by Craig Taylor
What they want is the magic bullet, you know, the tablet they can have the day after this unfortunate thing has happened that’s going to make all the problems go away and it’s not really the antibiotic they need. Mostly what they need is something that’s going to erase their memory and you can’t fix that. Working in the City that’s pretty much most of what I see, especially during Christmas party season.
Well, you know, you’ve been to a Christmas party, I’m sure. This is where it all happens. This is where ‘ooh, I’ve accidentally had sex with the secretary’ happens. So much insanity goes on at Christmas parties. People who have been taken to lap-dancing clubs because it’s what everyone in the office was doing, you know, and are convinced they’ve caught HIV because they’ve touched a pole somebody was rubbing against. It’s tough. Physically there’s absolutely nothing wrong, but physical problems you can deal with really quickly. That’s okay. The psychological stuff is what takes the time.
From early December until the tail end of January it is absolutely insane where almost every man that comes in will tell you an almost identical story. It’s really quite amusing. It’s the office party. People go out and get absolutely bollocksed and have inappropriate sex with each other. I’ve had people in the past come and see me in absolute hysterics because this has happened to them and they were working for the police. They were vice squad and they’ve managed to have sex with somebody inappropriate at the Christmas party and thought it was funny. Well, not funny – ironic. As I said, sex is a great leveller. Everybody makes exactly the same mistakes no matter how old and how wise you are, in London you’re always just that one beer away from inappropriate sex.
The Christmas party stuff kind of tails off January time. February bimbles along, it’s a bit too cold, but after Valentine’s Day you will see lots of people coming in for emergency contraception. You know, the morning-after pill. Lots of that. Around the same time you do get the odd person who’s discovered they’re pregnant after the Christmas and New Year shenanigans. And then, you know, March, April, May we just kind of tick along, nothing really sensational happens during that time of year. You get people coming in because they’ve just got random problems. But then the summer months, it’s all sort of fallout from the summer holidays; everybody’s been off to Ibiza and shagged the entire island, been shagged by the entire island. And then there’s the Pride festivals and music festivals. Then again it tails off a wee bit before it all starts building up to Christmas.
You get quiet people that really don’t go out all year and they just go absolutely crazy at these Christmas parties because they don’t really drink all that much and then all of a sudden they’re confronted with this vast amount of free alcohol and just completely lose their total identity and have absolutely no idea what’s happened to them. If there was no alcohol in this city I probably wouldn’t have a job.
GETTING ON WITH IT
NIKKY, LINDSAY AND DANIELLE
Students
It’s raining outside a school in South London. A police officer speaks to parents at the school gates as the children drift out in packs. The screens on their phones start to glow. Phones of all sizes are returning to life. Rucksacks, fingerless gloves, hair clips holding down the unruly hair. Black kids in groups, white kids in groups. The drama room has a reassuring familiarity with its black curtains, lighting booth and the stacks of chairs. This afternoon the room is set out for a debate. Two pairs of chairs at the front, rows of chairs for the other competitors from other schools and a table that holds packs of cheese and onion crisps and plastic containers of Fruit Shoots. As a few of the students enter and eye me suspiciously, a little aggressively, I ask them what they think a Londoner, or anyone coming from somewhere else to live here, needs to know to live in the city.
NIKKY: Learn how to read the Tube map. Definite.
DANIELLE: That is a good one. Actually there’s a lot of things. I want them to be clever. Like, if they come to London they’d probably be scared of London because of all the media things they hear. You hear like, you come to London, you’re gonna get stabbed. If you see a black person on the street, if he’s got his hood up, you’ve got to be running and that. Whereas because we live here we know how it actually is, so we’re not scared and we’re not wary all the time. Obviously it’s good to be wary sometimes, because anything can happen at any point in time, but we’re not majorly scared. I’m only scared that if somebody lives outside London and comes in, they’re not going to be streetwise. They’re going to think everything’s magical out there, like you can run around and everything’s fine and that, but it won’t be. I think it’s important to be streetwise.
LINDSAY: How to cross the road, basically, properly. It’s so busy and you see how many people get run over and killed, it’s just simple things. Like, don’t worry about learning how to do algebra; learn how to cross the road because you’re going to need that more than you’re going to need algebra in life.
NIKKY: Keep your valuables to yourself and be aware. Yeah, London does teach you to be aware of things.
DANIELLE: Don’t stare at people. If you see something that’s a little bit out of the ordinary, most people’s first reaction is to stare at it and that. Don’t stare.
LINDSAY: I know why my mum said, don’t stare, when I was like 4. Now I know why.
DANIELLE: If there’s a big gang, right, normally you turn just to have a look at them and see what they’re doing and that. But because we live here, we know it’s best not to give them eye contact so there’s a reason for them to say something. We don’t have to be scared and put our heads well down and walk past them scared, we can still continue our conversation with whoever we’re with – just don’t stare.
PAULO PIMENTEL
Grief counsellor
When I started doing this work, all I could think of was the Harrods IRA bombing in 1983. I must have been about 16, I still didn’t have my driving licence. It was a Saturday and my sister was a Saturday girl in the men’s department of Harrods, and my dad came to wake me up because I’d been clubbing the night before or something – I was a bit of a rebel. I said, where’s mum? He said, she’s gone down to Oxford Street. I switched on the news and they said there’s been a bombing in the men’s department at Harrods and then I thought, I’d better get down there. I tried to call the department, there’s no answer, and so I drove my dad’s Mini like a lunatic, without a driving licence, down Park Lane. We lived in Marylebone, and I was listening to the radio and they said there’s a suspected bomb in Oxford Street. And I thought, bloody hell – my mother and my sister on the same day.
Of course Harrods had evacuated and I didn’t know where they would evacuate to. I couldn’t get down into the Knightsbridge bit so I went round the back and I saw these people in this warehouse and I thought, maybe they evacuated there. I went in and there was my sister standing there. She was in terrible shock. I said, you’re coming home with me, got her into the car, went home and then had to find mum. There’s a bomb going off in Oxford Street and we can’t find mum and of course we didn’t have mobile phones so there’s no way of getting in touch with each other. But before we could leave, my mother turns up at home. I said, there was a bomb scare. She said, oh, was there? You know, completely oblivious to it all. The four of us sat down to dinner that night really quite happy that we were the four of us together. We thanked our lucky stars.
Later, when I started doing this work, my sister told me that she had seen a man’s head being blown off, and she’d been living with that for an awful long time with no support, nothing.
That day with Harrods affected me for a long time. It’s one of the reasons I took on this work.
Not long after the 7/7 terrorist attacks, we set up the 7th July Assistance Centre. The phones just went ballistic, absolutely ballistic. It was like opening the floodgates, the helpline had to go 24-hour. It took about two or three weeks for us to adjust to it. Of the people involved in a trauma, only between 5 and 25 per cent
actually develop PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Everybody else is okay to get on with things. But often they need somebody to talk to, somebody to scream at when they get angry, to talk with about all the guilt that they’re feeling. They’d go into minute detail about the Underground, about the smell of blood, the smell of the dust, the smell of everything.
In fact it could have affected so many more people. It’s alarming how, you know, it’s only fifty-two people that died, when you think of the size of London and the size of those Underground trains – each one carries up to about 1,000 people. So it could have been much more horrific. But a lot more people were affected because their lives changed. Their lives changed totally.
Many of our bereaved clients were in between their fifties and eighties, a time when a lot of them had retired, led reasonably peaceful lives, and then suddenly they’re hit by the loss of their son or daughter – it throws absolutely everything into disarray. Imagine if somebody went out to work, called last night or two days before, everything’s hunky-dory and then all of a sudden you don’t know where that person is. You know they’re in London. You don’t know where they are. You try to get in touch with the authorities. They can’t tell you anything. You can’t get hold of them on the mobile. Then all the mobile networks go down anyway, so you can’t get hold of anyone. And then the networks are up again, you still can’t find that person. You know … just that is a trauma in itself and then finding out that the person’s actually died, their limbs are missing, all sorts of really grotesque stuff like that. What do you do?
The problem is to be able to cope with all that and do your day job and be a partner/mother/father at the same time, explain things to kids who have no idea. A lot of them do know unfortunately, but they shouldn’t have. You know, why do people do this? Of course, it’s for ever. They’re going to die with it. And sometimes they’ll need to talk about it. My concern is that there’ll be days that are real shit for them, and just to know that you can pick up the phone, get somebody at the end of the line, to come in for one or two counselling sessions that may save their relationship, may save their employment, may save their relationship with friends, family, you know? Because also there will be these cutting remarks from people: oh god, you still think about that? And it hurts when you’re suffering and when you’ve suffered so much, for somebody to just dismiss it like that.
I’ve spoken to a lot of people who said, I wish I’d died on that day because my life has changed so much and I’m not able to cope with it any more. People don’t understand me any more. If I’d died they would have been able to get on with their lives without me. Which is really hard for people to say but it’s the way they feel.
We’ve been through two world wars, we’ve been through IRA bombings and now we have this 7th July bombing and we can’t cope any more – what the hell’s going on? You know. Take the Madrid bombings in comparison to the London bombings. The 11 March 2004 bombings on the trains in Madrid caused a government to fall. Everybody saw that it was the fault of the government’s foreign policy. It became very political and the bereaved and survivors became celebrities. Here, it didn’t move the government. We just want to forget about it, forget it ever happened. You’re supposed to get on with your life. You know, the stiff-upper-lip thing.
The truth is, the British have changed an awful lot. I come from a Latin culture, which is two hours’ flying time away but a world away, and I tell you, the British have become much more in touch with their emotions in recent years. There never used to be any of this kissy kissy thing. Now everybody kisses each other – all over TV, men are kissing each other, women are kissing each other, everybody’s kissing each other. We’ve gone completely the other way, which I think is really good. I remember when I started school here, my dad would drive me to the school and I’d say, don’t kiss me outside the school, it’s like horrendous. But in Portugal we kiss everybody.
The Sunday following the 7th July – 7 July 2005 was on a Thursday – on the Sunday there was a planned march through the Mall. People actually thought, is anybody going to turn up? But thousands of people did turn up, saying we will not be beaten. They will not win. It must have been a security and logistical nightmare for the police, but it was phenomenal.
You could be hit by a bus, you know, you could be in an accident. You could fall down the escalators at the Tube and crack your head open. All sorts of horrible things can happen to somebody, so do you stay at home and just wrap yourself up in cotton wool? The likelihood is that most of us will die from something else not terror-related and there may also be a certain sort of humour about it, you know, because we are living in London.
One day in the Haymarket there was a car with a bomb about to explode and I had walked past that car literally about two minutes beforehand, before the police came and took it away and dismantled the thing. I remember saying, ‘How funny. Can you imagine, the project director is bombed to death in a terrorist attack? The Mail would have had a field day.’ We just thought it was hilarious, and just then some people walk into the office. We’re cracking up laughing and they say, is this the bereavement service? They expect us to be always sitting there in mourning. But it’s completely the opposite, because if you didn’t laugh your head off you’d be crying your head off.
LISTON WINGATE-DENYS
Personal trainer
I grew up in the East End, so most of my friends did a martial art, or boxing, or ju-jitsu. I used to live on a council estate, so most of the kids did something. [He laughs.] In our little area alone, we had seven world champions at something, at some stage. Wen chen kai, karate, judo – actually, it wasn’t judo – ju-jitsu, a form of cage fighting which used to be done underground, back in those days, it’s not all the glamorous stuff it is now. But mainly karate. Some of the people that lived in that area, they were destined to fight somewhere, and instead of doing it on the street, they took it somewhere else.
It was quite a strange place to live – lots of pockets of different types of people, so you had blacks, you had Irish, you had Chinese. My mum had come from St Lucia in the mid-Sixties, when Bow, Mile End and all that was a dumping ground for West Indian immigrants looking for work, either on the buses or in the hospital. It was a long, long journey to get back home, so a lot of the people who came from the islands just stayed here. Mum, her first job here, she was a cleaner, as most of them were. And then she was a machinist; she was very good at that. And then she worked for Tower Hamlets as a home help. Dad worked at Ford, as a sprayer.
I think growing up the son of immigrants in the East End put me in good stead for the rest of my life. Clearly you met all types of characters, from those that were really quiet to those that killed people. Do I miss there? No. But it taught me to understand how people work, how to not take people for granted, and also, don’t believe their hype.
There are just so many problems on the streets now. It’s not good. The backbone’s going. Everything’s too fast, everything’s too expensive. And everything is, ‘What have you got? That much? Oh this looks nice – where’d you get that from?’ I’ll give you an example: there’s loads of people that live round here who might as well just live anywhere. It’s a bit like going on an all-inclusive holiday – you turn up and you stay at this fantastic hotel, and people will look after you, and you’re fed, you do all the massages and you do all of that, but you never go anywhere. Certainly here, in Notting Hill, there are a lot of people that live behind big old gates and they might as well live anywhere.
Around here no one cares. Everyone’s all, ‘There you go! Get yourself down to Portobello!’ And you’re down there any day of the week and you’ll see four or five people you recognize from the TV or from a magazine. Nobody cares! Except if you come here and start giving it the whole ‘I’m a cheese’ and all of that. I expect no one’s interested. You know, people come here, they got their sunglasses on, they come down here to train. It’s like, ‘What for, man?’ ‘There’s so many paparazzi.’ ‘If you do
n’t want the paps to take a shot, we’ve got a side entrance, just come through there! If you want me to pull these down, I’ll pull them down.’ It’s not like anybody else is really that interested. [He motions to the blinds that shade the free weights and benches of his gym, and the crosstrainer and the treadmills and Swiss balls.]
I think that’s where London’s going wrong. I think everyone’s started to believe their own hype. I’m just saying London in general and Notting Hill in general.
Well, you know, I have a guy that’s up in the air three or four days a week. Three or four days a week. Now that’s not good for you. You know I start work some days at 5.15 in the morning, cos someone’s got to be in the office for seven. You know, these are the sort of changes. People now won’t leave the office cos they’re frightened they might lose their jobs. So instead of going, ‘Look, I’m going to have a healthy heart and lifestyle so I can make sure that everyone that comes to work is healthy enough to go to work and people going to work can make the right decisions cos their minds are working.’ Oh no – ‘Cane them, get them in to work. Cane them; work twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day.’ Why not have them working ten hours a day, but working properly.