underground? The one that fell down the Mile End ventilation shaft late in the war, killing hundreds who sat on the platform playing cards and drinking thermoses of tea by candlelight.
The bombing of Mile End stuck in my mind, but in a pleasant sort of way. After all, for an American veteran of street violence, London was a paradise. Thoughts of a contained, underground explosion during a historically distant war only made the present seem more benign. Allida, my nightclubbing London neighbor, routinely sauntered home at 3 a.m. across Hyde Park without the remotest thought of rape, stabbing or robbery. Shooting was simply unthinkable. Still, there were moments in the Central Line, more like a sooty steel pipe, when I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if anything exploded. The passing walls were only a couple of inches away from the sides of the rounded cars, and the endless racks of blackened cables seemed even closer. By the time I left London, the IRA bombings were beginning, and thoughts of an underground explosion no longer seemed so remote.
Today, I'm strictly a tourist in London. Russell Square, site of Thursday's bombing on the Piccadilly Line, now has an accessible bus line. I banished all thoughts of wheelchairs from my mind when I lived in London. Now that I virtually live in a wheelchair and have to banish all thoughts of ever using the wildly inaccessible tube system, the new disabled-friendly London beckons in a way it never did before. I can't help feeling my losses, even as I bounce through Soho's cobblestone lanes. Yet in my ambulatory youth, I could never get around this town the way I can now. On this last day of June, rolling my electric wheelchair out of a South Kensington Hotel, I happily searched in vain for an accessible breakfast place, up one street and down another. Until I found an Italian restaurant serving breakfast on sidewalk tables. I ordered bangers and eggs, health be damned, drank tea and read the Guardian, absorbing the real news of Iraq, and feeling waves of sanity wash over me. Okay, so it was practically July and 55°, with the rain blowing sideways under the restaurant awning. I was indescribably happy.
Within a few days, Marlou had arrived and we had seen most of the current season at the Royal Shakespeare Company's provincial home in Stratford. We'd watched the RSC breathe life into a Jacobean play by Massinger the night before, deciding that the work probably deserved a "do not resuscitate" advisory, and were gearing up for a wildly avant-garde "Twelfth Night," when I decided that I just had to buy an every-other-decade new sports coat, rolled into Marks & Spencer and chatted with a shop assistant. She had that modestly helpful M&S demeanor, asked how long we were visiting Britain and where were we from...and had we heard the news from London? There had been several bombings. Gosh, I said, anyone killed? Oh, she thought about 20. Rolling between racks of clothes, my hand inadvertently slid off the wheelchair control, jerking me to a halt. Something in my face sank. Glancing up at hers, I saw the opposite. These are quite nice, she observed, extending the sleeve of something gray and tweedy. Her look said it all. We were going to get on with jacket selection, or we were not going to get on at all. I told her I wanted something brown.
"Twelfth Night," full of unscripted pianos ascending and descending above the stage, while a jazz combo played the Elizabethan airs, was too much for me to absorb. Besides, I was still absorbing the news. After the play, Marlou drove our rental car across the dark Gloucestershire fields towards my cousin's house while I switched on the radio. I needed to hear the details of the morning's bomb blasts. But the BBC's Radio 4 was doing a show on birdwatching. Radio 3 was Haydn. Nothing but pop music issuing from Radio 1, with five minutes of hourly news on Radio 2. Surely I'd find nonstop news on Capital Radio or one of the other commercial stations...but a full scan of the dial produced almost nothing. Whatever had happened was over now. You could always switch on America's CNN, if you were silly enough to demand an 11 p.m. rehash of what had transpired half a day earlier. Meanwhile, it was time for sleep. The morning papers would certainly be there. And so would England.
