Above the music from the pub on the corner,
a bottle’s throw from the Thames Embankment,
and the noise from the eateries housed
in the arches of the railway embankment,
spaces where once there had been workshops,
if you stand still in Bank End, Southwark,
you can hear the squeal of commuter trains
crossing the river to Cannon Street station –
built on the site of a trading post
of the mediaeval Hanseatic League,
exporting wool, importing beeswax.
***
When the first Brixton Riot began
I was staying in a small hotel
just off the Embankment in Pimlico
on the opposite bank of the river.
One night, I woke to the sound of dripping.
I turned on the bedside lamp. Water
was trickling from the ceiling
through the light fitting, down the flex and the shade
onto the carpet. I went to Reception,
and woke the Night Porter. I could hear
distant sirens, and thought at first they had been
summoned for me – then imagined another’s
anxiety, and their brief comfort. I had looked
through the hotel’s glass-panelled front door
and seen fires lighting the southern sky.
***
I think of those for whom accidents are never
benign, those who live without dignity,
and those who know nothing but hardship.
This a place of angry strangers,
among cut and tailored granite and limestone,
shipped in blocks on the sea and the river
from Portland Bill and Cornwall’s Lamorna Cove.
***
Once, when I was eight and with my mother,
after we had been shopping at John Lewis
on the Finchley Road, as we entered
the nearby Finchley Road Underground
to take the tube train to Golders Green,
I noticed an ambulance parked at the kerb –
and then two ambulance men approaching us
carrying a stretcher. The body was wrapped
in a grey blanket. On the covered torso
was a bowler hat and a briefcase.
Between the body and the stretcher’s edge
there was a long, black, furled umbrella.
My mother explained what had happened, and why.
She was one who longed for oblivion –
but death came at a time of its choosing.
***
Trapped in that liminal space between present
and past, between being and remembering,
that eternal picture show, what might fix
a troublesome head, a troubled heart?
In Tate Modern – a gallery re-purposed,
in this city of money and invention,
from a disused power station on Bankside –
across its spacious mezzanine floor
a little girl is cart-wheeling. O the
banality of joy!
By David Selzer