This is London by Ben Judah

Author:Ben Judah [Judah, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447274803
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

KNIGHTSBRIDGE

The Filipinas know everything about Knightsbridge.

The Filipinas are always watching. The Filipinas know everything about here. Today there are at least fifteen thousand servants here. The typical mansion will employ four housekeepers, two maids, a chef, a driver and, of course, a personal assistant – or butler. These castes have an ethnic tinge. The chefs are typically French or Moroccan. The drivers are mostly African or Eastern European. The butlers tend to be English. But the housekeepers are almost always Filipinas.

And they are always watching.

The Filipinas took weeks to persuade. The bosses are violent, they said. The bosses will fire us, they pleaded. But finally the Filipinas invited me for tea: on one condition. They must not have a single feature identified: no names, no haircuts, no eye colours, no heights or visible limps, or gaits, no addresses, no places of birth, no ages, no frowns, scars, or particular chuckles or grins. They could only be identified collectively as the Filipinas.

And once that was agreed, they promised me the secrets.

‘Come on Sunday. Come for tea with us and Auntie Mia.’

As I come for tea the sky is muggy and grey.

Northbound carriages are sticky and humid. There is a clammy and heavy thickness to the summer air. The carriages are uncomfortable with sweat. Beads drip along the faces of the old men and damp patches grow under their arms. There are reddening faces and dehydrated eyes. There are sighs of relief each time the Jubilee Line scrapes and squeals to a halt. Thudding doors open with sudden gust of unbreathed, cooler, thinner air.

The station where I exit is twenty-five minutes north-west of Mayfair. Here the tracks run outside. The platform is a concrete slab between them, without pretensions. Blackbirds flick to and fro over the line, as if distressed by impending thunder. The tannoy is booming with a Ghanaian accent: announcing closures.

Auntie Mia’s address is on a terrace backing onto the tracks. This is a shabby row of slate-roofed workmen’s cottages. Their easy-to-crumble clay-brick facades each have a fooling-nobody bay window smacked to the left of their front door. The little romantic carvings in the corners of the windows are now creviced with a blackish muck. This is a row of people coming and going: another stopping-off point, of doss houses and damp rooms, in outer London, where transience, and uncertainty, is the rule not the exception. In a third of London’s boroughs half the population churns every five years.

As I ring on the bell, I avert my eyes from little white boys in hoods, smoking skunk, coming and going out of the open door, two houses down, sweating a boredom that very quickly turns to menace. There is none in the Filipina house. Only commotion and cake smells. This is how the servants relax: with frenetic baking. The women sit me down. They are giggling and eating fried bananas and quickly stir mixtures as they snigger about their owners in a swirl of sugary fun. The oven slams open and shut with sudden syrupy wafts.

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