by Craig Taylor
When it’s finished flowering its leaves will emerge in April or May. Those trees will hold on to their foliage, the same leaves, right until mid-December. They’re a late-leaf-losing species. Much greener for a longer period of time than many other species of trees. All trees are good, but Chanticleer score highly.
Another good one is the London plane. London is well known for its plane trees. A lot of them were planted a hundred or so years ago because the atmosphere of London was very very smoky and the pollution was very very high and the plane tree was found to be able to cope well with that. They grow well in a smoky environment because they have a very thick, leathery leaf which stands up well to atmospheric pollution. Pieces of bark will actually fall off the outer skin of the branches and the trunk as the tree develops beyond its early years, and that’s like changing an air filter on your car, you know? They get clogged up with atmospheric dust particles and so on, and when they’re choked up, basically, the irregular-shaped pieces of bark just fall off onto the pavement and the tree’s clever enough to actually develop new bark under that old stuff before the old stuff comes off.
You see plane trees in some of the London squares, Berkeley Square being one of the most famous, but most of them have got quite a selection of large London plane trees in them. Those in Berkeley Square are thought to have been planted in 1789, and are still growing strong. They are huge. They’re in pretty good shape and they’re nicely spaced out. They need lots of room in order to develop and grow properly and these particular trees have certainly got that. They are majestic. They are the Rolls-Royce amongst London’s trees and they really are the cat’s whiskers. They are beautiful. The Victorians and their predecessors knew what they were doing, choosing London plane and giving them space. Their branches are just beginning to converge on each other from one tree to another, rather than a sort of interlocking knitting effect which you would otherwise get.
We’re taking cuttings from them at the moment, we’re propagating them because the London plane is a hybrid of the American plane and the European plane. It’s got blood in its system from two different plane trees. Consequently, if you try and grow them, propagate them from seed, you’ll get different characteristics coming in the second generation. Whereas if you take them from cuttings, and snip little shoots off, you’ll be sure to preserve the characteristics that the trees have got there at the moment in terms of the second generation. So we’ve got a nursery down in Hampshire doing that work for us at the moment, growing these trees on so that when they become big enough, if there’s any spaces in Berkeley Square, we can pop a new tree back in so that the second-generation planes grow up and have, in 200 years’ time, the same features that the plane trees have got there today.
They say there’s more under London than actually above it. We have to open up trial holes and put cable detectors over the surface of streets in order to ascertain whether or not there’s sufficient room, ground space, for trees to grow in harmony with gas pipes, water pipes, and so on and so forth. The two can coexist quite well. Roots are like worms, you see, they will take the line of least resistance and if they come across a pipe in the ground they will divert around it rather than going up to it and instead of finishing their life there. Or sometimes we’ll insert a barrier which stops the root at a point and when it reaches that barrier the roots will turn left, turn right, go down, basically, they won’t go up anyway.
The true soil of London is much much deeper than just beneath the actual surface, due to the changes and developments and alterations and formation of the city. But a lot of London is either London clay, up in St John’s Wood and north Paddington, shrinkable clay, and as you come further south through Hyde Park, sand and gravels. In this area you find alluvium and black peaty sort of soil. So there are three main types, actually, which make for different challenges.
In the northern part of the city, roots of trees extract moisture and the clay will shrink. Buildings with a load of weight on the actual clay can sometimes crack and subsidence will develop. We do take that into account. People want everything to be just like a shop window basically and rightly so. They can claim off the council for damage they think a tree may have caused, undermining foundations and possibly causing damage to buildings. So we have to prune the trees quite frequently and fairly severely. We have to take these things into account when choosing new trees as well. We don’t want to plant trees that are going to cause problems for the future. We want specimens which are certainly long-lived and suitable for their particular setting.
The ginkgo is also well suited here, because in London it’s a few degrees warmer than outside the city. It was thought to be not completely hardy when the tree was planted at Kew, hence the position chosen alongside one of the greenhouses, but the greenhouse has now gone. It is very very hardy indeed. The ginkgo is a very old tree from China, relatives of which were thought to be grown on this land when dinosaurs were tramping around. Ginkgo biloba – some people love it, some people have less complimentary comments to make about it, but it’s the oldest living tree known to man, in actual fact. There’s one at Kew Gardens that’s about 200 years old. It’s a huge tree.
There’s also the Wollemi pine from Tasmania, which was a wonderful find by some explorers in the mountains of that country. Wollemi pines have now been planted at Kew and all sorts of famous gardens. A little-known species, it’s a coniferous tree which has kind of taken off. There’s bound to be others in currently undiscovered parts of the world. Like the Dawn redwood from a part of Sichuan in China, a tree thought to be extinct until somebody got in after the war and found this tree growing there and sent seed back in about 1950. Now they’re the greatest street trees out here.
ELISABETTA DE LUCA
Commuter
I like London, but I’m not a city person, I like being in the countryside. That’s where we live and that’s why I commute. My village is on an estuary about seventy-five miles from London, so my quality of life when I’m at home is beautiful. We’ve got an old shipbuilder’s cottage and a lovely garden and we can see the stars at night and there’s no planes or smog. In the mornings I walk across the park to the station and get on the 7.06 train. And then I try and get a seat.
My season ticket is £4,660 a year. My line goes from London to Norwich. It’s actually one of the lines that went into administration, it’s been taken back by the government, so it’s in a lot of difficulty. The trains are very old and dirty and smelly. The toilets are so filthy, it’s filth on another level, it’s grimy ground-in dirt, like the cleaners must pretty much give up. I take toilet paper and put it on the seat, and I use it to close the lock and everything. I even hang my bag round my neck so I don’t have to put it on the floor. It’s such an unpleasant environment, and it’s a long journey: an hour and twenty minutes.
When you commute all the time you develop relationships with these strangers and you just hate them, you really resent everything. There’s this one smelly guy in particular who has got really long legs and he’ll fall asleep and by the end of the journey I’ve had to move carriages because he’s practically lying on me. There’s this one woman, I call her Mrs Piss-Piss because she’s always grumpy. You’d never sit next to her because she evils you out. And the seats are so narrow, it’s really horrible. Somebody who reads the newspaper is immediately in your personal space. Yesterday I was putting some make-up on and dumped half a pot of shiny stuff on a man’s trousers. He’s probably going into a bank and suddenly he’s got glitter on him, he looks like he’s been having a bit of a cross-dressing weekend. He was really upset and not hiding it, whacking his leg and being really arsey about it.
The trains are always delayed. You get a ‘delay repay voucher’ which you can use off your next season ticket or you can spend it on the train, and so all these hardened commuters basically just get drunk every evening. They do these 2-for-£4 on cans and you get these hard-core groups from your town saying ‘Oh hello, how was your day today?’ And they get really drunk and noisy and an
noying. So you don’t want to be too near to them either.
They really pack the trains out, and people who pay for season tickets like us can’t sit in reserved seats. So you’re a commuter, you’ve had a hard day at work, you just want to sit and check your BlackBerry and do some work – and someone will come and say, I’ve got a reserved ticket. You’re like, I’ve got a four-and-a-half-grand-a-year season ticket! But they can throw you out of your seat. Quite often you have to stand, especially in the evenings, while the seats in first class are practically all empty. But you can’t sit down on them, you’d get fined a lot of money. Even if you’re pregnant you have to have a letter. I did sit in it once and I just cried cos the ticket collector came up and he said, ‘You’ve got to go’ and I said, ‘I don’t feel well, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’ I started crying, but he ended up throwing me off the seat.
On Friday nights and especially around Christmas and Easter, people are always throwing up on the train. It’s a dirty train anyway so people don’t have a lot of respect for it. Recently I was sat on the train going home, probably a bit pissed as well and somebody threw up on my shoes. Some suit just goes blueergh, everywhere, and it’s disgusting. Once I seen a pissed kid, he got some ketchup down the wall of the train and then he got his chips and he was eating the ketchup off the walls of the train. It’s just so horrible.
You get kids and families when it’s school holidays, they come into the mix with the commuters. Kids don’t know that that guy is desperate to get down the carriage cos there’s a whole stream of people trying to get that seat and knows he has to get there. They don’t know that the train’s gonna be really full so they shouldn’t put their bags in the carriageway. I feel like a really bad person but you do end up thinking like, get out of my way you horrible stupid fucking child, I’m going to kill you! You feel really angry and you’re desperate to get home and you’ve run to get the fast train. But they are just a family that have just come down for the day for half-term and happen to end up on the commuter train so it’s not really fair to them.
It’s the eating as well, and the putting on make-up and the personal conversations with friends and family that people have. I’m always reading what’s on people’s laptops. I’m just really nosy, so I’m always reading what people are writing. I’d say 90 per cent of people are slagging somebody off that they work with or talking about a social problem at work – they’re never talking about work, like, ‘I’ve really go to do that’ or ‘Yeah, how are you gonna do it?’ It’s always like, ‘Well, I can’t fucking believe her, she never gets anything done does she?’ It’s always gossip and it’s always politics and I think, god, no wonder the economy’s fucked! Nobody’s doing any work, everybody’s in some dispute with a colleague and that’s the whole focus of their job.
When everybody’s drunk it lubricates things, and that’s when you do see the nicer side of people, like when everybody’s had a few drinks or it’s round Christmas, sometimes you get carriages that end up singing. There’ll be some young girls who reckon themselves like X Factor somethings and they’ll start to sing and other people will join in and there will be a bit of a drunken sing-a-long. Or the train’s stuck in the station and it’s come up on the board that it’s been cancelled and you’ve been moved to another train and it’s all crowded – everyone starts going ‘Were you on the 6.45 last week?’ ‘Oh yeah, that was terrible wasn’t it, I didn’t get home till …’ And everybody starts exchanging their stories and that’s quite nice. So there’s good and bad.
I think our train system is a bit of an analogy of our society, you know, there’s like inequities and inconsistencies and old-fashioned divides and people being despondent and not trying to fight against issues and just going along with things and settling for second best.
When I finally get home at night, I always wonder how many mites have jumped on me on the train and then jumped off in my house. They’re commuters like me. And at the weekend all the clothes that have been on the train have to be washed on a Friday. Everything has to be cleansed of London. Then I feel my weekend begins.
GLEANING ON THE MARGINS
SARAH CONSTANTINE
Skipper
We set off for Waitrose just after eleven at night. Sarah brings tools when she goes skipping in the bins around Balham, usually a metal bar and a roll of durable orange bin bags which hold the loose carrots she scavenges, and the occasional cabbage and the tiramisu that sometimes leaks through its dented packaging. The bar is particularly effective when gaining access at the Balham Waitrose.
I walk alongside her down the dark Balham streets and she continues with the stream of facts about her life, though it is hard to hold much of the torrent as it passes. She is 42. She mentions her age again and again, sometimes referring to the crack her bones make when she stretches them out thanks to her recent battle with lupus. Sometimes she mentions 42 in reference to the way she can’t dance all night any longer or what her hair will or won’t do. She wears her hair in a mushrooming pile that curves back over her forehead. It’s held in place firmly, she says, and demonstrates by thrashing her head about as if she were on a dance floor. As we walk she delivers a loud version of part of Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech. She uses the metal bar to add weight to the words, waving it like a baton. The speech rings off the Balham houses. Immediately after, she begins the speech again in softer tones but stops as we reach Balham High Street and then she quickly, silently, crosses the road.
She doesn’t need to use the metal bar this evening. It doesn’t take much effort to get close to the bins. Sarah unrolls the orange bin liners and holds the flashlight. She tears through plastic bags, discards empty packages and wades through what’s left. She squeals with delight when, amongst the detritus, she uncovers a cache of Walnut Whip.
There’s a hospital opposite Clapham South Tube station which is now flats. It’s the South London Women’s Hospital, that’s where I was born. Top floor, third window from the left. I asked my mother once. I think she told me just to shut me up. Rossiter Road is where we grew up. It was a pretty rough area then. Next door was a brothel – black women for black men, and they used to have big speakers on the windowsill blasting out reggae. There used to be a woman in a white bikini standing in the door. I used to go and look at her sometimes. Hey you, she said, hey little byai. Get out of here, go home byai. It was a full-on red light area, Bedford Hill, at the end. Working girls everywhere. Where the Sainsbury’s car park is now was just derelict buildings. The school in Chestnut Grove used to be piles of rubble. Where the Asda car park is now was just piles of rubble from the war. There were a lot of bomb sites. It was a very rough area. A lot of alcoholics, men damaged from the war, came back and were basically drunk everywhere. Lots of shell-shocked people and it was just a run-down rough higgledy-piggledy area bisected by lots of railway lines. I remember it as lots of decay everywhere.
My mother was completely insane. She used to keep bags of rotting rubbish up to the ceiling. It was really grim. My father was about as savage as you can get. He’d been a gangster in Greece during the Second World War, he was one of the partisans and he relished killing Germans and taking their weapons. He looked like a Mexican bandit from an Italian western. Big moustache, round staring bloodshot eyes, big bags under his eyes, always cigarette smoking. Dark brown skin, always sitting on the edge of the chair like a coiled spring ready to leap. He was bloodthirsty, a fierce mad-eyed Greek who sweated adrenalin and testosterone and would explode with provocation if you even looked at him. Things got hairy for him over there. He’d killed too many people. He had to escape and that was it. He worked as a kitchen porter in 1950 in Earl’s Court exhibition halls and my mother worked as a part-time waitress there.
Later he worked in a fish and chip shop in Vauxhall Bridge Road, and every Saturday he would go out and find people walking the street drunk and pick fights with them just for the hell of it. He used to come back all bloodied. He had a mouth full of gold teeth and a no
se that was broken so many times.
He had loads of shotguns. He used to go out to the countryside every weekend and blast the pigeons. He came back with a mole once. I don’t know how he managed to shoot a mole. And when he died, there happened to be an amnesty for weapons. I carted round a huge quantity of handguns, Smith & Wesson revolvers, automatic pistols, hand grenades. He had six hand grenades. He had a ten-bore pump-action shotgun. You’re not supposed to have a ten-bore. And he had all these weapons, all these various guns he wasn’t supposed to have and piles of ammunition. I think this was ’95. I dragged this huge quantity of weapons. I had a car then. I went to the police and said, is there an amnesty? Yes. I opened it and he said, do you want to give your name? I said no. Goodbye. I wasn’t Sarah yet. I was still George then.
I was a complete nerd growing up. I went to Tulse Hill School. It was jungle rough. Open gang warfare. Baby boom years and it was busting at the seams. And I was a pretty-faced, chubby kid who was very dysfunctional and didn’t know what was going on all the time, and going home to bags of rotting rubbish. I retreated into my electronics and engineering. I used to bunk off and go to the Institute of Electrical Engineers and stroll in like I owned the place because I had the uniform, black trousers and black shoes and a tie. Go in and pretend I was a member there. It’s just over Waterloo Bridge on the north bank. I would stroll in, sit down and read. After about a year they caught me.
I’d try to drag bits of machinery home, I was always dragging things back. Old televisions, old radios, mopeds, motorbikes, lawnmowers, anything electrical, mechanical, a boiler. I’d drag them into the garden and sneak them in later. It was cool.
