There are perhaps seventy B20s in England, and Peter maintains more than forty of them. His customers come from all walks of life and have become his friends. They often tour with him in France or Italy. He introduces them to each other, and they introduce each other to him. He also connects a lot of things related to the cars–buyers with sellers, auctioneers and dealers with both, owners with suppliers of parts. He doesn’t advertise or have a website, just an answering machine beside the kettle in his office. But if you happen to buy one of these cars, need one fixed or maintained, or are just interested in them, at some point you’ll find yourself going off the A30 down the narrow lane.
Peter is a specialist superconnector, fitting together all the pieces of the world around this particular car. Because he dominates this network, he connects everyone and everything in it. People find out about Peter and seek him out, which is what Greg did.
As Greg was leaving after one visit, maybe because of his North American accent, Peter asked him, ‘Do you know this Jay Leno fellow?’
‘Of course I know of him’, Greg replied, ‘and that, aside from being showbiz aristocracy, he’s as big a petrol-head as you can find.’
‘Well,’ Peter said, ‘he seems to be a really nice and genuine guy. He called me the other day and we had a great chat. He was very enthusiastic about Aurelias and keen on learning everything about them.’ Then he added, ‘Someone told me he does a talk show. What’s it like?’
Paul Erdös was and Andreas Meyer and Peter Harding are crucial connectors within their own worlds. Within every intellectual discipline, every university, every school, every office, every church, every football or baseball league, every industry or commercial niche, every small town, and every social world imaginable, there are one or more superconnectors who seem to know everyone and connect everyone.
But there is another type of superconnector. Rather than connecting people within a given world, they build bridges between diverse worlds.
In 1999, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece in the New Yorker called ‘Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg’. The article has since become justly celebrated. Lois, he said, was a ‘connector’. She was then, and still is, Chicago’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, but during her long career she has been part of many diverse groups and still has vibrant links to them. She has directed the Chicago Council of Lawyers, founded a pressure group called Friends of the Parks, opened a used jewellery store, run a drama troupe, been Director of Special Events for Mayor Harold Washington, started an underground weekly paper, worked in public relations and a law firm, saved an old railroad from closure, worked in a flea market, masterminded Chicago election campaigns, raised money to put on plays, and–perhaps most important of all–established the famous Gallery 37 project, which each year teaches thousands of unemployed youths how to make and sell art and jewellery. The kids also study painting, sculpture, drawing, poetry, textile and graphic design, acting and music. The project has since been replicated in many other cities.
One day, Cindy Mitchell was protesting in a freezing Chicago park, vainly trying to stop the Parks Department from lugging away a beautiful statue of Carl von Linné. Lois happened to drive by, saw the fuss, and started interrogating Cindy. What was going on? Why did Cindy care? Lois jumped back in her car, but later she persuaded two journalists from the Chicago Tribune to contact Cindy and turn her protest into a huge story. Cindy ended up as president of Friends of the Park for a decade and met hand-picked contacts of Lois, many of whom became her close friends. Gladwell quotes Cindy as saying, ‘Almost everything that I do today and eighty to ninety percent of my friends came about because of her, because of that one little chance meeting…What if she had come by five minutes earlier?’23
Lois knows civic activists and politicians, lawyers and flea market peddlers, housewives and musicians, actors and journalists, nature-lovers and science-fiction writers, jazz players and intellectuals, artists and property developers, volunteers and antique-store proprietors, actors and railroad buffs. She has a huge range of acquaintances, and misses no opportunity to introduce them to each other.
If you ring Central Casting and ask for a typical Canadian grandmother, they might send you Eleanor MacMillan. At first glance, she ticks all the boxes: five-foot-one, bifocals, faded hair, Scottish descent, won’t admit her age but her grandchildren will tell you she was born around the same time as the Queen. She’s in good health but for a bad posture and a tricky heart valve. The widow of a noted orthopaedic surgeon, she spends most of her time between Ancaster, near Toronto, and the Muskoka Lakes, Ontario’s cottage country where well-to-do Canadians and Americans have summered for more than a century.
Eleanor is of the inter-war generation, yet grows with the times. Conservative and frugal, she saves leftover food, no matter how small the portion, until it goes bad. She seems to be building a strategic stockpile of chairs. She’s careful with people too, sizing them up before giving her confidence. Even so, she’s a world traveller with thousands of snaps from bus trips through the likes of Iran, Mali and Burma. Not a knitter or doter, but a former biologist, she’s happy to show her grandkids how to catch a snake. She’s also swift on the freeway–and no one dares to tell her it’s time to slow down.
She also hangs out with Rastafarians.
You see, Eleanor bridges the worlds of Ancaster and the timeless former smugglers’ island of Carriacou in the West Indies. Each winter she flies to Barbados, then climbs aboard an eight-seat Britten-Norman Islander, which hops down the Grenadines to Carriacou’s tiny airstrip, usually scattered with grazing livestock. A local minibus takes her cross-island in twenty minutes, through the main village of Hillsborough, where she greets old friends Cuthbert Snagg and Barnabus Quigley, while avoiding the local thief. Her destination is an isolated house up a deeply rutted track, where iguanas climb the trees, a donkey brays and the Caribbean shimmers beyond an overgrown yard. It’s a three-mile walk back to Hillsborough, but only a few minutes to Bogles, a tiny village of one-and two-room shacks, some with electricity, several inhabited by dreadlocked, bleary-eyed Rastas. They grow vegetables, tend goats and chickens…and smoke ganja.
Everyone in Bogles knows of the old lady from the house in the bush. The children yell her name when she passes, and have been visiting her for years. One of them, then in his late teens, was Levi Thomas. Levi’s middleweight prize-fighter physique and mound of dreadlocks might seem intimidating at first, but he is one of the gentlest souls you could ever meet. He used to sit on Eleanor’s settee for hours in silence, flipping through old issues of Canadian Living, just looking at the pictures.
Perhaps these photographs made Levi want to visit Canada. He finally got there, stayed with relatives, and worked hard at two kitchen jobs. The money was good, and when his tourist visa expired, he borrowed his cousin’s ID. One day the police came looking for the cousin, figured out Levi wasn’t their man, but still charged him with overstaying. A thirty-day term in Toronto’s violent Don Prison stretched to six months after the police lost his passport–they wouldn’t deport him without one, yet wouldn’t release him while he was awaiting deportation. No charges. No legal representation. Unaccountable functionaries did nothing to resolve the situation, even though they admitted they had misplaced the passport.
Eleanor got wind of Levi’s predicament and went into battle. After getting nowhere with uninterested officials, she managed to reach the archdiocese in Grenada. A priest found Levi’s birth certificate and faxed it to Canada. Levi was deported a few days later, but you wonder how long he might have languished in jail, because absolutely no one other than Eleanor took any interest in his plight.