Assault at Notting Hill
James Hughes-Onslow
I spent last Sunday and the Monday Bank holiday in a house between Portobello Road and Ladbrooke Grove not many yards from the Westway Flyover — probably the daftest place in the country to be on this particular weekend in view of the violence which took place at the Notting Hill Carnival last year and duly erupted again this time.
I had simply called to see whether a well-known gardening correspondent who lives there was all right, and to discuss ways of defending the dahlias which were trampled last year by hordes of black youths seeking refuse, breaking the knobs off the iron railings and falling down a well.
The possibility of such scenes repeating themselves seemed remote at that time on Sunday afternoon. I had arrived at Paddington on the same train as a lot of West Indians from such exotic-sounding places as Ealing and Slough to find that the station was crawling with pop fans bound for the Reading Festival. I once went to the Reading Festival and I can report that, of the two groups, the Carnival crowd are a good deal less dismal than the Festival crowd — and, incidentally, that they no more belong to Notting Hill than the junkies do to Reading, hence the anger of the locals in both places when things get out of hand.
In Portobello Road, Cardinal Hume, Archbishop of Westminster, was `sharing the joy of the people' and three Anglican clergy were dispensing goodwill outside their church in Ladbroke Grove having just held a service attended by the chairman of the Community Relations Commission, David Lane. Smiling policemen seemed to agree that they had over-reacted last year but that they wouldn't do it again. There was even talk of the miraculous `selfcleansing' effect of allowing the black community to look after themselves, with black stewards to police the carnival.
But it is the very unpredictability of racial violence in this country which scares even seasoned veterans of conflicts in Northern Ireland, Paris or American university campuses. The time to panic, I was told by experts, is when you see a stampede, with grinning black faces. This could easily be mistaken for a further manifestation of exuberant carnival goodwill but it is in fact an organised group of hoodlums (from Brixton, they all say in Notting Hill) who enjoy the bravado of indiscriminate muggings, though preferably of white victims.
Individual white men running flat out, pursued by several hundred blacks, brought to the ground and kicked into the gutter, were a common sight in Cambridge Gardens, which leads from Acklam Road to Ladbroke Grove, last Sunday night. Women and old people were easier victims, their purses and wallets being quickly emptied and thrown across the street.
I made the mistake of picking up a woman's purse which was thrown in my direction and was immediately attacked by about eight black teenagers, one lot administering the punches, the others going through my pockets but, rather humiliatingly, without finding anything that interested them. I am not paid enough, and I certainly lack the curiosity, to try and find out what motivates these criminals. I stayed indoors for most of the carnival as if in a state of seige. We ventured out for the newspapers, some West Indian food, which proved uneatable even to the cat, and, on Monday evening, for some curry from a take-away Tandoori restaurant in Ladbroke Grove.
We discussed what it would have been like to have been at Troy or Londonderry. Someone said that the disco, pounding away under the Westway flyover, gave him the same sort of headache that he suffers at Test Matches against the West Indies. A girl who had participated in the Vietnam student demonstrations in the United States and in the Paris riots of 1968, said that this was much more nerve-racking, possibly because she was getting older. She asked for a glass of whisky. A homosexual couple, Victor, who is white, and Marvin, who is black, went out for most of Monday, on the grounds, I think, that between them they were neutral. However, Victor was beaten up when he became separated and was only saved from further battering by Marvin's shouts of 'He's my friend.'
The Monday evening Tandoori expedition took place in the nick of time, just as the police were lining up with their fibreglass shields and dust-bin lids for the final confrontation. We ate among the tropical plants in the conservatory trying to ignore the screams and crashes of populace outside. In fact this really heightened the effect of a terrible tribal uprising.
Two black girls banged on the door telling of an emergency. They wanted to go to the loo. Once in the loo, they collapsed with hysterical laughter. Then a reporter from Time Out and two more from a radical magazine called The Leveller. They really only wanted a glass of wine and a grandstand view of the carnage from the top window. Once the fighting had moved towards Ladbroke Grove, they made their excuses and left.
Two white girls and a white man with a knife wound, all of them badly shaken, were let in for cups of tea, the girls particularly upset that many of their black attackers had been girls. Then a dazed policeman, struck on the head by a brick, came in to recuperate, followed by a Sunday Times photographer, also hit by a brick. A black reporter and a white one appeared wanting to see the ITN News at Ten, from which we learn that four people are critically ill with stab wounds, one of them a nearby resident who' was standing at his gate. Meanwhile coffee was being served in the conservatory. Dahlias (which had survived) were still pretty high amongst the topics of conversation and so were some long anecdotes about how one behaves under stress. There was also a serious suggestion that next year's Carnival should be in The Mall.
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