Dr Ruth Jenkins (1): New Beginnings

New Beginnings

I awoke and it was a new day. It was Monday and early September and my room was at the very top of a tall Victorian house with one large square window out of which I would climb in weeks to come to sit on the fire escape.

I was in the land of red letterboxes, red telephone boxes and red double decker buses.

That morning I went to the German Embassy to have my passport extended. I had to catch the bus at Notting Hill Gate and first I thought I was the only passenger but in the very back sat an old woman dressed all in black. Her hair was white, her face haggard and her posture rigid. She sat at the centre of the rear seat, holding a black book in both her hands, arms stretched out. Then she opened her mouth and she began to sing hymns at the top of her voice.

Passengers joined all the way to Rutland Gate where I had to get off, but nobody told her to stop. She sat there singing. And to this day my heart is singing when I am in London, just as it was singing when I was sitting on the fire escape one late autumn evening, the fog veiling all. I was listening to gospel music when out of that dark moist fog came a deep voice: ‘Mahalia!’.*

© Dr Ruth Jenkins 2009
This piece was written as a Ready Writer assignment.

*Mahalia Jackson

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