Thirty minutes

It is hard to believe that this screen of ubiquitous buddleia, scenting the suburban air, hides a railway line that has triggered intense debate, caused thousands of people to protest, and made a minister of state into a figure of hate. It is often referred to as “the Chiltern Line” and if the government has its way it will be the route for HS2, a high speed rail link connecting London to Birmingham and reducing the time of the present journey by about thirty minutes. What could you do with thirty minutes? Start the clock.



Spend your thirty minutes trying to complete a public consultation document, bearing in mind that it has been drawn up by someone who wants you to fall into a trap, to make you say that you actually do want a train charging past your home at over 200 miles an hour, that you have no objection to years of construction work, that you believe every word they say about noise levels. You left school to get away from this kind of thing and here you are taking an exam to stop your home becoming worthless, to justify the years, decades of work you put into paying a mortgage. You take advice, watch videos, listen to the experts before you answer “no” to everything, in a desperate attempt to save all that effort and sacrifice.


Think of all those minutes and half hours spent in a job you hate, gritting your teeth to get through one more day, hour, minute without flinging your letter of resignation at the boss, all for nothing because you are a nimby, small fry, nothing to a man whose salary you pay but didn’t vote for. Another nameless face in the crowd at a demo, along with all the other unwanted little people who have cluttered up his day, getting in the way of “progress”.

You will never be one of those gaining that extra half hour on a train moving so fast that the rest of mankind becomes a blur. You will never afford those plush seats and wonderful service. You will wait with all the rest on a station platform waiting for a worn out train that has been held up, again. Because there is no money to improve what already exists, what you can afford. You will sit in your car, on a bus, in a jam caused by the years of construction work that you are paying for to build a railway line you don’t want, can’t afford, don’t need. You will grind your teeth and curse those who inflicted this upon you and your lowly kind and know that you are helpless. You don’t count, your kind never have.


Thirty minutes in a bluebell wood, deafened by birdsong yet wishing you could make less noise as you walk amongst trees that were old when you were a child. A thousand cobwebs and caterpillar threads cling to your arms as they must have done to those of your ancestors when places like this were vast and untouched. You are the first to walk here today, in a place that has never changed and you thought never would until the minister expressed his opinion. Knowing that you are barely a heart beat in the time it took to make this place that cannot be replaced, replicated, remade. Thirty minutes, a pin prick in time in this woodland set like sapphires and emeralds amongst the coral of suburban rooftops, one last place to remember what it must have been like in this land before “progress” came and ate away at your soul. Time counts for nothing here.


Half an hour at an estate agent’s office, listening to all the advice he can give you on how to sell a worthless house. Paint the walls a neutral colour, thank God you redecorated some of it last year, it will take less money, less time. You’ll get the downstairs lav done in thirty minutes. Put the “For Sale” sign up and hope to hell that the neighbours don’t put one of those bloody posters in the window, hope that whoever takes the bait doesn’t check up on what that means. Keep your fingers crossed for a lot longer than thirty minutes, through every rare viewing, trying not to wince when “it” gets mentioned until you realise that they were just curious, not serious, bad luck. Wish that the things that once made your home such a bargain (“Five minutes walk from the nearest station!”) weren’t the things that make it so undesirable now.

The worst half hour is the one spent listening to your tearful elderly neighbour, born in her house, the one she hoped to die in. Listening to the despair of a woman who cannot fill in a form at the best of times and is rendered incoherent at the thought that her childhood home might be demolished, just another of the worthless small fry who will be swept away for the greater good. She loves her garden but even that has made her a target for the mockery of businessmen. She doesn’t own a bowler hat and her lawn is tiny, a postage stamp of green, but she knows each lily and rose, remembers the ones her mother planted and loves them still. It has taken many a half hour to make this patch of heaven and it was worth every moment.


Wonder, sometimes, how long it would take, how many pills, how much booze, to take the problem away forever. How many of those affected regularly spend thirty minutes that close to edge, when the worry becomes too much - “Why are you crying Mummy?” - when there is no fight left and despair takes over. When you begin to think that all the effort is pointless, that all those half hours have been wasted and you are worn away to nothing, for nothing. Knowing that, when the dust that can never settle makes its way, every day, into your home, your precious half hour will be frittered away by a business man, distracted by the many pleasures in that brand new temple to retail - the station - rushing off half an hour late in a wasteful carbon heavy cab to the appointment he might have made, had he been more mindful of those thirty minutes.

Stop HS2 - advice on completing the consultation document
Stop HS2 natonal petition

Stand up and be counted

I’ve got to admit that it took me several days to send off the census form. For some reason I put off filling in or even looking through it, in spite of all the television and newspaper ads encouraging me to get on with it.

This is our third census at our present address. It’s one of those things that mark you out as an established couple, like replacing a saucepan or a washing machine that you bought when you first moved in together. It occurred to me that our former neighbours must have filled out at least five during the time they lived next door and that it will be the last one that another neighbour will complete as a resident of our street before she moves.

Establishing where we all are every ten years, the census of the UK’s population asks questions about employment (or unemployment), religion (a voluntary question) and the kind of home you live in, amongst many other things. Genealogists love them. Now that many are online you can find out within minutes what your great-great grandparents were up to in, for example, 1871. A tantalising absence from a census could be explained by a contemporary event such as a war. A child born a few months before one census may have died by the next one, a great aunt or uncle representing a potential branch of your family tree.

Unfortunately for those keen to know what more recent generations have been up to, the information collected by the census remains secret for a century. This rule only became a legal requirement in 1920, allowing the records for 1911 to be released three years early. Women had begun to demand the right to vote and some boycotted the census taken that year as a protest. One suffragette wrote “If I am intelligent enough to fill in this paper, I am intelligent enough to put a cross on a voting paper.” This comment, her personal direct action, remained a secret for almost a hundred years.

The question “Do you stay at another address for more than 30 days a year?“ tells of university for one young adult or military service for another. There must have been many households in the UK for whom the absence of one name at their address brought a sense of pride and happiness because their child had succeeded in gaining a place on a course. For others it meant pride and sadness at the loss of a family member in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The questions being asked are as good an indicator of cultural, economic and political changes as the information they bring in. I wonder what my ancestors would have made of questions about same-sex civil partnerships? The 2011 census allows for the fact that these relatively new official forms of relationship may have broken down already (“Separated but still legally in a same-sex civil partnership”; “Formerly in a same-sex civil partnership which is now dissolved”).

A great uncle of mine earned some extra cash while a student by gathering information for the 1921 census and came across a situation that revealed how some people dealt with failed marriages at the time. Calling at one house he asked for Mrs. X to which the reply was “Which One?” The head of the household was living at the same address as his wife and his new partner along with all their children. Both women referred to themselves as “Mrs. X“ to maintain a veneer of propriety at a time when it was not easy for the average person to obtain a divorce. The Divorce Act of 1969 came into force in 1971 so it may have been another ten years before the impact of the new legislation was evident in a census.

The questions that I found most difficult to answer were the one about qualifications (really confusing - I’m still not sure I picked the right option) and the one about the ethnic group I think I belong to. I wonder how many others from a partly foreign background struggle to answer that sort of question as I do. The promotion around this year’s census has emphasised its value to individuals, that it represents around £22,000 in spending. The government is trying to persuade those reluctant to complete it that it will ensure the right level of services in each area. One question asked if I help or support a neighbour or family member with age or health related needs. Another asked how I travel to work.

They seem to want to know so much and that may be what put me off getting stuck in. For the first time I found it rather intrusive. In the end it turned out that only a small part of the booklet required completion because it allowed for a household of more than two people. I got off quite lightly but I feel for anyone organising a sleepover on the same night.

“H4: Apart from everyone counted in question H2, who else is staying overnight here on Sunday 27 March? These people are counted as visitors. Remember to include children and babies.”

Some unexpected extras for the census officials.

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.

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.

Fallen from grace

A few nights ago we were woken by the pained screeches and howls of two foxes getting it on somewhere very close to the house, until recently one of the less notable sounds of suburban life. On this occasion I would not be surprised if a few of our neighbours had got up and checked that they had locked the back door and shut all the downstairs windows.

The fox has is no longer seen as the charming redhead that you help out over the winter with the odd bowl of cat food. Tabloid headlines have put Mr. Fox into the same category as the paedophile. He is no longer fantastic. A mother found a fox mauling her twin baby girls in their nursery after it entered her north London home through patio doors left open on a hot night. Since then the local council has set traps in the garden of the house and destroyed three foxes caught there subsequently.

A number of Londoners, among them the mayor, Boris Johnson, have come forward to declare that foxes are vermin, a nuisance and now, a potential danger. The surprising thing is that just as many have stood up for the fox, pointing out that London and its suburbs have become a free food fest for vermin of every kind. It is not just the kind hearted residents of the city who are to blame. Patrons of take away food establishments do not feel the need to dispose of whatever they have left over responsibly, dumping it anywhere; proprietors leave bags of rubbish in the street long before collections are due because the fines are never big enough to put them off. Add to that the introduction of fortnightly rubbish collections for reasons of economy and it is hardly surprising that the fox and the rat have flourished.

In spite of what has happened I am quite happy to see foxes in our garden. If we keep the doors closed on hot evenings it is because we are worried about the two-legged variety of visitor, the burgling kind. I heard the eerie shriek of a fox for the first time in the suburbs, believing at first that it was a woman’s screams. Then it almost sent me into orbit but I now know that one of nature’s charmers is about. And I have been charmed by the fox. The sight of cubs tumbling over each other on the lawn, of an adult sunbathing on the compost bin, of another loping purposefully along the street ahead of me, I still regard these moments as special, magical. If those strange and dangerous eyes have once looked back into yours from a safe distance they are hard to resist. For those as divorced from wild nature as some town dwellers are it must be hard to resist trying to turn such a creature into a friend with the help of frozen chicken.

My perspective had to change once we became cat owners, not actively discouraging them but the occasional bowls of cat food stopped (I once economised by providing cheap dog food and was treated to the sight of a fox having a sniff and then walking away from it. Everything in its demeanour said “You expect me to eat this?”). We do leave out bowls of water, shallow enough to prevent a hedgehog drowning or tilted to allow an easy escape, that double as a lido for young starlings. I began to do this after seeing a desperately hot and exhausted fox take a rest on the patio. It was too frightened to let me put water out for it and ran off.

There was one hairy moment when I glanced out of the kitchen and saw a large fox standing stock still on the lawn with our beloved moggie right next to it. To my amazement the fox ignored Jones as he began to lie down next to it in a submissive gesture, the one that told us that he was due for a tummy rub. By this time my hand had rattled the doorknob and the fox departed in a hurry. Jones didn’t look too unhappy to see me but he didn’t seem frightened either and it has led me to wonder what sort of relationship he had with foxes in his early life as a stray. Most cats don’t win the argument. Nevertheless, when I found three young ones gazing at me expectantly through the French windows one Sunday morning I thought of Jones, at that moment snoring under the duvet, and resisted the temptation to slip them a dish of Felix.

I don’t blame foxes in any way for the problems they cause. They are fulfilling their role in the ecology, scavenging and cleaning up after everyone else and it is not their fault that we provide them with so much work. However I believe that for some the feeding of foxes has more to do with a need to be loved by an outlaw than a genuine desire to help wildlife. We have forgotten that this adaptable survivor has been charming humans for centuries. Very few animals have engaged the attentions of artists, writers and poets in the way that the fox has. Brer Fox, bold Reynard, Disney’s Robin Hood, Beatrix Potter‘s “foxy-whiskered gentleman“ and The Tod in “The Plague Dogs” by Richard Adams, from Aesop’s Fables to Roald Dahl it has been recognised as cunning, sly, deceitful - the Loki of British wildlife. Most recently the fox has been equated with the scheming young women drawn to celebrities in the video for Wiley’s “Wearing my Rolex”.

Perhaps those living within the town walls would be slower to defend the fox if their livelihoods depended on it. The playfulness that leaves our back garden strewn with shoes, rubber ducks and sparkly Christmas baubles is the same as that which leaves a hen coop in a bloody and distressing state. There are those, parents in particular, who have come to understand that a patio covered in faeces is a high price to pay for a glimpse of something wild.

It is time for the authorities, in consultation with local wildlife trusts, to take a rational and sensitive approach to the urban fox, educating the public in the best way to interact with it and acting in all our best interests. A blanket approach which treats all foxes in the same way would be inappropriate, what we need is a fox czar.

The recent incident really worries me. I fear that it will be used by politicians to gain votes by hitting an easy target rather than tackling obvious litter problems and dangerous dogs that Londoners fall victim to every day. Another concern is that the tabloid reaction to it will give permission to thugs to torture and kill foxes. They will use the same dogs that I worry about to carry out this task and then celebrate with a take away. One of the saddest interviews I heard following the attack was with a teenager who described the foxes in her area as scruffy, clearly unaware that sarcoptic mange causes these animals real misery - it isn’t because they are too lazy to groom themselves. Ignorance of this sort leaves the door open to cruelty.

Unfortunately, thugs on the other side of the argument have also made their feelings known online and the family in question have been given police protection. I have no doubts about the truth of what happened and wonder how those who care so passionately about animals in general can be this unfeeling towards the human kind.

I wonder if, by treating the urban fox in this way, we have worn away some of the mystery that drew us to it in the first place. As a result of our affection it has become commonplace and ordinary. We have lost our innocence having denied it the dignity due to it and our fall from grace is all the harder for it.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard_cycle

http://www.thefoxwebsite.org/index.html

http://www.save-me.org.uk/

Too much of a good thing

At last, the thaw. When, unusually, it began to snow before Christmas it added to the festive atmosphere. For once the weather outside matched the images on the cards indoors. It rapidly lost its appeal. London was bored of snow. Every local phone-in show made that very clear.

The problem is that the British don’t have to deal with it very often so we are left in total disorder on these rare occasions. There is a desperate rush to spread grit and salt on main roads (but not residential side roads, leading to many complaints) and panic when they start to run out. This year there was outrage when the snow turned to slush after it was rained on, creating a slippery treacherous mess on station platforms and pavements. It turned out that grit had been spread but the rain had washed it away. The slush then became icy and even more slippery. I saw one man slip over on the steps at North Acton Station before Christmas, hitting his head on the metal edged steps.

Judging by the state of the pavements in West Ealing this week I think I know where most of that grit ended up. A shame that some of it didn’t reach residential Greenford or the business district in central Ealing.

New snow is special. I love the way that it reflects the light and muffles every sound, especially at night. It’s easy to walk in (crunch crunch) and renders everything beautiful. It even managed to lend a quiet beauty to the place where a good man met a violent end a few months ago.

When the snow first hit the UK it was regarded as lovely, if a bit of a nuisance. I was obliged to head out in it and couldn’t help smiling at everyone I encountered. And everyone smiled back. It was a lot less fun hours later when there had been a slight thaw and even worse when it had refrozen. I watched a pensioner pass the house, holding my breath in case he slipped over.

I considered (along with many others according to the media) whether to sweep the pavement in front of the house for the benefit of those passing by. A good citizen would surely do it. My main concern was that I would not clear it well enough to prevent a thin layer of moisture refreezing and leading to the problem I wanted to avoid. In the end I left it as it was because I had found that it was easier to walk on the remaining snow and frozen slush, especially if it snowed again.

Extreme cold (by UK standards) leads to a rush on hats, scarves and gloves in the shops (I’ve made three hats since Christmas), an abandoning of New Year diets in favour of warm comfort food and a rediscovery of things like hot water bottles, and balaclavas. Personally I recommend lemon and ginger tea with honey. It has been difficult for birds, who can’t find food under the snow, and the local foxes were louder than usual and probably very hungry.

An unexpected fall of snow last February led to a small snowman in the front garden complete with carrot nose and apple eyes. This time around I find it hard enough to get to and from work on it to have the energy to play around in it which is a shame because it didn’t snow very often when I was a child and I could do some catching up. I spent many childhood Christmases in the countryside and one year (the forecast promising snow) I was given a plastic sled. The worst present ever as the snow failed to materialise.

Now that things are back to normal it is interesting to note what this episode has revealed about the UK. Many schools remained closed because even though the pupils live in the area, their teachers do not (house prices are often prohibitive). Pensioners will leave the house to go shopping but many of the younger generation will have a duvet day. A lot of people don’t own the right footwear for ice and snow. The news channels are more likely to interview the RSPB about the impact of cold weather on wildlife than Age Concern about its impact on the elderly.

In the meantime, while we’re bothered about snow, on other parts of the planet we call home extreme heat continues to take its toll and one of the terrible natural disasters that always seems to follow Christmas leaves its mark on Haiti. The fun’s over.


http://www.dec.org.uk/donate_now/

For Robert Godrey, in the hope that the sight of all that snow cools things down.

A pot addict confesses and appeals for help

Well, it got your attention didn’t it? Actually, the type of pot I am obsessed with is the kind you look at, fill with pot pourri or soup. Not the kind you smoke.



I haven’t given in to my addiction to things ceramic for a few years but I have just parted with £25 to help out a talented potter called Kirsty Badham. Her kiln came over all chaotic recently and destroyed some pots-in-progress. In an effort to raise the funds to repair it, Kirsty has offered to make a bowl in return for each of the 100 pledges of £25 that she receives through this site:
http://www.pledgeforapot.co.uk/



Now, I am trying to be helpful by doing this but I also see this as an opportunity to buy a unique and lovely thing at a bargain price - I’m not stupid - at a time when things are rather tight (I have yet to break the news to The Attached One that I have taken this course). In fact, if money was no object I know that we would not be able to move for things ceramic. I’m not sure how or when this need to own pots developed, it may have started at the British Museum where I fell in love with ancient pieces such as those made by the Beaker People. I expect Freud and Jung would see connections with wombs or similar but that’s all too complicated for me. I just like pots.



The last investment of this kind was a week’s wages spent on a bowl by Julia Jefferson. I needed a salad bowl and it occurred to me that I could eat from something handmade and beautiful rather than mass produced. It means a lot of careful hand washing but I still love it. When we brought it home I couldn’t stop looking at it and it seems to have been made for blackberries.



When I actually got the chance to make pots myself things just got worse. I don’t want to mislead you, don’t imagine that I am capable of slapping a lump of clay onto a potter’s wheel and turning it into something resembling a bowl. My efforts were restricted to pieces built from slabs or formed in plaster moulds, incorporating leaves and fabric dipped into slip (liquid clay). As far as I was concerned it was choosing the glaze that was the fun part.



Once I left college (and free access to a kiln, clay, glazes and knowledge) I had to buy my pots from other people, often potters who had stalls at festivals and fairs. I went through an unfortunate phase when I bought every chipped and manky piece of 1930’s crockery that I could find for 50p at car boot sales. Most of these are now living in boxes under my work room table. No Clarice Cliff unfortunately.



Some unusual items have made it onto the walls and into a display cabinet. I dream of eating from plates made by Sean Miller, an urban potter based in my area and one day that will happen. Until then I drool as I sit in front of the screen, perusing craftsmen potter sites. It has been a while so I think I deserve one of Kirsty’s bowls. Can’t wait to see it…

A

An allotment show in suburbia

On Saturday I went along to the local allotments and gardens association autumn show and dropped off the albums of photographs that I had taken of earlier events. I felt that these should be archived as the membership of the association gets smaller and gardens in the area disappear under concrete. There were many of the same old faces, the same reliable people who have kept things going through good times and bad. A stall selling local honey, another selling bulbs and plants, and work by a local artist.


There is something about the very ordinary surroundings of the church hall that makes the flowers and vegetables on display look even more extraordinary. Spiky orbs of orange and red chrysanthemums against the long maroon curtains, pale wavy discs of squash against the green baize of the exhibition tables. I expect someone does tidy up before it all gets going but no one seems to mind the stacks of plastic chairs and the odd mix of screens. The produce is what counts.

Admission is free to these shows that take place in the spring, summer and autumn but it is taken as read that you buy a raffle ticket when you go in. Prizes include the usual bottles but we won a walnut tree last time. It will be a decade before we get any walnuts out of it but we were delighted.


Some might feel that our association is in something of a time warp but I find the sameness and regularity of these events reassuring. It is low tech and quiet, relying on face to face, human contact and legwork. There is no website or email address. I suspect that these modern facilities would increase the membership but it would trade a special, indefinable quality for convenience. When I walk into that church hall I know that it probably looked very much the same in 1956, and in 1978. All that has changed is the fashion and hair that has either fallen out or turned grey.

When the association was founded almost eighty years ago the area that I live in was a shiny new suburb, built alongside main roads, a few Victorian buildings and a railway line. Property speculators encouraged the founding of garden associations and front garden competitions because the bare patches in front of the new houses did nothing to enhance the look of the place. By encouraging householders to turn the muddy plots of land around their homes into gardens they knew that they would add value to their development without having to spend any more on it themselves.



Within twenty years of its being founded the gaps had been filled in by Tudorbethan and Art Deco semis and the gardens were being pressed into service to help those on the Home Front. They became a vital resource and garden associations came into their own. Once the Anderson shelter had been built the space around it was used to fill the gaps that rationing had left. Suburbanites who would never have been interested in growing potatoes suddenly wanted the advice of those who had been growing them for years. The allotment society was the best place to ask and many more clubs of this kind were founded.



I find it sad that, at a time when the UK is undergoing such a positive change in attitudes to the environment, these associations are disappearing because no one is prepared to run them. Most of those running the one we belong to are retired or very elderly and are actively seeking new organisers. I play a small part by pushing leaflets through doors three times a year and putting a poster in the window but I can’t help thinking that many people pay lip service to the environmental movement but can’t be bothered to part with the £2 annual membership fee or walk two streets to a church hall where these events take place. These associations usually offer a discount to their members which can mean quite a saving to someone on a tight budget. They are a great example of a local, green, community resource and in spite of a renewed interest in growing vegetables they are literally dying off.

There will be a time, not that far away in the future, when we will have to start growing our own food just as they do in Cuba, where every spare foot of land is being put to use. When that time comes we will need all the good advice of the members of such associations to make every seed and drop of water count. Let’s hope that they are still there to help us out.

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=82416

　

Forbidden fruit

The fig tree that belongs to my neighbour is heavy with fruit. I have a fool with a fondness for bonfires to thank for this. Two years ago, whilst in the process of taking in hand the neighbouring rundown property, he began burning bits and pieces one morning and kept this up for five hours. I was a bit concerned that he might set fire to our shed and then, quite possibly, our home. Before I went out I spoke to him just to make sure that he was aware of my concerns, just in time as it turned out. He was about to pull apart the fence panel that we had propped up to cover the gap in the fence (that our neighbour was in fact responsible for) and burn that too.

Most of the stuff on the pyre came from the garden that he had been “tidying up” and I mentioned that as much as I loved their cherry tree I was certain that it was responsible for the cracks in our walls as it was so close to our house. Half of it was leaning over the fence and some of the branches almost touched the walls. He claimed that the roots of a cherry tree never spread that far but the cracks in the concrete on our side of the fence told another story. When I pointed out the sticky cankers all over its trunk he said that it would need some looking after but I was glad to see that within a few days that he had looked after it to the point of cutting it down.

I do miss the cherry blossom and the sherbet scent in the spring. The cherries were nothing special but still edible. Some years ago I got annoyed that the starlings were the only ones getting the benefit of them and actually asked if I could have them. I had found a recipe for pickled cherries and was determined to use them for it. For several weeks I kept running outside to scare off the birds and finally picked as many as I could reach. Then I spent a sticky, juicy hour removing the stones. I didn’t have the right kind of pan for the purpose and used a Le Creuset casserole pan but I did have the right kind of preserving jars.

By the time I got around to cooking them up it was around 11.30 at night. I heated up the vinegar with the brown sugar and brought it to the boil. Unfortunately cast iron retains heat too well to allow it to cool down quickly when needed so the bloody thing boiled over and the boiling hot sugary mess ran all over the hob top. My eyes watered as the kitchen was suddenly filled with acrid fumes. There was just enough left to put the cherries into and I spent some moments holding my breath while handling a very hot glass jar into which I was pouring an equally hot cherry/vinegar/sugar mixture. It didn’t explode so I got something right. The lid went on easily and tightened perfectly as the vacuum was formed. By now it was 1am, the back door was open and the kitchen looked like the site of a dangerous experiment.

The next morning I proudly pointed to my jar full of pickled cherries. “They look like sheep’s eyes” he said and went to work. That jar went onto a high shelf and was eventually binned after living there for quite a few years.

I did make blackberry jam on one occasion and we were both surprised at how purple it was, I’ve always meant to make more. The strange thing is that there don’t seem to have been that many this year in our garden. I try to pick as many as I can because if I don’t the rats and the birds will get them and spread them around the place. As a consequence there are brambles and cherry trees everywhere.


I don’t know if the rest of the country has been affected in the same way but in west London we have been blessed with an abundance of free fruit. There has been enough of the right weather at the right time to leave the trees along the A40 quite literally dripping with fruit in shades of gold and red. I’m not sure what these trees are, damsons probably, but unfortunately their proximity to a road with high pollution levels means that I can never take advantage of that harvest (this doesn’t stop one woman I’ve seen picking and eating berries as she walks along even though I’ve mentioned the risks to her). The pavements alongside it are sticky with rotting pulp and I have to watch my step because their slippery skins and small hard stones can send you skidding, especially after it rains.

One morning I found myself peering out of the window at one of the self sown trees at the wilder (OK, scruffier) end of the garden. At first I wondered why its leaves were turning so early in the year. Then I realised that these autumnal dabs of gold were in fact the same kind of fruit that I had seen at the roadside. I had never seen fruit on it before. Even the ornamental plum, Prunus cerasifera nigra, is strutting its stuff in the fruit department.

Unfortunately there is only one fig tree but as I said I have bonfire man to thank for the abundance of them that now hang on my side of the fence. Once he had hacked down the cherry tree he managed to prune the fig in such way as to leave all the fruit on my side. Thanks to the way the shed and the fence are arranged I can pick all those figs the moment they have ripened. I consider it payment for five smoky hours and summers spent with the windows closed because my neighbour liked his Beethoven loud.

　
　
　

Gone

Recently I listened to a BBC Radio 4 feature about the increasing number of people in the UK who are found to have died without it being noticed. Their bodies have lain for years in council flats with post, including demands for payment of bills for utilities and letters announcing the termination of their supply, building up against their doors. The pension or benefit that is automatically transferred into their bank accounts pays for the rent that is automatically drawn by direct debit. The silent financial machinery that we have come to take for granted keeps their demise a secret.

The neighbours who said little more than “Hello” in all the time they lived next to them assume that they have moved away or are reclusive and don’t want to be bothered. As this feeling is often mutual the situation continues until a gas meter has to be replaced or essential maintenance has to take place. Someone breaks in and discovers the skeletal remains of someone who once had children, siblings and friends. No one has noticed the space in their midst.

At that point the good people who carried on with their lives unaware of the corpse next door develop a conscience and wonder if they should have been better neighbours. They may even take measures to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen to them by seeing their family members more often.

Around the world others are disappearing for different and more sinister reasons. In the UK we would expect our police force to investigate a disappearance not instigate it. I can’t imagine what it must be like to live in a place where I had to fear them. The term "to be disappeared" came to be used in relation to those who were taken into custody by security forces in countries such as Argentina where it is thought that between 1976 and 1983 as many as 30,000 people “disappeared”. Although this type of activity is usually associated with dictators and countries with a poor democratic record “the war against terror“ has led to some strange alliances between the UK, the US and countries such as Pakistan, where democracy is in a fragile state.

Masood Janjura and Faisal Faraz were taken into custody on a bus there on the 30th July 2005. They were seen in detention but the authorities deny that they have them in custody. Masood’s wife, Amina, is leading protests in Pakistan demanding that the authorities release such detainees or at least confirm that they are alive. Please watch the “Dateline” video on this link. It is very moving and reminds me how difficult it would be for me to cope if my other half didn’t come home one day. My thoughts are with Amina and her husband who looks the sort of man I would be proud to know. If you feel the same way please take a look at the suggested action on the link.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=524

“When people lose their sons and daughter they do everything in their power to find their children.” These are the words of a refugee from Grozny whose son, 29 year old Ibragim Gazdiev, was kidnapped in broad daylight by armed men of Russian appearance in the republic of Ingushetia. Ibragim’s dad probably thought they would be safer there but he is now awaiting news of his son who he is well aware may be enduring torture or who may even be dead. Gazdiev Muhmed Yaponzovich wants to send a wave across the world to let the authorities know that what they are doing is being scrutinised and that light is being cast on their dark activities. He hopes that this will bring his son back to him. Be part of that wave and take a look at the link.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=522

Sanjiv Kumar Karna was on a picnic with ten friends in southern Nepal when they were arrested on the 10th October 2003. They were beaten and interrogated and, although six of the group were released, it is not known what happened to Sanjiv and four others. In the past Sanjiv had an opinion and expressed it, he became involved in politics as a student just as many young people do when they attend university or college in the UK. Then, just as many of us do, he stepped away from all that and got on with his life. Unfortunately as far as the Nepalese security forces are concerned once an activist, always an activist. His family have been told that he was killed during “police action” but this has been denied by the police. There is a chance that his body lies with those of his missing friends in Janakpur but even though funds to pay for the cost of exhumation are available and the police have a duty to investigate the claims nothing has been done. Another father, Jai Kishor Labh, waits for news of a son.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=349

The thing that strikes me about these missing people is that they are just like us and would not look out of place in my neighbourhood. They are the people we live next to and rarely speak to. They support Fulham and scratch their bums, they don’t like cheese and they will miss “Big Brother”. They are ordinary. They are us. That is why it matters that they have “disappeared”. It is important to notice and speak out for them because things have happened recently in the name of the UK that suggest that next time it really could be you.
　
　
This is dedicated to Patrick, a fellow member of an Amnesty International local group, who died at home following an epileptic fit. He was not found for several days but at his funeral it was clear that he had many friends who loved him and that he had been an active campaigner for human rights and those with disabilities in spite of being disabled himself. I am certain that Patrick would have had a blog if the internet had been available to him at the time. It would have been a more interesting blog than mine.