'Business as usual’in beleaguredLondon

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33454, 8 February 1974, Page 2

'Business as usual’in beleaguredLondon

By

C. S. COOPER.

London correspondent of "The Press")

LONDON'. February 7. The man in the doorway said. "Don't trip over the generators" — but his warning was hardly necessary they made so much noise, nobody had eyes for anything else. There they sat. brand new. scarlet little engines, roaring end trembling with urgency in the broad entrance to an Oxford Street store—the latest evidence that Britons ire beginning to accept that » return to the good old days Is becoming more of a dream than a hope. Earlier makeshifts, hastily tiggea up for a few days—perhaps a few weeks of power fluctuations — are being superseded by more

sophisticated makeshifts, a tacit acknowledgement that temporary is going to be a very long time. Probably the fundamental change in London, since the oil and coal crisis exploded, has been the darkening of the city. Outwardly, anyway, little else seems different. Theatres, restaurants, pubs, traffic, are al) roaring away as usual. It may all be a cavorting on thin ice. but so far the surface is holding. SHOPS BUSTLING And London, not being a major industrial city, shows little evidence of any threeday week. Offices are still bustling through five days, although forbidden light and heat for half of them, and shops are trading their customary six davs—albeit half the time in spooky gloom. Certainlv we Londoners are far from freezing or starving, as anxious messages

from New Zealand try to convince us we are. Swamped under awesome forebodings of disaster, yes. But suffering, positively not. Not yet. GAPS ON SHELVES There are gaps on the supermarket shelves, perhaps only 10 instead of 15 brands of whiter-than-white wash powder, only eight instead of 12 snap-crackle breakfast delights, and a few tins missing—a container, not a contents shortage. There was a flurry last week when canned carrots disappeared—in spite of greengrocers being up to their eyebrows in fresh carrots. What cries of pain there are have risen from those who see the slightest diminishing of trifles as the collapse of the British way of life. It is not unlikely that they will endure further wounds as they discover what really are the basics of living. There is one genuine areai

for alarm, however. There < is a shortage of toilet paper:t and this priceless commodity ■< is being sought with almost’! the panic that petrol engen- I dered in December. “WHAT CRISIS?" This week the windows of Boots the chemist are; I proclaiming, ‘‘Sorry, no toilet : paper," and family supermar- i kets. more apologetically.’ l ; have set a limit of one packet of rolls a customer. i But otherwise, looking i around London, one might be tempted to say. "What eco- < nomic crisis?” i Certainly neither the cus- ’ tomers nor the counters of 1 the major stores reflect a dis- i aster situation. Apart from 1 the eye-strain lighting, it is” still, philosophically, business : as usual. On their rostered dark days 1 stores without their own 1 generators are caverns of’ gloom. Even those with gen-*’

erators are running at quarter power to nurse their precious oil, and their ceilings are festooned with stringhung flex and anaemic naked globes. BARE BONES Fancy plastic covers have been ripped off fluorescents and multiple nests have been denuded to single tubes. The fleshy subtleties so cherished in lighting the goodies have given way to the bare bones of stark utility. Apart from the appearance of generators in forecourts al) manner of desperate ingenuity is surfacing. Hundreds of thousands of camping gas . lamps, hissing away at 12 cents an hour, are still the salvation of the less affluent stores. And the French company that has the monopoly is making multiple fortunes, rushing the lamps and gas cans across the Channel as

fast as they can be hauled out the factory door. Streamers of fat wires and thin wires hang everywhere, supporting anything from raw 1 car globes to headlights, from electric candles to bedside lamps, and beyond the halfhearted throw of these juryrigs shop assistants weave in | the shadows behind their torch beams. At the moment, of course. There is a choice. Shrewd 'shoppers study the power rosier and select the morning—or afternoon —when their favourite store is allowed to draw from the national grid. But now the miners have decided to strike even that choice may disappear. Perhaps the beleagured London that is pictured abroad will fit the frame before too long. The simple chilling fact is this: all that stands between Britain and calamity is the seven million tons of usable coal in the bins of the power stations.