A Single Swallow (39 page)

The bus station is a slow world. People move slowly, work things out slowly: we are the time-rich, cash-poor of Europe.

An Algerian man is waiting for a friend on the delayed bus from Madrid.

‘Yes, I live in Paris now. I hate it. It's shit, I'm going to move to London. How much is it to go there?'

‘Forty-five euros, plus five in tax.' (The first departure tax anyone has asked in the entire journey.) Because he was the first Francophone not to proclaim a hatred of the English I told him he was welcome to Britain, and advised him to try not to arrive in the winter.

The motorway from Paris to Calais is full of trans-continental traffic. According to its markings one truck belongs to a Russia–Poland–Spain–Morocco transport company. A British vehicle belonging to C. J. Bird Transport is decorated with a huge swallow. The lorries cross the wide flat spaces of the Picardie plains like tramp steamers on a dead sea. A sign proclaims ‘Picardie – Terre Fertile' but the earth's fertility is being flogged remorselessly: sprayed, ploughed and planted. There are no hedges or fences; gangs of tractors permit the earth no rest. This is a land which has been made addicted to chemicals; nothing lives here but a scattering of crows. There is nothing for a swallow to eat and no sign of them. Outside the old mining villages are spectacular slag heaps, straight out of a Zola novel, and spring covers the distant hillsides with buds. The country reminds me of Gulliver in Lilliput: mighty, in its sweep to the horizon, but tied down by the million tiny ministrations of men and machinery, enslaved.

The coach stops on a windy stretch of tarmac between French and British customs. Unclear on which way they should go first, the fifteen travellers fragment, some heading one way and some the other. The customs officers swiftly realise that half the head count provided by the driver is missing and immediately, comically, blame each other. The English are liars, mutter the French officers, darkly; the French are playing silly buggers again, say the English. An English officer is on the phone to his boss.

‘Yeah, yes, I know I said I was going to do that thing for you but I haven't even had time to start. As it is I've only got eleven of us on. Eleven staff and one Immigration Officer for the whole port of Calais . . . It's a complete . . . That's all thanks to the new – you know. It's UK plc or whoever . . .'

They stamp us all through and the bus drives us onto the ferry. The boat seems a wonderfully old-fashioned cross-Channel world:
children wailing, adults nattering, the first British voices and the first Welsh, too. An excitable woman on the stairs informed her family ‘So now we know what's up there we wanna see what's down here!' and they follow her, complaining contentedly. It was a dizzying, elating experience to be on the ship, amid the throng, to look around and to see myself no longer as singular, but as one of a crowd, of a type – of a people. All the way from Cape Town, I marvelled, and here I am. Almost home! The matter-of-factness of the British seemed to preclude any great celebration. Cape Town, I could imagine them saying, what a long way; was the weather nice?

Before we cast off the captain's voice addresses us in calm, estuarine tones reminiscent of an Essex golf club: ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, we're ready for sea now; conditions in the Channel . . . there was a gale earlier on but now it's overcast . . . murky . . . and with our stabilisers we should be fine, it's just a stiff wind from the east. Sailing time is about one and a half hours. I do hope you have a pleasant crossing.'

‘I hate boats. Make me sick!' announces an elderly lady. ‘That's why I'm out here.'

I see her later, mid-Channel, wrapped up on the veranda deck under the misty sun, as we steam through a calm eye in the veering wind. She looks completely happy.

A lorry driver from Manchester is leaning over the rail, eyeing the listless grey surging of the Channel. ‘You should see it when it's rough or blocked because of strikes or whatever. Operation Stack they call it: anyone can do it, a couple of lorries or a few fishing boats blockading a port – chaos. Normally come over at night – this is the first time I've seen it in daylight for ages.'

His boss made a fortune in VAT washing, he says. ‘You take a bunch of mobile phones, drive them to the Czech Republic, take a break while they change the seals on the crates, then drive them back. He made millions. Had a whole fleet of little vans doing it.'

Today he is driving a load of thirty-five pallets of car interiors.

‘You sweat it a bit in customs, hoping no one has stuck any tobacco or whatever in there for a mate, because if they have it's you who sits in the cells waiting while they sort out the paper trail . . .'

I spend most of the crossing on deck, shivering happily in opaque sunlight. It would be too much to hope for the sight of a swallow making the crossing; with the wind settled in the north-east they must either be waiting for a shift in its direction, or battling in against it from somewhere further south and west, the Cherbourg peninsula, perhaps, or Saint-Malo.

The cloud breaks and suddenly there are the White Cliffs, and there is Dover. I feel another surge of exultation, and something like trepidation, too. How will I find the world I had left – how will it find me? And though I had faith in them, there was still an illogical question mark in my mind: would the swallows really make it? It seemed extraordinary that after all this way, and having reached the vast farmlands of France, so many swallows should go the extra perilous miles out to these islands in the North Atlantic. Ornithologists have no way of explaining it but that the birds probably began their migrations at the end of the last Ice Age, following food sources, and have continued simply because it is a successful strategy. The urge to return to where they were born is less explicable, and not all do. Young males seem to head for ‘home', their parents' nesting area, moving on only if all the spots are taken. But young females are more adventurous. One female, ringed as a nestling in Warwickshire, was found the following year breeding in the Netherlands. She must have met her mate on migration or in their winter quarters.

The white cliffs become greyer as we pass the moles that protect the Port of Dover. The wind is still stiff from the east. People stream down to the car decks as the ferry performs a neat pirouette and glides into its dock, ropes are thrown, the engines fall quiet, the nose lifts and a ramp comes down. The coach drives us over the gap, and we are in England.

 

DOVER TURNS A
rather weary, almost ramshackle, face to arrivals from the continent. Faded chalk boards offer deals on Sunday lunch; a hotel looks so run-down I long to stay there just to meet its ghosts; an ill-looking man smoking outside a pub gives a blank eye to the through-traffic. The coach hauls us up to the London road and the driver starts the video: a bad American film dubbed defiantly into French. From the motorway there is little to suggest that we have entered a promised land. What Patrice would give to come here, how infinite are all the sacrifices made by all the people from so many of the countries of the earth to get here: France may be the first choice of second home for western Europeans, but from Romania to Kashmir to the Cape Flats, from Turkmenistan to Sri Lanka, it is this low green land that so many long to stand on, under these quietly rolling grey skies.

We enter the city of London at Lewisham. The other passengers stare at the close-packed houses, the traffic, an Italian restaurant dyed grey by exhaust and the multi-national crowds, all wearing the uniform expression of Londoners: part-closed, part-faraway.

‘Can you help me?' asks the boy in front of me. He is from Congo and he wants to go to Manchester.

We arrive in one corner of Victoria Coach Station; his bus leaves, soon, from another. We run pell-mell through the crowds, buy the ticket and run again and I am amazed to see that nothing is translated into any language other than English. This is the first monolingual
country I have arrived in. The Manchester coach driver welcomes the boy aboard in a friendly way and I am alone again, in a crowd of travellers, simultaneously at home, and lost. I call my father. He sounds welcoming, but cautious.

‘
Avoir une hirondelle dans la charpente
,' the French say – to have a swallow in your woodwork, like bats in the belfry, means ‘to be mad'. Did I go mad in Gibraltar? It seems my father fears so. My brother, too.

The 19th April is a bright, sharp burst of spring in the suburb where my father lives. My brother stands on a station platform lecturing me with deep concern. I have lost too much weight. I have undergone one hell of a journey. I am not right. I must, must ‘go and see someone' – do I understand? I do understand, but I am not finished. The journey is not complete. We misunderstand each other. I am unwilling or unable to give up my new habits. I sleep lightly and short. I say I am more than happy to go on living without a mobile phone: my father sees paranoia in this. I am amazed at how precious and pressured everyone's time is: did I live like this, once, fitting everything into small windows of freedom between work and rest, like putting chocolates into an advent calendar? I want to talk and talk but I can hear myself talking too much. The English, or Londoners, anyway, never talk too much, except when they have been drinking. I feel I have become both too self-contained and too open for their comfort. The webs of email, text messages, carefully timetabled diaries, pencilling-ins and arrangements that will or will not be firmed up, seem to hold everyone together in semi-presence. The idea that you might not know where you will be sleeping the day after tomorrow, and therefore that nobody else can know, seems rabid eccentricity.

For three days now I have seen no swallows and the familiar discomfort is back. Where are they? I must find them. They will be out there, away from the city, coming in like a tide from the south, spreading over the country. Negotiating the trains and tubes without the deadness of familiarity is very strange; horribly tense, in fact. The line of people on the station platform on Monday morning, holding their breath as the minutes count down to the arrival of the train; the
barely restrained rush for seats; the sound of people breathing shallowly; the minutely self-conscious shifting of legs, arms and bodies, shuffling into interlocking positions until the carriage becomes a dense mass of human flesh; the intensifying crowds of travellers and trains as we approach Vauxhall; the cattle-like press down into the underpass; the feeling that a step out of place will cause chaos and collision; and above all, all the time, the never-ending harangue of announcements, admonishments and advice from automated voices, station staff, posters and signs: don't forget this, watch out for that, don't obstruct, closed-circuit television, stand back, allow passengers, unattended items, security, security, security . . . the word is everywhere, like a fire-alarm half-ringing, as though the air-raid sirens are on permanent stand-by, war has been declared, and we await the arrival of bombers. Nobody speaks, smiles or screams but all express themselves in little huffs of disapproval, acquiescence or inconvenience: the silence of so many bodies seems at once sinister and comical. But it is difficult not to admire this multicoloured, multi-cultural, multi-lingual breed of people, these Londoners, who make their way, every day, in one of the fastest, most expensive, most competitive cities on earth. Tourists look amazed and bemused, as if everyone else is playing a joke on them: they gaze around, mystified, as if waiting for someone to start laughing. When a voice begins speaking behind me I have to crush an urge to turn and join in the conversation. The speaker is a man, and by his accent, a cockney.

‘Used to go down there when we was younger. No one 'ad property down there then, now everyone does. And that other place, bit further along. Bognor Regis.'

The small boy with him says something which I miss.

‘Mullins? Long as he pays 'is own way, the tight sod. Went to Florida with 'im once an' he came back with the same money he went with. You know those two gold coins he 'ad? Got them off 'is grandmother's eyelids. That's what he's like. Good as gold he is but he can be a right little plum.' (Laughs.)

The small boy asks something.

‘Yeah, number two in the world he was, true.'

‘He's on Youtube!'

‘Yeah, there was one bloke above him, an American. He was a bit good. You're soft on 'im, aintcha? That's because you're as soft as doggy do-do in the sun. Don't worry about Mullins. He's got plenty stashed away. His missus is the most intelligent woman I've ever met in my life and she takes care of 'im . . .'

Oh, the joy of being able to eavesdrop fluently again!

We surface from the tunnels on the conveyor belts of the escalators. There are now digital television screens showing adverts as little films where there used to be defaced posters. Corners and entire quarters of the city have fallen to the wrecking ball and are being remade, but it is the permanence which arrests me. London is grand and mighty: here is the evidence, the acquisition and achievement of empire, from the edifices of the great offices of state to the regal sweep of the terraces, from the cathedral to all the spires, this forest of stone, brass and steel has been culled and collected from across the earth. Cleopatra's Needle seems typical – this ancient obelisk is here a little bauble, a collector's item, towed to the Embankment across seas of time and culture, like a caught fish. The British Museum is a pirate's hoard. Nelson stands on his column at ease, like a landowner surveying his estates. How terribly well London has done. The elegance of the city, its ease with its riches, its imperviousness to time and its indifference to the individual seem to render the crowds ant-like in our scurrying, and termite-sized our little lives, harnessed to serve and maintain it.