Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson Page B

enjoy the rest of his evening.
So unsafe was it, particularly after dark, that the police often wouldn't let us out until the small hours, particularly on nights of big demos. Because we never knew when we would be set free, we had to form our cars into a line and then sit for hour upon hour in the freezing cold. Some time between 11 p.m. and 1.30 a.m., when a significant portion of the braying throngs had been beaten back or dragged off to jail or had just wandered home, the gates would be thrown open and a great fleet of News International trucks would roar down a ramp and out onto The Highway, where they would be met by a barrage of bricks and crush barriers from whatever was left of the mob. The rest of us, meanwhile, were instructed to make haste in convoy through the back lanes of Wapping and to disperse when we were a safe distance from the plant. This worked well enough for several nights, but one evening we were sent on our way just as the pubs were shutting. As we were proceeding down some darkened, narrow street, suddenly people were stepping out of the shadows and into the road, kicking doors and heaving whatever came to hand. Ahead of me there were startling explosions of glass and intemperate shouting. To my deep and lasting astonishment someone about six cars ahead of me - a fussy little man from the foreign desk, who even now I would happily drag over rough ground behind a Land-Rover - got out to look at the damage to his car, as if he thought he might have run over a nail, bringing those of us behind to a halt. I remember watching in sputtering dismay as he tried to press back into position a flapping piece of trim, then turning my head to find at my window an enraged face - a white guy with dancing dreadlocks and an army surplus jacket - and everything took on a strange dreamlike quality. How odd, I thought, that a total stranger was about to pull me from my car and beat me mushy for the benefit of printworkers he had never met,t
who would mostly despise him as an unkempt hippie, would certainly never let him into their own union, and who had enjoyed decades  of obscenely inflated  earnings without once showing collective support for any other union, including, on occasion, provincial branches of their own NGA. Simultaneously it occurred to me that I was about to squander my small life for the benefit of a man who had, without apparent hesitation, given up his own nationality out of economic self-interest, who didn't know who I was, would as lightly have discarded me if a machine could be found to do my job, and whose idea of maximum magnanimity was to hand out a six-ounce can of beer and a limp sandwich. I could imagine the company writing to my wife: 'Dear Mrs Bryson: In appreciation of your husband's recent tragic death at the hands of a terrifying mob, we would like you to have this sandwich and can of lager. PS - Could you please return his parking pass?'
And all the time this was going on, while a large wild man with dreadlocks was trying to wrench open my door with a view to carrying me off wriggling into the darkness, some halfwit from the foreign desk fifty yards ahead was walking slowly around his Peugeot, assessing it deliberatively like someone about to buy a second-hand car, and occasionally pausing to look with puzzlement at the bricks and blows raining down on the cars behind him, as if it were some kind of freak weather occurrence. Eventually, he got back in his car, checked the rearview mirror, made sure his newspaper was still on the seat beside him, put on his indicator, checked the mirror again and pulled off, and my life was saved.
Four days later, the company stopped bringing round free sandwiches and beer.
It was thus very refreshing to walk without fear for my life through the dozing streets of Wapping. I have never bought into that quaint conceit about London being essentially a cluster of villages - where else have you seen villages with flyovers, gasometers, reeling derelicts and