Notes from a Small Island

by Bill Bryson

  I walked along the painfully noisy street called The Highway, quietly agog at all the new development. It was like being in the midst of an ugly-building competition. For the better part of a decade, architects had been arriving in the area and saying, ‘You think that’s bad? Wait’11 you see what / can do.’ And there, towering proudly above all the clunky new offices, was the ugliest piece of bulk in London, the News International complex, looking like the central air-conditioning unit for the planet.

  When I last saw it, in 1986, it stood forlornly amid acres of empty warehouses and puddly wasteground. The Highway, as I recalled it, was a comparatively sedate throughway. Now heavy lorries pounded along it, making the pavements tremble and giving the air an unhealthy bluish tinge. The News International compound was still surrounded with sinister fencing and electronic gates, but there was a new maximum-security reception centre that looked like something you’d expect to find at a plutonium depot at Sellafield. Goodness knows what terrorist contingency they have allowed for, but it must be something ambitious. I’d never seen a more unbreachable-looking complex.

  I presented myself at the security window and waited outside while my colleague was summoned. The most eerie thing about the scene now was how serene it was. The memory seared into my skull was of crowds of demonstrators and police on horses and angry pickets who one minute would be screaming at you with wild eyes and big teeth and the next would say, ‘Oh, hi, Bill, didn’t recognize you,’ and then exchange fags and talk about what a dreadful business this all was. And it was a dreadful business, for among the 5,000 sacked workers were hundreds and hundreds of decent, mild-mannered librarians, clerks, secretaries and messengers whose only sin was to have joined a union. To their eternal credit, most bore those of us still in work no personal grudges, though I confess the thought of Vince stepping from the crowd with a machete always hastened my steps through the gate.

  :* For about 500 yards along the northern side of the compound, •butting Pennington Street, stands a low, windowless, brick building, an old storehouse left over from the days when the East find was a bustling port and distribution point for the City. Gutted and kitted out with hi-tech trappings, this rather unlikely building became, and remains, the offices of The Times and Sunday Times. Inside, throughout that long winter of 1986, while we fumblingly found our way through a new computerized technology, we could hear chants and turmoil, the muffled clops of passing police horses, the roar and shrieks of a baton charge, but because the building was windowless, we couldn’t see anything. It was very odd. We would watch it on the 9 O’clock News, then step outside and there it would be in three dimensions - the most bitter and violent industrial dispute yet seen on the streets of London -happening just outside the front gate. It was a deeply bizarre experience.

  To keep morale up, the company each night brought round boxes of sandwiches and beer, which seemed a cheery gesture until you realized that the largesse was carefully worked out to provide each member of staff with one damp ham sandwich and a six-ounce can of warm Heineken. We were also presented with glossy brochures showing the company’s plans for the site once the dispute was over. No two people seem to remember the same things from this brochure. I clearly recall architect’s drawings of a large indoor swimming-pool, with unusually sleek and healthy-looking journalists diving off a low board or lounging with feet dangling in the water. Others remember squash courts and exercise rooms. One guy I know recollects a ten-pin bowling alley. Nearly everybody recalls a large modern bar such as you might find in the first-class lounge of a well-appointed airport.

  Even from beyond the security perimeter, I could see several new buildings inside, and I couldn’t wait to find out exactly what facilities the staff had been blessed with. It was the first question I asked my old colleague - whose name I dare not confide here lest he find himself abruptly transferred to classified advertising telesales - when he came to collect me at the gate. ‘Oh, I remember the swimming-pool,’ he said. ‘We never heard anything more about that once the dispute was over. But give them their due, they’ve increased our hours. They now let us work an extra day every fortnight without additional pay.’

  ‘Their way of showing they think highly of you all?’

  ‘They wouldn’t ask us to do more work if they didn’t like the way we did it, would they?’ Quite. .

  We strolled along the main thoroughfare of the plant between the old brick storehouse and the monumental printworks. People passed like extras in a Hollywood movie - a workman with a long plank of wood, two women in smart business suits, a guy with a hardhat and a clipboard, a deliveryman cradling a large pot plant. We passed through a door into The Times editorial suite and I gasped quietly. It is always a small shock to go back to a place where you worked years before and see the same faces toiling at the same desks - a combination of sudden familiarity, as if you’ve never been away at all, and profound, heartfelt gratitude because you have. I saw my old friend Mickey Clark, now a media star, and found Graham Searjeant in his little cave made of newspapers and press releases, some of them dating back to the days when Mr Morris was still making motorcars, and encountered many other friends and former colleagues. We did all the usual things -compared stomachs and bald patches and made lists of the missing and dead. It was quite splendid really. Afterwards, I was taken to lunch in the canteen. At the old Times building on Gray’s Inn Road the canteen had been in a basement room that had the charm and ambience of a submarine and the food had been slopped out by humourless drones who always brought to mind moles in aprons, but this was bright and spacious, with a wide choice of tempting dishes served by chirpy cockney girls in bright, clean uniforms. The dining area itself was unchanged except for the view. Where formerly had sprawled a muddy swamp crisscrossed with neglected water channels full of bedsteads and shopping trolleys, there now stood row upon row of designer houses and jaunty blocks of flats of the kind you always find around redeveloped waterfronts in Britain, the sort of buildings where all the balconies and exterior trim are made from lengths of tubular metal painted red.

  It occurred to me that though I had worked at this site for seven months, I had never seen Wapping and was, of a sudden, keen to have a look at it. When I had finished my pudding and bid fond farewells to my ex-colleagues, I hastened out through the security gates, intentionally failing to turn in my security pass in the hope that nuclear attack sirens would sound and men in chemical warfare suits would begin a sprinting search of the compound for me, and then, with nervous backward glances, I redoubled my pace up tennington Street as it occurred to me that at News International ?this was not actually outside the bounds of possibility.

  I had never strolled through Wapping because during the dispute & was unsafe to. The pubs and cafes of the district teemed with disgruntled printers and visiting delegations of sympathizers - Scottish miners were particularly feared for some reason - who would happily have torn a wimpy journalist’s limbs from his sockets to use as torches for that night’s procession. One journalist who encountered some former printers in a pub some way from Wapping had a glass smashed in his face and, as I recall, nearly died, or at the very least failed to enjoy the rest of his evening.

  So unsafe was it, particularly after dark, that the police often wouldn’t let us out until the small hours, particularly on nights of big demos. Because we never knew when we would be set free, we had to form our cars into a line and then sit for hour upon hour in the freezing cold. Some time between 11 p.m. and 1.30 a.m., when a significant portion of the braying throngs had been beaten back or dragged off to jail or had just wandered home, the gates would be thrown open and a great fleet of News International trucks would roar down a ramp and out onto The Highway, where they would be met by a barrage of bricks and crush barriers from whatever was left of the mob. The rest of us, meanwhile, were instructed to make haste in convoy through the back lanes of Wapping and to disperse when we were a safe distance from the plant. This worked well enough for several nights, but one evening
we were sent on our way just as the pubs were shutting. As we were proceeding down some darkened, narrow street, suddenly people were stepping out of the shadows and into the road, kicking doors and heaving whatever came to hand. Ahead of me there were startling explosions of glass and intemperate shouting. To my deep and lasting astonishment someone about six cars ahead of me - a fussy little man from the foreign desk, who even now I would happily drag over rough ground behind a Land-Rover - got out to look at the damage to his car, as if he thought he might have run over a nail, bringing those of us behind to a halt. I remember watching in sputtering dismay as he tried to press back into position a flapping piece of trim, then turning my head to find at my window an enraged face - a white guy with dancing dreadlocks and an army surplus jacket - and everything took on a strange dreamlike quality. How odd, I thought, that a total stranger was about to pull me from my car and beat me mushy for the benefit of printworkers he had never met, who would mostly despise him as an unkempt hippie, would certainly never let him into their own union, and who had enjoyed decades of obscenely inflated earnings without once showing collective support for any other union, including, on occasion, provincial branches of their own NGA. Simultaneously it occurred to me that I was about to squander my small life for the benefit of a man who had, without apparent hesitation, given up his own nationality out of economic self-interest, who didn’t know who I was, would as lightly have discarded me if a machine could be found to do my job, and whose idea of maximum magnanimity was to hand out a six-ounce can of beer and a limp sandwich. I could imagine the company writing to my wife: ‘Dear Mrs Bryson: In appreciation of your husband’s recent tragic death at the hands of a terrifying mob, we would like you to have this sandwich and can of lager. PS - Could you please return his parking pass?’

  And all the time this was going on, while a large wild man with dreadlocks was trying to wrench open my door with a view to carrying me off wriggling into the darkness, some halfwit from the foreign desk fifty yards ahead was walking slowly around his Peugeot, assessing it deliberatively like someone about to buy a second-hand car, and occasionally pausing to look with puzzlement at the bricks and blows raining down on the cars behind him, as if it were some kind of freak weather occurrence. Eventually, he got back in his car, checked the rearview mirror, made sure his newspaper was still on the seat beside him, put on his indicator, checked the mirror again and pulled off, and my life was saved.

  Four days later, the company stopped bringing round free sandwiches and beer.

  It was thus very refreshing to walk without fear for my life through the dozing streets of Wapping. I have never bought into that quaint conceit about London being essentially a cluster of villages - where else have you seen villages with flyovers, gasometers, reeling derelicts and a view of the Post Office Tower? - but to my delight and surprise Wapping did, in fact, rather feel like one. Its shops were small and varied and the streets had cozy names: Cinnamon Street, Waterman Way, Vinegar Street, Milk Yard. The council estates were snug and cheery looking, and the looming warehouses had almost all been smartly renovated as flats. I instinctively quivered at the sight of yet more glossy red trim and the thought of these once-proud workplaces filled with braying twits named Selena and Jasper, but it must be said that they have

  t^learly brought some prosperity to the neighbourhood and doubt-| fess saved the old warehouses from far sadder fates.

  Near Wapping Old Stairs, I had a look at the river and tried to ^imagine, without the tiniest measure of success, what these old neighbourhoods must have looked like in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they teemed with workers and the wharves P were piled high with barrels of the spices and condiments that gave ; the surrounding streets their names. As recently as 1960, over ? 100,000 people worked on the docks or drew their livings from it, I’, and Docklands was still one of the busiest ports in the world. By 1981, every London dock was closed. The view of the river from Wapping now was as tranquil and undisturbed as a Constable land-- scape. I watched the river for perhaps thirty minutes and saw just one boat go by. Then I turned and began the long trek back to Hazlitt’s.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I SPENT A COUPLE MORE DAYS IN LONDON DOING NOTHING MUCH. I DID a little research in a newspaper library, spent most of one afternoon trying to find my way through the complex network of pedestrian subways at Marble Arch, did a little shopping, saw some friends.

  Everyone I saw said, ‘Gosh, you’re brave!’ when I revealed that I was planning to travel around Britain by public transport, but it never occurred to me to go any other way. You are so lucky in this country to have a relatively good public transport system (relative, that is, to what it will be when the Tories finish with it) and I think we should all try harder to enjoy.it while it’s still there. Besides, driving in Britain is such a dreary experience these days. There are far too many cars on the road, nearly double what there were when I first came here, and in those days people didn’t actually drive their cars. They just parked them in the driveway and buffed them up once every week or so. About twice a year they would ‘get the car out’ - those were the words they used, like that in itself was a big operation - and pootle off to visit relatives in East Grinstead or have a trip to some place like Hayling Island or Eastbourne, and that was about it, apart from the buffing.

  Now everyone drives everywhere for everything, which I don’t understand because there isn’t a single feature of driving in Britain that has even the tiniest measure of enjoyment in it. Just consider the average multi-storey car park. You drive around for ages, and then spend a small eternity shunting into a space that is exactly two inches wider than the average car. Then, because you are parked next to a pillar, you have to climb over the seats and end up squeezing butt-first out of the passenger door, in the process transferring all the dirt from the side of your car to the back of your smart new jacket from Marks & Spencer. Then you go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn’t make change or accept any coin introduced since 1976, and wait on an old guy who likes to read all the instructions on the machine before committing himself and then tries to insert his money through the ticket slot and maintenance keyhole.

  Eventually you acquire a ticket and trek back to your car where your wife greets you with a ‘Where have you been?’ Ignoring her, you squeeze past the pillar, collecting a matching set of dust for the front of your jacket, discover that you can’t reach the windscreen as the door only opens three inches, so you just sort of throw the ticket at the dashboard (it flutters to the floor but your wife doesn’t notice so you say, ‘Fuck it,’ and lock the door), and squeeze back out where your wife sees what a scruff you’ve turned into after she spent all that time dressing you and beats the dust from you with paddled hands while saying, ‘Honestly, I can’t take you anywhere.’

  And that’s just the beginning. Arguing quietly, you have to find your way out of this dank hellhole via an unmarked door leading to a curious chamber that seems to be a composite of dungeon and urinal, or else wait two hours for the world’s most abused and unreliable-looking lift, which will only take two people and already has two people in it - a man whose wife is beating dust from his new Marks & Spencer jacket and berating him in clucking tones.

  And the remarkable thing is that everything about this process is intentionally - mark this, intentionally - designed to flood your life with unhappiness. From the tiny parking bays that can only be got into by manoeuvring your car through a forty-six-point turn (why can’t the spaces be angled, for crying out loud?) to the careful placing of pillars where they will cause maximum obstruction, to the ramps that are so dark and narrow and badly angled that you always bump the kerb, to the remote, wilfully unhelpful ticket machines (you can’t tell me that a machine that can recognize and reject any foreign coin ever produced couldn’t make change if it wanted to) - all of this is designed to make this the most dispiriting experience of your adult life. Did you know - this is a little-known fact but absolute truth - tha
t when they dedicate a new multi-storey car park the Lord Mayor and his wife have a ceremonial pee in the stairwell? It’s true.

  And that’s just one tiny part of the driving experience. There areall the other manifold annoyances of motoring, like National Express drivers who pull out in front of you on motorways, eight-mile-long contraflow systems erected so that some guys on a crane can change a lightbulb, traffic lights on busy roundabouts that never let you advance more than twenty feet at a time, motorway service areas where you have to pay £4.20 for a minipot of coffee and a jacket potato with a sneeze of cheddar in it and there’s no point in going to the shop because the men’s magazines are all sealed in plastic and you don’t need any Waylon Jennings Highway Hits tapes, morons with caravans who pull out of side-roads just as you approach, some guy in a Morris Minor going 11 mph through the Lake District and collecting a three-mile following because, apparently, he’s always wanted to lead a parade, and other challenges to your patience and sanity nearly beyond endurance. Motorized vehicles are ugly and dirty and they bring out the worst in people. They clutter every kerbside, turn ancient market squares into disorderly jumbles of metal, spawn petrol stations, secondhand car lots, Kwik-Fit centres and other dispiriting blights. They are horrible and awful and I wanted nothing to do with them on this trip. And besides, my wife wouldn’t let me have the car.

  Thus it was that I found myself late on a grey Saturday afternoon, on an exceptionally long and empty train bound for Windsor. I sat high on the seat in an empty carriage, and in fading daylight watched as the train slid past office blocks and out into the forests of council flats and snaking terrace houses of Vauxhall and Clapham. At Twickenham, I discovered why the train was so long and so empty. The platform was jammed solid with men and boys in warm clothes and scarves carrying glossy programmes and little bags with tea flasks peeping out: obviously a rugby crowd from the Twickenham grounds. They boarded with patience and without pushing, and said sorry when they bumped . or inadvertently impinged on someone else’s space. I admired this instinctive consideration for others, and was struck by what a regular thing that is in Britain and how little it is noticed. Nearly everyone rode all the way to Windsor - I presume there must be some sort of parking arrangement there; Windsor can’t provide that many rugby fans -and formed a patient crush at the ticket barrier. An Asian man collected tickets in fast motion and said thank you to every person who passed. He didn’t have time to examine the tickets - you could have handed him a cornflakes boxtop - but he did manage to find a vigorous salute for all, and they in turn thanked him for relieving them of their tickets and letting them pass. It was a little miracle of orderliness and goodwill. Anywhere else there’d have been some-one on a box barking at people to form a line and not push.