Week 3 Impressions by Tom Schoeneman

Kiwi Invasion

“London is so large and so wild that it contains no less than everything.”

--Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography

Saturday, 6 February. Mary and I had spent 3 hours wandering through the Imperial War Museum. On our way back to our flat on Finborough Road, we stopped at mid-afternoon at the Gloucester Road tube station to go to Waitrose for dinner food. The first sign that something was amiss occurred on the platform opposite. An eastbound District Line train disgorged a couple of dozen young men and women dressed in day-glo yellow vests and hard hats who were VERY LOUD. Not just British loud—speaking above a murmur—but yelling and screeching loud. This roiling mass congregated on the platform and began yelling up the stairs to some mates. Two members of the Metropolitan Police in their own day-glo vests leant on the balustrade at the top of the stairs and looked down, placidly, at the turmoil.

Mary asked “What do you think that’s all about?”

“Some sports fans,” I guessed. The Six Nations rugby games had just started in Cardiff.

The mob of apparent public works crewpersons began boiling up the stairs. At that point, my only thought was to get to the top of the stairs from our platform and beat them to the turnstiles. “We don’t want to get stuck behind that lot,” I explained to my footsore spouse.

In my haste, two notable things barely registered to my single-purposed mind. First, the crowd ascending was met at the top and melding onto another crowd who were dressed as . . . cows: Men and women dressed in white pyjamas inked over in great black spots, many sporting inflated pink udders fastened to their crotches.

Second: As we beat the crowd to the turnstiles, we noticed that the noise was getting LOUDER. We emerged from the Gloucester Road station to a riot of some kind. Gloucester Road had been cordoned off at the corner of Cromwell. The entire street for several blocks was filled with boisterous people. There were police everywhere. A demonstration? But who demonstrates wearing inflated surgical gloves over their naughty bits? And in addition to public works crews and cows, their were faux doctors and nurses, people dressed as beer cans or cloaked in a vaguely British looking flag, and more and more, in a bewildering variety.

We struggled through the crowd to the Gloucester Arcade. Inside, the broad hallway in front of Waitrose was trashed: The white linoleum was strewn with bags and litter. Finally, Mary stopped a young man and women dressed in pink pyjamas to ask what was going on.

“It’s New Zealand Day!” exclaimed the pair. “We’re Kiwis! There are 8000 of us in London.”

OK: So how is it that a good portion of these thousands made Gloucester Road their own?

“It’s supposed to be a pub crawl on the Circle Line,” said the young man. “But the Circle Line is closed for the weekend.”

As it turns out, on February 6, 1840, the Treaty of Waitangi founded New Zealand and made it a part of the British Empire. And every year on this date, the good Kiwi ex-pats of London go on quite a tear. We had a nice chat with the proud Kiwis outside of Waitrose. We established that the only part of New Zealand that Mary and I had visited—Auckland—was rubbish and that the next time we needed to visit the north end of the south island as well and the south end of same. “Not that I’ve ever been there,” said the young blonde woman about south South. We presented ourselves as ex-pats for four months, which was quite impressive to our new, pink friends.

“You know,” said the young man, “you are the first who have stopped to ask us what we were doing.”

I said, “Well, of course the British wouldn’t, would they?”

“No, of course not,” he agreed.

We took our leave with mutual wishes to “have a good time.”

Inside Waitrose, it quickly became evident that the store was doing a booming business selling six-packs of beer to strangely dressed people who spoke English with non-British accents.

In the checkout line, one such gentleman responded to my query of “Kiwi?” with “No, actually, I’m English. But I lived there for a few years.” His t-shirt front had a panel on the left that said “I am not a whingeing pom.” On the right, a tui bird (indigenous to New Zealand) responded, “Yeah, right.” The shirt was an advertisement for Tui Beer, a company whose motto is “Distracting the boys from the Task at hand since 1889.”

Outside, Gloucester Road was quickly filling up with empty beer cans. Mary snapped a few photos for posterity:

We pushed our way through the crowd and descended to the oasis of relative calm and quiet that is a tube platform. And so ended what should have been a routine trip to the grocery store. Ah, London!