So I dragged my bags out of the aeroplane at Heathrow and, having run the gamut of the slit-eyed customs and immigration officials, who these days comprise all sexes, all tendencies, and all races, which is no simple trick I can assure you, I got on the very civilised express train and found myself at the heart of Paddington station, more or less in the heart of London, capital of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, within 15 minutes — not bad, even for the 21st century.
All of this called for a pause, if not for celebration; at least for a breather. So I dragged the said bags up the escalator, having survived the zig-zag of the vaulting, pigeon-stained glass arch roof of the highly Victorian station building that greets you in an unfriendly way as you step off the train, and found my way to a place where they sell strictly therapeutic and medicinal quantities of Guinness (not that I’m doing subliminal advertising for the Irish off-shore multinational, but one does sometimes wish it would take notice of who its friends are and pay us the odd kickback for saying that its product is the finest, richest, darkest [which helps] nectar in all the world, provided it is served up right).
So anyway, no sooner had I sat myself down to draw breath than a bald cockney head poked itself out of the door of the pub and, without so much as a by-your-leave, imposed himself into my space — okay, I lie, he first of all asked if I minded if he joined me, seconds before plonking his pint of bitter down on the other side of the table, rolling an Old Holborn spliff, and then staring into the middle distance, the way the English do when they mean you to understand that they are not invading your space, and don’t expect you to invade theirs either.
Very English this. Very British. But when you’ve lived there as long as I did in my prime (so long ago, so tinged with mixed regret and delight) you know that what you see is not necessarily what you get.
So I eventually broke the silence with this man who had invaded my body bag at that table overlooking the honking, cellphone-yelling, diesel-engined, shunting, back-and-forth chaos of Paddington station, and we fell into a conversation that was to last almost a full hour, and would cover almost all corners of the globe, the universe and everything that populates it, within reason. But mostly, of course, I suppose we talked about ourselves — which, in the scale of things, is pretty much the same thing.
My new-found friend’s name was Thomas. He told me at the end of our hugger-mugger that he preferred not to be called Tom, for very good reason. His surname, he told me, was Jones, and he had decided very early in life that he didn’t want to be unfavourably compared with the white-suited, tight-trousered, hairy-chested Welsh crooner of the same name. So, Thomas it was.
Thomas was born in the East End. He had come up in the gangs, ”cos you don’t know any different, do you?” Then he joined the army — ‘also ‘cos you don’t know any different”, and then served 12 years in the armed forces, rising modestly through the ranks, mostly serving in the British colony of Cyprus.
What made me really sit up and listen, in these days of unwarranted war conducted by unreconstructed imperial leaders, namely Tony ‘Blah-Blah” Blair and George W ‘Bushfires” Bush, was his statement that he had finally resigned from the army in the early 1980s because he didn’t want to serve in the Falklands, when Margaret Thatcher launched her surprise war against the Argentinians in the distant Malvinas. ‘I knew I would have to obey orders,” Thomas told me as he sucked ruminatively on his pint, ‘and I didn’t see why I should go and kill people who hadn’t done anything to me. It didn’t seem right. Like I said, I fight me own fights. The army was just a job. My superior officer thought I didn’t have any brains to know what war did to people. So I resigned.”
This was the most refreshing conversation. We make so many assumptions about so many things — not least that ‘the British” and ‘the Americans” are the ones who have decided to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, against the consciences of most of the world. The reality is that the majority of people, in Britain at least (the Americans have proved themselves to be a different kettle of fish with the outcome of the latest presidential election), are against this antediluvian way of thinking.
Thomas, my few-found friend, East End, working class and been-through-the-mill in ways I don’t have time to tell you about right now (although I reserve the right to bore you with them over the next two weeks or so if World War III doesn’t break out instead) restored, as I say, my faith in humanity, in a way.
And in this topsy-turvy world, where the best of our intentions are buried under prejudices (yes, all of us) and certainties that have not necessarily been very carefully thought through, this kind of casual conversation helps you to make it through another difficult day.