We became very popular for those two and a half years, with friends dropping by unannounced (that far-off era before mobile phones), for spontaneous gatherings, fuelled with takeaway retsina from the Venus Kebab House below – sometimes moving up onto the roof on summer evenings, which we made into a simple garden with a couple of trips to Columbia Road flower market. Chatter of voices and the scent of roasting meat and garlic floating up in waves from the streets below. And in the winter we had snowball fights high above Charlotte Street from our kitchen with the girls working in the offices of the sexual health clinic opposite.
At this time, Platform – the arts organisation I had started with a close friend some years before – hadn’t yet established itself, and as there was only limited funding, I started teaching part-time at an adult education college in Soho to supplement my income. The students came from all corners of the world, some of them refugees, nearly all of them working (mostly in low-paid jobs) in London. I soon fell in love with teaching, which was relatively well paid in those days, and also the ethos of the place – because it was a state college the students got highly subsidised courses taught by extremely committed and well-qualified teachers (some of them also writers, musicians, journalists in their other lives). It was also a novelty to live so close to your workplace; when I started I realised the zigzag above was the most direct way there, and timed the walk at just under seven and a half minutes. This meant that if my afternoon class started at four o’clock, I could leave at ten to four, and just have time to do my photocopying before making my entrance, sweeping into the classroom with a theatrical flourish, already speaking to my gathered students as I was crossing the threshold … The classes soon developed a special energy, becoming much more than just a place of learning, rather an animated space where all of us shared our experiences, our political views, our memories – a place of real transformations and friendships.
More than twenty years on, so much in life has changed. Partners, friends, homes. Today I live in east London, in Hackney – a place that in my central London days I would have regarded with incomprehension, but which is now simply where I feel I belong. Platform has grown into a respected organisation of researchers, educationalists and activists, and has gained support for work examining the impacts of corporate power. And although I don’t actually need to teach any more, I find it hard to stop altogether – it’s a rather mysterious kind of addiction. And so, from time to time, I can still be seen making my darting fox-track through the city, though now it starts by emerging from the Central Line at Tottenham Court Road, fighting my way down Oxford Street for 300 yards before reconnecting with my zigzag route from over twenty years before … A very alert observer, positioned high in Soho Square, for the last twenty years, might have seen the same figure, walking very fast, cutting the corners off the square, almost every Tuesday and Thursday evening, before disappearing up Carlisle Street, and zigzagging into St Anne’s Court … Walking from youth to middle age. Different coats over the years but the leather rucksack still the same, with the umbrella handle poking out the top.
To understand such continuity is simultaneously reassuring and disturbing. In many ways I feel the same as I always did, yet somehow the city confronts you – the same pubs, the same doorways, the same streets you first saw with the searching eyes of youth. Now these places are thick with memories and associations – not a street here or a pub that doesn’t contain a past story. And catching a glimpsed reflection in a window I see reflected back a face I recognise, though more furrowed than I remember. The hardness of stone and steel in the city, its unforgiving fixity. The softness of a face, how quickly it can bruise, or crumple with a smile. And all of these people, rushing past me tonight with such animation, will be gone, like me, so quickly, in the vertigo of time. So a need to stop sometimes, to slow down, to look at things we never normally make time to look at. To raise eyes above, or below, the level of the street. To look back at ourselves from that reflection and ask about the things that get lost in the day-to-dayness of life.
Only a couple of days ago, coming up the steps from the Central Line platform at Tottenham Court Road, I saw something I’d never really looked at before. I paused, recognising the name of the little town stamped into the steel reinforcers on the edges of the steps. It was only a few miles from the house where I grew up:
FERALUN-BOWES-SCOTT & WESTERN, HALSTEAD, ESSEX
Curious to have the name of a company marked permanently on the fabric of the city – hubris surely, with capitalism’s continual process of extinction and reinvention? Then my eye caught another name, this time with a phone number, but it must be from many years ago because I noticed there was a digit missing in the code.
AATI LTD TEL. (0376) 346278
Some strange impulse makes me want to ring that number. Maybe for the simple reason that it exists. But also because hundreds of millions of eyes must have passed over this tiny corner of our city, yet I doubt if anybody has ever actually written down this number and phoned it. I have a feeling that a voice at the other end of the line might have something quite significant to communicate, perhaps a message from a different kind of underworld? Though, on reflection, the result would probably be far more banal, a recorded voice explaining to the caller that the number was no longer available …
A kind of assault.
That’s the only way I can describe it.
A moment that changes the trajectory of your life.
It happened in a cinema in London, long ago. I was twenty-two years old. Watching one of the longest films ever made, certainly one of the most unforgettable – Shoah, a nine-and-a-half-hour examination of how the Holocaust was organised.
One section of the film disturbed me in a way I could not immediately understand. A voice was reading out an office memorandum, written by one bureaucrat to another. It slowly became apparent that the letter was explaining how a mobile gas chamber could be modified into a more effective killing machine. This was part of the document, as it was read out by the director, Claude Lanzmann, in the film:
Since December 1941 97,000 have been processed by the three vehicles in service with no major incidents. However, in the light of observations, the following technical changes are needed:
1. The normal load is nine per square metre. In Saurerfn1 vehicles, which are very spacious, maximum use of space is impossible. Not because of any overload but because loading to full capacity would affect the vehicle’s stability.
A reduction in capacity seems necessary. It must be reduced by one metre instead of attempting to solve the problem, as hitherto, by reducing the number of items loaded. That also extends the operating time, as the void must be filled with carbon monoxide. On the other hand, if the load space is reduced and the vehicle is packed solid, operating time can be shortened considerably. The manufacturers told us in discussion that reducing the length of the vehicle would unbalance it. They claim the front axle would be overloaded. But, in fact, the balance is automatically restored because the merchandise during the operation displays a natural tendency to push to the rear doors and is mainly found lying there at the end of the operation. So the front axle is not overloaded.