East-West Page 7

  ‘I hate you!’ she shouted, storming out.

  ‘Why do you always rise to it?’ her mother asked him later. ‘She’s just bored. There aren’t enough other youngsters her age round here. People with children can’t afford it.’

  ‘They don’t work hard enough,’ he said.

  North Acton, 9.30 a.m.

  When was she going to grow up? her mother wondered.

  ‘Haven’t you got revision to do or something?’ she said, pulling open the curtain.

  Her daughter twisted her face into the pillow. She won a few more seconds of darkness.

  ‘I’m not at school, Mum,’ she complained.

  Her mother retorted, ‘You’re twenty-one now.’

  ‘I know,’ she responded.

  Her mother rearranged her argument: ‘We only want what’s best for you.’

  The daughter negotiated: ‘Exams aren’t until after Easter. Don’t worry. I’ll have plenty of time to revise. I’m doing fine at uni. But there is more to life than just studying. Look, I’m saving money by staying at home. I’ve got the job in the bar to get the cash I need to buy my clothes. I’m very grateful to you and Dad, but I have to enjoy myself a little and the only time I can go out is after the bar closes. And there are night buses, so it’s OK.’

  ‘What time did you get in?’ Her mother smelt a rat.

  The daughter tried to explain: ‘Oh, not too late, and it isn’t as if there’ll ever be any trouble here. If anything kicks off it will be in Ealing Green, down by the college, south of the main line.’24 Skilfully she had changed the subject.

  ‘Trouble, what trouble?’ asked her mother.

  ‘Kids. You know, kids with nothing to do. They’re always hanging around down there. Ones I used to know at college, the ones that didn’t get to uni. They’ve got nothing to do.’

  ‘They should get a job,’ her mother retorted.

  ‘There are no jobs,’ replied her daughter. ‘Anyway I’m at uni. Working at the bar isn’t the only reason I have to get up. But what if I didn’t have uni? What would I do? Work at a bar to pay the rent and to buy some clothes and then just sleep all day? What for?’ She saw the older women’s expression and stopped.

  Her mother started: ‘Before she had me, just before I was born, my mother was fighting for the right to work. Women weren’t expected to work after having a child then. Gran was paid a pittance then, just because she was a woman. Women teachers got equal pay on my birthday. I bet they didn’t teach you that at university! What about my jobs? Were none of them good enough? Not good enough because I didn’t go to university? I didn’t have a career because I had you! Twenty-nine was not young then. Not to have a baby. It was old. I wish I had gone to university.’

  ‘You wish you hadn’t had me,’ the daughter said curtly.

  ‘I didn’t say that. It’s just that most other mums round here seem to have more. I lost out. I’m doing a job you think even your friends who left college shouldn’t touch. What for? To pay off the mortgage? By the time we do that you might have left home, if you ever find a job that is good enough for you!’ her mother complained.

  ‘I’m going to be a transport planner,’ the daughter said. She knew her mother hated planners. They were going to turn Acton into the new King’s Cross. This was her mother’s favourite complaint: the building of that new ‘Great Western Station’ at Old Oak Common.25 Planners would harm the value of the neighbourhood.

  Greenford to North Acton

  Within a year of these 16 people waking up along the westernmost extent of the Central Line the fears of the residents of Perivale came true:

  ‘When Transport Secretary Justine Greening approved plans for the £32 billion HS2 link this month, she announced a 2.7-mile tunnel through Ruislip, in a concession to protesters who say their lives will be blighted by noise and disruption.

  But their neighbours in Perivale and Greenford say they still face the prospect of 225mph trains thundering past their homes on the London-to-Birmingham route, as well as years of building work before its completion in 2026.’26

  The four mothers we have just met, from Greenford through to North Acton, are unlikely to have to suffer much of the building work. Average-aged when they gave birth (for this end of the line), today they are aged 54, 53, 50 and 50.27 Most will sell up and move further out of London before any disruption begins. That’s what people of these ages tend to do in this part of the world. They are just waiting for their children to leave the nest. Their concern is for the equity they will lose in the value of their homes at the point of those future sales.

  It’s worth making a point about parents: these parents from Greenford to North Acton have all been quite old. From west to east these mothers were aged 42, 38, 32 and 29 when they gave birth. This is typical of north-west London: parents entering their sixth decade with children entering their second or third. Their ages are taken from a nationally typical set of ages of mothers drawn from distributions revealed in recent official records.28 In other words, for the places where they gave birth, in most cases for the first time, these mothers are not unusual.

  Source: See http://www.londonmapper.org.uk/features/inequality-in-london/

  The childhood demography of the Central Line is quite simple: two hills of relatively high numbers of children are separated by a valley of childlessness. The metaphorical river of never-growing-up is the one running down Tottenham Court Road. The peaks either side of the river of childlessness are to be found by Northolt to the west and Leyton to the east, places where just over and just under a quarter of all people are young children.29

  East Acton, 10.00 a.m.

  ‘It’s only a ten-minute walk away,’ he had said. She said she had brought him some new clothes so he could throw away the old ones. He liked to look smart. He’d always worried about how he looked. She had noticed it even when he was in playgroup. He had taken more care over his clothes than other kids had.

  ‘It’s only ten minutes back to East Acton,’ he had said. It had been a long way for her to come, early in the morning, but she worked evenings. But this wasn’t how she’d thought she’d be spending her Saturdays this spring.

  When he was little she’d thought about how well he’d do at school, how he’d go to college, to university, meet a nice girl, get a good job, settle down, buy a house and make her a grandmother one day. Not too soon, mind, but one day. Now she was buying him clothes, and he was 24 years old. She remembered how she felt when he got out of nappies.

  He was already reminiscing over her visit, which had just ended. ‘It won’t take you long to get home,’ he had said. Had these been his last words? Why hadn’t he said, ‘Thank you for coming’? ‘Thank you for the clothes’? Or just ‘I’m sorry.’ Was he sorry? It wasn’t really his fault. He’d just been a bit slower than the rest. It didn’t help that he’d gone to that school; that he’d not much liked his teachers. Maybe he’d been unlucky. But his mum just told him it was because he was slower that he kept on being the one that got caught. In here he wasn’t slow. In here he was one of the quickest. In here he was one of the older ones at 24, not the baby any more. He wouldn’t get caught so easily again. He didn’t want his mum having to bring him second-hand jeans, again.

  ‘It’s only ten minutes.’ That is what he’d said. But that was just the walk back to the tube. She had the time, she didn’t have the money. It was the cost of the ticket that was the unspoken issue. The cost was £4.30, both there and back; £8.60 in all, or maybe £1.60 less with an off-peak day travel card.30

  ‘You should get an Oyster card,’ he’d told her. She didn’t want an Oyster card. It would remind her. She didn’t need it for anything other than visiting him.

  ‘You’d save £4.60 if you got an Oyster card,’ he’d said. ‘It’s just £2 on Saturdays.’ She’d never had any kind of card, didn’t want to get into debt.

  ‘It’s not a credit card,’ he’d said. What did he know? She wasn’t going to get in debt. She’d brought £10 in pound co
ins to spend on the two of them in the canteen. It had to be pound coins, she’d learned that. You can’t take notes in.31 But it hadn’t been enough. It would be the only time she would eat out this week.

  Altogether the tube tickets, the £10 of coins, the cheap charity-shop jeans came to more than £20. He’d be out in a few weeks, though. He thought he wouldn’t get caught again, but he was the kind who always got caught.32 He just got restless, and he wanted things, only good clothes, not second-hand jeans.

  A minute later she was reminiscing over her visit. He hadn’t even said thank you.

  Visiting time for remand prisoners ends at 10 a.m. at Wormwood Scrubs on Saturdays.

  White City, 10.30 a.m.

  What was she going to do?

  ‘Make it the history of the “now” of White City,’ they’d said. ‘Include a bit about the past but make it relevant to now.’ She was googling ‘White City’.

  ‘BBC Breakfast’s Sian Williams quits to escape move to Salford’ was the headline in Tuesday’s Evening Standard.33 Way down in the comments below the article she read:

  ‘There seems to be a general assumption by many southerners that the BBC staff will have to uproot their families and live in Salford … so you’re telling me that all the BBC staff live in White City? Most will aim for the wealthy Cheshire and Lancashire suburbs including Alderley Edge, Wilmslow, the Ribble Valley etc. and commute as they do now.’34

  Well, she was BBC staff and she lived in White City, but only because she was 27, had not yet met the right person to settle down with and couldn’t afford better. And, anyway, it was great when QPR weren’t playing at home.

  ‘The route of the Marathon in the Olympics in 1908’ (she was googling again), ‘went from Windsor Castle to White City.’ But then she read that the last half-mile of the route was now all built over.35 The year 1908 was too early for radio recordings or TV cameras and no good for reconstruction. And that date was no good. What she needed was an anniversary … She typed on.

  ‘The Coronation Exhibition, 1911 …’36 Now she was on to something. ‘The 22nd of June!’ she cried. Oh, God! That was too soon, she couldn’t make a programme in three months, not even for radio, not from scratch. She read more, faster, but she thought that ‘George Frederick Ernest Albert of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’, who became George V that day, was hardly ‘now’. The BBC didn’t welcome irony on how the royals were even more Saxe-Coburg and Gotha than before, ever since Liz had married Phil, who was more German than Greek. But when had she married him? When was Phil born? Who was he? Why were his sisters not invited to the royal wedding? Did the public really want to know? Was there any anniversary in that? This just wasn’t going to work.

  What’s ‘now’, she thought? ‘Politics’ is now. She shouldn’t put single quotes around every phrase. She thought harder. She thought, right – why not the politics of ‘White City’? She hadn’t bothered to vote last year; but she could quickly find out who had, TGFG (‘Thank God for Google’).

  She lived in Wormholt and White City ward. It took her a few more minutes to work that out – to work out where she lived! She ought to have known that voting was by ward. Well, she did now. Amazing what they didn’t teach you at university.

  ‘Good God,’ she exclaimed. All three of her councillors were Labour.37 Well, no wonder it’s rough round here, she thought. You’d hardly expect Sian to live somewhere where almost everyone voted Labour. She’d heard that half the kids here were living in poverty, that it was worse here than the East End, but that couldn’t be true, could it?

  ‘Elections,’ she said (to no one in particular). ‘Damn.’ None in 1911, but two in 1910; what was she going to do? And why was she working on a Saturday morning? She’d spent half an hour and just gone round in circles. Should she walk to work? The media village felt a bit like an open prison, all that security, with Starbucks outside for everyone to show off their new phones and pretend not to want to bump into anyone. Only the tragic people would be in on Saturday, she thought. And all the men were married.

  Shepherd’s Bush, 11.00 a.m.

  He wasn’t married, wasn’t in a relationship. He was still in bed. He had a job but didn’t work Saturdays and he had a hobby, the local history of Shepherd’s Bush Green. It wasn’t that he was a nerd. It wasn’t that he had nothing else to do. It was just that what had happened round here in the past had been so fascinating, so important, and so few people knew about it.

  Most people here didn’t have kids. Kids were in White City or Holland Park. Here was just a bit too busy, a bit too noisy. But there was something else too. Here was where the poor were, and had been. The very poorest part was just north of here to be exact (and he did like to be exact), a place called Notting Dale. It was here, in 1911, that the highest death rate in London was recorded.38

  The nascent Labour Party gained control of its first ward here, in 1906. In 1911 George Lansbury, the Labour MP, had published his pamphlet ‘Smash up the Workhouse’. He read on his iPad: ‘The Notting Dale Workhouse on Mary Place was then renowned as “the cruellest in London”.’39 The anarchists used to meet here and revolution was planned.40 The American president had been shot by an anarchist just a few years earlier. The greatest abject poverty in London was found here on the way to Latimer Road, and ‘the close proximity of one of His Majesty’s Prisons for short-timers leads many of the prisoners, when they are released, to find their way here by sort of instinct’ apparently, according to Robert Lee, a missionary writing on the area in 1902.41 Just like my neighbour, he thought, out on bail from the Scrubs …

  But then he read on:

  ‘There is one feature of Notting Dale which strikes you forcibly if you go into a local crowd engaged in a heated argument, and that is the preponderance of the rural accent; for this is a district in which the evil of rural immigration has written itself large. Thousands of honest country folk crowd up year after year to the great city that they believe to be paved with gold. Of those who come in by the Great Western a large percentage drift to the Dale, failing to find room in the districts around the terminus; and in the Dale a process of moral deterioration goes on which is a tragedy.’42

  Moral deterioration, just like his neighbours one the other side, then! His mind raced: except they’re from rural Pakistan, not rural Padstow. He liked living here, he liked his neighbours despite their trading in illicit goods, and he liked making connections with the past.

  He read out aloud the words of the Reverend Thomas Yeats, as spoken at the London City Mission’s annual meeting held on 6 May 1911: ‘Midway between Holland Park and Shepherd’s Bush, with its western boundary abutting on to the White City, is the notorious district of Notting Dale, “that dark spot”.’43

  He turned back to read more of Robert Lee:

  ‘Enquiring from old residents whether this part is better or worse than it was 10 or 20 years ago, I have received conflicting reports. For various reasons I cannot see how there can possibly be any change for the better.’

  Robert Lee mentioned ‘Freston Road’, so he Googled it, and laughed to find what looked like the offices of upmarket designer Cath Kidston near this exact spot. It would be so easy to tell a story of ‘now and then’, he thought. What has stayed the same and what’s changed, but would anyone be interested? Any woman? He needed to make himself more interesting to women.

  Holland Park, 11.30 a.m.

  ‘Is this how I’d expected to spend weekends this spring?’ she wondered, talking silently to the baby in her tummy. She was 33 now; she’d be 34 when she gave birth.

  ‘I’m 23 now, but will I live to see 24 …’ she sang. What was it with her and lyrics? They got trapped in her head, but she was living about as different a life from a Gangsta’s Paradise as it was possible to live.

  ‘We spell it “Gangster” in Holland Park,’ she told the little one in her tummy. She was just 16 when that song was number one. She had always known she would go to university, do well and marry well. No one who lived
here came from round here. If anything she was a bit young to be a mum here at 33. She knew that – for London – she was the typical age to be a mother, but London was split apart, and the chasms were widening. She’d read it in a book on the tube. Nationally four out of ten mums were older than her and five out of ten were younger. She was the ‘one in ten’, the one in the middle. Her dad used to sing that. She didn’t know where the song came from. She’d never really known what that song was about.44

  ‘Playgroup or nursery?’ she asked the bump. The schools round here were good apparently, not just good but some of the best, but ‘bump’ might do better in the independent sector. They shouldn’t put their principles before their child’s future, her husband always said. He was in Manchester, away on work. He travelled a lot. They’d thought of living near there briefly. ‘Alderley Edge’, ‘Ribble Valley’, everywhere north sounded so rustic. At least everywhere you might want to live. But his career meant they had to be here. What if he had to find another job? What of baby’s future? Where best to live to do well at school, go to college, to university, to meet someone nice, get a good job, settle down, buy a house and make her a grandmother one day?

  She sang, to herself and the bump, ‘I’m the child that never learns to read ’cause no one spared the time.’

  There had once been a workhouse near here, she told the bump as she walked along Mary Place. She’d be pushing a pram along here soon. Was this where Mary Poppins was set, or was it Peter Pan? So many children’s stories were set around here. Had the workhouse been Oliver Twist’s? She turned left past Henry Dickens Court.

  There are now places in Britain where, if you have a baby and it is a boy, he is more likely to go to prison than university; she remembered reading that somewhere too, her hand on her bump. But their mums weren’t married, she thought. All the men round here were married. Her mobile rang and it was the father-to-be. He had something to tell her.