First Day of Work with London Transport
On that first day of training I went for breakfast to the staff room in Victoria Station. There was the usual group of uniformed stationmen and stationwomen walking in and out, making tea, greeting each other. Most of the staff were Londoners, middle-aged, who still remembered (and talked about) the war, with a sprinkling of Jamaicans and one or two Asians. They were friendly in that rough-and-ready way that Cockneys, for example, are.
"Sit youhself dahn there love, grab a mug of Rosy, all roigh'?"
And then they're gone and you're on your own.
A thin middle-aged man, his hair already completely grey, approached me, saying he could tell by my accent I was Irish. I could tell by his thick accent that he was from the south of Ireland. He asked me where I was from. Dublin of course. He said he had lived in Dublin, on the South Circular Road. I said that's where I lived. Then he asked me did I know a Mrs. C--she was my grandmother!
Occurrences like this freak me out! Like meeting Sean, whose family I knew well back home, the first day I arrived in London; the girl I had taken to our school graduation dance, Nora Tunney, in the Hope and Anchor pub in Islington; Georgina, a left-winger I had met in Dublin while still in school, at a Ewan McColl concert in the Union Tavern; the attractive red-head we had given a lift to in Wexford, in Leicester Square--there were more weird co-incidences like this to come!