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Event #142: Hall of Mirrors 
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I'm not bitter. But in the early days, when I was seven, I got a spark from the bonfire in my eye and my teachers knew about it before I got into school the next day. And they had all seen my sister crying under a tree because she was scared of bangs. It was local, in a community that was as mixed as they came. But on fireworks night last year, when I met my friends in the nearest pub to the park as usual, I bumped into people from every white, middle-class institution I have ever been part of: secondary school, university, work - even though many of these people lived miles across town. Ravenscourt Park had attracted a following from people steeped in my home culture. And now it symbolises everything I want to leave behind.
Ravenscourt Park is in Hammersmith, West 6. Hammersmith is not much like Hackney, East 8, where I ran to this summer and found a flat that overlooks a Turkish bakery, Berber barbers, a Swedish supermarket, Jamaican flour shops and a Vietnamese take-away. A bit excessive you may think, but there is more community here than in those white buildings four miles West. Where else in London can you get bread and meat on credit, without even writing an I.O.U?
As for Camden, North West 1, where I lived for the past two and a half years, I scarcely miss it. I've had more surreal experiences here in six weeks than in that officially-designated hub of wackiness, where raving is the norm and families go unseen.
Walking back from the bus stop to my new flat in the early hours of last week, I saw that the high street had been swathed in videotape, zigzagging from one lamp-post to another. The bus drove straight into the tape and pulled it into penetrative spikes as the slack ran out. The tape wasn't going to break, but nor was the bus going to stop. As the tension built up and I stared up in amazement, it felt like the perfect end to a crazy party.
It struck my befuddled mind that it was up to me to stop the tape from tangling the whole road, so I grabbed a free end blowing above my head. The street was frosty and deserted except for a man on the other side of the street who had had the same idea. We gathered up armfuls of the stuff and he came over to help me stuff it into a bin. Yes it could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but he was only half my height and, for once, I wanted to be the mysterious woman who vanishes into the night.
So Hackney was looking good and I was pretty sure I'd been right to avoid Clapham, South West 4 - the current Mecca for London's twenty-somethings. Clapham has lots of houses, lots of bars and nothing else, like an out-dated student campus for people who like the familiarity. But moving forty minutes from my old friends, I was plagued by insinuations that I had deserted them. I needed evidence that Hackney was worth the distance, if only to encourage them to move nearby. Fireworks night would be the test. I would check out the display on Hackney Downs.
Guy Fawkes, the man behind Remember Remember the Fifth of November/Gunpowder Treason and Plot, means nothing in Hammersmith. Ravenscourt Park is famous for its beautiful fireworks, not for burning alive the man who had tried to blow up Parliament way back when. But in Hackney, the smoke and the fire were fearful.
Hard-core dance tracks blasted out of the darkness and three-years olds swayed to the beat on their fathers' shoulders. The chant built up to "EX-PLO-SION-EX-PLO-SION" as bright lights swept across the park and fireworks erupted close by. Suddenly the bonfire spouted a cloud of orange sparks which whirled over our heads, swirling into monstrous shapes that threatened to drop down to punish us for our sins. It felt pagan, as though it was there to help us celebrate danger. "This is the path Guy Fawkes took and look what happened to him" was the message from Hackney Council, and the crowd's marvelling oohs and ahs took on a sense of thankfulness that we did not have to live in a world that bad. We could go home and live quiet, happy lives watching our three-year olds grow up safe.
Not just a stack of old wood and council furniture, the Hackney bonfire was a plywood construction of the Tower of London. A Medieval pageant processed past with red torches before flaming the tower, which burnt down all that effort in twenty minutes flat.
Hackney pulls it off by not being on the tube, I think. A sure way of splitting Londoners into two camps is to ask them whether they use buses. In my opinion, people who rush too much and think too little would not consider sitting on the top of a bus, above the crush, dreaming their way through circuitous streets. But those who enjoy it may wind their way here eventually.
One of my Clapham friends told me the Ravenscourt Park fireworks were stunning this year. I said that in Hackney they had put them to music and she was under-awed until I described the heat of the beat. "Oh - I assumed you meant classical music," she said. She proved my point. West London is about making things look pleasant, but East London is a cooking pot of life.
West Londoners live in a dichotomy of respectability (which is the norm) and the criminality which undercuts it. You either keep yourself to yourself or you attack. But East London strikes me as less polarised. People talk to strangers all the time and what matters is not your attitude but the circumstances under discussion - whether it's a slow bus or who finished first at the laundrette. You can be raving drunk or earnestly intellectual and it doesn't matter a hoot.
Here, you speak as you would with friends, but you take on a new anonymity, as an equal voice in a diverse crowd. To someone like me with a background of privileges oozing in stereotype, it feels like freedom. And, for the record, I'm taking part.And East London is isolated by the City - that cess-pit of financial speculation which has taken over the heart of London. Who wants to get a whiff of that on a Saturday night?
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