Dancing on Air
Corinna Adam
There were no television pictures ..*.of Meanwhile Gardens last weekend, though they celebrated Carnival there as well. There were no pictures, perhaps, because Meanwhile Gardens does not con- form to received ideas about the Notting Hill carnival. The theory is that, if there is no violence worth mentioning, the affair has been a 'huge' success. An 'amazing' success, reflecting an idealised multi-racial tolerance. 'Police and organisers pronounc- ed themselves delighted last night as the Bank Holiday festivities, held in near- Caribbean sunshine [sic] ended peacefully • • ' So, since there was no need for in- trepid cameramen to dodge bricks and bot- tles under the great Westway bridges, we Were given the 'other' pictures what might lust as well have been archive film montage of steel-bands and multi-coloured dancers. Not forgetting the statutory clips of P.C. Plod essaying a samba, or P.C. Pester reluctantly lending his helmet to a publicity- conscious black girl.
August Bank Holiday is now, by custom (which is to say people have decided over the past few years to create a 'tradition') the time when white English society pays its brief dues to Caribbean culture. If I were black I would find a lot of it insufferably Patronising. I might tolerate the vicar wag- gling his hips on the church steps, but I Would find it misplaced. I might be grateful that my son hadn't been arrested for smok- ing marijuana (though he very likely will be if he's caught at it in All Saints Road during the next few days). I might — almost cer- tainly would — enjoy owning a few poor streets for a couple of days. But I would know that it was a token ownership; above all, that those streets are scarcely worth owning.
Meanwhile Gardens is a lineal descendant of other reluctantly conceded green patches In London, with similarly apt names like Barmy Park (where Bethnal Green lunatic asylum, now the library, once stood) or It- chy Park (where City meths drinkers sleep). The 'Gardens' are a strip of bumpy grass landscaped rubble, in fact — trapped bet- ween the Metropolitan Railway and the Grand Union Canal. This hinterland space was eagerly taken over by local amenity groups a year or two ago, but the name does not appear on street maps. What it says there is 'under development'. In the streaked twilight at the weekend, as little exhausted groups sat among the beer cans listening to almost equally exhausted bands, it had a certain sorrowful beauty. On the other 363 days it is sorrowful, full stop.
A bit further on lies Golborne Road; another street that doesn't figure much on the TV screen. This is the headquarters of
local organisations like the Grassroots bookshop and the North Kensington Law Centre. Directly outside their doors on Monday night, an amiable if not wildly en- thusiastic group of 200 or so people danced to the Trinbago Carnival Club's steel band. The Law Centre was shut, which may have been a good sign (they had earlier announc- ed they would be open throughout the weekend, in case of trouble.) They spread their net wide, those idealistic young people at the centre of what, before Brixton, was London's best-known black community. (Many people regard Notting Hill, scene of the 1958 riots, as the birthplace and proving ground of British black consciousness.) To- day, one of the posters in the window asks our support for a Lesbian woman, dismiss- ed from her job as a houseparent in North Wales.
Along Ladbroke Grove, on the stalls sell- ing fried fish and Red Stripe lager and a variety of self-improvement techniques, many involving solar energy, there were petitions to be signed against harsher in- justices. Najat Chafee is 22, Moroccan, and has a small baby. She faces deportation to Morocco because the British authorities think she should be with her husband, who has a history of violence and left this coun- try of his own accord last year. Reggie Yates has a British grandfather and a British wife and child; he is due to be deported to Ghana for 'overstaying', even though when he was taken to court the magistrate gave him an absolute discharge and ruled that he had a right to settle here. At any other time, pressure to sign the peti- tions would have been more strident.
Two days; and both the police and the black community know that Carnival doesn't really count. By definition, Narren- freiheit is short-lived and otherwise cir- cumscribed. All that can be said, now that the streets have been cleared of feathers and cans, now the Guardian-recommended bakery has taken down its shutters and there is quarrelsome business-as-usual along the Portobello Road, is that the situa- tion is no worse than it was a week ago. And it was bad enough then in all cons- cience. When the carnival is just a vague memory of noise and pretty scenes, recollection of All Saints Road last April 20th will still be bitterly clear. All the `ethnic' groups in the area, including poor whites, have serious unanswered complaints about the police running amok that day. (If it proves anything at all, a peaceful carnival simply shows local people that they them- selves were tolerant, not that the police have changed.) The internal debate in the new Ken Livingstone-financed Police Monitoring Group, about whether and under what circumstances to talk to the police, will continue. P.C. Plod will again be called a neo-Facist, as some of his col- leagues certainly are. And the Mangrove Freedom Fighters, most disciplined and dramatic of all the dozens of groups, will sponge and press their Castro-style uniforms in the certain knowledge that things are getting worse, meanwhile.
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