a sentence prepared for these occasions, ‘Excuse me, but did you know this is a Quiet Coach?’ uttered in a polite and confidential tone, with a finger pointing helpfully to the window sticker, but the responses from the addressees vary considerably. Some, usually women, simper and smile and nod, and extend a placatory hand, as if admitting they are at fault but craving indulgence, while blithely continuing their telephonic conversation; others, evidently genuinely unaware that they are in a Quiet Coach, and indeed unable to get their heads round the very concept of a Quiet Coach, a place where a man’s inalienable right to have loud private conversations in public might be forfeited, stare at you with incomprehension until the truth sinks in, and then say something uncomplimentary about you to their interlocutor, and sulkily terminate the call or take themselves off to the next carriage with an air of persecution. One man, who was drunk, threatened to punch my fucking nose through my fucking face and out the other fucking side. Fortunately he fell asleep before attempting this rearrangement of my features.
Yesterday’s journey however was uneventful, and I was sorry to exchange the relative tranquillity of the Quiet Coach for the bustle and clamour of King’s Cross, where we arrived only a few minutes late. I descended into the bowels of the Tube and took the Northern City Line to London Bridge, and then a half-empty commuter train down to Brickley, a journey through Graffitiland. There are graffiti inside the train, gouged into the carriage windows with glass cutters, or scrawled on the laminated melamine panelling with coloured marker pens, and spray-painted graffiti outside - on the stations you pass through, on rolling stock inert in sidings, on buildings overlooking the railway, on walls and bridges and staircases and the doors of lock-up garages, on every inch of available surface. The riot of lettering adds a bit of colour, I suppose, to this drab segment of south-east London, but linguistically it always seems to me somewhat impoverished - mostly the names or pseudonyms of the artists, seldom a witty epigram or sharp political comment. When was the last time I laughed at a graffito? Years ago I spotted one which still makes me smile when I think of it: under a sign, ‘Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted’ some wag had written, ‘Bill Posters is innocent’. Nothing as amusing greeted my eye as I made my way over the footbridge at Brickley Station. Just names, obscenities and acclamations mostly to do with football teams.
Brickley is one of the older London suburbs, first developed about a hundred years ago, with streets of squat identical terraced cottages on the flat bits, and larger terraced houses and tall detached and semi-detached villas on the hilly bits. These properties, built of the old yellowish London brick with stone and stucco decoration, much modernised, converted, divided and extended, still dominate the district, interspersed with more recent post-WW2 redbrick developments - low-profile blocks of flats and tiny terraced town houses for first-time buyers. But Lime Avenue, where I was born and where Dad still lives, doesn’t belong to either of these architectural periods. It’s a gently curving street of small inter-war semis squeezed in on rising ground between a main road and the railway, and it leads nowhere except to the main road at each end. The houses on the railway side have back gardens which abut on to an unusually high and wide embankment, with trees and bushes and grassy hollows; the kids who lived there in my childhood had access to this illegal adventure playground which I envied. Our house, number 49, like all the houses on the other side of the street, has a small back garden raised up artificially on landfill contained by a high concrete wall. A main road runs beneath our rear fence, and the tops of the buses that pass are just visible from the first floor, though you can always hear them in the garden. The street’s name derives from the lime trees which in my childhood were placed at staggered intervals along the pavement on each side, and have since been removed and replaced by rowans, after a campaign by car-owners who objected to the sticky gum dropping from the lime trees on to the bodywork of their vehicles. The houses are separated by narrow side alleys and have no garages or carports, so the street is lined with cars parked nose to tail on both sides.