An Officer and a Gentlewoman by Heloise Goodley

Author:Heloise Goodley [Heloise Goodley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780330143
Publisher: Constable
Published: 2011-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

One of the most soul-destroying activities of my former London life had been the painful daily commute on London Underground. Standing on a station platform each week morning, queuing four deep with waiting passengers, silent and motionless in the winter darkness, a sea of grey and black woollen coats and umbrellas, watching the rain hammer down onto the track. Praying that as the next carriage drew to a stop in front of me there would be a sliver of space that I could wedge myself into as the doors slid open. The depressing ten-mile journey from Fulham to Canary Wharf each morning and night took a whole hour, stealing two hours of my day. Two hours of being pressed like a sardine in a can. Two hours with some random hungover Australian backpacker breathing hot, heavy alcoholic fumes into my face. Two hours with a sweaty unwashed armpit hovering its damp patch over my nose. Two hours with a total stranger’s crotch pressed against my upper thigh, rocking and bumping with the swaying train as it sped along the tunnels between stations. Sadly, if my boyfriend was out of town, my daily Tube journeys were the most intimate I’d find myself with someone else all week.

One particular cold morning as I travelled on my commute to Canary Wharf I was part of a very British incident.

I was on the Jubilee Line racing east, ticking off station stops: Westminster, Waterloo, Southwark, London Bridge, Bermondsey. At Bermondsey, the train doors beeped open and someone stood up and departed, leaving me with the rare pleasure of a seat. I sat down and settled in, unfolding my newspaper, and hiding behind its broadsheets, as the train sped on towards Canary Wharf. At some point, in the blackness between station stops, I sensed something down at my feet. Peering over the top of my newspaper shield, I saw there was a woman kneeling on the floor of the carriage, crouched over her rucksack praying. Wedged between mine, and the other passengers’ feet, she was curled on the floor with an open copy of the Koran in her hands, reciting and muttering its verses. She was sweating in the large puffer jacket she had on too. This was before London had experienced its own version of Al Qaeda’s terrorism in the 7 July bombings, but September 11 2001 had occurred two years earlier and Londoners were all too aware of the threat to their capital. I leaned forwards and tapped her shoulder, whispering the offer of my seat, but she declined.

If she was planning to detonate a suicide vest of explosives on this Tube train, she’d chosen well: the carriage was packed with London capitalist scum. The suited City types most hated by extremists: Occidentalism, amoral, greedy, materialistic infidels.

I am quite sure that had such a scene occurred on the New York subway it would have been encountered very differently from the London experience I was part of that day. I would guess that New Yorkers

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