The same old story

I think that UK is living, in these times of Brexit, the same crisis which passed forty years ago, when Maggie Thatcher took the power.
Like at those times, UK is experimenting a difficult passage from an open society, capable to accept from abroad all  the best contributes which can come, to a scared misure which risks to transform the Country in a less cultural pole for art and intellectual minds.
 I've always been very fond of the English skill of hosting people from all over the world.
I've admired and been fascinated by the way England has been able to allow anybody in search of freedom and democracy to stay in the Country.
And now, with Brexit, I feel that all this will be more difficult (I hope, nevertheless, it won't be over). I realize there are two opposite souls in England: one opened and one closed.
Which one  is going to win the challenge?

Memoirs of London - 16

16.

There were, all around Leicester Square so many public places, each one with its own peculiarities. For example the "Cafe Paris" behind his seeming normality, kept a secret known only to a small circle. It was frequented by old and rich women in search of gigolò or any handsome young man in order to forget for a few hours, their loneliness and their time, perhaps ran  too quickly; or "The worm", a meeting place for gays and lesbians; the "Cokney Pride", where was played  the  traditional London’s music. 

Just in front of my pitch used to gather  a group of tramps.  They sat very often in a circle on the benches, right in the middle of the square.   The benches were set all around  a circular flowerbed in  care to Mary, a girl with no age, brown skin and black hair, stained teeth partially broken on the front. As  a young woman she had been a maid at Buckingham Palace and had been sacked for his drinking  or stealing; or perhaps because of an unwanted pregnancy; her friends called her "Queen Mary" or simply "Queen". With her I had more frequent contact, for  she was fond of ice cream.  I presented one cone to her, from time to time. Afterwards I knew many of them. Each one with his own story.

Miss Rambling, an elderly paralyzed lady who juggled with her wheelchair in London traffic, better than a gymkhana champion, was the only to be  strictly abstemious.

 The others guys and girls, including Mary, were all heavy drinkers. They drank alcohol in place and more than any other liquid drink, including water and milk. However, not everyone had reached the terminal stage of alcoholism.

Max, for example, was sloping slowly but inexorably on the verge of addiction. It was increasingly difficult for him to "hook" in  the Cafè Paris, from which he portrayed his only source of income.

As a young man, as shown by some of his youthful photos he proudly showed, he resembled Clark Gable and of his original beauty only remained in his face a distant halo, distinguished by black mustache, still well-groomed and thin, on a  vaguely sensual lip. But when he was in  group with the tramps, with a bristly beard on his reddish cheeks and crumpled clothes, he looked more like the shadow of himself than that of the American celluloid myth he had looked like in his youth.

 Max had played at the races, one by one, all the properties inherited from his family. He often talked to me about horse racing and sometimes, in the transportation of his story, he said with rage that he would succeed on  redeeming at least one country house in Wales, where he would finally retire for a quiet and sweet old age.

The others, for the most part, were however much more battered and unkempt. Hair without care, black face, of that black that only the road can give; always dirty and torn clothes; beltless trousers  and laceless shoes, signs of their frequent go to and  from places of forced hospitalization, if not from the Royal English Prisons.

They always had the inevitable bottle of liquor or wine in their hands or pockets, or, in the lean periods, a concoction they called "sloppy drink", or more simply "slop" of which I could never understand exactly which ingredients it was made of.

"A Stuff" - Joe,  an ex-boxer,  once told me,  - "that when you drink it, it kills you kindly".

16. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 15

15.

Chapter Three 
Leicester Square 

In the  morning, right in that day,  when all the white collars and secretaries in London were already at work, as previously agreed, I called  the Office to find out what would have been my place of work. Lucky gave me a hand: Jim, the guy who led a great selling point had forfeited the day before and that  made  vacant the position he occupied in one of the most important squares around the West End. 

When I got to the shop in Leicester Square I introduced myself to  an  Eastern Arab manager whose  name was Ibrahim.  He gave  a careless glance at my badge and  showed me my positon the back of the store, where I found the machine "Carpigiani", the milk to make the ice-cream, the  cones and some chocolate bars they called flakes to be served as "optionals" squeezed in the cream on top of the ice cream cone.

 In addition I had provided, right next to the ice cream machine, a dispenser with two trays, one for the orange juice and the other for the lemonade that I made it myself with running water and concentrated juice.

 Taken up position at the front of the store and, proud in my white apron, I began my new adventure of ice cream seller  in the Brian Brook Company.

Leicester Square is a square not far from Piccadilly Circus. You get access from there through  two short but commercially important streets: Coventry Street and New Coventry Street.

In the way to the wide  Trafalgar Square, instead, heading south, all  around the National Gallery, in a street called St Martin,  there is another special category of street's traders: the itinerant painters!

Students from the Academy of fine arts in London and from  the High  Artistic schools around the world, amateurs, skilful men  in the art of painting and portraiture; young emerging artists and old decayed artists; aspiring artists or assumed, all converge in this corner of London to offering passers-by the result of their inspiration onto canvas, for a fee that can range from a few pounds for a portrait or a caricature done right there, to much more  expensive  portraits in different  styles and subjects, with the hope  to leave to his descendants  maybe the equivalent of a Van Gogh. Although few tourists, to be honest, had the courage and the business acumen to invest and bet on the pictorial talent of those strangers, anonymous exhibitors;  and not least, it is certain that everyone, including the merely curious, breathed some fresh air authentically Bohemian because, beyond the artistic value of those painters not sedentary, passers-by were to appreciate the skill, ease and freedom with which they expressed in their art their existential anxieties, actual or alleged that they were.   In the more immediate vicinity of Leicester Square there are plenty of  box offices, theaters, pubs, discos, restaurants, clubs, bars and nightspots, bureaux de change and clothing stores; the latter, mostly, are the property of Indian and Pakistani traders, open seven days a week, from nine in the morning until late at night. The presence of several offices of the change machine was a safe attestation of cosmopolitan  London especially for the attraction made to foreigner visitors by this place.
.. to be continued...

London for ever - 10

I’ve  recently been to  an important conference which took place in London in the premises of the Royal  Law Society.

It was organized by an important International Law Firm called SLIG, founded by the three Gaglione Brothers (Alessandro, Giuseppe and Roberto) who are  skillful lawyers both in Italy and in Egland and Wales (as a matter of fact they practise in London  as Solicitors and in Rome as Lawyers in a high degree of expertise ).

It was about being solicitors in England and Wales today and what presumably it could be after Brexit. It was really  very thrilling for me to meet a lot of lawyers coming from so many different towns in Italy and lawyers who practise in London as Solicitors or under different labels (but still in the juridical field).

Though I’m already in my sixties I’m still able to dream. And to be a solicitor in London is one of my dreams.

In the afternoon there was even a space for us to pose some question to three English solicitors come to show us what Brexit might change in the legal profession for Italian lawyers in England and Wales. The scenario they drew up wasn’t not all catastrophic, though surely remains a certain degree of uncertainty.

I was tempted to take the  word just to say how I’m sad of the Brexit (though I respect the democratic expression of British voters; we could even say a lot about the way the 2016 June’s  referendum was held and what kind of negative, external forces influenced the voters, but I still respect the road our British friends are taking to drive their Country out of EU, saving the Unity of the Kingdom and doing the best for themselves).

I’m not neutral as the Solicitors Regulation Association are. I’ve already said that I wanted UK staying in the E.U. because I believe that British are essential part of the European brotherhood I’m fond of.

That's why I say London is for ever.

after the Conference The SLIG Firm had a suprise for all of us: they brought all around London in a free tour in a wonderful, original  Router Master double deck red bus.
I want to thank Alessandro Gaglione and his brothers also for this final present.
That's why I still think London is for ever.

10. to be continued…

Memoirs of London - 14

14.

- "I was talking about the liberation movement represented by rock music, which has, to some extent, captured the legacy of hippies ....
- But open your eyes, please !!! Do not you realize that hippie ideology has also been transformed into a commercial ideology? Here we sing love, peace, freedom! But life, loss, is not made of songs. As a matter of fact they are kicking us in the  ass! Starting with the great fruitful business of Rock Discography and Musicians in the head! Let alone for the liberation movement! "

- "Maybe Rock music is actually just a stage, a dream that enlivens life! But along with an idea, a great revolutionary idea we still do not know about the exact design! "

- "The only real revolution is that made  of action, not of dreams. Every idea to be credible must have an affirmation! It must contain the seed of application and we are due  to accomplished with it! Do you understand !? "

- "Who tells you that the ideas of the rock movement will not find a tomorrow’s application? Great ideas, you know it, can walk for centuries and then pluck suddenly like the underground veins of oil ...".

- "Just wait and hope for yourself. I got bored of waiting, thinking and even dreaming. We are doing the game of the masters, do not you understand? They give you music, they give you alcohol, they even tolerate smoking as long as you  do not break the bullocks on them. And if it is not enough for you to forget, there are other palliatives ... "

-" What are you referring to? To the heroine, by chance? "
- "Yes, even heroin! To heroin and churches! "
- "To the Churches ?! To which Churches! "

- "To every and each fucking church! To all the churches of eternal oblivion, of all the religions of this dirty world, from the west to the east. But in the end, to think about it, even a opium canopy is a church of oblivion. And if the heroine is not at your hands, you can take a plane and go to the East: then if your corpse will float in the Ganges, the West will have lost a scumbag and the East an ill-dreamer and so it is! "

Now his beard, dripping and scrubbing on dry cheeks, seemed to tremble. But I was not very impressed and went on exposing   my thoughts.

- "But do you see? There is a lot more and different from opium, in the East! Even there is like everywhere: everyone finds only the answers he’s looking for. Maybe the junkie finds them in the opium, perhaps he does!  But someone else could find them on a less materialistic and merciless dimension; on assuming an alternative way of life to ours; a model that is more like human; on discovering values ​​that are not just profit, career, or family! What do you think they've been looking for in the East John Lennon, Santana, George Harrison, and the other leaders of the Movement? “

While exposing  my thesis, Tommy had skillfully rolled  himself  a cigarette.

 He had pulled out of the pocket of his tweed jacket a tin can of rectangular shape containing an aromatic dry tobacco.  He had taken  a pinch with the thumb and  the index of his right hand and carefully distributed it on a cigarette paper he had previously spread on the base of the palm of the left hand.

 After a quick slip on the rubber strip, he had cleverly rolled it up just managing with the first three fingers of both his hands. Afterward he had passed over his right index  to verify the complete adhesion of the paper and slipped it in the left corner of his thin lips. Then he removed the lid, stuck on the base of the box, locked it in and passed it to me, with his right hand in search of his lighter.

I refused his invitation, lighting his cigarette with my Swedish matches. He leaned against the wall with his shoulders, his left knee leaning against the plant he had pointed at the wall too.

During our conversation, some tourists stopped to look at the mirrors Tommy had on exposition, slightly inclined to the wall.

Some Italians exchanged intentions, recognizing the familiar idiom; many asked abruptly "How much?" Pointing with their finger some mirrors of interest; others, perhaps more confident using the English language, stated "how much does it cost?", always pointing the mirrors with  the same gesture, or with the eyes.

Only the rare Englishmen and those who know something more than the simple grammar also added a "please" to their question. But Tommy, that day more than ever, seemed to be less interested in business, and he served only those who were really ready to buy,  putting the money in his hand. And he snatched them quickly, delivering the chosen mirror with a cold thank you.

- "Look, Eastern religions and philosophies are not so different from ours! A plethora of ideas that have the main purpose of repressing and conditioning people and above all to perpetuate the power in the hands of those who have it: priests and popes involved! No, I know what it takes to. For the conquest of the power we need  to change things in a different way. How did Lenin, Mao and Fidel Castro? "

- "There are so many ways of taking power, other than the revolution that is brutal and that seems to me a way to overcome! For example, one can take power by transforming it through the transformation of the future generations…without any violence anyway!

Tommaso's eyes showed to me  he did not understand.

"I'll try to explain better my idea on how to change the world!"-I continued to say -"If we could inculcate more serious, more equitable ideas on those who’ll be  on charge of power, as a result, we would necessarily be educated all the people that way. And I believe that these injections of novelty and trust would  come from the East. "

-"I think this way of yours is a pious illusion! Then is such a tortuous idea that it will not be able to give documented practical results "-he said sadly, shaking his head.

Then ended, in a more firm tone--"The more I think and the more I convince myself that the only viable path is that of the revolution."

I realized at that moment that he was just trying to convince himself and not me. I was convinced of the opposite, although several years later, returning with thought to that of our reasoning, I would have noticed that his analysis was more acute and rational than mine, idealistic and utopian, at the highest levels.

-"But how can’t you see that you might be fighting  for a rotting corpse? I insist on you that it is necessary to intervene on the basis rather than aiming at the summit! ".

-"Bull  philosopher’ shit! If you intervene on the basis, than on the summit, it is clear that the times of intervention multiply to a disproportionate time and I believe only in this life and in what men can do through it. Moreover, the revolution has as its ultimate purpose to reeducate the people! But to do that, you must seize power! Do you understand it ? "

No, I did not understand it, even if I sensed that behind that speech, that his undoubtedly nervous attitude was maturing a decision whose  I had confirmed only several years later.

I was surprised to think of how different Thomas had seemed to me when I first met him.

 I had immediately taken as a  model. With his  detached way of treating the material things of life; the rejection of the values in which I did not believe too and from which I had moved away leaving Italy for other shores. And with him, in his group, with his friends  I had learned to let myself go, driven by the long and gentle waves of smoke, on whose clouds I had found myself suspended almost without realizing what I was doing, but pleasantly, without asking myself a reason why. And now I felt a strange restlessness as if suddenly I was awakened by a shattered dream and I was so much identified in him and I had believed so deeply in his London world that now his crisis could not be also mine. I felt the need to move away, to  walk lonely and think. I greeted him affectionately, as always and perhaps more. I never saw him again, because he left for Italy and I for other roads. I knew of him through the  newspapers: his wrong choices; his bad masters; his industrious repentance, whose sincerity I never doubted.

And his death, under the tires of a car, as an accidental shot, inexplicably and suddenly started from the time rifle fate.

14. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 13

CHAPTER II

TOMMY

13.

Tommy belonged to the old guard of the Italians in London.

He worked illegally and at the same time he perceived the weekly unemployment allowance which officially was due  for being fired from the factory where he had previously worked.

But  according to his personal opinion it  was instead a form of reimbursement of the taxes paid in those years.

 Afterwards, he sentenced, in a society like the English, where a pair of gloves for fox hunting cost a hundred pounds (that he was more or less how much he earned for a selling mirrors for a month in the street ( inclusive of  Saturdays and Sundays) is not surely up  to the proletarians like him make economy.

Moreover  he had to defend himself in some way from the inflation invented by bankers and masters to exploit the working class.

 And since the escalators in London were only in the subway, he defended himself by perceiving that little government aid that, coupled with the variable payroll of the mirrors, allowed him to live quietly.

Tommy (as they called him in London, but his real name was Tommaso) was a bourgeois guy, of those who, in the eyes of the majority, could  never justify their anxiety or their dissatisfaction in the society.

High, long-limbed, and with regular facial features (I admired him and a little envied him for the ease with which he attracted the women’s gaze) Tommy  was endowed with a willing and determined character that, combined with his affectionate and altruistic charisma, instinctively wore you to love him,  well despite some of his contradictions which himself  was unable to explain and  which he did not even realize.

 But the latter thing was a common trait of  the generational movement which I also belonged to.

He had left Rome in the early seventies, when the dream of a more liberal society had already been broken on the barriers of respectability  and bourgeois hypocrisy. So, disappointed by the betrayal of that working class in whose union he, activist of the student movement, had blindly believed; still overwhelmed by that youthful rage that in the ideal years of '68 had released the highest vital energy; shocked, unbelieving, that the bloody boom was just the outbreak of an air bubble rather than the first crunch of the fatal collapse of a weary system, to be cut off at all costs; with the desire to forget and to find the more than ever living animosities of emancipation; driven by the fascinating cultural appeal of the new frontier of the movement, which in the shadow of the Big Ben sought refuge and regeneration in those years where the instances and the search for a new identity of a restless and shaky West seemed to find, if not an answer,  at least a reverberation of hope and ransom in the crises and illusions of Oriental myths, of which the capital of the former British Empire for its past colonial and vocation constituted the ideal and secure outpost; uncertain, helplessly and  confused, he was  passively dragged into London by one of those energetic currents, as mysterious and inexplicable as invisible and uncontrollable that impetuously are capable of dragging the fate of whole peoples and nations.

- "Ciao," I said, getting  behind him from a narrow alley.
- "You bloody scared me," it was his lusty response.

- "Excuse me Tommy! You were so overwhelmed that I could not resist the idea of ​​a joke. How are you?

- "Well, well .... And you? Did you find a job at last?

-"Yes I did! A company for which I have worked in the past has promised me to summon me ..... maybe next week ....! Do you know those machines that turn milk into cream, hang on by souvenir shops along the streets ...? "

- "Ah, yes, I seem to have noticed them, sometimes. Tourists seem to be crazy for them, don’t they?

-" surely they do! But also British seem to like them a lot.
- "Then it is even better! How much  do they pay you? "
- "I  work a 10%, ‘you know?"
- "And how it comes weekly?"
-"I do not know! It depends on the position! There at Oxford Street there would be a lot, but I will not be sure of that! Given my past experience, however, I could also have a good pitch! Ihope well...
- "I have spoken to my boss anyway! I was waiting for you to call me at home ... "
- "Yes, I called you, but you didn’t seem to be there..."
-"Didn’t I?! When did you call? "

He always spoke in a calm, almost indifferent tone, as if his words were the story of other people, not his owns. That day I felt in his voice an unusual emotional thrill.

- "I called a few days ago. Then I knew about the ice creams would take me back and I did not try again…’ you know? I just came to say hello to you! “

He  smiled slightly, seeming to regain his indifferent air as usual.

- "What did your boss say by the way?" I went on.
- "He said the place is available for you"

- "well I'm glad hearing it; thank you. Anyway,  I try in the ice cream now; Later, if they do not give me good wages, I might be asking them .... "

- "As you like! Do not worry, the work here is easy. And then maybe you'll take my place. Here is good enough ... "

- "How are you leaving?"
- "I’m going back to Italy"
- "Do you go on holiday?"

- "No, not on vacation. I'm meditating a more challenging step, a more important choice. Here in London I just broke. Think that yesterday the police broke into the house while there was no one and when I came back I found all my stuff out of the door ... "

-"Do not tell me! Another certainty of London that crumbles .. "

I was genuinely sorry for that news, not just for my friend, but for the fact in itself. I paid five pounds of rent for my furnished room on Caledonian Court Road, but I had always been fascinated by these free-lance communities that in  London were called  squatting houses, because, according to my way of thinking at that time, it was more appropriate to occupy unlived  houses that let them empty and lifeless.

At that time, I only considered the sociological and cultural aspect of the squatting phenomenon without worrying about the economic aspect, especially from the point of view of the owners of the houses .
Anyway, so things were going to happen, even if the situation was  to change seriously very soon.
- "Bloody Hell," Thomas continued, "only last year they would not be allowed to do such a thing! Crushing a squatting! "
- "I heard that they were about to issue a new Squatting Act .... do they have already done it?"
-"No I do not think so. I would have known if they did. The Conservatives are still on  the opposition but  they are getting stronger ... "

Again I noticed in her wards  that unusual emotion.

- "Where are you living  now?"
- "I have sheltered in the house of friends, in Fulham; They are organized; There is always someone at home and if they all leave, especially in the evening, they leave the lights on. And even the houses on the side are occupied by squatters: families of unemployed workers, poor devils. There they will not dare to break through …"
- "So you're okay, right?"
- "Yeah, maybe it was all there!"

He stared heavily in my eyes as if he were considering the importance or the opportunity to continue talking. I supported her gaze, then I offered one of my cigarettes. He continued after breathing smoke into the sky.

- "But tell me what am  I still doing  here? I'm bursting, ‘you know? I do not even remember what I  came here for and what's worse, sometimes,  I do not even remember who I am! My life, my thoughts, my actions are so different since I live here! Who is the real Thomas, do I ask to myself? It was only yesterday that I fought, albeit naively, to change society and  today I’m living  in a cloud of illusions, in a space which  I don’t even know the course? "

His unusual tone lit up my congenial polemic force and as I could, I tried to face him, also because, although he did not know the course, as he said, I felt I had to continue my journey; moving forward and without turning back.

- "Movement always follows a course, in my opinion! We need  to wait! We are in a moment of stasis; Soon clouds will light up! ...

- "No! Enough it’s  enough!" He  interrupted me abruptly, "I want to go back to earth, I have to tie myself to my past, to my true story! And, by the way,  what movement are you talking about?"

13. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 12

 Other street traders I knew in London were "the mirrors sellers". Except for a few apart in  some isolated places, the mirrors sellers were mostly located in a narrow net of roads around the famous Carnaby Street, the real commercial hub of London’s tourist and rolling on since the epic of the Beatles.

 A little already decayed, but still a great attraction in the second half of the seventies. All the range of the consumer’s  symbols and the new western mythology, which also might be found in the T-shirts sold as souvenirs in the many stores that occupied the short road, the kingdom of cheap and quick tourist shopping , alltogether with the symbols of London, were reproduced on mirrors of different formed and sold on the street in front of those stores, which also constituted their store and warehouse.

From  Marylin Monroe to Humphrey Bogart; from Gin Beef Heart to Coca Cola; from the stylized liberty models to Union Jack, passing through the Irish beers Scottish whiskey, rock bands and even the Royal Family, everything was reproduced on those colored mirrors, gently framed and sold from a minimum of 99 pence to a maximum of £ 20 depending on their size and from  the buyer's tourist wallet and luggage.

The mirrors sellers of this area were almost all Italians or Spanish people.

Young people who had come  up to London in order to study English  language and know the city.  Or may be escaped from the economic and political climate of reflux and, in any case, all invoked by the great fascination that London's capital of Rock Music still exercised on the young people of that poorer Europe and they sought, together with greater freedom, a job that allowed them to   live in a decent way, relying only on their strength and without weighing on the family. Among the Italians stood the young freak looking , distinguished by the seemingly cluttered appearance .

I called them the minor brothers of the sixty-nine revolutioners. But among the mirrors sellers  of Carnaby Street there was an authentic and remarkable representative of the former young’s revolution whose name was Tommy.

12. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 11

11.

 Our quiet Oxford Street daily’s life  was sometimes broken by the sudden and almost fleeting appearance of the "smugglers".

These were lurking people from the  East London less wicked and dishonest than their nickname could allow to presume, who were capable of improvising a street sales of genuine false brand names best suited for a Goldoni’s comedy.

They usually acted in groups of four, each one of them with a definite role.

They arrived to Oxfors street  in a peak hour (between 11.30 a.m and 16 p.m.) after parking  their van in one of the inner streets. They usually occupied a sidewalk segment between two crossbars; two of them acted as poles in each of the two intersections, so it could never happen that a patrol bobbies came unexpectedly  and the other two arranged the box with the merchandise in the center of the pavement (perfumes, wallets, scarves, lighters, watches, jewelry, which varied according to the days, but they were  always fake trademarks).

 One of them, the speaker, sitting on one of the cardboard boxes, overturned as a  seat, while on the other higher the objects were exposed for sale, boasted the quality and price of their goods,  extolled in that incomprehensible London dialect, which itself was an unmissable show.

The other, the provocateur, was placed behind the crowd who regularly stopped around the show, attracted by that improvised show and pushing against people with the elbows, showing  the money between his fingers, shouted "... I buy  three of them! "," I want two! "," I take four of those! "dragging behind him dozens of buyers who sometimes gave the money without even knowing what they were buying.

Once one of the two poles, aware of the arrival of a couple of bobbies, gave the alarm. Within a matter of five seconds, without having previously reassured the occasional customers on their honest intentions, goods, money and boxes had already disappeared swallowed from the alley opposite to the policemen 's arrival direction. And after these, completely ignorant, had disappeared from the acute view of the poles, at the same point they were reforming the sales desk. And it should be added that the interruption did not do much to the affairs of the band.

As a matter of fact the fear of the police the band showed, whether true or false it might have been, convinced people that the proposed deal had to be very profitable.

What a blessed naivety of British people and London tourists!

I remember  that my father used to count about Neapolitan scoundrels selling to naïve buyers fake gold watches since the endo of Second World War,  pretending they were booty of  the last robbery of the century. Though everybody knows  the Neapolitan Theatre , is somewhat different from the English comedy.

 I also remember that Bob once confessed to me that he had earned his way of living in that style , for some time,  and he  knew those who practiced it,  to be all very good guys.

11. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 10

Other street vendors were the papers sellers.  They also came almost exclusively from East London but it was very rare to find young people among them. They worked outdoors all year long, occupying the corners at the exit of the most important metropolitan stations, using some of the simple metallic box inside which the newspapers were and, sometimes,  a table with metal chair, and from there emitted some incomprehensible sounds that merged with the drafters  coming from the bowels of the earth, through the infinite meanders of the subway; and in those sounds one could no longer recognize the names of the heads of the daily newspapers Evening Standard and the Evening News, which they pronounced in a short,  deformed by habit, similar to the rattle of a wounded beast, to attract the  attention of the distracted and hurried passengers in transit to the entrances of underground tunnels. The Evening News was actually just an imitation of the most famous Evening Standard. The latter was published in multiple editions from seven a.m. until late at night, with a frequency between  two and three hours. From one issue to the other, only the first page was changed in order to attract the readers to brilliant news. It was distributed to such vendors with a truly fantastic delivery network.

The delivers came in black-yellow van, and from there, with the engine still on, without descending from the van,  they flown the  newspapers packages.

The Evening Standard did not have a precise political physiognomy (at least not in the sense that we Italians give it to this expression) and perhaps it alternated its ideology tuning  with the political parties ruling  the largest London administrative body: "The Great London Council ".

All those vendors gave me a strange impression: that they had always done  that job. Not only for the wheeze voice that characterized them, but also for their very dirty clothing. The skin of their face looked   dark, almost dirty, because of the exposure to the unhealthy air.

 It also seemed to me that they felt  always cold, even in the summer, as if in their bones it was penetrated the humidity and the chilling breath of the freezing drafts coming from the Tube.

 They wore gloved handcuffs in order to easily grab money and newspapers and warmed up with a tea-milk cup they bought take away from the nearest snack bar.

Despite  of their appearance, which in the days of intense fog blended with the surrounding landscape, becoming a characteristic element, like the red royal columns of the Royal Mail, the telephone booths and the black cabs, the sensations they conveyed were, however positive.

 I do not say they were cheerful, but may be jovial. A serene and resigned joviality, as if the diffusion of the events, from London and the whole world, contained in their newspapers, made them impermeable to emotions, placing them above the human events, as if they were impartial messengers  from the underground’s gods.

When passing by, where I was working, they never lacked to nod at me with  sympathy, at the same time giving making a sound which wanted to be  an "are you all right " but one could only hear a  hiss, like the wind that had entered into their bodies, consisting of three, perhaps only two syllables, veiled, almost died  in the throat.

10. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 9

9.

One of them, who used to work in the ice cream sell, was Bob, who had made me an instructor, a few years earlier, in the short period of previous work placement: in particular cleaning and maintenance of the machine, and preparing ice creams and ice drinks.

He wasn’t  very tall (you would say surely more than five feet but less then six, with light hair, combed with a line-centered brush;  his eyes were green colored and very  moving on the features of the face, made a bit irregular by two slightly pronounced upper incisors.

 At the left lobe, with a lot of naturalness, he carried a small round gold earring, fashion, which on our country  was still beyond to come. His clothing was both simple and well-groomed. Particular attention, however, he showed on  the shoes and the t-shirts, on which, usually stood out of immeasurable, numerous gold chains, different in appearance and size, as our women do when they wore  the  ancient folk costumes.

Bob was definitely nice. Very uneasy, he was always around in the nearby shops, he was a jumper, or a grocer's colleague. In his "pitch", which was usually the most profitable, he had during the high season one or more aides on whom he uploaded, in a casual and good manner, most of the workload. When it happened to be in distribution, at peak times, sometimes he was bizarre.

Once, for instance, there was an  orderly and long queue of customers waiting to be served at  the ice cream machine,  up to the outside edge of the sidewalk.

Suddenly Bob said  he had to go and make a  phone call. And so saying, he showed customers a ten-penny coin, holding it high between the thumb and index finger of the left hand and hissing, with the upper lip slightly curled on the teeth, in a string of  glottis shots : "I'll be back in a minute!”.

After he had  disappeared into the store I tried to do my best on serving the customers. When he was back, seeing so many people still queuing,  he asked me kindly,

to set aside, tracing  a semicircle with his left forearm and grabbed a dozen cones, he was able to fill them all by turning his hand skillfully under the ice cream faucet, simultaneously driving the lever with his right hand, and while I was struggling to get ice cream in both my hands, to distribute them, the customers, cheered him up with admiration.  And it seemed that these customers had the magnitude, because there were more and more behind them, and Bob's show was repeated until the machine could keep on refrigerating.

But when he stayed away for a longer time he used to ask me, with a significant gesture of the index rubbed on her thumb, if

I had any  banknotes, which he called in his funny slang “wonga”.

It was at that time of my first novitiate in London that I started to love the English.

 If he did not have customers, he read the newspaper: The Sun, the Daily Mirror and, above all, the Evening Standard, a London daily newspaper that published everything about horse racing, the other sporting events of the day, as well as some local, political issues and seldom  internationals.

He did not read much concentrated or for a long time, since he looked up from time to time to whistle or recall the attention of some glamorous girl of passage, on the goodness of whose forms we did not always agree, and if I tried to drag him to comment on some political news or abroad eco-social argument, its responses were always superficial, albeit not evasive.

At first I noticed a certain surprise in his eyes when listening carefully to my reasoning, and I did not know how to interpret it.

As time went by, I realized that it must appear unusual and even bizarre to him  that an Italian  ice-cream seller , wanted  to deal with arguments that not even the English and the Londoners , like he was, would to be  interested on.

 So, though seen as a sort of  phenomenon, a bit funny and original, I realized that his attitude towards me went gradually changing, from the initial snobbery and indifference into a cordial, sincere sympathy  that I was not able to turn into a deeper friendship, perhaps also because of my immaturity and insecurity.

Bob and the other dealers, including his two brothers and a sister, had left the school shortly after they had solved their attendance obligations; indeed, many even before that term.

Rebellious and refractory to the harsh rules of the English teachers, they preferred the free life of the street; without hierarchical supervisors invading or rebuking and  without any form of obligation (it was not rare he changed bad  words with some overly demanding or unfortunate customer).

 And with a great pay over the average earnings of workers and employees.

9. to be continued... 

Memoirs of London - 8

But if Soho is the pulsating heart of London's by night,  tourism is the real great business  in the  rest of the West End: a huge shopping mall and amenities in whose veins runs an infinite river of people, motorized and money which draws a continuous replacement of new life from the invisible arteries of the immense underground subway of the London metropolis.

The presence of this mass of metropolitan plankton had allowed in those streets the emergence of a varied fauna of sellers, including the fruit ‘s stalls, which were set mostly along Oxford Street.

Their fruit, so beautiful and flashy to look fake, stood out more for quality and shape than for quantity.

The "fruit'stallers" actually sold to the passers-by, usual to quick "lunch-time", or to occasional tourists, Californian a red apple, a greenish South African "Granny Smith"  or even a Sicilian grapefruit, a banana or, perhaps, to the most sophisticated, an avogadro cut in two halves, provided with salt and plastic spoon.  While the few housewives or restaurateurs in the area, found in the nearby Berwick street market cheaper prices and better choices.

The "London Fruits Sellers Company" (from which these particular fruit sellers were dependent) was certainly a company with all right papers: municipal marketing permissions; Public land occupation license; Health insurance card and even regular and substantial payments to the Great State Partner: the voracious Fiscal of the Crown.

The corporate summit was almost entirely made up of Jewish, eternal and skilled financiers, always looking for investments and profits, while the organization on the field, so to say, was in the hands of the English.

The  vendors all came from the neighborhood "East London", a city in the city, the ultimate London, for those who were legitimately and authentically Londoners.

The concentration in  the east of the Thames of the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Londinium had gone along with the expansion of the English capital.

Pushed away to east by the enlargement of the ancient core of the city (as well as from Holborn, Seven Dials e Covent Garden), due to become in the centuries the wealthy square mile, evicted off the west to make space to rich and profiting buildings, the poorest people of London found shelter more and more to the East side of the town, merging with the offspring of the Huguenots, the Jews, the Romani and the already settled poorest English  people and so moving to  Clerkenwell, Finsbury, Shoreditch, Wapping, Limehouse, Hoxton, Stepney, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Aldgate, Millwall, Hackney, Rotherhithe, Mile End e Bow which  all became another London, the only real and original one, in contrast to London’s rich and tourists.

And while Harrod's, Selfridges, Marks and Spencer and the largest London banks were located where once they lived, they found refuge in the East End, far from the chaotic and polluted New Frontier. And when they crossed that invisible curtain that protected them to the east, they entered the "Town" or the “City”, but London was already behind. 

Bulwark and  symbol of the identity of this people was, still at that time,  the Cokney.

It is a real English dialect, though it has lexical borrowings from Yiddish,  and a distinctive accent that features T- glottalisation, a loss of dental fricatives and diphthong alterations.
This slang, which is said to bear more than one trace of early English London speech, acts as a linguistic element of group identification where the East Londoners find  their emotionally primary language, a true mother tongue.
 The other  English find it  very funny, a bit like it happens to the  Italians  when they hear  the colorful Roman dialect of certain comedians, from Ettore Petrolini onwards. Also in my company were several of these "East Londoners". 

8. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 7

7.

The "Street's traders" were a microcosm in the West End.  They were all and everywhere: drivers, painters, musicians,  trumps,  preachers, mystics, sandwiches-men, artists, pimps, prostitutes, nobles decayed, clean-washers, interviewers, fake and real pushers, teddy-boys, advertisers, rock-punkers, adepts, dealers  and sellers of any kind and much more than that.

Everyone could meet them in that circular microcosm of twisted alleyways, avenues, secondary streets and main arteries, all mysteriously united as an osmotic network of communicating vessels where the rivers, streams and seas walk in a twofold direction, never stopping. 

A living body whose pulsating heart is the West End.

Inside there is an even more intricate series of streets and alleys that goes under the name of Soho, where pimps and prostitutes (in regular and authorized professional clothes) have their kingdom.

Prostitutes could only indirectly be regarded as "street workers". 

In the English mentality, in fact, a "bitch in the street" is totally inconceivable. In England everything can be done,  talking of sex, supposed  is not known around. Anyone can make anything  but he’s supposed  not to spread it around . This  attitude,  hypocritical and paternalistic,  is for  sure a Victorian legacy that even the liberation movements of the sixties had failed to sweep away.

Whoever works in the street is the pimp. The one who makes as a trait-union towards the paradise of the forbidden, well protected by the strands of the sexy-shops.


These shops, all  opaque windowed,  at the time totally unknown and banned in Italy,  were officially licensed for the sale and rental of hard-core video cassettes and magazines, but in fact, and everyone knew it, they were the venue of infamous business, ideal recipe for itchy and perverted watchers of all kinds, sado-masochistic  represses, provided on the ground floor of prostheses suitable for pleasure and sorrow (whips, vibrators, inflatable dolls and all sexy accessories of paraphernalia you can imagine) and reserved apartments, projection halls, erotic cells with peephole and much more on top floors.

7. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 6

In 1979 I was back on the road to work for the B.B.C., a company that, apart from the initials of its name, had nothing else to share with British state television. In fact, the Benjamin Building Company did not afflict people with boring programs, neither it  talked with shameless lies about national and international political events. Finally my Company did not even put its nose in the lives of the Queen and the other members of the Royal Family,  generally speaking.

The company I worked for delighted their customers  by selling ice cream and drinks, logistically relying on a chain’s shop of souvenirs, sweets and tobacco’s  strategically located at several points in the great London area known as West End.

 This vast and famous London metropolitan area, which also includes Soho district and numerous small and large parks, is bordered by a perimeter that runs through the important streets of Oxford Street, Charing Cross Rd, Shaftesbury Av and Regent's Street, forming an irregular trapeze whose four tops pass from Tottenham Court Rd to Oxford Circus; from there to Piccadilly Circus and  finally end at Leicester Square, couple of yards   from Trafalgar Square, where Admiral Nelson's statue, according to the likely intentions of the public authorities who wanted it so powerfully high, witnessed  the  British’s greatness and glory to all those who would walk from there: French people, foreigners  and British from all over the Empire.

 In those years, the greatness and glory of England, after the almost total depletion of the British Empire,  seemed more remote and far from the statue of the great conductor of the seas. And nostalgia, it’s all over known, is a feeling that more acutely manifests itself, when the best times are over and  a crisis is bound to come.

 And that Great Britain was in crisis at the end of the seventies of the twentieth century, it immediately became apparent also to the "street traders" who, living among the people, felt the moods of the average citizen in an emotionally direct way.

 On the street, they felt discomfort and nervousness, though the real troubles were still to come, shortly thereafter, with the irresistible rise to power of the Conservatives headed by Margareth Tatcher (later known as the “Iron Lady"), which would mark the end of a cycle in London's administrative life, characterized by a policy of traditional securing of democratic freedoms and sympathy for the weaker social classes.

Moreover, the English metropolis had represented since the rising of the first music liberation and protest groups (born on the wave of the American Hippies movement, also known as the "beat generation") a decisive cultural reference point, helping to make London the Capital of the Rock Movement, where refugees disappointed by the illusion of the failed revolution of 1968, could find a safe refuge escape from the backflow of the reaction which  had gone through  the whole world.

And it was right there, in London, that they could still see the last glow of brightness before its definite sunset. So, in a good way, I agreed to resume my job and sell ice-creams and drinks in the street. By my side I had a refrigerating machine that turned milk into ice cream and a refreshing machine dispensing orange and lemonade.

Where  else could I work, let alone  the road? And to do what? Maybe to get into some office with air conditioning in the summer, heating in the winter, and the stench of paperwork under my nose? There was no other world for me, now, if not that; no other destiny, no other life I could have wanted, than the free life  of street's traders.

 Returning to the road meant for me to relive from the very beginning my adventure in that mysterious and fascinating city that, unfortunately and superficially, is too often considered cold and inhospitable, considering also that never or almost never come into you get a direct contact with English or British people.

 This story is devoted to London and to the dear places where I have lived in.  But it is also dedicated to all the peoples that those places with such variety and vivacity animated in those years who will pass through the main scene of my story: the streets of London.

6. to be continued...