Don't make assumptions

Father and offspring on a northern line tube. Father, Italian we think; children, both outwardly consumed in books. Struck by the artifice of it. Not a glance up or outwards, like a mock staging of the epitome of what it is to be rapt. Girl ten, boy, about eight. Postures neat and alert and more than a pepper-shake schoolish. Legs suspended cutely over ground. Very much brother and sister. A possible inkling of sister looking out for brother though too subtle to pinpoint. Dark complexions, rich thick lips, almost South American you might say, at any rate, darker than the father. Well, that’s down to mummy of course. Has to be. Where is Mum? Who knows.

It’s 2:30pm, left early because you’ve switched part-time. Northbound TCR on the Edgware branch back to Blighty. Thus carriage empty enough to clock and pick up on specific individuals and respective interconnectedness. General assembly = contractors i.e. labourers, all kinds of shift-workers and the late-Spring-European-part-family-weekend-breakers.

Father dressed well and he’s already been shopping. TODS bag at his ankles, who we think to be purveyors of shoes and leather goods like all the rest of those upmarket Italian goods’ outlets. He’s salt and pepper, groomed in some tweedy, muted autumnal jacket over clothes you can’t really see but you’re sure are highly proper. 

But he’s more than that appearance-obsessed Milanese type; because the very reason for these mock-bibliophile children is the assertion of the father whose own reading seems to be, partly at least, an ordinance to his children that whilst he reads on this tube journey, they must do too. It’s a big Italian hardback whose title you don’t make out but makes you think of Umberto Eco. An ironic cast to the whole thing and he seems to be in on the joke. Kids take it up as if of their own volition. Ha! Chips of the old conker. Instilling of values down the generations. Little gimmicky mimics. His pose and facial expression an almost identikit version of those of his kids. There is, seriously, not a meaningful movement or word exchanged within three stations of travel.

Then though, at Camden Town, father gets up and walks off the train. But the children remain. What? The children have remained, because the doors of the train are now closed. They are still on the train. What is going on?

Oh…. I see; he ain’t their father.