Paul Theroux: This was England

For almost two decades the travel writer Paul Theroux lived in Britain. He arrived shortly before Bloody Sunday in 1972 and here, he revisits the bombs, the strikes, the cheats and the streakers which left their indelible mark on him

It is the happy, often pompous delusion of the alien that he or she is a witness to an era of significant change. I understand this as a necessary conceit, a survival skill that helps to make the stranger watchful. I lived in England for 18 years, as a pure spectator, from the end of 1971 until the beginning of 1990. I was just an onlooker, gaping at public events that did not involve me. I was a taxpayer, but couldn't vote; a house owner, but still needed an entry visa; and for quite a while I had to carry an alien identity card.

Having lived for six years in Africa and three in Singapore, I knew how to be an alien. Keep your head down and stay current; save all documents and receipts; take nothing for granted. You are not owed anything. "Nothing personal" is the alien's motto, because the alien has no security, and no discernible future. I had a family, a wife and small children to protect: I was anxious. "You Yanks," people sometimes said to me when they heard my accent, as though I needed to be reminded I was an alien. But an alien is reminding himself of that every moment in the foreign country. The alien has to practise cunning to disguise this twitchy state of mind; but insecurity stretches the nerves, heightens the attention and makes the alien remember. Mine wasn't an era; it was simply 18 years of events. For an alien, life in the foreign country, never completely comprehensible, is always eventful.

Early on, it was a period dominated by smoking. The top deck of the bus was a designated smoking area, people chain-smoked in doctor's waiting rooms, British Airways allowed pipe smoking at the back of the plane, many movie theatres had smoking sections: an era of blue smoke and fruity coughing. The craze for bar billiards and snooker crested in the 1970s, with a surge of interest in snooker on TV, a show called Pot Black. The single-screen cinemas began to be transformed into bingo halls. Later, when cinemas became scarcer, churches were deconsecrated and gutted so that they could serve secular purposes, bingo among them. This surprised me, and I was shocked when Christian churches were turned into mosques.

Public events dominated my attention, as they do all aliens looking for ways to fathom the foreign country and their own slender connection. The stories unfolded ? the Yorkshire Ripper, the miners' strike and the three-day week when a shoe mender in Sydenham refused to serve me; he pushed me out the door (it was his day to close early, to save coal, to subdue the miners). A plane crash in the spring of 1972, the aircraft dropping like a stone into Surrey, and the emergency vehicles unable to get to the scene because so many people on this sunny Sunday drove to see the carnage (118 people killed), blocking the narrow roads with their cars.

The deaths in Northern Ireland were always in the news, the bombings all over. Bloody Sunday occurred about two months after I arrived: 14 Irish protesters gunned down by British soldiers, and many wounded. "The paras know what they're doing," was the line up at the Gollop Arms in South Bowood, "and one of those dead blokes had a nail bomb in his pocket."

Bombs, bombs! So many of them on lovely days, in parks and public houses, on Christmas, in hotels, nearly all of them the work of the IRA, whom I saw as aliens, like me. Even the car park of the House of Commons was a bombsite, the MP Airey Neave, about to be named Northern Ireland secretary, blown up in his car. The Guildford pub bombing of 1974, four people killed, many injured, and the same year, in two pubs in Birmingham, 21 people murdered. Lord Mountbatten and three others, including two children, blown up on his yacht, the Shadow V, while on an August holiday in Ireland. To the mournful echo of the bomb came the sententious crowing, the toothy triumph of Gerry Adams, cock-a-hoop with the deaths on the yacht.

The official IRA line was always, "Look what you made us do! It's your own fault!" A large nail bomb in 1982 in Hyde Park killed four soldiers and seven horses; another the same day, a large bomb under the bandstand at Regent's Park, instantly killed seven of the bandsmen and seriously injured all the rest, including many people in the audience ? another sunny day, the band playing selections from the musical Oliver! Six people killed at Harrods in 1983, at Christmas time. A bomb at three in the morning at the Grand Hotel in Brighton that was intended to kill Prime Minister Thatcher and her whole cabinet ? five people killed, many injured. Thatcher, working on her speech at the time, survived.

There were much worse bombings in Ulster, just as cowardly, just as vicious, just as pointless. IRA member Bobby Sands went on a hunger strike, demanding prisoners' rights in Long Kesh Prison, where he was serving 14 years. Refusing food, he intended to call attention to his list of demands: "The right not to wear a prison uniform" and others. He wished, punishing himself, to arouse pity. But the IRA bombs were in everyone's mind. And, not understanding that most people didn't care, and certainly not the prison staff, probably glad to see him suffer, Sands died of self-imposed starvation.

The clearest memory I have of the whole nasty Ulster mess, of cruelty and bloody-mindedness, is a newspaper picture of a skinny teenaged Irish girl whose boyfriend was a British soldier: tarred and feathered, gleaming black, with white tufts stuck to her body, her head shaven, terrified, pushed along a street by a howling mob of Catholics. She looked like an alien to me, suffering the alien's fate of rejection ? in her case, extreme and humiliating.

It was years before anyone dared openly to mock the royal family. The Queen, with her hint of spiritual authority ? defender of the faith ? was spoken of in whispers. "She works jolly hard" was the mantra. Princess Anne was named Sportswoman of the Year in 1971. I wondered, was the princess in her show jumping an inspiration to the footballers in the council estates?

One night a man named Fagan climbed the wall of Buckingham Palace and broke into the Queen's bedroom. Unable to summon help, her Royal Highness sat with Fagan, in her dressing gown, until she was finally spotted and Fagan taken into custody. But he couldn't be charged with breaking and entering ? it wasn't a criminal offence. So Fagan was found guilty of stealing a bottle of the royal wine, and at his trial when the subject of the Queen came up, he grew indignant and said, "I won't have that woman's name dragged through the mud!" or words to that effect.

Prince Charles got ostentatiously married and appeared in an iconic pose with Diana on a postage stamp; Prince Andrew's marriage to Sarah Ferguson was memorialised with a special label on a bottle of cheap champagne at about the same time it was revealed that Sarah's father frequented a certain massage parlour, the Wigmore Club, for a weekly wank.

Wank was a new word for me. I learned others in those years: pantechnicon, pastilles, salopettes, anorak, ginger wine, trifle, syllabub, riddling (the coal grate), gaiters, trug, secateurs, borstal, Boche, Gorbals, yobbos, scotia (a sort of household trim), valance, shandy, sent to Coventry, applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, chicane (as of a set of racing cars), gauntlets, whitebait, infra dig, subfusc, knackers, Christmas crackers, Dutch courage, Dutch cap, double Dutch, Screaming Lord Sutch.

I watched the conductor on the 29 bus on Lavender Hill making change, working his ticket machine with two hands and holding the money in his mouth, biting on the pound note. When I stumbled he quipped: "Have a good trip!" And the other passengers hooted. The estate agent in Clapham explained that the five-bedroom house on the market for �10,000 had no central heating, "Just arm-swinging". Denis Healey said in a speech, "You're out of your tiny Chinese mind." George Brown demanded to be in the House of Lords because he had just turned 53, had worked hard enough in his political life and he needed a sinecure. He didn't seem very old to me, but he got his sinecure and became drunken, idle Lord George-Brown.

Another Labour lord, George Wigg, Baron Wigg ? he had enormous ears ? was arrested for "kerb crawling", another new expression to me. He denied it and was acquitted, but it was apparently true. It was known that he stalked strolling prostitutes in his car. He was a mate of the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who had ennobled one crook after another, Lord Kagan, Lord Miller and others. Those were Labour men. Jeffrey Archer, a similar piece of work, who claimed to be head of the Conservative Party, became Baron Archer of Weston-Super-Mare: another crook, a proven liar, slimy, with a history of fiddling funny money schemes, and now a lord. So this was how the system worked!

A news item that struck me ? this was in the 1970s ? described a woman who was charged with trying to encourage her mother to commit suicide so that she could inherit the house. "Mummy, take the pills," and the mother sweetly replying, "I'm not sure I want to, love." The daughter persisted, "Go on, Mummy", and almost succeeded, until the mother's nerve failed her and the plot fell apart.

Sir Anthony Blunt, the Queen's adviser on paintings, expert on Poussin, turned out to be a Soviet spy and a traitor. This fascinated me: here was an intelligent and well-connected Englishman, authentically horse-faced, who (so it seemed to me) had set out to make himself an alien. But Blunt was living proof that such a man could not succeed in becoming an alien, even in his treachery. He held a grand position; he was exposed; he did not fall far. He had betrayed many people, but still had many friends, and his connoisseurship was widely respected. He was asked how he felt about being a traitor. "Dreadful," he said languidly, in the tone of an afterthought, as though he was talking about having a bad cold. He summed up for me another way British society worked. He hardly suffered, was never put on trial, still had his chums and defenders; it was a victory for suavity, and after he was unmasked he wrote his Guide to Baroque Rome.

No one knew much about the SAS ? even the initials themselves were obscure ? until 1980, when the Iranian Embassy in London was taken over by Iranian separatists. Hostage negotiations continued; London was watching. Then black-suited soldiers abseiled into the building from helicopters, killing all the hostage-takers except one. "You let one of the bastards live," Denis Thatcher said, smiling, to one of the SAS men at the award ceremony afterwards.

The killing of police officer Yvonne Fletcher never left my mind. It was in the spring of 1984; she was patrolling a crowd of protestors outside the Libyan Embassy in St James's Square. And then she fell, killed by a bullet from a gun aimed by someone inside the embassy. And when the embassy was closed not long afterwards and the diplomats swaggered out to the square ? to fly home to Libya ? the TV announcer said, "One of these men killed Yvonne Fletcher."

Of the many scandals, each contained a memorable line.

"Bunnies can and will go to France." Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party, had written to a man who was said to be his former lover. He was entangled with this male prostitute yet denied everything and got off. The man in question, Norman Scott, had been targeted by one Gino Newton, who shot his dog Rinka, but failed to kill Scott. Scott revealed love letters from Thorpe with the "Bunnies" quote. It turned out that Thorpe might have been involved in the plot to murder Scott. But Newton was no genius, confusing Dunstable with Barnstaple. The magistrate lowered his head and said to him: "Even a moron in a hurry would know the difference."

"Lie doggo." The Lord Lucan scandal. Lucan, in an attempt to kill his wife, by mistake bashes in the head of his nanny Sandra Rivett. The name Rivett was always repeated with a smile (like the name Olive Smelt, whom the Yorkshire Ripper had attacked). Lucan tried and failed to kill his wife, who ran from the house covered in blood to the Plumbers Arms in Belgravia, screaming, "Help me!" Later Lucan wrote in a letter to his friend Bill Shand Kydd: "I will lie doggo for a while."

"If you stay here much longer you will go home with slitty eyes," Prince Philip said to some British students in China in 1986.

"GOTCHA" was the Sun headline when 323 Argentine sailors died in their ship, the General Belgrano, days after the beginning of the Falklands War. The Argentines struck back with missiles. "It's like two bald men fighting over a comb," the poet Borges said in Buenos Aires. And before this unnecessary war was over, with the capture of South Georgia, Margaret Thatcher hooted in triumph, exhorting the country with the single word: "Rejoice."

After Idi Amin expelled the Indians from Uganda in the early 1970s, they began to run the corner shops, the newsagents, off-licences; the shops were kept open later and later ? unprecedented hours. I identified with the Indians as fellow aliens and sometimes spoke Swahili to the newsagent on St John's Hill, from Tanzania, who missed the place terribly. We drank in the Fishmonger's Arms, an Irish pub, and he would frown into his beer and say, "It's mango season", meaning in his home town of Mwanza, on Lake Victoria.

These Indians knew everything about being aliens: they had lived as outsiders in East Africa and had great survival skills and a kind of accommodating and contemptuous deference. They began to take over the failing sub-post offices, the bill paying, the parcel weighing, the banking, the albums of postage stamps: none had run post offices in Uganda, but some had been duka-wallahs, shopkeepers, and could handle complex paperwork, the smudgy pads of carbon paper. They were willing to work on weekends, or on early-closing days. But the post office was shrinking ? it had begun to shrink in the first decade of my residence.

No one seemed to notice, or care, though it was an inconvenience to me when the Sunday evening pick-up at the mailboxes ended. I worked during the week on my own books, but on weekends I usually did a book review. I read the book on Saturday, wrote the review on Sunday and always posted it that evening so that it would be on the editor's desk the next day. The Royal Mail was a good name for this efficient system. As the years passed the post offices contracted; and then they became like toy shops, selling sweets and knickknacks, and no one got their mail on time.

England does not have a climate; it has weather, seldom dramatic. So I was astonished when the worst windstorm since 1703 hit the south of England one dark early morning in October 1987, killing 18 people. I was woken by my own burglar alarm, and the racket of many other nearby alarms. I had no lights; big branches had fallen from the sycamore tree in my back garden. I called Battersea Police Station, and though the phone was promptly answered, the policewoman could not help me. She said that everyone had the same problem: "It's the wind." When I asked for more information she said, "I am sitting in darkness." In the grey light of dawn I went out and saw the plane trees down on Wandsworth Common and across side roads. A man walked towards me, animated by the chaos, smiling, excited, blurting out to me, a complete stranger, "I've just come from Clapham Common. It's worse there! Trees all over!"

Of the many riots, in Belfast and Derry, in Liverpool, Notting Hill, Brixton, Clapham Junction and elsewhere, the riot that scared me most was not any of the ones that erupted near my home. Many times I had seen vandalism and riot damage, broken and boarded-up windows just down the road in Clapham Junction; I was even becoming used to observing sudden mayhem, football hooligans, racial incidents, windows casually smashed and cars broken into in south London.

But the riot in October 1985, in Tottenham, north London, on Broadwater Farm Estate, made me wonder. A howling mob, intent on destruction, chased and hacked to death an isolated policeman. This was police constable Keith Blakelock, overwhelmed by screaming masked rioters, wielding knives, and when they got him down they used these knives to try to behead him. They found that a human neck with all its bones and muscles and tendons is a hard thing to sever; and these maddened murderers failed, though they sawed at the flesh and bone for a long time, hoping for a trophy.

What I remember best was Bernie Grant, the unapologetic local councilman, weighing in. He was about my age, black, born in Guyana. He had been an alien once, but was now an accepted political hack with a following. I was fascinated by his confident smile, by his saying that the police had asked for trouble, and, "What the police got was a bloody good hiding." He did not mention that the fallen policeman, covered in blood, his face smashed, killed by the crowd, had been partly decapitated. I understand that a municipal building in Tottenham has been named in his honour ? not Keith Blakelock, but Bernie Grant; an arts centre.

These public events gave me a greater detachment, a growing sense of not belonging. I always listened for clues. On the radio, the line-up of panellists on Any Questions? sometimes indicated what the prevailing opinions were for or against the issues. They talked about TV shows. The Family, a BBC series that was broadcast in 1974. Terry and Margaret Wilkins and their family, a big vulgar shouting bunch, had allowed cameras to film all their comings and goings ? one of the earliest of what now would be called a reality show.

"I tell my children that they are lucky that we live in a happy home," one of the Any Questions? panelists, journalist Jacky Gillott said, when asked about the propriety of the show. She described how dysfunctional this TV family was. "Not all families are like the Wilkinses." She seemed sure of her family, but one night about five years later, Jacky Gillott went upstairs and, with her children still in the house, killed herself.

And then there were the silly movies, the awful music, the bad art, the sports failures, all the defeats, the public cheats, the liars, the nine-day wonders, the stars ? Simon Dee, Dusty Springfield, Erica Roe, Russell Harty, the talked-about actors of Coronation Street, in Crossroads and The Archers, all of them described in Dr Johnson's trajectory: "They mount, they shine, evaporate and fall."

The bombs were the worst, for the awful deaths and for the way they changed the texture of life. It is so easy to be a bomber or a sniper in a civilised country. And the dreary results were metal detectors in unlikely places ? museums, for example; and bag searches; and the left-luggage facility was rendered too dangerous to continue. It got so that any briefcase in a pub looked like a bomb.

The sleazy aristocrats and the crooked politicians, the spies and the trimmers, seemed to taint the whole society. Jeffrey Archer's books were stacked and sold everywhere, and they always seemed to me a visible sign of corruption. The horrible man wouldn't shut up, wouldn't go away. And though an apology from any of these creepy people might not have undone any of their crimes, it would have been something, a gesture. But in a society where "Sorry!" was almost a catchphrase, on most people's lips, no one who should ever have said sorry did ? not Wilson, nor Archer, nor Blunt, nor Major Ferguson, nor Bernie Grant, nor Gerry Adams, none of them.

"Sorry" was never uttered by one of the biggest crooks of the lot, Robert Maxwell, a certified alien ? born J�n Ludvik Hoch in Carpathian Ruthenia. He had changed his name, got a British passport, become a member of parliament, a schemer in publishing, an insider in the Labour Party, and a greedy embezzler. Cornered in his crookery, he killed himself by jumping from his luxury yacht off the Canary Islands. No suicide note; no regret.

Regret was perhaps implied in the last act of Harold Wilson's crooked friend, Sir Eric Miller ? a Jew ? when he killed himself on the Day of Atonement. But it wasn't an English thing; it seemed an alien gesture.

I endured the horrible, unapologetic faces in this national farce until the action became repetitive, or incomprehensible, or frightening, or frustrating. Some of the people I knew were awarded knighthoods, or went into the Royal Academy or the House of Lords; half a dozen killed themselves, or got rich, or vanished. Many of my writer friends ended up in the United States, participants in my culture, as I never was in theirs in England.

"Nothing personal," I said to myself. As an alien, I was living in a house that just happened to be in England. I never stopped writing: it was my mode of being. And then one day, knowing there was no place for me here, I slipped out, as some aliens do, and never came back.

This is extracted from Granta 114: Aliens (�12.99), out on 17 February. Subscribe for a year for �29.95 and receive Granta 110: Sex and Granta 111: Going Back completely free. Visit granta.com for more details

Paul Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist. His new book The Tao of Travel (Hamish Hamilton, �16.99) is out on 26 May