Then, just as suddenly, the Spades all ran, as if someone had told them to on a walkie-talkie from headquarters somewhere – and they dived round corners and inside their houses, slamming doors. Honest! One minute there were white and coloured faces battling, and the next there were only white. There was a lot of shouting and discussion after that, and a few more bottles through the windows where a Spade or two was peeping out, and the white kid was carried on the pavement where I couldn’t see him, and the law arrived in a radio-car and told everybody to disperse. And that was that. All over.
Then, a bit later, came incident number two – or three. Along another road I was prospecting, I saw driving along quite slow, because anyway it was pulling up, one of those ‘flashy cars’ A. Drove was on about, and four Spades in it – and the driver handling the thing in that way Spades often do, i.e. very expertly, but as if he didn’t realise it was a machine, not a wonderful animal of some kind. Well, two of those delivery vans I spoke of sandwiched it like the law cars do in US crime films, and out from the back and front of them came about sixteen fellers – those from the back spilling out as if they were some peculiar kind of cargo the van had on board that day. And these were not Teds, but men – anyway, up in the twenties, somewhere, I should judge – and this time there was no previous argument whatever, they just rushed at that vehicle, and wrenched the doors open, and dragged out the Spades, and crunched them. Of course, they fought back – though once again, there was that same brief hesitation as I’d noticed with the Sikhs, that same moment of complete surprise. Two were left lying, and got kicked (those boys certainly knew all about vulnerable parts), and two made away, one weeping; and about a hundred of my own people gathered round about to watch.
And about those who watched, I saw something new to me, and which you may find quite incredible – but I swear it’s the truth I’m telling you – they didn’t even seem to enjoy themselves particularly – I mean, seeing all this – they didn’t shout, or bawl, or cheer; they just stood by, out of harm’s way, these English people did, and watched. Just like at home at evening, with their Ovaltine and slippers, at the telly. Quite decent, respectable people they seemed, too: white-collar workers and their wives, I expect, who’d probably been out to do their shopping. Well, they saw the lads get in the Spades’ car, and drive it against a concrete lamp-standard, and climb back in their handy little delivery vans, and drive away. And once again, that was that. Except that a few coloured women came out and tended the men lying there, who the bystanders I spoke of had come up a bit nearer to, to examine.
Then came another incident – and soon, as you’ll understand, I began to lose count a little, and, as time went on, lose count a bit of what time was, as well. This one was down by the Latimer Road railway station, among those criss-cross of streets I mentioned earlier, like Lancaster, and Silchester, and Walmer, and Blechynden. In this part, by now, there was quite a muster: I mean, by now people realised what was happening – that there were kicks to be had if you came out in the thoroughfare, and besides, the pubs were emptying for the afternoon. And they all moved about like up in Middlesex street at the market there on Sunday, groups shifting and reforming, searching. People were telling about what had happened here, or there, or in some other place, and they all seemed disappointed nothing was happening for them then and there.
Well, they weren’t disappointed long. Because out of the Metropolitan Railway station – the dear old London Transport, we all think so safe and so reliable – came a bunch of passengers, and among them was a Spade. Just one. A boy of my own age, I’d say, carrying a holdall and a brown paper parcel – a serious-looking kiddy with a pair of glasses, and one of those rather sad, drab suits that some Spades wear, particularly students, in order to show the English people that we mustn’t think they’re savages in grass skirts and bones stuck in their hair, but twentieth-century numbers just like we are. I think he was an African: anyway, there’s no doubt that’s where his ancestors all came from – millions of them, for centuries way back in time.
Now, this kiddy must have been rather dumb. Because he evidently didn’t rumble anything was at all unusual – perhaps he’d come down from Manchester or somewhere, to visit pals. Anyway, down the road he walked, stepping aside politely if people were in his way, and they all watching. All those eyes watching him, and the noise dropping. Then someone cried out, ‘Get him!’ and the Spade dug it quick enough then – and he started running down the Bramley Road like lightning, though still clutching his holdall and his parcel, and at least a hundred young men chasing after him, and hundreds of girls and kids and adults running after them, and even motorbikes and cars. Some heathen god from home must have shouted sense into his ear just then, because he dived into a greengrocer’s and slammed the door. And the old girl inside locked it from within, and she glared out at the crowd, and the crowd gathered round there, and they shouted – and I’m quoting their words exactly – ‘Let’s get him!’ and ‘Bring him out!’ and ‘Lynch him!’
They cried that.
But they didn’t get him. What they got, was the old greengrocer women instead, who came out of another door, and went for them. Picture this! This one old girl, with her grey hair all in a mess, and her old face flushed with fury, she stood there surrounded by this crowd of hundreds, and she bawled them out. She said they were a stack of cowards and gutter bastards, the whole lot of them, but they started shouting back at her, and I couldn’t hear. But she didn’t budge, the old girl, and her husband had got the shutters up inside, and by and by the law made its appearance with some vans as well this time, and they got through the crowd, and started milling round, and collected the young African, and moved among the mob in groups of six and told it to disperse – with truncheons out this time, just for a change.
I went off after this to be a bit alone. I rode out of the area to the big open space on Wormwood Scrubs, and I sat down on the grass to have a think. Because what I’d just seen in there made me feel weak and hopeless: most of all because, except for that old vegetable woman (who I bet will go straight up to heaven like a supersonic rocket when she dies – nothing can stop that one), no one, absolutely no one, had reacted against this thing. You looked round to find the members of the other team – even just a few of them – and there weren’t any. I mean, any of us. The Spades were fighting back all right, of course, because they had to. But there were none of us.
When this thing happens to you, please believe me, it’s just like as if the stones rise up from the pavement there and hit you, and the houses tumble, and the sky falls in. I mean, everything that you relied on, and all the natural things, do what you don’t expect them to. Your sense of security, and of there being some plan, some idea behind it all somewhere, just disappears.
I dusted my arse, and rode down Wood Lane to the White City, where the old BBC’s building, that splendid modernistic palace, so as to send their telly messages to the nation. And I looked at it and thought, ‘My God, if I could get in there and tell them – all the millions! Just take them across the railway tracks, not a quarter of a mile away, and show them what’s happening in the capital city of our country!’ And I’d say to them, ‘If you don’t want that, for Christ’s sake come down and stop it – every one of you! But if that’s what you do want, then I don’t want you, and for me, it’s goodbye England!’ Then I turned back again inside the area, inside those railway tracks that hem it in – out of White City into Brown Town and as I was travelling past the station there, I saw another small encouraging sight, and stopped and looked.
This was a small old geezer, with a cloth cap and a choker, who’d got hold of a young Spade so tight I thought at first he was arresting him, or going to damage him in some way. But no! Apparently this boy must have told the geezer he lived up in Napoli, and was a bit dubious about going home, and this old codger, feeling his youth again, must have grabbed him by the arm, and said, ‘You’re okay, son, come with me,’ and set off holding the coloured boy with a look o
n his face as if to say, ‘If you touch him, then you touch me, too!’ And I wondered why it was the only two I’d seen who’d fought back had been old-timers?
But that gave me an idea. I rode back to the White City station, parked my Vespa, and went inside to have a look around. And sure enough, there was a young Spade standing there, and I went up to him, and gave a great big smile I didn’t feel, and said, how’s tricks? and would he care for a lift home on my Vespa? He seemed a bit doubtful, but I asked him where he lived and went on chatting him, because I’ve found if you keep on talking at anyone who suspects you, the mere sound of your voice usually wins them over, and he said Blenheim Crescent, and I said hop on then, and I’ll see you there. As we went out, a ticket number said, was I carrying my iron bar, just in case? Real witty.
So I batted along, and I tried to make conversation with the kiddo, but he just clung on and said, ‘Yeh, man!’ to everything I said, and as we reached the groups of bystanders we got one or two yells and whistles, and the odd brick, and a few kids ran out on the road in front of us, but I weaved or accelerated, and we got through to Blenheim Crescent without trouble. I was keyed up, expecting motorbike chases, and big mobs, but nothing happened. And that was the extraordinary thing that day in Napoli! It all popped up here, and subsided, then popped up there, then somewhere else, so that you never knew what streets were frantic, and what streets peaceful.
Well, I saw the kid to his door, where lots of dark faces were peering through the curtains, and he asked me in a moment. Well, frankly, I was a bit dubious now. It wasn’t that I was afraid of my own people seeing, so very much, but I was a bit scared of the Spades themselves! After all, one white face is so much like another – especially on a day like this. However, I thought I really must stop being scared, or I just wouldn’t get anywhere, and so I said sure, why not, I’d be glad to, but could I bring my Vespa in there and park it in the hall.
Well, he took me down to the basement, and there I found a sort of war cabinet of West Indians in progress. The boy made it clear, right away, that I wasn’t a POW or something, and they patted me on the back, though several still looked damn suspicious, and wouldn’t talk to me. They gave me a glass of rum, and one said to me, what did I think about all this? And I said I was disgusted and ashamed. Well, one of them said, at any rate, I was the first white man they’d seen that day who looked them in the eye when he spoke to them.
And then the phone rang, and a tall Spade with a bald head picked it up – and would you believe it, he was through on the blower to Kingston, Jamaica! And he had quite a natter with the folks back home, and I didn’t much like a lot of what he said, and I wondered how my own people, out there in Kingston, surrounded by thousands of black faces, would be feeling when the news of it got around? And I also wondered whether, all over Napoli, there weren’t other Spades calling Trinidad, and Ghana, and Nigeria, and Christ knows where, and telling them the story? And how all the whites in all those places would be treated, too? Because one big mistake a lot of locals make is to think that all Spades work on the London Transport or on building sites – whereas stacks of them are business and professional men, who know all the answers: for example, this bald-headed character turned out to run a chain of hairdressing establishments.
Then one of the Spades who was still suspicious of me said, did I think it was the English way of life to attack 6,000-odd in an area where there were 60,000 whites or more, and if us white boys wanted to show how brave we were, why didn’t we choose an area like Harlem, where the whites were a minority? I could think of a lot of answers to that, but the others shut him up immediately – in fact, what amazed me the most, in the middle of all this, was how damn polite they all were to me. And then they started chatting about plans, and one said the law was no use whatever, they must set up vigilantes; and another said anyway, they’d got to organise as a community, and keep it that way in future; and another said up in Nottingham, they’d moved Spades out of certain areas ‘for their own safety’, but if anyone tried to move him, he was damn well staying where he was, because this was his house, and his wife and kids were born here, and he’d had a bash in the RAF, and he was one of the Queen’s objects the same as any other. And I began to get embarrassed, as you can imagine, because of course I partly agreed with them, but also I wanted to stick up a bit for my own people somehow, if I could. And the hairdresser cat realised this, and he and the kid I’d brought there saw me to the door, and opened it cautiously, and said all was clear, and I trundled my Vespa down into the road. And the kid came out to the pavement, and said thanks for everything, and shook my hand and gave me one of those smiles that Spades can turn on when they feel like it.
Well now, I thought, I’d better look in back home, to see if anything was happening there, and also to find out if Cool was quite okay. So I started off, and made the corner, where eight or so crashed the bike, and slung me off, and next thing I was standing against a wall with faces six inches from me. And what I liked least of all was that the oafo nearest me was carrying something wrapped in a science-fiction magazine.
Now luckily, the happenings of the day had made me so indignant, I wasn’t frightened any longer. And also, although I’m a nervy sort of number, when a crisis comes, I usually surprise myself by keeping calm – however much my ticker’s pounding there inside. So I stayed still as a rock, and eyed the yobbos, waiting, with one hand in one pocket round my bunch of keys, and the third finger through the ring of it.
‘We sore yer,’ said an oafo.
‘Darkie-luvver,’ said another.
When I glimpsed the SF number unwrapping his chopper, I whipped my keys across his face, and kicked another you-know-where. Then it was on! I was tensing for the death blow as I thrashed about, when suddenly I realised I was not alone in this – in fact, for just a moment, I had nobody to fight with, because two other kids were fighting them, so without waiting to raise my hat and ask who the hell they were, I ran over to my fallen Vespa, grabbed the metal pump, and cracked it on some skulls, and see! The Teds were in flight, except for one lying whimpering on the pavement, and I was shaking hands with Dean Swift and the Misery Kid.
‘Dr Livingstone, I presume,’ said Swift.
‘You bet your bloody life it is!’ I cried.
‘That feller hurt me,’ said Misery, rubbing his hands and looking very pale and angry.
‘My Gawd!’ I cried, messing their hairdos for them and almost kissing them. ‘It had to take this to bring you two together!’
The Ted on the deck was trying to get up, and the Dean pushed him down and held his neck with his Italian shoe. ‘We heard there’d been happenings,’ he said, ‘and thought we’d come up and take a dekko.’
‘It’s all in the evening papers,’ said the Kid.
Well, was I un-displeased! And was I glad it was two kids of my own age, and two jazz addicts, even if of different tendencies, and even if one was a layabout and the other a junkie, because this seemed to me to show their admiration for coloured greats like Tusdie and Maria really meant something to them.
The Dean had picked up my Vespa, and he checked the motor, and then said, ‘Well, how we to now? What we go where we do?’
‘What about this one?’ I said pointing to the Ted, who the Misery Kid was holding by his hair.
The Dean approached him. ‘You’re full of shit, aren’t you,’ he said, whizzing his fist round within a half-inch of the zombie’s face.
‘Wot I dun?’ asked the yobbo.
And that’s it! He’d scare you stiff inside his little group, but now he looked such a drip you couldn’t even get vexed enough to crunch him. ‘Wot you dun?’ said Dean Swift. ‘What you’ve done’s get born – that was your big mistake.’
The yoblet, seeing he wasn’t going to get fixed, had plucked up courage from somewhere. ‘Ar,’ he said, ‘so a few of ver blacks git chived. Why oil ver fuss?’
The Dean swung him round, gave him a Stanley Matthews kick on his striped pink jeans, and told hi
m to beat it fast. At the corner, the thing cried out, ‘Cum back termorrer fer ver nest lot!’ and cut out.
Well then, as we were discussing this, and examining the yobbos’ chopper, who should come round the corner but a cowboy: one of that youthful, pasty sort, with shoulder blades, and a helmet not too secure, and boots too big for his athletic feet – usually the least pleasant, those young ones, that is, if any are. And he looked at the Vespa, and we three, and the metal pump, and the chopper, and he said, ‘What’s this?’
‘You’re prompt on the scene, son,’ said the Dean.
‘I said, “What’s this?”’ the law repeated, pointing at the chopper.
‘This,’ said the Dean, ‘is what the local lads you can’t control tried to do my pal with.’
‘What pal?’
‘Me,’ I said.
‘And why you holding that pump?’
‘Because I used it to defend myself,’ I told him.
‘So you were in it too,’ the cowboy said.
‘That’s right.’
‘But you say you got attacked.’
‘You’re beginning to dig, mate,’ said Dean Swift. ‘You’re speedy.’
The copper stared at the Dean. But the Dean had carried that look often enough before, and stared right back. ‘You call me “officer”,’ the cowboy said.
‘I didn’t know you were one, captain. I thought you were a junior constable.’
The cowboy looked round, as if wishing for reinforcements, and said, ‘You’re all coming to the station.’
‘Why?’ asked Dean Swift.
‘Because I say so. That’s why.’
The Dean gave a crazy yell of laughter. And though I sympathised with his attitude, I wasn’t pleased, because all I wanted was to get to hell out of here immediately.
‘Look, captain,’ said Dean Swift. ‘Aren’t you supposed to arrest the law-breakers? Well, that’s the way they went – all the whole click of them.’
Absolute Beginners Page 20