BENNY GREEN
Last week my wife and I both fell'victims to the most beguiling of all temporary illusions. Whether or not we tumbled together through a tiny crack in the space-time continuum, or were the willing dupes of some obscure psychic confidence trip I couldn't say, but whatever the explanation, our corporate brain suddenly began reacting as though this were 1951 instead of 1971 and London by day was still a real, actual, attainable place.
According to the sign a few yards down the road from my front gate, we live twenty- Iwo miles from Marble Arch, most of them brand new-motorway. There was a train ar- riving at Victoria at 3.40 that afternoon which family -diplomacy made it imperative to meet. Our babysitter network having disintegrated the day before, at ten minutes past two my wife and I, our five-year-old son and our babe in arms gaily entered our car, smug in the knowledge that we had granted ourselves an absurdly generous amount of spare time. Everything went smoothly enough till we reached that point of no return where the motorway takes a right turn into Finchley Road and stops pretending that it is of any conceivable use- to anybody, except possibly the people who got the con- tract to build it.
Suddenly the traffic began to clot and my adrenalin began to bubble accordingly. I spent the first ten minutes of our stasis heap- ing abuse on the planners who had recently Widened the road, evidently without widening it half enough. Every few minutes we inched forward a little more, and I observed yet another tired face peering pityingly down at Us from behind the curtains of a first floor window. Camden Arts Centre came in sight and I spotted a girl at a window, making tea. Under the circumstances, the least she could have done was offer us a cup. Cer- tainly there would have been time for us to drink it, return the crockery, help with the washing up and still get back to the car Without the other drivers noticing anything.
By 3.5, by which time the five-year-old had become disenchanted by the game of spotting Ugly traffic wardens and had turned instead to rehearsing his Opus 4, a new composi- tion for meat skewer and biscuit tin, we had arrived at that same Marble Arch which we are supposed to live twenty-two miles away from, although by now I was willing to Swear under oath that it was more like a thousand and twenty-two. Victoria Station now began to loom like a mirage, and as I told myself that after all we would be able to get there in time, my adrenalin began slowly falling to something like a normal level.
It immediately leapt up again the moment we entered Park Lane, which was so hopeless a snarl of belching machines that it became clear to me that our expedition had been doomed to failure from the start. We crawled Past a cinema and I notice that Cromwell was still running. So much for the theory
that slapstick is dead. . The Grosvenor loomed up. A man wearing the uniform of
an Afghanistan field-marshal stood on its threshold waving angrily at taxis. The thought then occurred to me that perhaps I had made a giant miscalculation. Was there some kind of investiture this afternoon which I had not heard about? Perhaps all those pinched, twitching faces behind all those steering wheels belonged to people going to the Palace to collect their OBES for exporting garbage? . . . We drew alongside the Dorchester. On its front steps stood a man dressed as a Liechtenstein Air Chief Marshal. He was waving angrily.at taxis. .. These people in all these cars, why weren't they all busy working somewhere? Why were they free to clutter up the roads in this way? . . . A man dashed out of the Hilton dressed as a Montenegrin Admiral of the Fleet. He started waving angrily at taxis
The five-year-old came to the coda of the final movement of his opus and turned his attention to the babe, who had been scream- ing Stockhausen themes ever since we got in- to Edgware Road and was now trying to eat my safety belt. We cruised within sight of Ansley House. 'Who was Wellington?' asked the composer. 'He was a great man who had a boot named after him. so let that be a lesson to you', I replied. I then gnashed my teeth for a while before noticing that somehow we had achieved the road alongside the back garden of Buckingham Palace. This put me in mind of an old scheme of mine to snatch leaves from the royal trees and sell them to those same Americans who used to buy tins of London fog and shares in Tower Bridge. After all, the leaves were overhanging a public thoroughfare, and there was no question that it was true to describe the leaves as part of Buckingham Palace....
We reached Victoria Station at 4.10 and were not obliged to spend much more than half an hour looking for a vacant parking meter. During our search I had visions of a vast Chestertonian army rising as one man on a stormy night and jamming beer bottle tops in every parking meter in London. My wife nudged me and pointed out that my lips had been moving. '1 was just wondering', I explained, 'why there are never any NCOS in the Montenegrin Navy.'
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