Malter

This is what John drew for you

JOHN DREW: AT THE BACK OF THE MARCH AGAINST THE WAR

Where railway lines come criss-crossing in from all over England,
A great concatenation of them, at Euston and St Pancras and King’s Cross,
Bringing in all of the North, that’s where the march began, that’s where.

All of the North it did seem as we assembled towards Gower Street.
There were banners and badges and flags and lots of laughter.
There was Hebden Bridge (must have been poet Don Atkinson, Linda said later),
There was Sheffield and (watch it, Mister Would-Be-Churchill Blair) Sedgefield.
People had left Scarborough at five o’clock in the morning
And were Ł600 short of funds to pay for it. Their motto: Make Tea, not War.
There were old people and young people, men and women and children.
There were lots of printed banners and badges and whistles being sold
But lots also of home-made placards and home-made woolly hats.
One badge said: Bush and Blair, More Own Goals than Sunderland
(Three in seven minutes the previous week). That flushed out the Newcastle fans.
We were due to march to Hyde Park to hear some speeches
But we couldn’t begin to start, every street feeding into Gower was jam-packed,
Youngsters climbed on to bus shelters, shimmied up traffic lights to look ahead.

We just couldn’t move. Another march was coming from the Thames
And like the Thames, it carried a massive current,
Coming from the furthest shires, coming from the towns,
Tributaries, it seemed, from every hamlet,
They say a million but most came one by one, like Bill and I,
And made up more than a million, I’d reckon, because we couldn’t move
For a long time and when we did we shuffled rather than marched
Down a street where Regency terraces resisted regime change.

People sat in their open windows, cold as the day was,
And cheered and played music. Not a single person barracked. It was awesome.
Bill and I had made a decision to march and all these people had joined us.
So much so that we kept getting stuck in the cold. Bill was stiff for days.
Actresses on Shaftesbury Avenue leaned out of the windows of their dressing rooms,
Ignoring the bitter wind, and waved and waved and waved.
It was like a Victory Parade, this one to end a war before it began.
There was an Iraqi family on the pavement with little home-made notices
Saying how much they hated their leader but how they didn’t want their country
Bombed and people killed and how grateful they were for our support.
They must have come out thinking to be there an hour or so, but the crowd
Went on and on all afternoon stretching out into the evening.
We saw men in Muslim dress, we heard French spoken, we jigged to a Brixton band.
Some way down Shaftesbury Avenue, those who’d started from Yorkshire
Had to decide whether to head on to Hyde Park or to start for home;
They had a last train to catch or a chartered bus was leaving.
The green banner of the Greens from York remained. All day long
It had either brushed the tops of our heads or dipped somewhere in front of us.

There were lots of policemen, lots and lots of policemen, mostly looking sheepish,
Because how would you like to be a policeman standing on the sidelines
With the thought you might have to take in a million people
And even then be left with perhaps another million on your hands?
Come on, this wasn’t just Piccadilly after a Cup Final.
But the police didn’t have to worry,
It was a peaceable march, a march which spoke for Peace in the Middle East
And, in spite of the tanks set up ominously around Heathrow,
Spoke of peace in the middle of London. At times it was sheer fantasy:
Fortnum and Masons against the War. The Ritz says Not in My Name.

If our march was like a railway, the lines all coming in at rush-hour
And nobody able to move, the other march was more like a river
(As we imagined it) coming up from the Thames, flowing along Whitehall
And up Saint James’s and when it grew dark backing up along Piccadilly
Even as the main current still kept flowing on down. Silent, eddying, dark.
And it could have been flowing down Edgware Road also, and the King’s Road,
So many were there it could have filled every fabled street in London.
And this Thames was all the people of England, and others too, and others too,
And it flowed all afternoon and never ebbed
And many of us never got to Hyde Park in time to hear the speeches
But never mind that, that wasn’t the point any more,
The point had been made whatever the speakers might say.

And what was the point? What did the march achieve?
I remember Shanghai in 1989. The Shanghai Symphony Orchestra
Played Beethoven’s Ninth and the Internationale
And little groups of students set out from this side street and that side street
Waving red flags and yellow flags and flags of every colour
And by the time they reached Communist Party Headquarters on the Bund
There were a million marching that had begun in twos and threes
Just like Bill and I. And what good did that do?

That is to miss the point. To ask the wrong question.
The moment of pure freedom is when the people march,
When they put aside whatever they have to do that day
And take back their own streets. That is an end in itself.
Ask the actresses in the theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue.
Ask the Iraqi family who stood on the sidewalk there
Growing taller and broader with each succeeding minute.
Nothing will ever be quite the same again. That is the point.

What effect will the march have on real political life?
It was real political life that the people made into a march.
There is always only the present and what we are able to make of it.
The march was composed of a myriad of desires, of infinite possibilities.
It was its own realization. Why ask what will happen next?
Would you ask the living Thames why it is it is flowing?
And whether or not tomorrow it will rise and flood the world?

Posted by sanyi at March 20, 2003 12:46 PM