A BIT OF A BLOW
John Sweeney meets the
dossers and tower-block dwellers who weathered the storm
DURING the London blitz, Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene occa- sionally found themselves wandering around at the height of the bombing of the blacked-out capital, enthralled as the fires crackled, the bombs fell and panes of glass crashed to the ground. Muggeridge writes in the second volume of his autobiography, The Infernal Grove: 'There was something wonderful about London in the Blitz.' The image of those two great men of letters savouring the capital's chaos as a night- time treat kept dancing in my mind as London recovered from its bashing by nature last week.
There were no fine novelists or journal- ists to hand in Lincoln's Inn Fields when the hurricane struck in the small hours of the morning. Only a knot of the capital's proudest and most independent tramps witnessed the storm, the hard cases who religiously shun the blandishments of the Salvation Army and sleep in their card- board boxes, with a stale copy of the Daily Telegraph for a pillow. As the square's plane trees were blown over, one poor wretch was killed, according to differing reports either crushed by a falling tree or flattened by a knocked-over wall.
When the winds had died, against a backdrop of beached leafy leviathans, an expensively dressed middle-aged couple fed the sodden pigeons bits of bread, ignoring the sodden human a few yards away. A shivering frame, a growth of beard, a black coat which must have looked the worse for filth in Harold Wil- son's premiership and the distinct, give- away pong of piss, Tom was one of the surviving tramps.
A soft-spoken, pleasantly polite Scot, he was reading a horror paperback, showing a snarling, blood-stained nightmare animal on the cover: Wolfen, a novel by Whitley Strieben. Was that as frightening as the storm? No, he said, and grinned a dental- hygiene-poster grin. He had spent the night of the storm scared witless in the frail, wooden bandstand at the centre of the Fields, which had emerged unscathed.
`It was terrifying. I've never been so scared in all my life. The noise. The noise.' A fresh shiver of fear, or, perhaps, the DTs, or something of the two combined, whipped through him. He shook his head, in mute acknowledgment of the force of the storm, and then he told me his story.
One of the other dossers, Big Fat Patsy, had been sleeping in his box on a bench when one of the planes had toppled, the trunk crashing down a few feet away from his cardboard home. From the fragile shelter of the bandstand, the others had watched Big Fat Patsy's head pop out, survey the scene, and pop back in again. When they ran out to see if he was all right, they found that Big Fat Patsy was fast asleep. The British dry cider industry should be proud of him. I gave Tom a pound for his tale, which caused the pigeon-feeders to scowl. On my way out of the square, my car ran over a pigeon, which seemed like justice of sorts.
Someone else who slept through the storm was a giggling blonde with green- varnished toenails, a polytechnic student occupant on the 19th-floor of Hack- ney's Trowbridge Flats. These are the tower blocks so awful that the council `Buddy, can you spare a grand?' blows one up every now and then, to encourage the others. The blonde had been to a party the night before, and had missed everything. She had heard, howev- er, that one woman had been trapped in the lift for an hour, with no power and the telephones out of action, until a man had gone on his motorcycle to fetch the fire brigade. (The thought of spending five minutes longer than necessary in a Trow- bridge lift-cage, a metallic, evil-stinking oubliette, would make even Big Fat Patsy shudder.) Two floors down, someone with an old lady's voice squeaked through the letter- box that her bed, which was on castors, had shifted half-way across the room because the tower block was swaying so much. But, no, she wasn't going to open the door. At the bottom of the tower block, the vortex from the wind had knocked over a tree and a concrete lamp-post, squashing the roof of a bronze Honda Civic as if it were made of marzipan. Helen Branchflower, a sprightly 74-year-old wearing a pair of grey, flared slacks and a maroon coat, was chatting to the block's black caretaker, who was earn- ing some over-time, about the storm. `That's the worse one I can ever remem- ber. When the power went off I just sat in the dark with my torch, feeling it sway. I was so scared I had to take some paracete- mol.'
Worse than the Blitz, even? 'Oh, yes. At least you had the whistle of the bombs to tell you to duck. With this storm there was no warning, nothing. My dog went nuts, poor creature. It was as black as Newgate's knocker.' The caretaker and I laughed, wondering just how black that was.
To the west of the flats, past a railway line weirdly silent, and creepily unblinking traffic lights, a dazed pensioner held an electric kettle to the sky and asked aloud what had happened to the power. In Victoria Park an avenue of 30 to 40 plane trees was uprooted, a file of old ladies pathetically exposing their dirty bottoms to the world for the first time in a century or more. The running sequence of fallen timber uncannily stopped just before a park-keeper's house, sparing it and its occupants with a blind mercy typical of this storm. What if the big wind had blown outside the small hours?
As other people stumbled by, awed by a 96mph wind into talking to ordinarily- shunned strangers, united by wonder, you would be hard put to place this crazy topsy-turvy forest in London E9, let alone anywhere outside the like of Whitley Strieben's vivid imagination. This was-not the everyday London of casual street abuse and automatic unconcern.
Across the road which divides the park, an enormous tree had fallen, blocking it. A handful of stunned council workers were growling away with their chain-saws. One stopped for a moment, looked at the green chaos which surrounded him and, in the purest Cockney, said: 'This is out of order.'
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