Trench Foot In Waterloo

Thisis one of our trips together.

            Every half term, every schoolholiday, and my Granda Bill takes me to London. It’s not far by train. He usedto commute until last year, since he moved in with us. But the family nevertalk about where we came from, or that side of it at least. It’s funny becausewhilst he, quote, married well, and my Dad’s side look down on that part theymarried in to I’ll find out later that all roads that don’t lead down fromScotland lead to Lambeth, both sides. My Granda Bill doesn’t care. My GrandaBill doesn’t give a stuff for any of it. He went through seven years in thearmy and never had to be shot at once. He was a company clerk, the eternalcorporal, and he and his likeminded mates transferred each other moments beforebeing sent anywhere nasty. Can’t really blame him can you? It meant he was inuniform before most and got demobbed two years after the war, oddly he gotposted to Germany only when the surrender was made. He didn’t see his daughter,my mum, until she was two. Fly fucker.

            We go by train because we always goby train.

            You might remember them. They havecompartments, and they’re smoking. And you have to lean out the door to openit. On tele a running gag would always be about British Rail sandwiches, andthey weren’t far wrong. If there was a buffet car it’d be musty, damp, andthere’d be a glass dome with a scotch egg, and the noteworthy sandwich and asausage roll under the smeared horrid display. And crisps if you were lucky,but we took our sandwiches with us, always cheese. He’d make them from hisbread, because his bread was different to the family bread. You had to cut ityourself, and it wasn’t stale, and the cheese would be circus strong, and therewould be pickle from a jar all sticky about the rim, layers of roll-top stickywithout a crust.

            We’re going to visit the sights inLondon. Really we’re just going to London because he can’t really adjust to notbeing there. He thinks it silly that no one keeps a pig and chickens in theyard, and he calls the garden a ‘yard’. Everyone used to, and that’s why baconand eggs are such a breakfast fixture now. We’re going to some touristy placeand he’ll know half the people working there. When we get off the station we’llbe picked up a taxi and it’ll be Uncle Roy or the other Uncle Roy, who aren’trelated but know Bill and who secretly he’d write to first to meet us, and Ispent years thinking there were only two cabbies in London. Or that all the cabbieswere called Roy. And when we go home we’ll be carrying half a bloody greatfish, or a parcel of giant liver, and we’ll be roundly told off.

            We’ve been everywhere everyone elsegoes. We’ve been to funny museums no one else goes to. We’ll walk these funnylittle streets and sometimes these new, equally horrid streets and he’ll tellme about who was there, once, when there was another London there. We’ll stopevery hour for a cup of tea because he’s fuelled by tea. Not in a cafe. He’llknock on a door and we’ll go in and I’ll drink this milky tea, and listen topeople I’ll never, not ever, meet again. Or we’ll go into the little shacksUncle Roy or Uncle Roy use.

            But it’s the toilets I’m scared off becausethe ones on the train are never working. And the ones in the station are fearfullythings. Stained wood, never cleaned, shit everywhere. The one in Waterloo isthe worse, or at least the one I always have to use, when I have to use it. It’sunderground. On the way there’s a barbers where you can get a shave. And thetoilets are an inch deep in what I hope is water (but which I know is not). AndI have to sit there with my feet off the ground, and there’s no seat, and thepaper if there is any is that stuff in school, paper, shiny on one side, thatscratches your arse.

            So years later when the toilets cost20p and are clean, and metal, and don’t leak, and you don’t have to read ancientgraffiti you don’t understand, and they don’tsmell, at all, it's a little piece of wonder. But that's a few years yet and my ticket stub is that. A rectangle of cardboard that I'll clutch in the cubicle of strange sounds and stranger smells.

            So we’re going to London.