Lindy Kato (Writer)

London

Liverpool Street Station where Underground and Overground meet, December 2023.

If jotting your story down will stop it from endlessly gyrating around your brain, then I have a ton of writing to get done. I am permitting a shaft of light to pierce the darkness of my skeleton closet. It isn’t the worst thing that has happened to me, just the first. If your closet door is tightly shut and you want it to stay that way, please do not read on!

Recently I had cause to travel fairly extensively on the London Underground. There is a breeze that announces the imminent arrival of a tube train and it has a smell. Not an unpleasant, musty old smell but a scent all of it’s own. The first underground link between Paddington and Farringdon opened in 1863 and was barely underground. The deeper tubes that we know today had to wait for the advancement of technology to develop them, and the Piccadilly line, that I got leaving Heathrow (because the subway to the Elizabeth line was flooded), opened in 1906. It could be forgiven if the air was a bit musty but that familiar smell triggers my emotional brain, resulting in the replay of a video that needs dumping.

Really it all started in 1968. The machinists at Fords went on strike after they were demoted from ‘skilled labour’ to ‘unskilled’. The truth is that in 1968 women were paid half what men were paid for similar work. After all, married women don’t need the money! Dad didn’t want me to work myself to death for half a wage because I wouldn’t be able to pay my way in the world. He didn’t have much hope for me in the marriage stakes. How could he think that? I was eight and three quarters. Just for the record I have been married, to the same person, for forty-four years.

Then in 1969 my brother got sick, really sick, pale and floppy. The local hospital wouldn’t take him and sent him by ambulance to Piccadilly, London. I first encountered the smart girls on the train when we visited him at the Golden Square Hospital. Red berets, black socks, black pleated skirts and soft, warm, red winceyette shirts. Some of these girls were readers—like me. No one bothered them or tried to make them play, they just left them the hell alone. This was the school that I would attend.

I would need to pass the ‘eleven-plus’. This British test separated students suited to an academic education from the majority that would have a more vocational training—at a school where everyone knows they failed. This meant the pass mark would change each year to ensure the correct number and gender of students. The pass mark was often lower for boys and I suggest this might have compromised the quality of those academic students in some years, and wasted academic talent needlessly in others! In my ‘B’ class, there would be two odd (really odd) students, on average, that would pass each year. All the ‘A’ class students in our non-streamed school would succeed, no one from the ‘C’ class would ever pass. Worse still, I would only be ten when I sat the eleven-plus by dint of the ‘race-horse’ birthday system for school entry that meant I was the second youngest in the class. Then, if against all odds I did pass, I would need to be successful in the entrance exam and an interview. In short, my chances were zero. Since 1959 it had been mooted that the school would move to Essex, so far it had remained in Bow Road, in the East End of London. Hopefully it would stay there, I wanted to travel to London, on the train, with these sophisticated girls in their stunning uniform.

Dad might not be educated but he isn’t silly, he took the school system on full frontal. He wanted more support for my brother and got him shifted to a better school. At the same time he scored a shift to the ‘A’ class for me. Wiley old coot, he knew that an eleven-plus pass would be an exit ticket from the working class.

So in 1970 I proudly wore my red beret (which left pink rings around my blond hair when it rained), and traveled on the London Underground. The Underground is a thing to behold. If it worked it would be brilliant, but now, as then, people are packed like sardines at busy times, plus there are outages, breakages, floods and strikes that can stop an entire line. Even leaves on the track or the ‘wrong’ kind of snow will mess up the timetable and double the number of commuters for the following train. School chucking out time was crowded enough but if you found yourself in office emptying time it was far worse. Dad said to always use the carriage with the guard in, but at office emptying time getting on any carriage was a struggle. Why did I get so many detentions? You feel isolated, bereft of friends. I would battle for a ‘NO SMOKING’ carriage, routinely defaced to ‘NOSMO KING’. I would stink for days if I failed.

That day, I would be sickened, the nausea still hits me now and again.

The train was hot, bodies had been pushed in so the doors would close. Facing me, and slightly to my right, was an older fat guy. I make mention of this not to be ‘fattist’ but because in those days, it was unusual. He felt squishy in comparison to the random bony hips thrusting into my torso as the train steadily rocked. He also felt hotter than the other bodies and I realised that ‘older fat guy’ had his trousers unzipped and his penis on display. It looked nothing like I had ever seen, shiny pink and fleshy with blue pulsating veins. It grew before my eyes as he rubbed against my school uniform in time to the movement of the train. I was paralysed. In another two years I may have become the sassy teenager, raising her hand high and announcing to the entire carriage:
“Excuse me sir, but can you put that penis away before you muck up my nice school uniform!”

I never told a soul. I was eleven.