England was in revolt, but Bayswater was doing well. People were crowding in from all over the world and property prices had gone sky-high. The news from England was only real when it actually stepped on us. When Mrs Thatcher abolished the London government, the Greater London Council and its leader, Ken Livingstone, with it, I was caught unprepared. We all liked the cheeky young man who had lowered the tube fares and stood up for Londoners. He wasn’t the pompous Henry Drummond-Lord Cramp-Mrs Thatcher sort of English person. We felt he would have fitted in at Hereford Road, would have sat right down on the floor cushions and joined in the talk. How could a city’s government be completely abolished just like that? Not just replaced, abolished. Even in Zanzibar it would have been shocking. The GLC had a big building opposite the Houses of Parliament that looked equally important and permanent. This was a coup, a rug pulled out from under us, proof of the existence of arbitrary power. Because I had followed events so loosely the news came as a shock. I had taken England to be reliable beneath the surface, well regulated, entirely different from Africa, and I felt personally betrayed to discover it was not. People died in coups.
Even more upsetting to my sense of balance than the London coup was a modest plan to privatise Porchester Baths. This was news landing right on my big toe. The swimming pool was the first place that I had made my own in Bayswater, before I came to think of all Bayswater as mine. Recently, with my new affluence, I had become a regular at the more expensive Russian Baths section. I went there for steam heat, dry heat, all sorts of heat and water at any time of the year. I treated myself to massages there. Sometimes I treated Gabrielle. I drank tea on the deck chairs between the potted plants and chatted like a queen with other foreign women. This was my place. Now Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives wanted to develop it, modernise it and sell it to the highest bidder. There was to be a public meeting and, stiff with the resolution to take control of my world, I decided to attend.
This meeting was my single public act in London. I was convinced that I had a right to be heard. I was a regular customer and a prominent local resident. I might be an illegal immigrant, unable to vote, but in the United Kingdom of Bayswater I was a citizen of good standing.
The meeting was held in Porchester Hall, part of the same building that housed the baths. A row of Conservative men sat facing us and told us what they were going to do. I looked around the hall. There were at least a hundred white faces with a sprinkling of brown. The public was given their turn to speak. Members of swimming clubs talked of their love for the pools, others admired the architecture and the elegant varnished changing cubicles that bordered the pool and were so convenient. People were taking the words out of my mouth. Nobody liked the plan for taking out the cubicles and making room for squash courts. I found that the place I thought I had cherished in isolation was cherished by a whole community. I put my hand up then pulled it down. Then put it up again.
“Yes,” the chairman said, pointing in my direction, so that I looked behind me. “'Yes, you.”
“I just want to say how much I like the woodwork around the pools.” My voice wavered; I was astonished and unnerved to find myself standing up to speak in England. “I want to agree with everyone else. You shouldn’t change anything.” Then I sat, my heart thumping at my effrontery, finding this was all I had to say.
“Thank you,” the chairman said dryly. “Any fresh points someone would like to raise?”
That was it, the sum total of my London politics. The meeting closed and we all exchanged friendly, glancing smiles, me and all those nice English people I never seemed to meet. We had told the Westminster Conservatives exactly what we thought of their plan to ruin our baths and privatise them. We’d spoken in a single voice and sent them packing. I was thrilled, like a schoolgirl noticed by the older girls and invited to their party.
A few weeks after the public meeting I went to the Baths as usual and found them closed, piles of broken, varnished wood in the street, with the sound of smashing and ripping coming from inside. We had all been ignored. Though we had seemed to be in control, we had not been in control. There was something about England I was not properly understanding.
I’m tracking them, the signals that might have cautioned me if I had troubled to pay them attention. The coup, the baths. Then there was the murder of our friendly halal butcher down the road, a Libyan, who the police said could have been the victim of either a London burglary or a Libyan assassin. They never did decide, and let the matter drop. And there was, about that time, the explosion that blew up the Arab newsagent in Queensway, in the building that also housed my dentist. That story was overshadowed in the local paper by the toppling of a crane on the Whiteley’s site with the death of its operator, an event more real to its readership than murders and explosions among foreigners. They were scooping out the insides of Whiteley’s then, behind the dark facade—why was I so surprised when Ron told me it had been reborn?
RON IS BACK. HE BOUNCED OVER TO SEE ME THE SAMEday he arrived, fired up by jet travel.
“Hey, I loved Zanzibar,” he announced immediately, expecting me to be delighted. “It’s still pretty much unspoiled. The old city could do with a coat of
