At first, the fear
dictated that there had been a death. A
crowd gathered on the pavement immediately outside the sliding-door entrance to
St Albans City train station. Struck by
horror, their contorted faces dipped as one to scrutinise the ground between
their circle of feet. From the ticket
barrier I caught sight of the commotion and surmised that the object of common
viewing, of shared shock, must be a body, a fallen person, a casualty or
perhaps even a corpse, freshly robbed of life.
It was in fact a dog poo.
In most other cities and
certainly in any decade before the 1990s, this would have prompted no
fascination at all. But this was today,
in the middle-class commuter city that boasts the highest house prices of any
London satellite settlement; and this was a gloriously bright beige exhibit,
resting crudely in an erratic formation of clumps, each one almost the size of
a horse’s, starkly drawing attention to itself, strewn across that entrance as
if to make a point, as if an over-sized dog had a political agenda it wanted to
share with every St Albanian intent on railway travel today. In short, it was a fucking huge pile of
conspicuous shit left right in everybody’s way.
“You’d think one of the
station staff would clean it up,” complained one indignant woman in a tone of
voice that affected a degree of disassociation from faecal matter that is
naturally impossible for a human.
“Don’t tread in it!”
another woman warned her children, tugging at their arms in an effort to
circumvent the offending land-mine of turd.
In the same way that our children are spared the fresh air, the freedom
and the dangers that the offspring of the 60s and 70s faced and relished daily,
so are they protected from ever standing in dog shit these days. I have two children and notwithstanding the
fact that one of them trod in our own dog’s plop in the garden last week, I’m
pretty sure that they’ve both traversed childhood without the inconvenience of
having to scrape stubborn excrement from between the lines of rubber that form
the grip on a trainer sole.
They say that trauma burns
images into the brain and that these remain for much time afterwards. I personally cannot cleanse my memory of that
scene today, but it has only been a few hours.
I grieve for those poor children, whose sense of horror was fuelled by
the adults around them who were unable to cope with the situation. In these moments, children lose that sense of
security, that naïve faith in grown-ups that had led them to assume that we can
protect them from anything and deal with every difficulty in life. I daresay today was an immutable rite of
passage for one or two of them.
I fled the scene. I am not one to rubber-neck on motorways and
there was no aid I could lend to this tragedy.
My hope is that the emergency services will remove all evidence of this
canine arse-spillage before I use the station tomorrow, but not before some
small spark of light can illuminate the grim darkness of today, ideally courtesy
of some poor sod stepping right in it; because to paraphrase George Bernard
Shaw, “Life does not cease being funny when people die or a dog shits on the
pavement any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
