“The writing is on the wall
Don’t look for meanings
Between the words
the words are all”
From Peachhey Se Peachy by Bachchoo

Dear Reader, allow me to begin with an extract from my book, London Company, not as an advertisement but for reasons which this week’s incident provoke:

The street noises faded as I fell asleep.
I woke up unable to breathe and opened my eyes to a white mist. Panic. In that instant I thought I was being choked and had gone blind, but then full consciousness returned and I could see that my blindness was caused by smoke. I couldn’t see beyond a foot along the floor. Had I left the fire on?
In Keith’s room or in mine? I couldn’t breathe, but as one does underwater I was naturally holding my breath, but how much longer?
I went towards the door. I opened it and saw and heard the flames roaring up the staircase, stimulated by the extra draft I had created. I had to use a lot of strength against the strong wind of a draft to slam the door shut and then I rushed to the window, lifted it and stuck my head out to take a deep breath of real air.
Instinct made me reach for the trousers I had shed by the mattress on the floor and, with my head still sticking out of the window to breathe, I struggled into them. I had to jump to escape the invading flames.
It was two floors down.
Now I could see that there were a few people in the dark street. It was approaching dawn. One woman shouted.
“Oh God, Oh God!”
“Call the fire engine,”
I shouted at these spectators.
The glass front of the ground floor, the bookshop, began to explode outward onto the pavement and street with loud bangs as from gunshots.
The door of my room flew open with the draft that came from underneath and I remember thinking that it was powerful enough to break the lock. There was thick black smoke coming out of Keith’s first floor windows so I couldn’t see the pavement below but I climbed out of my window, turned my back to the street, clutched the window sill and lowered myself to my full length towards the ground. That would reduce my fall by eight feet. Then I kicked the wall outward and let go.
I fell backwards on the pavement and the hot shattered glass went through my back. Both my heels were hit hard and one of my ankles was badly mangled, but apart from that and burns and bruises, I had survived.
Two men literally dragged me to the opposite pavement. A man put a heavy woollen coat around me as I struggled to sit up. The glass front continued to explode and shower bits all over the pavement.

The “I” of the extract is myself and “Keith” was my flatmate who was mercifully not in the building that night. This fire-bombing took place on March 15, 1973. The date sticks in my mind because in Shakespeare’s rendition, Caesar is told to “beware the Ides of March”, and though I am not one for omens, the date has been linked to several nasty encounters in my short and happy life.
Later that morning the media reported that three Asian shops and FREEDOM NEWS, the bookshop of the Black Panther Movement above which as a caretaker member I lived, had been fire-bombed. The fire brigade chief who questioned me and whom I questioned from the pavement, even as his crew attempted to extinguish the flames that completely consumed the building taking with it all my (uninsured) worldly goods, told me it was clearly arson as they had found bits of the petrol bomb that started it. The police came but no one was ever arrested or charged.
Subsequently it was alleged that a fleet of scooters had passed the fire-bombed premises in the early hours and thrown the bombs. We surmised that it was a political act by the far right anti-immigrant National Front.
I recall the incident because on June 5, a Mosque and an adjoining community centre in Muswell Hill, north London, were burnt down in what the counter-terror squad of Scotland Yard are treating as an arson attack. The nation presumes that the attack on the centre used by the Somali Muslim community is retaliation, however meaningless and aimless, for the slaughter on the streets of Woolwich of Drummer Rigby, a British soldier, by two men who waited to be captured at the scene of the murder and said they had done it in the name of Islam.
For once these suicidal killers clearly stated their aims. They said they were against the British slaughtering innocents in Afghanistan and they “wanted to start a civil war” in Britain. They anticipated that there would be attacks on Muslims as a result of their barbarous action and that would occasion a surge of militancy from the Muslim population of Britain.
The only sign so far of the success of their strategy is the allegation that the burning building had the letters EDL daubed on it. The letters stand for the English Defence League, a political movement which was formed as a counter to the street demonstrations by tiny “jihadi” groups against soldiers returning from Afghanistan. The EDL gathered a few hundred supporters on the streets each time to counter the “jihadi” provocateurs.
The leader of the EDL condemned the fire-bombing of the mosque and said it had no connection with his organisation. It is more than likely that while the bombing wasn’t “official”, a person or persons in sympathy with the EDL’s viewpoint (one can’t call it a policy) carried it out.
There have been, this past week, stones and missiles thrown at mosques but Muswell Hill is the only serious isolated incident, and my prediction is that it will remain so.