Tag: short-story

The kindness of “strangers”

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“We risk becoming an island of strangers” Keir Starmer.*

Now that I am old and full of sleep I find that people are occasionally starting to offer me their seat on the tube. It happened twice on a packed Metropolitan line train yesterday. Both the people offering were young women wearing hijabs.

We live almost at the summit of a very steep hill, so coming home laden with luggage is always a bit of a slog once we’ve got off one of the many buses that stops nearby but doesn’t dare try to ascend it. There are no routes. I suspect the drivers might need oxygen. At any rate, there is always a slight air of base camp about us as we pause at the bottom, look ruefully at each other, up at the slope, take a breath...”ready for this?”

Getting to that point close to midnight on Sunday in the rain, and a young black bloke in a car opposite starts shouting at us. We couldn’t make out what he was saying and initially weren’t sure he was talking to us, or had just stopped to shout at someone down his phone, or whether he was being threatening or not. So many urban myths, so little time. Thinking he might need directions, I wander over to talk to him; and it turns out he’s seen our predicament and was offering us a lift, which we very gratefully accepted. Friendly young man. Helped us in and out of the car with the luggage. Good deed for the day.

And on the way back, we struggled out of the lift at West Ham station just as our train was drawing swiftly in. Being a four carriage train it was sweeping ahead of us down to the far end of the platform, so we ran after it – limped in my case – as fast as we could, lugging backpacks, trundling wheely suitcases with bags balanced on top and pulling a heavily laden shopping trolley. On flopping down in a seat, having heaved all this up into the carriage- “pfff!” the Eastern European woman sitting opposite catches my eye, smiles and offers me a drink of water because “you look out of breath”.

Our neighbours aren’t strangers, and nor, it seems, are strangers.

* I know that Starmer now says that he deeply regrets using that phrase, but doing so was not an accident. All speeches of that sort are worked over many times by many people and every phrase is designed with calculated effect – which button will this push, which strings will that pull, what kneejerk reaction can we get with the other? His regret comes from being caught out as these calculations blew up in his face. He doesn’t, however, seem to have learned from this – that the xenophobes and racists he is trying to impress won’t be impressed and anyone who wants to fight them will be repelled – because he’s still on the same course towards disaster.

Return of the Bodyless Heads?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Every year during the Autumnal years in the early sixties, when I was in my last years of Primary school, as the nights drew in and visibility declined on the playing field at the heart of the estate I grew up on, some of my friends claimed that it was haunted by bodyless heads that they had seen floating across it in the middle distance. There was much heated debate about this, with most of us quite sceptical, but the sheer vehemence of those that had “seen” was enough to bring on a wary shudder in our lizard brains – of the same sort that made us nervous of walking up the alleyway behind Cromwell Road in the dark, because the bush half way up, which we knew perfectly well was a bush, looked like a gigantic bear reaching across to grab and eat us. Some Winter evenings we got a bit of the way up, saw the bear bush, hesitated and turned back. An irrational fear that we knew was irrational, but potent nonetheless.

The bodyless heads turned out in the end to be some older kids who’d started the story as a lark, and backed it up by running across the field shining torches up into their faces, giving the impression of eery ghost lit heads floating at speed and sparking shouts of “ITS THE BODYLESS HEADS!” from the gangs of younger kids still mooching about after it was too dark to play football but too early to go home to bed and hasten the next day…and school. Even though we could see the bodies running along, dimly, somehow it was more fun to believe than not.

I was reminded of all that by these bodyless heads in the local precinct. Decapitated dummies, oddly cloned, modelling hijabs and other stylish headgear, balanced on the top of rollable purple luggage; in some ways even more eery than the original fantasy in the field. Somehere, there are complementary headless bodies…

This one looks a bit resentful that someone has taken a lump out of her nose.

Talking to my brother about this revealed an alternative origin story for the bodyless heads. Long before Halloween was a thing in England – we used to do “penny for the Guy” for Guy Fawkes night and no one had heard of Trick or Treating (or “trickle treating”, as the kids in my class used to say) – one of our more creative Primary school teachers got us to carve a Jack o Lantern. Being England in the 1960s, we didn’t have pumpkins, so I think we used Swedes. They smelt really bad anyway. They were quite small and a bit pallid looking, but we put candles in them, and I think some of my classmates might have put them on top of the fence posts at the ends of their back gardens facing onto the Field; so, from a distance in the twilight, the legend of the bodyless heads would have been born. The kids with torches would have been playing into it for a laugh.