Extract No.2 "Waterloo Sunset"

Another very short extract. I am just setting the scene. The next one will come with a "warning". It's going to get very dark...


I cross Waterloo Bridge; the pavement is three large and two small paving stones wide with a pretty gully of eight-inch bricks between the two foot square and fifteen inch square slabs. On my left are the Houses of Parliament – the Palace of Westminster to give it its proper name. In front of them is Charing Cross Railway Bridge with its new footbridge alongside it. I have always thought Charing Cross Bridge is the most romantic of London’s bridges. I used to love the old soot-stained, blackened footbridge running alongside the railway bridge, and the way that you could watch the trains as they drifted in and out of the station, through the struts of the bridge they flowed like an old movie, stuttering and jittering in and out of Charing Cross.

I remember, as a child, watching them at dusk with the lights inside the carriages flickering past. In those days I was highly visible, a small child glued to the railings staring at the trains snaking past, oblivious of the drop to the dark rushing waters below. Passers-by would stop and check to see if I was accompanied by an adult or that I was not lost, or any number of worthwhile things.

A monochrome bridge. A black and white movie. A steam- wreathed symbol of love. Now, however, the white masts of improvement that signify the new footbridge – out with the old and in with the new – they’ve dissipated the bridge’s romantic mystery. The soot and smoke washed away by New Labour, replacing the work of the past with the fury of the future. The steam has evaporated and the scene is in a beautiful nouveau colour, all romance denuded by a downpour of modernity with a massive full stop at the end of the bridge: the Millennium Wheel, like some child’s Meccano construction with its pods of tourists slowly rising and tumbling through the sky like flies in test tubes.