Yes We Have No: Adventures in the Other England - Softcover

Cohn, Nik

 
9780394568706: Yes We Have No: Adventures in the Other England
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0394568702 ISBN 13: 9780394568706
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

A portrait of the hidden side of England presents a country of techno-freaks, obsessed soccer fans, graffiti artists, Elvis impersonators, faith healers, and fetishists, in a study of a side of the country seldom seen by tourists

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nik Cohn is the author of <b> Need</b>, a novel, and <b>The Heart of the World,</b> which won the Thomas Cook Award for best travel book  of 1992.

Aus dem Klappentext

cricket, tea with the vicar and the changing of the guard (and about the much-hyped Cool Britannia as well), and encounter a hidden nation -- the many millions who've fallen out of the mainstream, or chosen to jump. Nik Cohn's kaleidoscopic England is made up of techno-freaks and soccer-obsessives, faith healers and fetishists, graffiti artists, Odinists, Rastas, Elvis impersonators, even the Antichrist. Armed with insatiable curiosity and guided by Mary Carson, an unstoppable Irish firebrand, Cohn whirls from the changing countryside of Cornwall and East Anglia to the ravaged postindustrial North, from riotous seaside towns to London netherworlds. Whether rampaging native or second-generation immigrant, each member of this remarkable chorus has a distinct story and a voice to match, and their lives define a world cut loose from tradition and all certainty. Gone bananas, in fact.<br><br>Humane and exuberant -- a surprising guide to a country we thought we knew, and writing of the highest order.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I was sitting in an English garden. It was a hot and sticky afternoon, one of the first sweaty days of summer. Robin had been showing me his stamp collection indoors, and afterwards there was tea on the lawn. Shortbread, cream cakes, home-baked scones. An old blind spaniel called Duffer sat at our feet, feebly snouting at a stick. "Poor old boy, he's past his sell-by date. Glue-factory time for Duffer," Robin said, and everyone laughed.

China tea with lemon and honey. The pinks and sweet williams were in full blossom, but the peonies were almost done for. At every breath of a breeze, another fat red petal detached itself, drifting down. "Gardens are such a heartbreak, don't you find?" Alice said. She was pale and delicate-looking, and she favoured wispy clothes that drooped. "Roses are the worst," she confided, drooping too. Then her two sons came home from school, strapping pink boys in cricket whites, ravening for chocolate éclairs. They talked about leg-breaks; and Spencer, the games' master, who had a prosthetic hand; and Potter, whose mother had died. "I wonder what it's like, having someone die," the oldest boy said. "Oh, don't," said Alice. "Not at tea."

Fed and full, we drowsed in striped deck chairs. Tits and finches pecked for worms, the neighbor's cat kept watch from the fence and Robin discoursed on his compost heap. "I'm a horseshit man myself, always have been," he said. "Manure," said Alice, and the spaniel rose up to relieve himself. His eyes were milk-white, and he blundered into his master's legs. "Poor old Duffer," said Robin. "Who's a dead dog, then?"

In the evening, I caught the train back to London. Passing through Hertfordshire, through fields full of rape and ripening grain, I started to read The State We're In, Will Hutton's book on contemporary Britain. "The British are accustomed to success," it began. "This is the world's oldest democracy. Britain built an empire, launched the Industrial Revolution and was on the winning side in the twentieth century's two world wars. The British believe that their civilization is admired all over the world. A Briton does not boast openly, but is possessed of an inner faith that he or she is special."

When I arrived at King's Cross, the station was swarming with football fans. England was playing Scotland the next night, and the fans were celebrating in advance. Drinking, chanting, waving Union Jacks, they formed a solid wall.

I pass through them.

Euston Road is in flames. One whole section -- Barclays Bank, McDonald's, the amusement arcade where teenage runaways gather, the Greek-Cypriot greasy spoon -- has vanished completely, swallowed up by smoke, and the blaze is spreading fast. A series of flashes go off, one, two, three, racing down the street as if whipped by a gale-force wind. But what wind? The city air is heavy and still. That is odd. And so is something else. Each time a new flash explodes, the one behind it begins to gutter and die.

An image of surfing comes to my mind. As if the flames ride a wave, at one moment cresting high and wild, then swooping into a deep hollow, gone from sight, only to spring up redoubled.

What style of inferno is this? "Petrol poppers," I'm told. A skullhead, his face daubed red and white like a St. George's flag, says they're all the rage. Miniature incendiary devices, no larger than a ping-pong ball, you can buy them by the dozen.

This is the routine: you load up with PPs, then you and your mates steal a car and you head for the West End. Any spot will do, so long as it's crowded. A station, or a club, or a cinema queue; outside a football stadium is best of all. Once you've picked out your venue, you circle in traffic, jockeying for position, until you get yourself slotted, right up front at a red light. Then, first flash of amber, you take off. Put the pedal to the metal and keep it there, hard down, while your mates lean out the windows and let the poppers fly.

"Never fails to make an impression," the skullhead says. Old ladies out shopping and winos sleeping in doorways are especially susceptible. The only pity of it is, you can't stick around to admire your handiwork, you're already half a mile down the road, history, you never get to enjoy the full show.

The fire is dying as he speaks. Within a few seconds, all that remains of the blanketing smoke, the wild jets of flame, are a few black scars on the pavement.

Across the street, outside Barclay's Bank, a man in a plastic raincoat has taken a direct hit. He is still smouldering.

The only way to reach him, short of vaulting the iron barriers and charging blindly between the buses, is via the underpass. That means joining up with the football fans, who've formed a conga line and are shuffling towards Gray's Inn Road, singing "Three Lions on a Shirt" as they go. So we make our way, gut to arse, through the bowels of King's Cross and up again into the charred night air.

The man in the raincoat has been brought under control. A goodly stout woman in lace-up shoes is standing over him where he sprawls, beating at the smoke with a rolled-up Evening Standard. You'd think the man is a carpet, but he makes no objection. On the contrary, he relishes the attention. His face is upraised towards the blows and a shy smile gleams through the wild tangle of his hair and beard. "You're nice. You are a very nice lady," he says. Flakes of burned newspaper detach themselves from his coat, swirling upwards towards the street lamps. "You've got lovely teeth," he says.

Picking up his bottle of Turbo, he checks its level, then checks out his own person, fore and aft. "You've put me out," he judges, and hauls himself upright. When he shakes himself down, a last puff of smoke billows from the depths of his coat; it makes him look like an amateur magician. "I'm sweet," he says.

Round the corner on Caledonian Road, two bouncers block the door of the Flying Scotsman. A taxi pulls up and four Yorkshire businessmen pile out. "This here's the shit end of town, lads," announces their leader, a blazered, broken-nosed bravo built like a second-row rugby forward. "Follow me." So they do, and so do I.

Past the bouncers, we push down a narrow passage filled with women, leading to a small dark room filled with men. Mariah Carey's "Dreamlover" is playing and a girl on all-fours crawls nude across a narrow stage. Pasty-fleshed, pendulous, she sports a number of spangled stickers on her thighs and upper arms, but they fail to hide the bruises. "It doesn't get ranker than this," the second-row forward crows. "Pints all round, lads?"

A small section of the bar is opened to the pavement. Three stools are unoccupied, but on the fourth sits a man with a gold bracelet on one wrist.

The bracelet apart, he's dressed in standard Britwear -- a white tracksuit with sky-blue hoops, a nose-stud and trainers -- but their immaculate cleanness and the careless elegance with which he wears them sets him apart. The way he lounges, self-consciously languid, he might be posing for a fashion shoot: a street-sharp West Indian, somewhere in his late twenties, rangy and loose-limbed, with lazy eyes that miss nothing.

There is a definite presence about this man, a built-in sense of authority, verging on contempt. First, he looks me over, measuring, and then he looks across the street, at the football fans with their tattoos and Union Jacks, at the popper-scarred pavements, the last commuters scurrying towards Thameslink, the Trotskyite bookseller putting up his shutters, the elderly Italians outside Il Due di Coppi, the Aussies in their shorts and muscle shirts...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0394568702
ISBN 13 
9780394568706
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
327
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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