Here be strangers

I walk in Milton Keynes with a group of walkers, led by Master of Walk, Phil Smith, maker of Mythogeography. I utterly, totally, completely recommend walking with Phil. If you cannot do that, follow his starter kit. And for his work, related to this blog on signage, see here.

Almost as we begin this walk through this particular area - with a name and a claim to place that echoes from the 10th century - we come across this faded pink sign.

The first I notice, is the triangle of cautionary pinkness.

I'm living in gendered times. Pink. Not strong, sexualised, dangerous red, not white, vacant, blank, unformed - but pink, a tone given (not asked for), to girl, a trajectory awarded to her; a job then for her to wrestle it to other colours, better fitting her purposes.

But I want a public sign to be neutral! To be fair to us, show male and female equal in safety and danger! No. Even the sign conspires against me and my ambition for my kind.

I try to be forgiving, and imagine the wind, rain and snow unwittingly bleached this triangle of watchfulness, year on year picking it back, bit by bit, colour by colour, to its first procedural layer of printing.

Then this colour, it cannot be deliberate! It was an accident, a coincidental confluence of sign-print-technology and uncontrollable weathers. Now here it stays, pink, cracked, bent. It remains a ghost sign, whispering of things we cannot see coming or know in advance - just watch out, watch out, pink, girl, cation, here is vulnerability.

I look at the sign, carefully; the dog's head disembodied with its strangely happy face, breaking the line as if excited by its own graphic doggyness. The composing elements - the triangle we have culturally learned as caution; the border around the words; the faceless image left to a child's imagination; an outstretched hand holding, in my mouth's memory, hard boiled sweets - these do not convey enough. The word NO is here. Between all these - life hazard, adult threat, the unknown future your own desires can lead you - if you say nothing else to an adult, to yourself, repeat this word, NO. Say NO. As if this will be enough.

I look at the central image of the stranger-man. Not a woman, by the narrow hips, the picked-out line of that jaw. He's marked by what looks like a bomb of soil, a careful aim, like a kick, to his rear end. The staining - a target perhaps carefully chosen or made by random accident? - is not freshly done, but perhaps made within a more recent, more remembered time.

The mark - I imagine children using this stranger for their target practice - jolts the sign back into relevance: it implies, this sign is still wanted, still needed, today, right now. Round here, there remain strangers, and we need to see them, know them, use them for our aim, and say NO.

I look around, warily. We stand on the main road through a pretty, quiet village: we crowd of strangers in this place on our walking tour, gathered about this sign, all looking up at it, intently; strangers, yet not seeing in this sign a picture of ourselves.

Apart from our walking group - all of them are strangers to me - I can see no-one else on the village streets. It looks to me like the sort of place that should a stranger walk here, then everyone would know about them; everyone would track their movements along the high street. I wonder if curtains are moving to look at us, now.

I must be wrong about that. We live in more anonymous times. I look across the green spaces, under the trees. Here are ways and routes I don't know! I'm too strange to this place! Maybe the stranger - the other one, not us, we safety-in-numbers group - perhaps he knows these spaces, routes and paths, and he's still here, behind those trees, waiting patiently for the moment the sign is forgotten - the vigilance and rememberings, repetitions, reinvoking, his own image used for target - all forgot. Then, with those boundaries of memory and recollection down, the stranger can move in.

But when did this sign arrive here? Which year was the fear so great it heralded its installation? Was there a terrible moment, on this high street, and this sign is the marker? A memorial? Was it the decade when the whole town - new town, garden town - when it expanded, population tripled, quadrupled, and strangers, they were everywhere.

I wonder about the year. Sometime in the 1970s or 1980s? Within the last ten years? Recently? I search my memory for warnings and cautions of my childhood; I remember running from kerb crawlers slowing down to me aged about 5 or 6 with my friend, not much bigger; I have half-formed public information films montaged in my mind's eye; I have instructed my own children to shout, This man is not my daddy! This woman is not my mummy! I invoke this blanked-out, faceless stranger in my own house. I call him, only half in jest, Mr Spooky.  

Mr Spooky is the danger still out there; the groper, the bully, the manipulator, the home-wrecker, the hazard in life. My children will face him - or her - in their adult lives, yet to be. In my house, he is my folk devil. In this street, in this place, at this moment, we share him.

We do much the same as I think you would do. We are made a common group, safe, by this sign we gather round. We laugh, as a crowd. We - with our right to be here, our motives that are clean and pure - we win. We laugh at his strangeness that results in NO. We laugh at his pinkness. We laugh at his humiliation from the well-placed kick to his rear end and, as a group, we walk away.