(Loosely based on Andersen’s In The Duck Yard)
An obscure but historically rich family of age old standing first came to live in one of London’s green suburban idylls when those self same suburbs were nothing but virgin fields and meadows recently subsumed into William the Conqueror’s new realm. At that time the family name was long and impressive; D’Agouteville perhaps or Cholmondley-Warner or some such thing, but, as with all families, the generations followed one after another, proving more or less that sons and daughters inherit a mixed bag of genes and ancestral memory. Despite the vagaries of birthright and ability, the family remained true to its long heritage in one respect, at least, and that was to its ancestral home. Fortunes varied, were won and lost, and the family name changed through the ages, becoming a proper product of each model of social propriety, until, at the very end of a long line of ancestors , there was but one member of the family left living. She was known simply as Miss Jones.
During the long sweep of days that passed during which the family had faded into its current state of dilapidated grandeur, the great city had, conversely, spread its teeming streets far and wide. Miss Jones and her ancient familial home now stood in much reduced status in the middle of this quiet and genteel suburban sprawl. Around her home there had come the houses of merchants and bankers, followed by the lowlier dwellings of middle class managers and finally there came the estate houses of the common workers.
The family shut themselves away behind the barrier of polite poverty, pulling up the rope ladder of social interaction. Safe behind their crumbling castle walls, the family’s ancient lust for life dissipated, and the vitality of these new lives completely passed them by. Miss Jones, as the last of her line, lived a quiet and shrouded life that was bounded by the tightness of good old-fashioned values and good old-fashioned friends. From time to time she watched the new world of alien features and fads strut and crow and found it all strangely attractive, but the rules of the game quite prevented her from embracing such energy and liveliness. It simply wasn’t done. Self-control was an art that Miss Jones and her family had perfected through many long years of carefully managed breeding and etiquette.
Miss Jones had few vices and few interests that could be described as hobbies, but she was very keen on politics. Of course, it had to be the right sort of politics, the sort that was supported by bazaars, whist drives and charity lunches attended by her sitting member of parliament. Nevertheless, and in the privacy of her own salon, she was quite vocal in her support of the poor oppressed victims of foreign dictators and of those unfortunates in far off lands whose lives were devastated by fire, famine and flood. It was widely reported in the leafier lanes of suburban south London that after the local church’s recent summer fete Miss Jones had sampled the sherry and become extremely eloquent on the subject.
“When you see them on television sitting around their fires and singing their traditional songs, well, it’s so moving. They have so much dignity in their suffering. If it were only possible I’d take just such a person into my own protection. I would be a good mother to her. It’s in my blood, you know. We Joneses have always been that way inclined. But they are so far away and there is so little one can really do to help”.
Mistress Fate heard this desperate plea and within a week Miss Jones found herself facing a very new and challenging situation, for which she was entirely unprepared. Walking home from a visit to a friend’s house one evening at about seven o’clock, Miss Jones was enjoying the last of the sun’s tree-dappled warmth. The birds sang sweetly in the hedgerows and the last of the house martins were diving and darting across the sky as they fed themselves up for their long autumn flight south. A few wisps of cloud on the far horizon glimmered red and gold as they reflected the falling of day into the purple dusk of night. All was well with the world as Miss Jones turned the corner into her own street and was almost bowled over by a young man running at full pelt in the opposite direction.
Miss Jones spun around in an anti-clockwise direction when the young man’s shoulder hit her left arm with all the force and momentum of a battering ram. She lost her balance and her grip on her handbag as she stumbled and tripped over her own feet, falling backwards into a beech hedge that bordered one of the suburban gardens. The young man managed two or three disjointed paces before he too crumpled and flaked, finally tripping over an uneven paving stone and falling chin first to the floor. As he fell he thrust out an arm to try and cushion his fall. The evening’s background sounds of bird song and bees buzzing their way from flower head to flower head were cut in two by the sharp retort of bone breaking on hard cement.
Miss Jones heard the sound of footsteps following on behind the young man and as she pushed beech leaves out of her face she was able to make out three other young boys heading towards where she lay suspended in the hedge. With a physical urgency usually reserved for athletes and Special Forces troops, Miss Jones launched herself into a standing position, braced her legs upon the pavement and picked up her handbag in the most menacing way that she could manage. The young man with the broken wrist was of some ethnic stock, while the three other youths were Caucasians and Miss Jones was no fool. She recognised the situation for what it was and reacted instantaneously.
As soon as she realised what she was doing her legs turned to jelly, her heart skipped several beats, and she could feel herself glowing all over with beads of perspiration. All that had been so clear for that vital second was now clouded in the fog of doubt and confusion. She was not the stuff of legend nor of heroism, being the sort of person who worried that she was letting her whole class down when her shoes got dirty, and here she was facing down three members of an alien youth culture, whose sole intent was to inflict grievous bodily harm on another vulnerable individual. It occurred to her there and then that if they couldn’t get to the crawling thing behind her, they would probably take just as much delight in wreaking havoc upon the body of one of the genteel classes. Her resolve momentarily wavered. Nevertheless, centuries of fine and proper blood were coursing through her adrenalin swollen arteries, and with her unwavering sense of indignation on behalf of underdogs everywhere, she steeled herself for the physical punishment that was about to pour forth upon her head.
She looked straight at the charging youths and yelled at the top of her voice, “You’ll have to answer to me to first!”
The sound of running footsteps had already caused curtains to twitch in the front rooms of the houses of those who lived close enough to the road to have heard the disturbance. The sound of Miss Jones’s defiant voice being raised in such an unlikely and, frankly, shocking way, heralded the full pulling aside of various nets and blinds. As soon as the good people of this suburban paradise realised that one of their own was in trouble with a posse of hell’s skinheads, front doors opened and at least three elderly gentlemen were pushed and prodded out onto their doorsteps.
The three white boys, while hell bent on completing their terrible task, were not entirely insensitive to the weight of evidence that was being amassed against them. Their headlong charge towards Miss Jones and the stricken young man on the pavement behind her slackened off until they came to a skipping halt some ten yards away.
The gentlemen on doorsteps started shouting things like, “Bugger orf…We’ve called the police, you know…Go on, get out of it”.
The boys shouted obscenities back, informing anyone who was listening that they knew where everyone lived and would be back later to get them. The stand off lasted for nearly a minute before the sound of a siren in the distance saw the three of them break into a hectic run back the way they had come.
In no time at all, the entire street seemed to be filled with cars and uniformed officers, and an ambulance whisked the young man away to Accident and Emergency before Miss Jones had time to find out his name. She was, anyway, helping a very pleasant young policewoman with her enquiries and Miss Jones was on fine form as the policewoman took her statement. Truth be told she was probably a little tipsy having supped one too many medicinal Scotches from one of her neighbours’ hip flasks when she said, “They’re absolute scoundrels. Hanging is too good for them. That we permit such creatures to live and walk about on the planet! It wouldn’t have happened in the old days, you know, oh no!”
Quite what would have happened in the old days Miss Jones couldn’t actually say. She had a vague and hazy image in her head of one of her early ancestors running his opponents through with a large sword, and in her more candid moments she secretly approved of this approach. As it was she was quite content to end the day as she often did by toasting the world with another hint of single malt, safe in the comforting knowledge that the sun, like people, inevitably moves towards sunset.
Unfortunately for Miss Jones there was another sun of which she had taken no account whatsoever in her long and relatively restricted life, and at seven-thirty the next morning she was rudely awakened by a series of loud knocks at her front door. The adrenalin rush of the previous evening and the near quarter bottle of Scotch that she had drunk before bed had not mixed well and, when she opened the door to the reporter from the Sun & Mercury, Miss Jones was suffering from the unpalatable effects of her first hangover since her debutante years.
The next few moments were a horrible mixture of déjà vu and misunderstood questions, all of which left Miss Jones in a state of confused and bemused uncertainty. The photographer did at least have the dignity to let her change out of her dressing gown and slippers, but everything was still rushed and she looked as if she’d just gone three full minutes with a welterweight boxer. The only saving grace was that the headlines painted a picture of a plucky citizen coming to the aid of a poor victim of racial abuse. Over the next few weeks both Miss Jones and the young victim appeared in the newspapers and on many of the news and current affairs programmes on the television and the radio. Their life stories were told and compared and much was made of the fact that two very different worlds had collided and, out of the chaos of the moment, had created a perfect picture of what the country should be striving for.
In Miss Jones’s case her family background was investigated and she was revealed to the world. All of the political parties identified with her recent struggle, praising her for her actions, and she was held up as a paragon of good old fashioned and traditional values by the true blues of the political firmament. Even those who thought her type was an anachronism in these modern times were forced to agree that she was very unassuming and brave. Cameras whirred and digital footage streamed across the closed world of conservative South London, so much so that nearly everyone in the neighbourhood wanted to invite Miss Jones to their parties, to their charity bashes and to their seasonal celebrations.
The young man, of course, received some publicity as well. His face appeared in print and on television screens and his own background was presented to the world, just as Miss Jones’s had been. In his case, and although there was, obviously, just as much history to it, his family background was untraceable. He came from a remote region of a far off nation that was locked into a vicious cycle of civil war and warlordism. As much was made of the tragedy in his homeland as was made of his broken wrist and the fact that no one could find the perpetrators of the attack.
Unlike the almost universal acceptance of Miss Jones in the media, however, some of the reporting that related to the young man tended towards the dark side. Some newspapers, tiring of the feel good factor inherent in the immediate events of the day, started to ask questions about the presence of such people in the country. Numbers were discussed. Entry criteria were argued about and the cost of his treatment at the expense of the public purse became an issue for some of the more garrulous members of the establishment. When his story was set into the context of geography there were those who questioned whether any good could every come of a country that suffered from an apparently incurable case of Asperger’s Syndrome. The final denouement was the revelation that the young man in question was waiting for his appeal for asylum to be heard by the government and he was not yet, by any right, a citizen of the country.
For Miss Jones, however, the social breeze, which she had until now only briefly caught the coat tails of, turned into a full-blown tornado. She was invited to parties and to dinners with friends and acquaintances, about whom she often knew only the bare bones. Nonetheless, she found herself positively enjoying the concentration of interest that surrounded her whenever the conversation turned to the state of the nation and to the whole immigration issue. She felt that she finally had something to offer to these discussions, basing her opinions on her direct experience with these poor unfortunate people. She was the queen of the chicken run with a bevy of hens and cocks clucking around her, hanging on her every insight and word.
In all of this, in the hurricane of press interest that engulfed the protagonists and in the quietly ebbing tide that followed as the story wound down onto the spools of microfiched newsprint, Miss Jones and the young man never actually met. In fact, under the strains of the moment and the inevitable riot of questions and counselling in the immediate aftermath of the alleged attack, they had never even spoken with one another. Their only real, physical contact had been when the young man barged into her by accident on a street corner. In the resulting confusion, with neighbours comforting Miss Jones and paramedics aiding the young man, they had no time in which to become acquainted. Their only indirect contact was when they exchanged thanks and some brief sound bites via a television link.
It should come as no surprise that Miss Jones’s experience at the forefront of integration and social inclusion should provide her with the moral courage and the fortitude to deal with her next hot political potato. A year or so after the event on the street corner the government proposed the setting up an immigration processing centre in the borough where Miss Jones lived. Given her local fame as the woman who had a go, as the woman who stood up to racist yob culture, she was delighted to be asked onto the committee of the “Asylum Centre Campaign Group”.
As she said on local radio one evening, “We should all do what we can to make this country socially and culturally cohesive, and no one knows that better than I do. But even after all of my experiences I have to say that we, the people of this borough, do not want this facility in our back yard”.