Cherry blossom days

In the days following the momentous events in Egypt earlier this year I heard a brief exchange between a woman and a young man. She had not been able to hear what he had called out to her across the road.

“Sorry?”
“I said, I like you better without the hat!”
“Oh. Right.”

I told her I thought it was a compliment and would have forgotten it if it were not for the fact that she was a sturdy, no nonsense British police woman and he may well have been Egyptian . For a moment, thousands of miles away from Tahrir Square, the uniform that she wore represented so much more than it did to the average Brit. In Egypt the police had been obliged to withdraw from the streets, hiding away from an enraged population who had finally had enough of their corruption and cruelty.

As I grew up in London it was impossible to ignore the many refugees who regarded it as a place of safety. They brought with them their food and customs, for the most part keeping them behind their front doors unless a bond was formed with neighbours or business contacts. Most of the time they did not confide their reasons for fleeing their countries. When they did, it was often a shock to those who had grown up in a free and democratic society, even hard to believe.

Hardest of all to hear was the news that someone my family had come to like had died a prolonged and dreadful death at the hands of people who had lured him back to his former home. We came to understand why the children next door would not drink perfectly safe tap water. A childhood in Beirut meant a mistrust of any that did not come from a bottle as you never knew whether damage to pipes had led to contamination. I watched their mother pull handfuls of crumpled £20 pound notes from the pocket of her fur coat in Harrods toy department to pay for anything that would take away her little girl‘s memory of being kidnapped. Her au pair wept as she watched Sadat and Begin make peace on our television in 1977.

When I moved to the suburbs I found that I had not left these sad, sometimes terrifying tales behind me. There are pockets of the rest of the world all over the outskirts of every British city. From the restaurants and cafes where proprietors wait for the lunch time rush to the empty offices where cleaners spend their evenings, there is always someone who remembers long ago and far away, a time when things were better. Last night the scent of hyacinths wafted towards me which, at this time of year, speaks to me of Iran and exile.

Some of the best stories come from minicab drivers. I used to hear a lot about the former life of a young Sri Lankan, a former policeman who had been obliged to leave his wife and child behind when he fled from death threats. He pulled over to show me the scar on his leg, sustained in an accident, and gave a graphic account of what it is like to be in a car while being attacked by an elephant. He was waiting for his family to join him but I have not seen him since before the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004.

In the suburbs we have the pleasure of seeing blossom at this time of year as the trees whose ancestors were brought back from the East give us a brief but lovely show. In Japan there would have been picnics under the trees as they came into bloom, spreading from the south in a wave of creamy pink. This year the picnics and celebration of Spring have been forgotten as the country comes to terms with the aftermath of the latest tsunami.

Here, anyone who looks even slightly Japanese is avoiding eye contact in case someone mistakes their nationality and expresses their sadness. It is hard to know what to say when I do encounter someone who is actually from Japan. The enormity of what has happened is hard to take in. In a matter of days all those petals will fall and clog up the ventilators in cars parked along the street and create sticky drifts in the gutter. There is nothing to make me think that those trees will not blossom again next Spring but for many people thousands of miles away it must feel as though the world has come to an end.

British Red Cross appeal for Japan
Shelterbox
Save the Children

A girl thing

A couple of years ago I had almost reached my front door after returning from work when I heard something that stopped me in my tracks. I was outside a neighbouring house and I could hear loud, continuous sobbing and weeping. It sounded as though a woman was in great distress.

I really did not feel like sorting out anyone’s problems at the time, I was tired and fed up, but this was days after the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard, kidnapped as a young girl and held for 18 years. I decided that I did not want to be one of those people who noticed something and did not act on it. So I dumped my bag just inside my front door with an explanation to my partner, walked back and listened again. The sound was still coming from a first floor window. I rang the bell and explained myself to the man who answered the door. “I suppose you want to see them for yourself?” he said before turning and calling to someone upstairs. Two teenage girls appeared who seemed perfectly happy. So I left. A week later the same thing happened but I ignored it. I’ve seen both girls since then and I still have no idea what was going on.

At the time I was already aware that the suburb I live in was home to a number of brothels, with convenient transport links. The ads in the back of the local paper testify to it and I suppose that most of us regard it as a fact of life. What the majority of people who glance at those ads do not know is that apart from the women who engage willingly in prostitution there are now many who have been forced into it. Women desperate to earn money and gain independence are brought to the UK by traffickers, discovering too late that the men who promised them a great job and a new life are actually selling them into the worst situation imaginable. Even if they are rescued they are cut off from their old life forever, knowing that other young girls from their home town are being targeted by the same traffickers.



The cases of Elizabeth Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch are bound to chill the blood of anyone who thought that women in the West were no longer vulnerable to this kind of ill-treatment. There has been much speculation, particularly in Austria where these incidents occurred, that the men who held them captive were fossils, throwbacks to an earlier time when women were expected to do as they were told. Others suggest that these cases are symptomatic of an underlying desire to keep women in their place.

It is tempting to think that, one hundred years after the first International Women’s Day, the repression of women is restricted to countries where it is part of a cultural tradition. The truth is that all around us women suffer in silence, treating the bruises they get from an angry partner as part of the deal. It was revealed recently that it is common for there to be an increase in the rate of domestic violence after football matches involving Rangers and Celtic, in fact they doubled after one game.

At the same time I have noticed the capacity for violence is no longer restricted to men, if it ever was. There was a time when it was taken as read that a young teenage girl who caused trouble was a fluke and likely to come from a challenging background. How things have changed. Last year a young women was convicted of manslaughter, having stamped on and kicked a man who later died. She was seventeen years old at the time, her fashionable ballet pumps and handbag covered in her victim’s blood. So much for an expensive education and a comfortable home. I see Ruby Thomas in many of the teenage girls I now encounter, the smart back chat that some see as confidence as likely to be a first step in a potentially violent encounter. I never underestimate the dangerousness of girls in school uniform.

Almost thirty years ago, when I was still at school, a fellow students was told by one teacher that she was not welcome to study technical drawing in his class as he did not feel that a career in engineering was suitable for a woman. Even then this comment made jaws drop amongst students and staff who took it for granted that a woman could have any career she wanted. By then women had begun to take control of reproduction using the Pill and, especially with the advent of AIDS/HIV, by insisting on the use of condoms. That made it easier for them to delay having children until they wanted too but it has become clear that some have delayed too long and it has now reached the stage where women are being warned not to wait until their forties to get pregnant.

The influx of Eastern Europeans, largely Poles in my area, has shown up this element in the change of women’s fortunes. I don’t suppose that many of the young women who moved here several years ago planned to stay more than a few years but have in fact settled down and had babies. They stood out, often slimmer and healthier than their British counterparts and now that they are mothers they are unusual again in that the fathers of their children are in evidence and even live with them as part of a family unit. In my street it had reached the stage where there were barely any young children living in the surrounding houses. One morning I found that I had spent several minutes standing by the bathroom window transfixed by something unusual - the sound of a baby crying, coming from a neighbouring house.

The impression I get is that in my area British couples wait until they can get a mortgage before they begin having children whereas other nationalities are quite happy to raise their families in rented accommodation. These newcomers have at times seemed to have old fashioned values that were once common in the UK and the women in that group don’t seem to regard motherhood as restrictive. Personally I don’t believe women can have it all. I think you can be a good mother and hold down a job once the children are at school but I now find it difficult to accept the idea of a woman heading back to work leaving a very young child in someone else’s care. Perhaps I’m getting old and conservative.

Even so I was stunned when I heard about the impact that the notion that a male is worth more than a female has had on ante-natal care in the UK. Hospitals in areas where there is a large Asian population do not advise the expectant mothers in their care of the gender before the child is born as it can be a death sentence for a female foetus. It could lead to a “miscarriage”.

During my life I know that things have improved beyond recognition for so many women but it is hugely dispiriting to think that we are still being paid less because of our gender. In Portugal, a short flight away from the UK, women can still end up in prison if they have an abortion. In Guatemala it is almost commonplace for women to be murdered. In Afghanistan women continue to kill themselves in despair at forced marriages. In my own country women return to the homes where they are beaten and abused because they have no other choice.

I suppose you could argue that the fact that I was prepared to challenge someone over what I thought might be a case of domestic violence means that things aren’t as bad as they once were. People used to look the other way when I was a child because they felt that it wasn’t their business. Worse than that, the policeman who attended the incident might actually commiserate with the perpetrator. Today, the police officer who attends is as likely to be female but still capable of standing up to a man who thinks that pounding his wife after his team loses on a Saturday night is a form of leisure activity. Perhaps that is the biggest gain of all.

Small society

Something happened last week that brought to mind the Prime Minister’s continued efforts to explain his concept of the “Big Society” .

I was at the small parade of shops a street away from my home when I spotted a young woman, wearing the kind of long skirt favoured by Roma women, standing very close to an elderly man with whom she was deep in conversation. I didn’t think anything of it until I happened to look that way again and realised that I could see banknotes. Sometimes you just know that something isn’t right and as I was in the mood to take notice I walked up to them and asked what was going on.

By this time I was less than two feet away and could also see a substantial gold chain which I automatically grabbed to keep it where it was. I couldn’t tell which direction it was travelling in but in the seconds I had my hand around it I realised that it wasn’t the heavy gold necklace it appeared to be. I know metallised plastic when I handle it. The girl was startled and pulled it away from me but I had reached them in time to see that she had been taking more and more five pound notes from him. Over her shoulder I could see a man and another girl standing a few feet away, clearly worried at my intervention.

Something about the girl I was standing close to threw me, she seemed so frightened. I couldn’t work out exactly what was going on so I backed off and left them to it but by the time I had dealt with my errand I realised that I should have been firmer with her and told her to get lost. It was too late. All those involved had disappeared. I asked a shopkeeper if he had seen anything and was given one of those answers that makes me despair. Yes, some people had been trying to sell fake gold jewellery in the street, especially to pensioners. There was no point telling the police because by the time they arrived they would be gone. That was the mindset of every person I told in the minutes after it happened. When I mentioned it in another shop and said that I thought those involved might be Roma someone asked me what my nationality was. The suggestion was that to point out their ethnicity was to be racist, even though that is the sort of information the police would have asked for.

Looking at it now, days after the event, it occurs to me that what happened in the small space between the three of us brought up some really big issues. That young woman represented centuries of persecution and discrimination. As a citizen of the European Union she is of monetary value to her family in that she can be married off to someone who wants the right to live in the UK and is prepared to pay for a wife. She wouldn’t keep the money she was making by selling jewellery, it would be passed on to someone else, possibly along with any she managed to acquire through the benefits system and was actually entitled to.

The man being conned was clearly a veteran, of an age to have fought the fascists who murdered as many as 600,000 Roma. His reward was to be ignored because no one seemed to have noticed what was happening to him. Perhaps old soldiers really do fade away. The elderly, constant and uncomfortable reminders of what we will become, tend to be left to their own devices these days, their lives characterised by isolation and loneliness, their pensions worth less and less.

And there I was, unable to decide what to do or who to tell. Was it theft and therefore a police matter? Would I be wasting their time? Should I contact Trading Standards? Should I have just had the guts to shout at that young woman and scare her off, aware that she was as much a victim as the man she had targeted? So fearful of doing the wrong thing, of being drawn into something I might lose control of, of being accused of discrimination. My original urge to follow my instinct and intervene drowned in a sea of doubt and fear, undermined by the knowledge that I would probably be on my own with it, that no one else would help. In that small space between a young Roma woman, a veteran of World War Two and a forty something blogger, it was my responsibility to decide whose rights took priority at that moment but I had forgotten how to do it. I made the wrong choice.

It took me some time to realise that personal experience of dealing with the legal system influenced the way I reacted. The despair I felt at hearing the words “no point” came from understanding that those who spoke them were probably right. If the case was proved the pensioner would be unlikely to get his money back and the girl, a pawn in someone else’s game, would find herself in an even worse situation. In the hands of a sharp barrister a statement written in a hurry at the time could make the whole process pointless. If every person I had told about it had at that moment rushed up to deal with those involved we would have been called a mob. I want to make it clear that I do not believe the police are to blame for this, I am sure they are just as frustrated as I am at times.

Mention the “Big Society” and immediate reference is made to volunteering, or to the running of state facilities by charities, or to taking part in local government. That’s when I (and a great many others) switch off. The sad thing is that I think I understand what the Prime Minister is talking about. In some ways it is about being bigger than yourself, “ubuntu“, I am because we are. Have a conscience, give a damn, get your hands dirty. Well, a lot of us do that already. The postman who notices that a vulnerable pensioner is being targeted by scam mail . The neighbour who reports a child’s bruises. We need to make it easier and more socially acceptable to intervene in small ways, and back up those who do so. Somehow we need to develop more confident caring habits because until we do we won‘t be willing or able to move on to the bigger things that we are being asked to take on.

There are plenty of people out there who haven’t waited for someone else to fix a problem for them. There are probably even more who want to do that but are put off by the fear of being told off for doing so. We’ve protected ourselves through legislation to the point where we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, a lack of common sense in relation to child protection and volunteering has made it almost impossible to do something as simple as drive someone else’s children to a football match. At the same time it would be foolish to risk the kind of incident which brought that hard won legislation into force. I suppose those who promote the “Big Society” are asking us to take the risk of being found at fault in the hope that our motives will be understood by the majority, to rediscover self-reliance. It has reached the stage where too many of us believe that we longer have to be conscientious because we’ve paid others to do that for us. It remains to be seen whether we will recover from the atrophy that has developed as a consequence of being so well looked after, leaving some of us unable to think for ourselves.

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

Fort Home, Suburbia

At first I laughed when I saw it. Someone had pinched some pampas grass from a nearby street and stuck the stems very neatly into the shared hedge that edges ours and the neighbour’s front gardens. It looked quite festive, a night time prank by some passing reveller. Then it was pointed out to me that to leave them there might invite more negative attention, suggesting that if we let this pass something less funny might follow. So I called on our neighbours to ask if they didn’t mind my removing them and was really surprised to find that they were concerned that the opposite might happen. They had left them there in case the person responsible retaliated.

This incident is typical of the kind that leave the average householder with what we are told is an exaggerated sense of threat. The statistics tell me that the crime rate in my area is at an average level compared to central London but the sight of an empty wallet abandoned in the street or broken glass on a pavement where someone has broken into a car remind me that someone suffers as a result of criminal activity every day within a few metres of my front door. It doesn’t matter how often the police remind drivers not leave anything, even cigarettes, on show in their vehicles or suggest that we keep credit cards zipped into our inside pockets. We still leave ourselves open to opportunists with no conscience. One hot summer evening I called at a house to point out that I could see a handbag, heavy with money, cards and keys from the pavement through a front door that had been left open to ventilate the house. Even a locked door is no deterrent to car thieves who use a hook on the end of a broom handle to steal car keys from stairs and tables in hallways. I was told of one incident where all three cars belonging to one household were stolen at once.

In my experience it is older people, often those who have been on the receiving end of this kind of attention, who are most switched on about crime. A former neighbour giggled as he showed me his latest ploy to ward off burglars, a recording of a barking dog that was triggered when I walked past his back door. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it actually sounded like a recording of a dog and I suspect he was as aware of it as I was but it was certainly more convincing than the man who began barking when I slipped a piece of misdirected mail through his letterbox.

These attempts at putting off baddies may sound absurd but at least they were aware of the threat. Many people have no idea that they regularly leave their home in a state that screams “Come and get me!“ to burglars. I am left open mouthed at the naivety of the householders in my area. The enclosed porches that were meant to prevent heat escaping through the front door are often left unlocked. It is common for the post to be pushed through the letterbox in the glazed porch door so that bank statements, tax returns and all manner of confidential paperwork sit there for hours until the householder returns from work. Even if the door is locked there is barely anyone around to take notice if the glass panel is kicked in.

Those bold enough to go that far might take the opportunity to tackle the main door and help themselves to something more substantial than the cash, credit cards and jewellery left in full view. A surprising number of householders leave a spare key under a plant pot or somewhere similar and burglars know this. They are some of the most accomplished people watchers, reading the message sent out by the festering milk bottles and soggy newspapers that collect on your doorstep during your summer holiday. They know that a confident manner will reassure those passing by and that the average person is reluctant to sort out someone else’s problem, leaving them to get on with it.

“Kick ins”, where a driver waits in a car outside a target house while an accomplice literally kicks in the front door and carries out valuables, are quite common in the suburbs. I know because we were targeted in this way a few years ago. I was in the middle of a nap on a weekday afternoon when someone rang the doorbell and used the knocker rather too vigorously on the door . I took this to be an impatient courier and as I got to the top of the stairs in time to see the front door fly open I actually thought that some fool had lobbed the parcel at it in haste, bursting it open. It was the brief sight of a man stepping in and then very quickly out of the hall that put me right. I got to the bottom of the stairs in time to see him duck behind what was then an untidy and rather high hedge and into a car which tore off at speed. Being half asleep didn’t help as I tried to work out what had just happened but the one other person I saw in the street didn’t seem to realise that anything was wrong. It turned out that ours was not the only home to be targeted by this pair of thieves on that day. Their movements were tracked for some time on CCTV using number plate recognition technology. I was lucky in that I was in and did not come face to face with someone who would use violence rather than get caught.

Since then we bother to double lock the front door during the day and use the bolts and chain once we are both in. The hedge is now kept at a height that allows us to see the car when we are downstairs - we‘ve already lost one to someone who needed spare parts for his own similar car (he was kind enough to dump what was left of it a few streets away). The lawn is also kept in a reasonable state as it seems that untidiness suggests a vulnerable occupant who won‘t fight back. The hedge that the owner is no longer able to trim themselves also provides a screen for anyone busy at the front door for the wrong reasons. It seems that the message sent out by a house proud homeowner is “I am prepared to defend my castle” whereas an unkempt lawn and hedge suggest the opposite.

Suburban homes are particularly vulnerable because they usually come with front and back gardens. If a boundary fence comes down it often stays down until the owner establishes who is responsible for it. The fact that a long section of fence can be owned in part by several people doesn’t help as it can mean that the various sections don’t match up and a gap becomes a highway for cats, foxes and thieves. It is usually the police officer chasing a suspect who tells us about the intruder in our back garden. Reluctantly I have come to the conclusion that the low fence that has been in place there since 1936 between ours and the adjoining semi will have to be replaced with something much taller. It’s a sad comment on our times. We will also be replacing the gate to the front garden that was removed long before we arrived to reinforce the psychological barrier between the street and the house.

Those who lived in my area when the mock Tudor semis were newly built will tell you that there was a time when you could go shopping leaving the front door unlocked. If that really was the case I suspect it had more to do with the fact that there was usually someone around to put off a thief than with the general level of honesty. That generation knew their neighbours, married women were often housewives and strangers stood out. Ours inhabits a world where you can live next to someone for years and exchange no more than a few words with them in all that time. We no longer rely on our neighbours to inform and entertain us and are more likely to speak online to total strangers on the other side of the world than the person we know on the other side of the wall.

The irony is, of course, that we are as much at risk from the attentions of the dishonest online as we are in our homes. I have decided that I will never bank online as I’ve seen one news story too many about errors made by various banks. I get so many phishing emails mentioning HSBC that it has put me off becoming a customer. My partner spent Christmas Day eliminating a virus that had wormed its way into his PC. Fraudulent websites are so convincing that even the most alert are sometimes taken in. However, when it comes to emails Mr Musa Mohamad, Mrs Madina Dauda and Mr Hassan Karim should probably give it a rest as I’m unlikely ever to respond to their “urgent appeals” although I’m glad to know that I “remain blessed in the Lord”. It must be worth their while to keep up the relentless attempts to dupe people in this way although I can’t help thinking that it might be more fruitful to invest in the air fare to the UK and rifle through the recycling boxes out put every week by the trusting. Oblivious to the concept of shredding confidential documents, they discard bank statements and payslips, unaware of the goldmine they provide for those engaged in ID theft. Or they could just stick their hands into a few letterboxes.

I know that I will become much more vulnerable as I get older. An elderly neighbour told me that she is often the target of fraudsters via her telephone. Because she isn’t expecting the call she is not on her guard and before she knows it she has given away personal information to someone she cannot see and has never met. She has a piece of tape marked with a cross on the receiver to remind her to watch what she says when she lifts it. “Boiler room” fraud has deprived some of thousands of pounds in this way. I can see why some older people own the sort of dog you choose not to pat and that shreds their mail with enthusiasm. When I get to that age (and possibly even before that) I will have a pair of highly trained Dobermans called Heckler and Koch - I already fantasise about the next miscreant feeling the heat of their breath on his arse as he flees the neighbourhood.

http://www.met.police.uk/crimeprevention/burglary.htm

Mention the war

These shoes have been around for as long as I can remember. They have moved from the bottom of one wardrobe to another but they are still with me, a relic of World War Two. Along with a copy of “Make Do and Mend” they are some of the ordinary things I own that are left over from an extraordinary period in Britain’s history.

Recently there has been considerable and deserved mention of the deeds of the RAF during the Battle of Britain. For those who now live in London’s suburbs it is hard to understand the degree of fear and danger experienced by the ordinary people who lived in those houses before we did. Here and there you will find structures, both overgrown and reused, that were built as part of the plan to defend the UK. There are of course memorials to those in uniform but very little remains to remind us of the impact on everyday life.



When I visited Medway Drive in Perivale I could see nothing to indicate that six people were killed and thirty others injured in this quiet street near the A40. I was looking for a gap in the terrace filled by a post war building. Mindful that a surprising number of that generation still live in the houses they were born in I looked for someone in the right age group and struck gold. I was introduced to someone who had lived in the area since 1935 and remembered the incident very clearly. A parachute mine came down here on the night of 25th September 1940 and King George and Queen Elizabeth came to inspect the damage. Photographs taken at the time show them striding up the street in the company of the mayor and local officials. I was amazed to learn that the damage was repaired straight away and found that one of those I was speaking to, a child at the time, had been paid a penny a day to brush clean the salvaged bricks for reuse. The houses in this street were then no more than three years old and I suppose restrictions on the use of building materials were yet to be imposed. It is now impossible to tell that anything so devastating happened here.

Within minutes we were talking about the difference between an Anderson shelter and a Morrison shelter, what it was like to hear a Doodlebug (apparently it was when the whistle stopped that people began to run in all directions) and how one milkman coped during an air raid. They remembered the spivs at the dog track and the people who did not survive. They mentioned the policeman who was not provided with a free shelter (he earned too much) and sent his daughters into the neighbour’s for safety. There were memories of particular raids and of a woman who turned up to work at Sainsbury’s in Greenford with bandaged hands, still trying to work out how they got burned as she rode along on her bicycle.



It was a frightening time. Huge craters were the reminders of near misses. One of my new acquaintances described how he was on a paper round when the warning went out. He rushed under cover only to feel a great weight suddenly crushing him. He thought he had been hurt but in fact a woman had seen him head for shelter and leapt in after him. His friend told me that on hearing a blast and unsure as to what to do he had stood rigid with fear while his sister dived to one side. He had every right to be terrified. Five days after Medway Drive suffered casualties six enemy aircraft dropped bombs in the vicinity of Mornington Road in Greenford, though they were in fact trying to hit RAF Northolt, their gunners taking the opportunity to strafe the ground. A six year old boy called Keith Peters was shot, one of thirty-seven people killed or fatally injured in the daylight attack. His home was damaged beyond repair and then targeted by looters. What must it have been like for his mother who after the war lived in the rebuilt house until her death? It is unlikely that the present occupant of this address is aware of its sad history. On a quiet day in suburbia, almost seventy years after the event, it is difficult to imagine the sudden terror that descended upon the people here.



I used to wonder what these mounds in Hanger Hill Park were all about. Apart from the lumps and bumps there is a concrete block at the end of one and a scattering of concrete squares that seal off the entrances to an air raid shelter. Again there is nothing to tell you that this was the site of several deaths in 1940. It seems that even for those who managed to reach a shelter there was no guarantee that they would make it through a raid. One of the people who died here was known to my friend in Medway Drive, a man who had thrown himself on top of his wife and succeeded in protecting her.

There was a matter of factness and absence of anger in these recollections from two men who would have had every right to feel bitterness towards the enemy. When I hear John Cleese mutter “Don’t mention the war!" and harangue his German guests in an episode of “Fawlty Towers” first broadcast thirty years after the end of the war I still hold my breath, aghast. It was meant to shock and was not aired in Germany when the series was originally shown there but I wonder how it would have gone down in the Britain of the 1940s?



Take a look at the archives of photographs from this period and you will see nothing but smiling faces. Land girls digging up potatoes in Greenford, in fields that have long since been built on. The mayor’s wife collecting clothes for the children of factory workers. A man sitting in the ruins of his house but beaming at the camera as if it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. Perhaps he was in shock or just glad to be alive, who knows? It is possible, even probable, that the less positive images were quite deliberately erased from some memories as well as from archives. Like shoes pushed to the back of a wardrobe the bad times were put to one side.

They kept calm and carried on, railwaymen, nurses and doctors, firemen, the WVS, shop workers who swept up the broken glass time after time, the makers of endless cups of tea and strangers who held a hand until the final moment came. Air raid wardens who must have seen things that gave them nightmares, bodies blown to pieces including those of people they knew. This former ARP hut which is at one end of Ealing Village now shelters bicycles.



In 1940 these people had no idea how many weary hungry years of war lay ahead of them. When it was finally over the world had been turned upside down and many saw this as an opportunity to put new ideas into practice. I wonder if we would have had the NHS if it were not for World War II? I hope that in years to come as much will be said about the valiant efforts of those who kept the home fires burning as has been said of those in uniform. It is up to us, the generations who gained from what they did, to recall and applaud their bravery and sacrifice.

For Violet, who drove ambulances during the war and was particularly fond of Marlene Dietrich. Thank you for the shoes.



I am indebted to my long suffering partner, who not only acted as chauffeur and advisor on military stuff but provided me with the excellent “Ealing, Acton and Southall at War” by Dennis Upton (The History Press), in which I found the information about the attack on Mornington Road.

Be nice to your fireman this Christmas

For the last two years I’ve worked in the evening on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve and as a gesture of solidarity I’ve dropped off a bag of goodies at the fire station opposite.

The first time I did it I wasn’t prepared for the reaction I got. The man who answered my tap on the door seemed absolutely stunned that I had done this. He said “thank you” so often I started to get embarrassed and walked away feeling a bit tearful. The same thing happened the following year.

What amazes and saddens me about this is that the fire station in question is not stranded on a suburban roundabout. It is right next to homes and offices on a busy street. I can understand that those working in the office buildings aren’t around during the evenings and weekends but they must, as I do, see the engines rush off to a call. The flashing lights, sirens and bells are hard to miss. As for those who live right on the doorstep - if you’re reading this, I hope you’re ashamed of yourselves.

I know that when I spend an evening at work the worst thing that could probably happen to me is that I might trip over the vacuum cleaner cable or get splashed by something unspeakable. The chances of my dying from smoke inhalation are pretty slim (as long as certain people avoid using fire extinguishers as doorstops), as is that of being maimed for life in the course of my shift. However that could happen if it wasn’t for the speedy response of the folks across the road. They take that risk to stop it from happening to me.

Over recent years the emergency services have become the targets of, well, what do I call them? Thugs? Yobs? Uncontrolled, uncontrollable children and teenagers who take pleasure in assaulting the people who go the extra mile to keep us safe. There are places in the UK where starting a fire and calling the fire brigade so that they can lob things at them is entertainment. The same risks are faced by ambulance crews. While the police might to some extent regard this kind of behaviour as going with the territory it is almost beyond belief that anyone should want to target a fireman or a paramedic in this way.

That aside, I think the fact that we do not value those working for the emergency services speaks volumes about the sense of entitlement that has developed in our society. It has taken campaigns and images of amputees and coffins to awaken our respect for the armed services. Perhaps that’s the problem. If firemen, nurses and policemen were dropping like flies on a daily basis the majority might begin to notice their contribution.

Another obstacle to their being looked up to by the community that they serve is that, unless it is a very small one, they do not usually live where they work. In the case of the one that I am familiar with they probably can’t afford to live there. There is a sense of separation and the living breathing humans who do this work are just uniforms rather than recognisable members of the community. I don’t know that we can change that. The development of Safer Communities Teams have certainly helped to give our local police recognisable faces. This Christmas it even meant a home baked cake from me. When I was a child we knew our beat officer so well that when he retired he gave me the metal flower from the top of his helmet as a souvenir. I still have it somewhere. It’s interesting that in the idealised realms of childhood, for example Trumpton, it is taken for granted that there is a local fire brigade and we all know their names.

It isn’t about the food because, let’s be honest, many of us are already sick of mince pies by Christmas Day. It is the gesture that counts and the thought that someone, even if it’s just the eccentric cleaner from the building opposite, has noticed the effort you make when the rest of the world is tucked up safe in bed.

Fixing the fixers

On Tuesday and Friday evenings I clean an office after my regular job which means that I’m still in the building after 9pm. The office overlooks a busy main road and there are the usual sounds of sirens and traffic. Last night, at around 9.15 I heard what sounded like a large amount of scrap metal being dropped onto the ground.

Almost. It always take a while for my brain to work out what I can see before me in these situations. It seems that a small black car had pulled out from the car park of the neighbouring building when another, almost identical small black car had swerved to avoid it and had run into a lamp post on my side of the road. By the time I got to the window the first car was in the middle of the road pointing in the opposite direction to the other.

There is a fire station a few yards from where this happened and several firemen were on the scene within seconds. Within minutes two fire engines were blocking the traffic off in one lane while police from a station that is also close by directed it around the damaged cars. The driver of the second car was injured badly enough for it to take half an hour for him to be removed from the vehicle to the waiting ambulance.

This was all dealt with and cleared up within an hour. The two damaged cars were deposited, for the time being, in the car park next door. Sand was spread across the oil spill by the lamppost. Broken bits of car were swept up. What struck me was that I had seen all three emergency services acting in a calm and coordinated manner, comforting uninjured passengers, shepherding pedestrians out of the way, making things safe.

From the fifth floor I had a clear view and felt rather detached after the initial shock, as if I was watching a play. For those directly involved, who had to see and hear the shock and pain close up it must have been very different. It is easy to forget that these men and women often attend situations like this daily, even hourly, and are expected to take it in their stride. The rest of us can walk away and forget about it but it does not surprise me that some in the police, fire and ambulance services crack under the strain or behave in a way that doesn‘t meet our expectations.

Hours before the traffic accident I had watched a video recorded in Nottingham of police officers trying to handcuff a man. A cab driver had begun recording the event because one of the officers had repeatedly tazered the individual even though he was already on the ground and vulnerable. He was simply trying to avoid having his hands cuffed. He was also punched in the head a number of times. This went on in front of a crowd of people who were clearly angry about what was happening but the police concerned carried on regardless of their comments. I suspect that they were unaware of the fact that this was being recorded (which seems a bit naïve these days) and would have stopped it if they had known.

It has raised questions about the use of tazers which were regarded as a non lethal option for subduing potentially dangerous suspects, better than guns. I am more interested in why someone is prepared to obviously and repeatedly inflict pain in a way that seems unnecessary to most of us. Have those involved become so hardened by what they have seen and experienced that they do this sort of thing without thinking twice about it? Did any of them question for a moment what their colleagues were doing and consider stopping them? Was it just the end of a long and difficult shift?

Personally I feel that we expect rather too much of our emergency services. We are not there when a drunk vomits in the van that is carrying him to the police station, we aren’t the ones who have to clean it out. Ambulance personnel increasingly face attacks when they attend a situation and firemen go home to their families and act as if nothing has happened, having seen the consequences of a fire. For the police in particular there are no second chances if they get it wrong.

I am not excusing the behaviour of the police in that video and I have concerns about the way some have dealt with demonstrators over the years. It worries me that they are being deliberately wound up to be more aggressive ahead of these events by some of those responsible for managing them. However I believe that we should become as understanding and respectful towards them as we are now expected to be towards military personnel. It is clear that there is a link between the stress of serving in a war zone and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We are often shielded from the war zones that some places in our country have become and I think that once the dust of this most recent example of police brutality has settled, we need to look at how we are dealing with the people who clean up the mess so that we don’t have to.