Part 1: My Very Own Kennedy Moment

I came-to that morning, one eye slowly splitting open after the other, with one of the worst hangovers I’d ever experienced - a real WWI artillery-park stonk creeping up behind my eyes. Dell and Sylvie’s wedding the day before had seen some seriously non-responsible drinking going on, there could be no denying that, given the morning’s evidence. None. Not at all.
I swung naked out of my pit, bent double and groaning softly with the pain and rapidly condensing memories of the reception afterwards: the flinching, livid recollections of doing atrociously bad Kareoke while headbutting flying toilet rolls back at the hooting audience of guests made me want to stop thinking even more than the headache did. I tried not to, again: no Joy - by the time I’d made my way, swaying lopsidedly, over to the television, I’d dredged-up the images of me opening the last of the decent bottles of champagne all over my suit and, hours later, passing out on a bench outside a pub miles away from the wedding after a good half hour’s swearing at the traffic going by outside... At least I’d had a good time. I’d have to remember and thank whoever carried me home.

I was too dehydrated to piss, empty stomached, and I could smell parmesan cheese somewhere. It was shaping up to be a really good morning... about 9:30 according to the annoying red LED clock that was lying buzzing to itself on the floor next to a kicked-over ashtray with half an unlit joint and countless roll-up butts scattered all around it like lifeboats fleeing the Titanic. What I needed, of course, was tea and ibuprofen - and fast - but some basic orientation had to be done first to get me there, I had to have human voices and connection with that sunny, overlit world twittering and humming beyond the thick closed drapes that swaddled the room in stale smoke and warm, diagonal dustbeams. I reached out with a far too careful finger and slowly pressed the ON button, gritting my teeth and mentally steeling myself against the inevitable psychedelic onslaught of Sunday morning children’s TV... The picture snicked on and, shocked, I almost fell into the calm, awesome silence and serene vision laid-out before me on one... two... three channels. What the fuck was going on?
Windsor Castle, flags at half mast, microphone silence so complete I had to check the volume... My gods, I thought. The Queen’s dead!

At last, words: the announcer’s voice, so loud it nearly floored me, was soft, low, Received and respectful. This was definitely a Big One...
‘And, of course, we should also remember the family of Dodi al-Fayyad on this day of tragic loss...’
‘Huh?’ I thought. And then, as my brain woke up and took in a job-lot of possible political implications, ‘In one fell swoop, the House of Windsor’s problems...’
‘And for the benefit of anybody who has just switched on their television, last night, in Paris, Lady Diana...’
‘Perfect. Absolutely Perfect.’ I whispered. And then it hit me, as obvious as an Eddie Stobart truck leaping the barrier in front of me in broad daylight - the hotel suite, the sudden flood of weeping, inconsolable daughters bursting through the door after hearing The News...
‘This is really going to piss on Dell and Sylvie’s honeymoon!’

Part 2: Feedback Mechanisms

I finally and unequivocally realised that something very, very strange, profound and pre-medieval was dancing a Tarantella right through our rapidly regressing national collective psyche early one morning, two or three days after The Crash...

... I was daydreaming half-asleep, smoking a furtive cigarette down by the luggage racks on an overcrowded train from Purley to Victoria, making my slow way Up West for a day’s work. I was going to be late as fuck, on a day when every single production company in London was screaming out for tetrabytes of digital storage units, as many as we could physically rent, carry and deliver to them. The Diana Tributes were pouring out of Soho, and business in the little office overlooking Wardour Street was on the point of seizing up through sheer demand; I’d be needed as an extra hand, all right - and I’d have the hangover sweated out of me in no time, once I’d got myself there and Jamie had stopped swearing at me. I’d got the Frantic Work Call the evening before, whilst in the middle of getting drunk at an ex-girlfriend’s house, miles out in the suburbs. She’d never been a big Diana fan, to put it mildly, and her flat had seemed to be about the only sane and cynical refuge from... it, the whole hyperemotional, viciously sentimental mass madness pouring out of the airwaves, shops and mouths of people everywhere that week. I didn’t want any part of it; I’d had a recent and unexpected death in the family myself, and was still feeling rather more than touchy about it. Diana Fever? As far as I was concerned, I’d been vaccinated against it - all I could do was hang back and observe the termites with hate in my heart.

Crack! The noise of the slap shocked me out of my trance on the train, even more than the young child’s startled squawk and her scream of pain and confusion that followed straight behind it. It had been a real nasty, flat-hand crack across the back of the legs by the sound of it, a stressed mother’s pushed-beyond-endurance, hit the final straw whack. Or maybe the mother was just a vicious cow by nature: she certainly sounded like one if the strangle-voiced, incoherent bollocking she was giving her shrieking four or five year-old blonde daughter was anything to go by. She had the child by the shoulder, as if she’d grabbed the girl in the act of running away from her. I would have run, too. Straight to Social Services.

Then, it all pieced itself together: I spotted the huge stuffed toy, almost as large as the little girl herself, lying symbolic, cellophaned, and fought-over on the carriage floor. It looked brand-new, the sort of thing you might win your girlfriend at a funfair or buy at an outdoor market. Oddly, I can’t remember what species the toy was supposed to be, bear, dog, or whatever, but I do remember the yellow ribbon wound round its neck like a satin noose, clumsily hitching it to an eye-poppingly ostentatious “With Condolences” card.

The kid was well upset. Her mother didn’t look too clever, either, more like a Leibfraumilch guzzler who hadn’t slept in three weeks. It was obvious the child was pissed-off and grizzly at being dragged out at this god-awful hour, all this way, in the presence of a brand-new, massive toy that - and this she would never get into her head - just wasn’t for her. The train was still miles from Victoria, let alone Kensington - I’d sussed who the toy was for and where they were heading in one swift, sickening flash of egalitarian bile. Not quite believing what I was seeing, I looked closer at the woman - who was she, where, on the sliding ladder of income brackets, would a sociologist place her and this crazy, semi-feudal behaviour? Right at the bottom of the pit; I knew the smell only too well - cheap detergent and desperation. I doubted if the child even knew what a Diana was, let alone the Facts of Death and why her fucked-up neurotic of a mother would feel the need to drag her halfway across the City to spend god-knows how long in the morbid company of thousands of publicly grieving royalty-gimps and potentially iffy social rejects; probably to give the mother a ‘sense of closure’ or some-such dated socio-babble picked-up from Daytime-TV. Me, I felt like popping her one for her pig-ignorant, unthinking cruelty and the way she’s hit-out at that poor kid for naturally wanting a toy that, by all rights, should have been hers in the first place - she didn’t look too spoiled to me.

The feeling soon passed, to be replaced by more workaday thoughts and a dull, vast hatred of almost everything around me. That incident had really got to me. The awful thing was, for the next couple of weeks, at least, her behaviour would have been seen as almost normal. Even laudable, in some circles.

I have to say, though: the tourists lapped it up. Of course they did: and, for that spellbound week of terminal glamour, almost everybody had became a tourist. It had emptied Soho right out; Kensington was heaving. The pilgrimage industry hadn’t seen such good days since Thomas á Beckett had lost another little fracas with the Establishment. I’d never experienced anything like it. You could sense it, almost halfway across Town:

About two-and-a-half days after it started, all work in the office ground to a halt; not through melt-down, under-cutting, or physical breakdown - there simply weren’t any more drives available, anywhere. We’d sold out. Game over. Time to go down the pub, and wind down. Feeling proud and whacked, as you do when you’ve pulled off a hard bit of successful spur-of-the-moment opportunist graft and got weighed-in for it, the three of us hit the street. Now we weren’t rushing about the streets and alleys humping drives, we could appreciate just how empty and spookily deserted the place had become in the past couple of days. It was if, like the tipping a giant snooker table, the centre of gravity had moved a couple of miles to the West, and sucked all the free-rolling balls into the Kensington Gardens pocket. It seemed like only those who lived, worked, or regularly prowled the place were left behind. Vic the Tobacconist was standing outside his shop like the proprieter of a stranded village store in Devon, waiting for customers or gossip to relieve the off-season doledrums: ‘It hasn’t been like this since the Fifties!’ We decided to go down the Coach and Horses, if only for the novelty of being able to have a quiet lunchtime drink there.

Pints in our hands, leaning against the wall in Romilly Street, we thought we could finally let ourselves relax. That’s when we felt it. ‘Jesus!’ Said Jamie, ‘This is unbelievable...’
Now that someone had pointed it out, I couldn’t but feel it: a susseration, half heard, half sensed from somewhere out beyond Marble Arch, like a dry march of distant locusts. That woman on the train had only been the fanatical vanguard; now rest of them had turned-up.

Part 3: The View from the Street

Thud.
‘I can’t... take... much... more...of... this!!!’
Boot was having a hard time of it. Things had eventually got to him, and he was pure Working-class Royalist, had been for as long as I’d known him. Now he was smashing his forehead against the chipped steering wheel in desperation: here was proof irrefutable - the last seven days had been enough to turn even the most demographically certain of pro-Royals almost suicidal with thoughts of escape. It hadn’t just been me, then.
I slowly pulled myself out of my self-induced daze: I’d been slumped in Boot’s passenger seat, staring through the dashboard and fretting with his budget white Ford Transit’s radio as if sanity itself depended on it since we’d parked-up. A bad move:

I don’t know what they called it, who knocked it together, or where it came from, but I’ve never heard music anything like it before or since. It poured out of the speaker-grilles like deathly treacle - for the past week, wave upon wave of maudlin half-tempo trance beats had been spontaneously swamping the FM dial like virulent wide-band jamming in an American-sponsored war zone... Stars on 16 rpm. I’d been hoping to find something normal, unconnected, or even critical from a pirate station of any persuasion, but no. Everyone was at it. There was no getting away from the universal electronic tide of whipped-up schmaltz - she really had been anybody’s, after all.

I screwed down the volume to a trickle and looked round at Boot with fatigued, red-rimmed eyes. It was quarter to eleven in Morden High Street: another fifteen minutes and all this would be officially over. I was shaking with burnt-out anger, week-long nausea, and an almost homicidal desire to get away from the moated madhouse that Britain had become in those last few days. Anywhere away from here.
‘Christ, Boot,’ I slurred, looking him full in the Armanis, ‘This’s fucking dreadful! S’like Stalin’s sodding funeral!’
Even Boot didn’t seen concerned by that outrageous snap comparison; in fact I think he agreed with me. He just shook his head.

Though at least we’d both had the satisfaction of knowing that we’d been witnessing extraordinary times, in fact nothing less than History congealing all around us: the Western world hadn’t sustained - up until then - such a collective bodyshock since the day Lee Oswald went into work, leaned out the window, and turned his lone-nut theorising into suicidal, skull-splintering praxis. That almost random incident, too, had left nothing behind but an international sense of unquenchable shock and the sneaking feeling we’d witnessed some kind of honour killing. Plus ça change.Now my generation knew what it felt like.

In Britain, it was simultaneously both every Marxist’s wet-dream and every liberal republican’s nightmare. The Broad Masses had stirred and emerged onto the streets all right, but even though they were casting the occasional puzzled and hostile glance towards Windsor castle and bashing up the occasional disrespectful foreigner, they were carrying flags and flowers in their hands, not Molotovs or thermic lances. Nothing changed and everything had changed almost overnight.

When the new Prime Minister emerged from the crisis-huddle to made that “People’s Princess” speech, all he did was pour unction on the fire. He said he shared our grief... and rode out the shockwaves from the sentimental explosion that followed like an old pro. New Labour were In: nobody could doubt it after passing a test like that. It appeared to give popular licence to what had been building up for days, maybe decades; but in the end it was hollow - only a permitted outflood of hysterical mourning for an amplified signal on screen, dots on paper, the telescope’s love for the furthest possible target. Nobody really benefited. All it achieved was an infantile flare-up of conspicuous emotional waste that didn’t even get her a brand-new memorial children’s hospital in the end.
But it still didn’t mean that an awful lot of that grief hadn’t been genuine...

My head was slowly running itself dry with thoughts like these; a situation far from healthy. I took a deep, shuddery breath and mentally resurfaced. Daylight. Outside the cab, Morden High street was a fully functioning ghost-town going about its own business - nothing new about that, only now the rest of the world had caught up with it for a while. Boot and I were plotted-up on the side of the road opposite the Tube station, a couple of yards up-traffic from what was then the End of the Line pub, for the simple reason that, for the next ten minutes at least, there would be nowhere else to go. Our general plan was to wait for 11 o’clock and the world switching itself on again, score half an ounce of bud and some Budvar, link up with some similarly shell-shocked mates of ours, dig Graham’s decks out, and then Party for the same reason that makes small-town Pub Loners bugger-off to Marseilles and join the French Foreign Legion. It was looking to turn out a good one already.

So we sat there and watched the Street go by. Nothing much to see, for us: Morden is (and was even more so, back then in ‘97) a mainly indigenous terminal suburb tenaciously belonging to the kind of Working Class who actually fit that description. It was shut.

Boot moved, which almost made me jump out of the seat with shock. I looked round; all I could see of him was gold-on-black Fred Perry and a pair of blue-tinted lenses pushed on top of long, ponytailed hair.
‘Christ, Steve,’ he croaked, straightening back and pulling his face out of his hands, ‘I just wish they’d hurry up and bury her!’
He looked like a trapped, goaded animal who wanted out. I could more than sympathise.

The great majority of people witnessed that week’s final hour via the Media, together, directly plugged in to the same basic series of images and emotives as everybody else was. For those of you reading this who missed out on what it felt like to be ‘off-line’, so to speak, I can tell you from mine and Boot’s experience; it was incredible; it was awful. It was Götterdammerung, scripted by Barbara Cartland. We could only watch, and wonder.

Then, suddenly, I caught sight of something that made me double-take as violently as if I’d seen a family of Hassidic Jews skipping down Morden High Street eating hot salt-beef bagels. I thought they were Hassidim, at first. Boot didn’t need prodding - he was straight on it:
‘Good god, get on that!’
I already had. It was an entire local family, or most of one. Strangers to us; Mum, Dad, couple of kids and one set of elderly grandparents. Nothing out-of-place about that, except for the purposeful, grouped way they were walking, the hats, and the way they were all dressed, well… as if for a funeral. A very formal one. A Royal funeral, no less. Gods know where they were going to watch it.

Morden’s always been a bit more - on a good day - smart-but-casual than track-suit bottoms and adult baby-grow in style, but this mob stood out like a stand of ravens in a budgie farm: sharp and forbidding in their sleek anachronistic sobriety, not so much a flashback to an earlier, less pampered layer of urban inhabitant as a last rising, a last showing of something very, very deep, London and ancient. The Old Man - obviously the Guvnor - looked like everybody’s Mum’s tales of her poker-bending Elephant and Castle Granddad in his flat cap and muffler. Still as hard as a docker back then, by the look of him. Laugh and he’d deck you, whoever you were. Then the others would take over.

The rest of the family had a strange, unembarrassed cohesion to them, an un-questioning unity of purpose almost alien to modern English eyes. The liberal concept of the Generation-gap never quite filtered this deeply into the Working Classes - fathers and teenage sons still regularly go on the after-work kick-off piss together in this part of London to this day.

‘Paying their respects. Well, bloody hell...’ said Boot.
We watched them disappear into the middle distance and be swallowed up by the future, gone. I can’t remember if either of us actually said ‘We’re never going to see a sight like that again,’ but both of us remember knowing it, in that same instant.

Which left us staring at the street with five minutes to go, bored shitless, and not a traffic warden in sight. They knew better, on this of all days.
My right hand had automatically turned up the all-channel live radio commentary of the funeral for want of something better to do. It droned on, plastering a thin skim of clichés over the banal, deserted street-scene outside.
‘On this, saddest of days.... everybody, united in remembrance.... a nation says farewell to.... The Casket....’
A pair of Teds in a white van suddenly realise the World’s stopped turning.

In a way, it was dignified, moving and restrained; from our vantage you could have inserted a shot of Morden High Street, completely still and empty, into a Cardiff... New York... Leamington Spa... on-the-spot sequence without missing a beat or lessening any drama. Then Peanut turned up.

We both clocked him, shaven headed and in a hurry, turning the corner by the snooker-hall. We sank in our seats, but he still didn’t notice us - Peanut was too concerned with getting into the pub as quickly as possible to notice anything, including the fact that the pub was closed. The discovery bought him up sharp, almost with a bump.
We watched him peer into the murky depths of the boozer then skilfully pick the staff out of the gloom like recalcitrant winkles:
‘OI!’
We heard the blasphemous shout rattle down the empty street like the opening salvo of a coup d’état and grinned at each other like guard-dogs scenting trouble. Talk about impeccable timing - you could only take your hat off to it. All of a sudden the words coming out of the speakers were unimportant to us. This was the real stuff.
No reponse from the boozer. Next move:
‘OPPENUPYOUCUUNTS!’
SMACK!
Peanut’s legendary hammerpunch oscillated the locked doors like a near-by bomb-blast; the noise and effect were phenomenal, considering the circumstances. I was half-appalled and nine-tenths in awe of what I was seeing. I know Boot was impressed as well.
Peanut put the boot in a bit until a nebulous whitish blob hovered a safe distance behind the glass. The one-sided negotiations had started; the barstaff knew Peanut well: they had to, in their job.
‘Come on you cunts, I wanna Stella! You’re all fuckin’ Paddies in there, anyway! Lemme in, for fucksake, I wanna ( FX: SMASH!) beer! It’s Eleven o’clock - The bitch is in the ground... things are back to normal!’

At the time, I thought they were the sanest words I’d heard in almost a week. A truly magical moment.

The spell was broken and we were released. Some street movement - the pub doors reluctantly swung open and Peanut slipped inside for gods knows how many or what. The long, static-free silence on the radio suddenly exploded as Kiss FM kicked in with normal service and dance tunes pounded out again as if nothing had happened and the world still turned on its axis as it had only a week before. It was over.

Boot expelled a deep breath, started the engine, then gave it a second or two to get his bearings back.
‘That’s that, then,’ I mumbled, ‘Like Peanut said, back to normal’. Boot grunted as he swung the van round in a violent U-turn, then started fumbling with the buttons on his mobile as soon as we’d shot the roundabout and the country started to come back to life. Calls to make...
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it.’

© Stephen Mark Cox 2007