MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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G21 EUROPE
LONDON CALLING!NAIL BOMBSby FELICITY USSHERG21 Staff WriterTo read this article in Deutsch, Francaise, Italiano, Portuguese, Espanol, copy and paste the complete URL("http://www.g21.net/london35.htm") and enter it in the box after you click through.
LONDON, U.K. - Got home from the pub yesterday to find my sister had wept, desparately, into the answerphone at 8:15pm. "Fliss. Call me. I've just" and then she'd hung up, leaving me to figure out for myself what she'd just done. Split with her boyfriend? Taken an overdose? Her phone was answered, but by someone else. It was a wrong number and I was panicking as I dialled more carefully and heard her phone ring on and on with no sign of life at the other end.
It was the bomb in the gay pub in Soho. She'd just heard about it. Her messages of 16, 18 and 25 minutes past 8 said how she was alone and I hadn't called to say I was alive, and nor had her boyfriend and she was so afraid that her loved ones were dead.
She'd now left the house to travel the length of London to find me.
We're not used to war yet, here. I hadn't thought to call her, although I first heard about the bomb when four mobile phones rang simultaneously for my drinking partners in Fulham. The fag ends of the conversation sent the news across the pub in minutes, and people dived for their own phones to seek reassurance. But looking around those horrified white faces, I felt unnerved and left for ethnically diverse Hackney. It seemed naive to assume that any monochrome crowd was safe.
The fortnight before had set a pattern that felt bizarre but safe. At 6pm on Saturday, the bomb strikes. First blacks in Brixton, then asians in Spitalfields had nails exploding in their faces. Electric Avenue and Brick Lane are known throughout London for their vibrancy and fun, but buildings were shattered; people were killed; limbs amputated. All this week in the office, people looked up from their work and said they wouldn't be in Chinatown early Saturday evening, no bloody way, and then they put their heads back down. The police were on the case.
But the Soho bomb was on a Friday, and now it feels like we're at war. You might think we've coped with bombs before, but the IRA was like Sunday School compared to this sort of uncertainty. Back in the early '90s, when the Irish Republican Army was targeting department stores in London, I was selling DIY goods in Selfridges, Oxford Street, target of all targets. We may have all jumped whenever someone made a sudden noise on the tube, but the IRA prided itself on giving the police coded warnings for each attack.
Now we've got bombs which kill, no protocol and an unknown enemy. It could be Serb, in retaliation for NATO strikes, or it could be a load of unconnected pressure groups seeking publicity for their hatred.
Either way, feel guilty. Guilty for empathising better with Londoners than with Serbs and Albanians. Guilty that our media-driven society has come to a point where people die for column inches. But most of all, feel deeply ashamed that the human imagination is inspired by evil, and mimics it for its own gain.
We are so proud that we don't carry guns. Most people round here believe that more guns lead to more deaths and that it's as simple as that. But the direct link between guns and carnage means that we're not prepared for this sort of repeated tragedy: we didn't know we were capable of it.
London's sense of crisis is palpable. "What the hell is going on?" you hear on the bus and at work. And there's a pause, now, before getting back to the filing. The fear is compounded by the contract killing of Jill Dando this week, allegedly in retaliation for the good work of "CrimeWatch," the TV show she presents. Rumour says that the head of the BBC has been threatened too.
Is the war in Serbia inspiring people all over the city? How deranged will we get? My sister is more sensitive than most, and she understood the horror from the start. But even to the thick-skinned and thick, it feels like we're living the last of the good old days. +++ The Previous LONDON CALLING! +++ The NEXT LONDON CALLING! +++ The MAIN EVENT © 1999, GENERATOR 21. E-mail your comments. Send your snide remarks to Our Editor. |
