ON THE ROAD

On The Road

Waiting on my bike to come out onto the Harrow Road one day last week I was horrified to see a black-headed gull being hit by a car. It happened this way: foolish cafe owners deposit unwanted food on the grass near the canal, which usually includes lots of stale bread, and on this occasion a flock of gulls had been helping themselves. By the time I came along they were squabbling in mid-air, and the brawl spilled out into the air above the road, which, since this is exactly where the road crosses the canal on a humpbacked bridge, meant that they were not very high in relation to the traffic. They wheeled and skirmished, and one of them dropped a sizeable chunk of baguette onto the road, whereupon a succession of gulls tried to pick it up without being run over. Finally this black-headed gull swooped down and managed to lift the chunk of bread, and tried to fly up and away, but didn't have enough time; he was right in front of a car coming over the bridge. I was transfixed as the car's numberplate smacked into the gull and he cartwheeled under the chassis. I was expecting to see a bloody mess on the road. Instead, when the car passed out of my line of sight, there was the gull, still holding the bread, taking off perfectly successfully, and wheeling away out of danger.

I should add that many years ago I hit a buzzard when driving in Cornwall (it was standing in the middle of a lane). I was only going at 20mph but hit it firmly as I came round a corner. I didn't stop, reasoning that there was nothing I could do for an angry, injured buzzard and not wanting to make his acquaintance in those circumstances, but when I reached my destination I examined the front of the car and found a new crack in my numberplate. I returned the same way an hour later after doing a baptism interview and did stop. There was no sign of the buzzard at all. I always believed he had just brushed himself down and gone his way, and now I am quite sure.   


The Lonely Londoners

For our book group we are reading a novel called "The Lonely Londoners", by a man called Sam Selvon. He was a Tamil/Scottish Trinidadian, and the book is about the experiences of West Indian men living in London in the 1950s, in the era just before the notorious Notting Hill riots. Published in 1956, it is written entirely in Patois, and I found myself saying sentences out loud to see what they sounded like, and recognizing their authenticity. It is a remarkable piece of work and you instinctively accept the truthfulness of the picture it paints. This is not an angry, bitter, or campaigning novel, but is matter-of-fact about the atmosphere of the times.  Of course it's particularly interesting for us as it is set almost entirely within a radius of a mile from my house; they go and hang out in the Park, or saunter along Bayswater Road, but most of them actually live in Harrow Road, "what the English call a working-class area".  It feels like really authentic local social history, but then you ponder that this is actually self-consciously a "Beat Generation" novel, in the Kerouac mould; does its consciously literary identity compromise its truthfulness? I'd say not, and contend for the importance of the novel in giving us a picture of the past. Of course a novel doesn't tell us everything; you learn nothing of the Napoleonic Wars from reading Jane Austen, but actually Pride and Prejudice does tell you something about the experience of having troops billeted in the neighbourhood in wartime, and tells you a very great deal about the society those troops were meant to defend.  After all, no accounts, however objective or drily factual they seem, are actually unmediated; there is always a writer, who has chosen to record one thing rather than another, and has drawn his own conclusions from the events he chooses. So take that as a health warning!