London Urban Legends (24 page)

I went off down the street to have a whisky neat

And carefully laid my dead cat underneath my seat.

Then I got down on my hands and knees;

Went halfway through the town,

When the barman stops me,

‘Here’s your parcel Mr. Brown,’

So I had to thank the silly fool

And give him half a crown

For bringing me the body in the bag.

Having failed all day to get rid of the cat, Mr Brown hears a noise in the bag:

All at once from in the bag

There came a plaintive meow

Say Puss, ‘I’m dead no longer,

You needn’t bother now.

You’ve often heard it said

That a cat has got nine lives,

Well, I’m a married Tabby,

One of Tommy’s wives

And our families they usually come

In threes, and fours, and fives.’

But there were seven little bodies in the bag!

Another accidental theft is the urban legend about two travellers and a packet of biscuits. Printed versions appeared around 1972/74 and the legends appeared in Folklore from the summer of 1975. A traveller buys a cup of tea and a packet of biscuits in a Joe Lyons corner house, opposite Liverpool Street station (or in a buffet car or station café), and sits down to enjoy them. Also sitting at the table is an African (or Pakistani or West Indian) man, who helps himself to one of the biscuits. Shaken by the effrontery of this, our traveller takes another. The uninvited biscuit-eater takes another and this continues until they are down to the last biscuit. Here the African (West Indian or Pakistani) man breaks the biscuit in two and hands the traveller half. Our traveller loses his temper at this point and hurls abuse at the man. It is only then that he (or sometimes she) realises that his own packet of biscuits is lying unopened on his suitcase, and that he had been helping himself to the other fellow’s biscuits.

This story made it as far as Paul Smith’s
The Book of Nastier Legends
published in 1986, where the setting was a café in Southampton, biscuits became the fingers of a Kit-Kat bar and the patient and sharing individual changed from an ethnic minority and possible recent immigrant to an ‘outrageously dressed’ punk. The message of the story is the same as with the tea house: don’t judge people by how they look and, as with all of these stories, double check before confronting someone and do not be so suspicious. Also, take better care of your cat, be it dead or alive.

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and
shook it you would be amazed at the animals that would fall out.
It would pour more than cats and dogs, I tell you.

Yann Martel, Life of PI

Rat Land

In London you are never more than a certain distance away from a rat. This is an almost universal indicator of urban filth, London’s hidden dangers and the fear and loathing a lot of us have for rats. Each time the idea of rat proximity is repeated the distance varies. A quick Google suggests 6ft, 7ft, 10ft or a metric 5m or 18m. Why do we even think it’s possible to have an average distance from a rat? Do London rats outnumber London human beings? This idea seems to come from the 1909 book
The Rat Problem
by W.R. Boelter who undertook his research by asking country folk whether they thought it was reasonable to say that there was one rat per acre of land. Boelter made an estimated guess at 40 million rats, as there were 40 million acres of cultivated land in Britain at the time. There were also around 40 million people in Britain at the time. Since then, it only seems right to think that the rat population has increased more quickly than the human population, rats must breed like rats after all, and so now they must outnumber us, particularly in our grimy cities.

Luckily, Dr Dave Cowan, leader of the wildlife programme at the Food and Environment Research Agency, has tried to work out the actual person:rat ratio of Britain – both town and country – in a more scientific way. Counting cities, sewers and farms (farms are the most popular rat territories), Dr Cowan calculated that there are 10.2 million rats in Britain. The UK has 60 million human inhabitants, so people outnumber rats by six to one. As for approximate distance from a rat in an urban area you would be, at most, never more than 164ft (50m) away from a rat. Although you may, of course, be much nearer.

Parakeet Superstars

Unlike the pigs living in London’s sewers or the big cats roaming its suburbs, the parakeets of London are not an urban legend in themselves. They have been reported across London, from Twickenham to Boreham Wood to Hither Green. My own visits to open spaces in London, from Kensal Green cemetery to Manor House Gardens in Lee, have been cut through by a flash of green and a sharp parakeet squawk. Ring-necked parakeets cover south and west London, while the Monk Parakeet has colonies in north London. One encounter with the ring-necked variety in February 2011 in Richmond Park was like a Mardi Gras version of Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
; the old oak trees were thick with their bright feathers and delirious parakeet chatter.

How they arrived in London is another story, or rather stories. I first encountered the legend of west London’s parakeets in a copy of
Time Out
from June 2005, which claimed they are all descended from a pair that escaped from Jimi Hendrix’s flat in Notting Hill. The two birds were like the guitarist himself: exotic and flamboyant in a cold grey London. On escaping, they went to found a nation of parakeets in London and provide a high-pitched, alien soundtrack to the coo of London’s pigeons and chattering of sparrows. In a south London special of the
Evening Standard
’s
ES Magazine
in 2012, the parakeets were released by Hendrix, rather than escaping, and
Surrey Life
magazine in December 2011 imagined Hendrix playing ‘Little Wing’ as they sailed from the window and into Notting Hill.

In its ‘Myth Busters’ column, the
Fortean Times
, in January 2010, describes a version that is just that little bit more dramatic, as the parakeets are accidentally released from Hendrix’s flat following his death. From medieval to Victorian art, the human soul can be depicted as a dove departing through the window at the moment of death. Perhaps Hendrix’s soul couldn’t be anything as tame as a single, cooing dove.

Another story tells of the parakeets being the descendants of film stars rather than the pets of a pop star. The same
Time Out
article repeated the story that the parakeets are descended from some birds that escaped Shepperton Studios during the filming of the 1951 film
The African Queen
. A friend offered me another version in 2012, by suggesting the parakeets were related to a different African queen, having flown from the set of the 1963 film
Antony and Cleopatra
.

Yet another account describes a mass escape during the great storm of 1987, when an aviary was damaged in Northdown Park in Kent. If that is not dramatic enough, how about the parakeets being freed from quarantine at Heathrow airport by a storm? Or that a plane fuselage crashed landed on an aviary near Heathrow airport, or that the birds flew to freedom when the tanker that carried them ran aground or capsized? In many urban myths the parakeets of London do not arrive gradually; the story has to be ‘disaster!’ followed by an ‘instant parakeet hoard!’

Another celebrity version of the parakeet origin myth is that they were escapees from the aviaries of King Manuel II, Manuel the Unfortunate (the Portuguese king who ascended to the throne after the assassination of his father and brother and had to flee on 6 October 1910 during Portugal’s republican revolution). Manuel landed in Fulwell Park, Twickenham, for his exile where, it has been said, he attempted to recreate Portuguese life, including building an insecure cage for some parakeets. I have not been able to discover whether this story pre-dates the Hendrix one or if they are related. In any case, the parakeets are in London and any slightly exotic figure could be linked to their origins.

The story of the parakeets escaping Shepperton Studios is undone a little when it is pointed out that
The African Queen
was not filmed there but at Isleworth Studios. Isleworth may be quite near to Shepperton (as the parakeet flies), but no parakeets were imported for the making of the film. Britain has had a long history with these birds. In its factsheet on feral parakeets, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs states: ‘There is a long history of occurrence in GB, with a first record of breeding in Norfolk in 1855. However the present naturalised population dates only from 1969.’

A 1999 census of parakeets, which includes London, describes the birds as ‘successfully breeding in the wild in the south east of England since 1969’, suggesting there may be a Hendrix link (Hendrix died in 1970). It depends on how long it took the parakeets to get productive before anyone noticed. The census describes the origin of the birds as numerous escapes leading to ‘many feral populations’. Although it is a great story to imagine that one famous parakeet owner is the daddy to the birds all around us, there are, of course, hundreds of anonymous parakeet owners who may have lost or released their pets. The book
Parrots
, by Cyril H. Rogers, says of the Ring-necked parakeet that they are ‘probably the most common of all the “Polly Parrots”’, so it is perhaps no surprise that enough have escaped to form a breeding population across south London. And no matter how virile the parakeets of Jimi Hendrix may have been, they surely haven’t populated all of London with birds.