Brixton II

Hurricane

In 1987 we were living in a huge, empty bus in Brixton, loads of us. We didn’t realy listen to the weather podcast so we wok up one day with a tree lying across the middle of the road. There been a hurricane.

Peace Bus

There’s a funny story here about the warmth and humourously deluded aspirations of the Peace Bus – and that’s the one I’ll tell.
But, buried beneath it, there is also an icy wasteland (mirrored in the film Come and See) that is almost too painful to recount – but must be recounted – that’s to do with horror and anti-semitism and can’t be ducked.
How it is possible to marry these two. I genuinely don’t know. Yet.
(There are pictures of the Peace Pilgrims in Moscow in the Your Bit section).

The peace pilgrims.

Published by WCRP Youth/India for the Youth Wing of World Conference on Religion and Peace.

Despite the tour around the Auschwitz barracks, the piles of spectacles in the Holocaust museum, even my impromptu performance in the sunshine (I gave it up – thinking What if I cut my hand. Where will I get a tetanus!) eaten by the reality of the place, slowly a day of exploring an empty lot in Poland with old women sitting out in the sun selling postcards changed. Even the bright perky Jewish girls, somewhat overcome, after a brief conversation, had melted away.

The rain started to drizzle. I was all alone in a huge, empty desolate place, beneath darkening skies. I was standing on a hilly mound with barb wire fences in the distance behind me. I was at the terminus of a train platform for which there was no going back, no return.

What trip had brought me to this place of desolation when only a week before the young rasta from the cab place round the corner to the squat in Brixton was waving me off cheerily opposite Westminster Abbey…