David Abbott - Dark Albion: A Requiem for the English

W aiting for a B us

Awhiff of Frank incensed

OURinheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens.

At dusk on a freezing December weekday afternoon, Ihave to take a bus down Westcombe Hill to the North Greenwich UndergroundStation on the Greenwich Peninsula, which defines a loop of the Thames. At thebus stop I meet an old man named Frank who was a friend of my late father.Frank, wearing a check cloth cap, has a grey moustache. The last time I sawhim, which was at my fathers funeral, his moustache was auburn. His eyebrowsare still coppery. I too now have a grey moustache that was once auburn, withcoppery eyebrows.

Wotcher, Frank says, his lips blue from cold. Howare you? Still a journalist?

No, I say. Retired. I write books now.

You write books? he says. Had I confided that Iwas a ballet dancer he could not have looked more ill at ease. To make him feelbetter I add, Just a hobby, really; something to do, like making matchstickmodels.

Although the pavement is packed with people waitingfor a bus, we are the only ones speaking English. Where in the past there wouldhave been an orderly queue of Cockneys is now a haphazard crowd of settlers.Some stand by the gutter, some to the left of the covered stop, some to theright, some in the middle of the snow-covered pavement and some at the back bythe glass-fronted estate agents or the chemists shop. On this freezing day,with snowflakes hovering in the air and dusting shoulders, several are dressedin tropical clothes. No one has any concern for who was there before them. Thisis the new way of waiting for a bus. The likes of Frank and me, heirs to adifferent custom, find it disturbing. On the other side of the road is theGreen, a cross between a small park and a big roundabout, where I playedfootball as a child, using the trees as goalposts. It is white with frost, thetrees shrouded in ice. As I kicked the ball around, I could not have foreseenthat fifty years later I would stand across the road waiting for a bus among acrowd of brown-skinned foreigners.

Suddenly there is a commotion by the Green. Severalgroups of children going home from school have seen their bus coming and havemerged to break into a stampede across the busy Royal Standard junction,ignoring vehicles and causing drivers to brake sharply. The children all comefrom a local Church of England secondary school, which was founded in 1700. Itswebsite says it values diversity and is sensitive to the range of traditionsand cultures represented in the community it serves. In reality the diversityof the local community is not represented. All of the schools pupils areblack. They consist of adolescents of both sexes but mostly boys, all in aperpetual state of high excitement. For about forty minutes every afternoon inschool term Old Dover Road and nearby streets are taken over by them. Most of myneighbours avoid going out at this time and look forward to school holidays andweekends, when they can reclaim the streets. The children block the pavements,walking in groups of half-a-dozen and constantly yelling to each other betweenthe groups, so unruly and aggressive that police are routinely deployed.Recently while going home from school one of the children stabbed another witha knife. Four policemen are standing now by the bus stop in yellow fluorescentjackets, where they will wait until the children have dispersed. On the lastday of term and every Friday more trouble than usual is expected and twomounted police are deployed as well. In the past, four policemen at a scenesignified a serious crime, while mounted bobbies were only seen at big footballmatches. Now they signal obnoxious children going home from school. Thestampede is as incongruous as a herd of wildebeest streaming across an Englishroad.

Unfortunately, the bus the children saw coming was a108 - my bus. They noisily join the throng in front of me. Always heedless andover-excited, they are now further excited by their stampede and the snow andare jabbering and whooping uncontrollably. Some of their jabber is a sort ofself-conscious patois, which they adopt whenever they realise they have beentalking normal English for a while.

The red single-decker bus pulls up, its windscreenwipers slowly brushing off the snowflakes. My father used to take a 108 earlyevery weekday morning to work, greeting workmates with a sleepy Wotcher. Hewas a hammerman at the gasworks on the peninsula - slinging a sledge-ammer,as he used to say. In those days it was a double-decker Routemaster.

On this 108, all the seats are taken, a brown faceframed in every window. I will have to stand, or maybe wait for the next one.The boarding flow stops because someones Oyster card does not have enoughmoney on it for the fare and the harassed Sikh driver cannot explain becausethe swarthy holder is pretending he does not understand English, not even thebasic Not enough money. The Sikh lets him on without paying a fare. By thestep, a bespectacled long-limbed young black man says over his shoulder to anIndian pressing and banging a heavy wheeled shopping basket against his calves,Youre breaking my legs, man. The Indian responds with slight sideway motionsof the head. A Nigerian is so engrossed in a mobile-phone discussion,negotiating a deal in Yoruba peppered with the word percentage, that herudely pushes some other type of male ethnic; a policeman has to sort out theensuing inter-ethnic unpleasantness, hindered by them understanding neitherEnglish nor each others language. With everyone getting colder by the minuteand the bus becoming so packed that there is a real danger the Sikh will shutthe doors and exclude them, impatience and frustration now grip themulti-cultural throng.