Fluffhead and I went out in the springtime sun. Down to town.
Down to sit somewhere and have a nibble.
We pause outside the coffeehouse.
He likes the vanilla wafers they sell.
But it’s full. Not a space to be
had. We peer inside, checking; he
strains at his reins. Today the coffee house is filled with women. And children.
Not one man in the shop.
“What, darling? You
wanna sit in your buggy?” I hear a long
lost Cockney voice say, as we let the door swing closed on us, and I pause for
thought outside again. Fluffhead looks
up at me, eyes squinting in the sun. He
doesn’t understand why we aren’t going in.
Have you noticed there are few authentic post-war Cockney
accents anymore? First they got replaced
by Essex, Estuary – that strange flat pulled
out way of talking. And then by that
brilliantly interesting racial hybrid: the Estuary meets urban black school
slang. It’s incredibly blocked nose
nasal, and has given us the aural delights of: ‘Allow it, blud! Oh my days!
That’s long, its bare long…’ Etc etc etc.
Sadly that last is still in use but a titch out of date. I don’t have a secondary school age child to
bring it home to me anymore; and don’t live close enough to a secondary school
to hear it in passing now. Fry and I
used to spend long hours listening to and loving this weird new street
hybrid. And speaking it very badly, for
the love of the sounds of words. Of
course, he heard it and lived it at school.
But I was completely putting it on, just because the sound of it was
delicious and fun.
For some unknown reason, despite my birth Within The Sound
of Bow Bells in Bethnal Green, I fell out complete with relatively plummy accent. This always mystified my countryside mother
and my London father. And
my mother’s sister in law, who lived over the fence, next door in Roman Road. I got called ‘Little Princess’ in a not altogether
friendly way, by some people. At various
points in life, my accent got posher and posher (the only state primary school
in Mayfair, where we lived ‘cos of dad’s job
as a Housekeeper of an office block); and then finally lost its edge altogether
(20 years on a Council Estate in Paddington).
When I get really angry and lose my temper, raise my voice and generally
behave badly (too often), what you hear is a strangely articulate East End fishwife.
I can’t take myself seriously, verbally, being (a) not
incredibly quick on my mental feet out loud – much quicker here on page or
screen, and (b) listening to myself speak – I have no idea who this woman and
her roots are…This also explains why I don’t have the Voice of Authority you
need sometimes with children. I listen
to myself tell Fluffhead, or a younger Fry – “stop it!” and what I hear is a
precocious child bossing another child, in a silly plummy voice. The children laugh or ignore me. This is of course, inconvenient and annoying.
But anyway, I whoppingly digress.
Even after I just wasted your time for the 10 minutes it
took me to write that, there is still not one man in the shop. It’s packed to the brim, very full today, and
still all women. We’ll never fit inside.
Just had the worrying-y-est [yes, I made that up] thought. It’s also pretty obvious when you come to
it. Expect no genius insight here.
All those times I sit, watching, taking my little notes in
the coffeehouse. What about all the
other people in the room who might be taking their little notes?! About me:
‘Over there, just hidden by the half partition is a woman
who shows up every week, just the once. She’s
always a mess. Her hair is dyed reddish
brown and never brushed before she gets here, bit of a bedhead. She strolls in yawning, always chatting to
other people in the queue, regardless of if they want to talk or not. Last time, she bothered a large woman in an
overheavy tweed wintercoat about whether chocolate coated coffee beans keep you
up the way coffee does, and for how long.
Today, she tapped the shoulder of the Muslim woman in front of her and
jauntily, though it has to be said politely, asked her if she ‘felt oppressed
by the hijab’. This cringeingly
interesting yet problematic question actually resulted in an hour’s worth of
the two women having an intense and good conversation with exchange of views
and questions, which was fortunate for the note-taker, as she had unintentionally
picked a woman both as open as herself and as ok with answering questions
without offence. I listened to them
range over feminism in general, the education of women, the lusts of men and
who’s business it was to worry about them or not, and what it was like being a
Trinidadian Muslim. The woman was
wonderful and deeply thoughtful, and the note-taker wished she had taped the
conversation in full, as she had learned much and hadn’t written any of it down. One of the World’s Great Missing Interfaith
Blog Posts that would have been. She
hopes to see her new friend again sometime.
But this isn’t how it usually goes with her. Usually she bothers people in the queue and
that’s that until she pauses in writing or reading a couple of hours later. She sits down, unpacks her books (always so
many: 8 or 9, and she only ever uses 2
or 3 of them) and makes a pile at the table’s side.
Once she’s sat down, ordered her books and pens, and
belatedly fiddled with her hair, she starts taking medicines. She has a problem swallowing tablets, has to
throw her head back to get them down, and looks funny, like a cat trying to
balance a ball of wool on its nose.
Always so serious, head bent over her notebook, eyes moving
round the room, always watching. Gives
me the creeps, to be honest. Taking her
little notes. And scratching her
head. Shifting about, rearranging her
legs, changing position. Constantly. Ants in her pants, my granddad would
have said. Frowning and scowling and eye-drilling her page when she pauses from
writing. She notices Jonah and his
mother are there again. She notices
Jonah’s mother has a hugely obvious New Zealand accent – how in hell did she miss that before?? Whereas Jonas’s accent is from here and quite
posh…hmmm…’
See, now I ask you, is that actually flattering – someone watching
me watching them?? I come off like a
nutter. Anyway…we can’t get in to the
coffeehouse, so Fluffhead and I move along.
We go past the flower shop.
Fluffhead stops because he loves flowers. He bends his head low over the buckets of
hyacinths, bending his whole body, a very cute parody of attention, and smells
them deeply. I think he’s actually
blowing down his nose as much as sniffing, he can’t seem to quite do whichever
one when needed on command, yet. Buts he’s
vastly enjoying himself. The two women who run the shop come out and make
cooing noises over him, as they always do.
One of them offers him a digestive biscuit, which he takes with his thankyou nod
and large smile, generally being excessively lovely and heart melting (as they
often are when you’re out). He points at
all the different buckets of flowers and I have to identify them for him. The sun catches his hair and moves it about a
bit. He glows, with his small hands and
bent legs. Eventually we move on, going
to sit on a bench overlooking a retirement home. Fluffhead watches the cars and lorries going
by (he’s looking for buses), and I watch the retirement home windows, which are
open wide. A row of old people are
inside, looking out. They look a bit
sad. One of them is sleeping, head to
the side as Fluffhead does. I feel it’s
a shame to be looking out on a view of a set of roads, even if its sunny.
Makes me think of seaside hotels on the English seafront: Westgate,
Brighton, Worthing, Hove. A day baking with sun, too bright by far. I have always wanted to be one of those, usually pensioners, sitting on the long balcony
covered porches of those huge white fronted hotels. Sitting there with their white hair,
beatifically watching the sun twinkle on the sea, the golden bits at the far
edge of the horizon: white, blue, grey, yellow, gold, silver. Boats in the
distance, always quite far out. Almost a
mirage, but moving slowly along.
The smell of chips, and battered fish, salt on the air, salt
on the food. Prawns, shrimps, and the
tangle of nets, brown and dirty-looking.
Shingle, blackened and dried seaweed.
Boats bleached on the rocky shore.
Stones and warm conch shells.
Shells of perfect soft salmon colour inside, white and grey on the
outside. All the stones worn edges, all
round or ovoid, or rougher indeterminate shapes: but soft soft soft at the
edges. Like the little old people
watching them, their eyes pale now, faces dragging downward with folds of skin,
dry. Their strange clothes of no style
and often little attention to colour, but comfortable. The sit in their tall backed armchairs and
watch the sea, watch the people, drink in the light.
Are they sucking up life force and glittery joy? Or letting it all go and noting how separate they
are, set back from it all, a watcher of the scene? Imagining themselves not a participant, when
of course, they are – just by being there and part of the whole. That’s the other option: do they feel
themselves blending, pastel as the scene before them, as much a necessary part
as the stones and shells? Does it give
them peace? Or do they feel lulled,
watching that sparkly sea; in the incredible brightness? Does it send them off into their pasts, when
they ran agile and slender across the beaches of childhood, screaming and splashing
with friends long dead, or lost?
Do they crave strawberry ice-cream, vanilla blocks between
soft crunchy wafers? A choc-ice? A bucket and spade, to hear that thwack on
the bucket before releasing it, drawing it upwards, and seeing that perfect
sandcastle? Do they hear the gulls
above, crying and swooping, and think of tales of sailors lost at sea with
souls trapped forever in these birds? Or
the freeness of their height, their flight cool and supported by the currents?
There they sit, getting a bit sunburned on the backs of
their thin skinned hands and the bridges of their noses if their hat brims are
not wide enough. Or the balcony
extending far enough. Judging the world
as they stare out, nodding sometimes.
Watching it all go by. That smell
of sea, a salty slightly dirty tang, real and pungent. They sit, they watch, they remember. Part of everything.
And in the real world, Fluffhead turns to me and points at
his mouth; he’s hungry. I come back to Coulsdon, smell the roads, feel hungry myself. The pensioners in the retirement home are still at the window. One waves to me, and I wave enthusiastically back, feeling slightly less sad for them. Off we go,
slowly up the hill, Fluffhead examining the driveways for interesting stones or white feathers. Slowly toward home.
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