The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  Just once, Bush was invited to dinner at the Old Rectory. Sebald cooked with produce from his garden. His wife was not present. ‘They led separate lives. They were both German, strong personalities.’ Stephen did not agree. ‘I saw them as very close, bonded over a long period. But following their own paths, obviously.’

  The German department was absorbed, in one of those management rethinks, into Literature and Creative Writing. Sebald told Bush that if anyone was to be appointed as poet of place, the essential voice of UEA, it should be Stephen Watts. The one whose Whitechapel vision, derived from Hölderlin by way of Michael Hamburger, and rising above the houses, came through the car radio, causing him to swerve, all those years ago, on the road to Poringland. ‘What rough circle in our language has / brought us back to here?’

  Stephen believed that the radio message was something like what happens in Cocteau’s film Orphée: the blocked poet being contacted from beyond the mirror of death by oracular phrases that cut through conditioned behaviour patterns. Broken reception. Interference. Radio was the medium of wartime resistance, bizarre coded phrases initiating action. In 1985, while crossing the Alps, Sebald underwent a liberating spiritual crisis. ‘He seems to have lost some sense of himself only to discover himself anew, in prose and poetic prose.’

  Stephen’s poem began: ‘Lord in dream I was lifted out of London.’ And now, on this mild morning, that was precisely what we intended: under the river and over the hills to Croydon. Floating on memories and conceits.

  Sebald, Stephen tells us, ‘was not one to walk in company’. He made an exception for the Whitechapel poet. They drifted in slow circuits, like damaged artists in a French asylum, around the perimeter fence at UEA. They discussed the expedition from Precasaglio to Wertach. Sebald walked with his camera and Stephen with the urge to retrace the migration of his grandfather from that village in the Alta Val Camonica to Soho and Croydon. Croydon, as the poet spoke of it, took on the aspect of a site of authentic pilgrimage. For me, it was simply the end of the line. It was where London Overground gave up the ghost. Where London abdicated. Gotham City towers, sliding off the screen and on to the street, were the most lurid manifestation of the future as a giant comic book. When you arrived at West Croydon by train, the air you struggled to force into your lungs was different. Croydon was a botched experiment, inspired by the anti-metropolitan bias of Margaret Thatcher, in turning the city inside out. Leaving proud but peeling stucco cemeteries like Chelsea and Kensington empty, while hard-nosed business shifted to the bleeding edge, closer to airports that must grow and spread until they made London, as Ballard always contended, a mere satellite of no consequence; a cobweb museum of ridiculous monuments and equestrian statues of forgotten military butchers.

  Croydon was the Shining City at the end of our desire line, La Voie Lactée: the heretic’s Santiago de Compostela. For Stephen it was where he could pay his respects to his mother’s family, to the economic migration and resettlement of his grandfather. It was the abolished European café where the conversation continued, in many languages at once; an early model for the place by the Thames where he took his coffee and opened his laptop. For me, there was a chemical element I had yet to identify, something better than riot and fire. Croydon was over the hill from West Norwood, where I had lodged in my first London stay, when I was attending the Brixton film school. Croydon was the destination of choice for Norwood shopping expeditions, or so I was told by my landlady; never Oxford Street, too many foreigners.

  If Stephen was quiet as we walked, he was not subdued. He had taken off his hiking boots to creep through a stranger’s house, fingering the curtains, stroking the books, admiring the plants. ‘I wasn’t physically tired,’ he said, ‘more mentally (or spiritually).’ The span and scale of unforgiving suburbs, clean avenues without pubs or shops or evidence of any activity beyond sleep, drained him.

  Balanced on high stools in La Cigale, close to Surrey Quays station, coffee secured, we were approaching the point where the West Croydon spur of the Overground breaks away from the circuit previously walked with Andrew Kötting. La Cigale was always a Kötting favourite, and now it was one of mine. A good place to reflect and talk. The atmosphere was Italian and therefore appropriate to our sentimental journey – hissing coffee machines, panini, cannolo – but the name was French? Locust, cicada. The buzz of morning conversation, the rustling of newspapers.

  Stephen talked about his grandfather’s boyhood, about transhumance, a theme that engaged him. How the young shepherd followed the flock down from the mountains to the Po Valley. And then London. And how we were all nomads, it was our natural condition. He felt it, when I saw him before we left Shadwell, as he rushed out along the newspaper-strewn pavement in the direction of Watney Market: stalls where nomads set out their wares for other nomads camping in alien tower blocks. In 1904, Stephen’s grandfather was ‘second-head waiter’ at Caruso’s Italian Coffee Parlour in Greek Street.

  I told the poet how struck I had been by a film, viewed a few days before our walk, in which the painter Renchi Bicknell, who had accompanied me on a trek around the M25 in 1999, played the part of his great-grand-uncle Clarence. Renchi doesn’t have to utter, but his mimed performance is much more than an impersonation. Authentically bearded and costumed, and grasping a thick staff, he climbs with purpose, hopping from boulder to boulder across swift-flowing mountain streams, to pause at the edge of the forest, while the crew frame the shot of a panting hare. Renchi lies down, charcoal in hand, to make accurate copies of the rock engravings in the Vallée des Merveilles. And he paints, afresh, the watercolours Clarence produced of the region’s rare and spectacular flora.

  As Stephen’s grandfather retreated from the mountains to make his way through the maze of London, Clarence Bicknell, the privately wealthy high churchman who made nature his god, came to Bordighera on the Italian Riviera and then into the Val Fontanalba and the land of the pre-historic rock engravings. His fortune devolved from his father, the great whale-oil magnate, Elhanan Bicknell, friend and patron of Turner: the man who gifted London with its soft and shimmering light. And reeking reminders of where that light came from. Clarence, the thirteenth child of Elhanan, was a man of many parts; botanist, archaeologist and champion of Esperanto. He died in his summer home at Casterino, close to the Franco-Italian border. He left a large enough collection of drawings of alpine flowers and rock carvings, stones, bones, butterflies to found a museum. There is a photograph of the old man – about Renchi’s age, eyes narrowed against the pinch of sharp sunlight – in a deckchair, up in the mountains, pondering the sketch of rock markings he holds open across his lap. Like Esperanto, the movement of the pictographs are in a universal language that nobody remembers how to use.

  But I do remember, vividly, discussing these things with Renchi, up on the North Downs, on a section of the Pilgrim’s Way, on a hot summer morning, overlooking torrents of traffic on the M25. And how, in our lives, we can go no further than to reprise work laid out by our great-grand-uncles or great-grandfathers. Renchi, physically, accepted the imprint of Clarence, as well as a portion of his questing spirit. I avoided the beard and the watch-chain of Arthur Sinclair, my Scottish great-grandfather, the one who wrote a book about his travels in Peru, but the rhythms of my prose, wherever they came from, echoed his. Maps of improbable destinations have been pressed into our hands. Never satisfied, we pass that burden on. We have to make our own treaties with the knowledge that we are sponsored by remote and much diminished dividends of colonialism.

  We were soon confronted by recent rocks, in which Stephen showed little interest. The granite boulders of New Cross, some carved or scratched, formed circles derived from no obvious belief system, beyond casual affiliation with the Overground railway. Low punishment benches, made to deter rough-sleepers, were arranged around the boulders. Stephen notices a handpainted sign outside a junkyard: FOR SALE. ICE CREAM MACHINE. And he takes it as confirmation that we are still on the right track for the Croydon Creamery.<
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  Almost as soon as we left La Cigale, we found the first immigrant enterprise, a failed Italian roadhouse aimed at a cancelled highway: VILLA ROMANA. BAR & RESTAURANT. FOR SALE. White lettering on green. Red plants dying slowly in decorative pots. A battleship-grey corner building, with a tired awning, slapped against blue-balconied flats. Railway money is flowing another way, into an anonymous new-build, flat-roofed structure with picture windows.

  The strip of park shadowing the railway led us to a deserted New Cross estate with shuttered shops and low-level flats. In one of the designated play-zones, carpeted with squashy grey rubber to deflect harm, was a fountain of wilted flowers and cellophane wraps. Silver night-lights. Pink ribbons. Messages and black hearts scrawled on cardboard. Stephen walked away. He knew only too well what this portended and he had no desire to absorb, exploit or express prurient interest in an all too common tragedy.

  SUNDAY 3rd APRIL 2016. # MDOT’S WORLD// 8.14pm. AGED 17. YOU ARE STILL MY WORLD EVENTHOUGH YOUR GONE.

  Myron ‘MDOT’ Isaac-Yarde, ‘aspiring musician’ and popular rapper, was stabbed after an altercation with a number of disaffected estate youths. He died in hospital. Witnesses did not interfere: ‘It’s just gangs. People don’t have a little row anymore, they get out knives.’

  Joane Dean, who lived in New Cross for more than ten years, said: ‘We were supposed to get community centres but all we have is a pile of rubble.’

  In Fordham Park, they have totem poles quoting the area’s distant maritime history. And yet more scattered rocks. The Overground station at New Cross Gate is a dangerous orange colour. Like a nuclear tanning bed they forgot to turn off. The naked vitality of the traffic-snarled street, with its choking fumes, its shivering junkwrecks bonelessly folded in fastfood doorways against the nudge and knock of hustling pedestrians, is a relief from imposed-from-above schemes and crass municipal art. Only serving to remind us of what is missing, the art of risk, spat in the teeth of disapproval.

  In lockstep with Clarence Bicknell and Sebastian Longhi, we climb again, following the flight of the rocks and taking our own rubbings of the broad pavements, the uniform ribbons of settlement: up Jerningham Road towards Telegraph Hill Park, where pulsing messages travel out over the spread of London. The drumbeat of our footsteps. The folding and unfolding of a map that makes no sense. The futile attempt to re-establish contact with the theoretical river of the railway, somewhere down below: Brockley, Honor Oak Park, by way of Pepys Road and Avignon Road.

  Our first encounter of the day is with a woman tidying a children’s playpark. She sets us on the right track. It is said, though she does not say it, that Queen Elizabeth I, Gloriana, sat in the shade of the sovereign oak on Honour Hill on May Day, 1602. The last year of her life. The Overground line, flowing south, has meadows of death on both banks: Nunhead, Brockley, Camberwell New Cemetery.

  The trail of Italian restaurants and Creameries has run dry. Honor Oak is fronted by Colonel Sanders and his battery chickens: ‘It’s finger-lickin’ good.’ For the first time, as we close on Denmark Hill, someone – an Indian man, app-confused, smartly besuited, in a big hurry – asks us for directions, the quickest way to the station. I know this place, the crossroads, the Horniman Museum. It was where my son, my daughter-in-law and granddaughter lived, behind temperamental electronic gates, in a new property, across from the station and backed up, rather too intimately, against a lively pub. Which was why they moved out, and on to the south coast. They couldn’t afford a larger, quieter place in this rising Overground settlement.

  When I paused to take a photograph of record, the gates swung open and a young mother, pushing an infant in a buggy, walked towards the house where my son and his family had made their London life. It was convenient, except at weekends and holidays, when this stretch of the line often folded in favour of Crossrail excavations, to take advantage of the railway link with Haggerston.

  We discussed the status and vintage of Il Mirto, purveyors of ‘Italian Deli & Ice Cream’, and decided to accept the place, hung with trapezoid panettone boxes, displays of regional cheeses, olive oil, Prosecco, into the canon. London’s suburban stations are village halts supported and supplied by migrants from Alpine regions, from Sicily and Trieste. Sebastian Longhi, having served his time in Greek Street, followed the railtracks to their source in Croydon. Stephen has written of his mother as a child suspended in a photograph: ‘peeping round from / behind the ice-cream vendor’s barrow as / if she knew what was to come’. Croydon was such a distant elsewhere. They returned every Thursday – half-day at the Creamery? – to Soho, to stay in touch with the gossip, and for ‘fresh pasta and spinach’. Their rinse of dialect was polished with use. It echoes in Stephen’s head. He always comes back, after one of his energy-sapping fugue walks, to his Shadwell cave in the ‘degenerate regeneration zone’.

  In Sydenham, before we swung away to the west, we passed a pub theatre featuring The Silence of Snow: The Life of Patrick Hamilton. No English writer has earned his place in the bar of a roadhouse, breaking from some doomed drive to kill time, more than Hamilton. Stephen didn’t know the name. I recommended Hangover Square and Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky. By this stage of the day, it felt as if we had walked most of them. Unredeemed boozers from earlier times held their precarious ground between cemeteries, allotment slopes and the competing railways that branched off in every direction. Mark Farrelly’s play is set in the clinic where Hamilton underwent brutal sessions of electro-convulsive therapy, jolts of electricity into an already ruined nervous system. The broken novelist sits in the lounge waiting on his summons to the next hit. ‘The silence of snow,’ Farelly tells us, was Hamilton’s metaphor for loneliness.

  Penge West, Anerley: exotic names. But is this London? It’s tempting, on the platform at Anerley, with tracks stretching to the horizon in both directions, to place an ear against the cold rail, to pick up faint whispers from Shadwell and Haggerston. Out of our knowledge, the afternoon is turning; whoever we are now supposed to be, we are not those innocent walkers who began the day with clear eyes and great expectations. The tide is on the turn. Black windows in spiked houses flare with aftershocks left over from the mistreatment of Patrick Hamilton. Ice cream for a scorched tongue. Stuffed bears are being crucified in railway parks.

  Perched on top of two green plastic bags, set aside for recycling, is a wooden tribal fetish, a mask. African, Melanesian? I can’t be sure. Long slender painted wood with curving brows and prominent grooved nose. Thick lips form a flat base on which the mask could stand. Other jazzier masks, from an acid festival of the dead, are sprayed on the station wall. Teardrops of blood. Spanish lace around blank eyes. Costumes for mediation between the world of the almost living and the living dead, the ancestors. Our unseen accompanists on the wrong side of the river.

  I wedged the mask in my rucksack, from where it watched over the way we had already walked, whatever lay safely behind us. And I only hope there is not a significant gap in some display case in the Horniman Museum. My act of piracy reminds me of the cultural appropriations of Picasso’s mask-heads of the Cubist period, 1907–1909. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, those brothel furies, become the respectable suburban matrons of Avignon Road SE4.

  When I try to photograph Stephen, now moist enough to remove his grey top to reveal a maroon fisherman’s knit, against an autumnal blaze of Virginia creeper, my Nokia duncephone starts to tweet: Anna in Borough High Street. She has taken my advice and is about to ring on the door of the clinic. Since she went deaf in her right ear, her sense of smell has become acute. Now she is staggering, not just from lack of balance, but from the reek of competitive fastfoods wafting down the ancient pilgrims’ track. I was sure that the treatment would succeed, our long day’s march must have secured that favour from the gods. I imagined Anna’s olfactory sensitivity accessing the jagged saws cutting through fat and bone in the sawdust operating theatre of St Thomas’s hospital tower and the puddles of beer and piss from medical students and market
men, and the rotting mush of unsold vegetables carted in from Kent, and hot dung splattering from heavy horses on the road to Canterbury.

  In Love Lane it started to go wrong. Stephen thought he remembered coming out here to visit an Italian translator, who soon left for Oxford. Everything fitted, for a few yards, and then it didn’t. Love Lane belonged in the City, in Southwark, among the stews and dives. It had no claim on Anerley. Nor did the postman who sent us off, in a spirit of mischief, in completely the wrong direction. Over railways and tram tracks (destined for Croydon). Into cemeteries, allotments, country parks. All the extra miles and big skies we needed to coddle Stephen’s preoccupied silence. The gathering up of his poetic persona from a maelstrom of sense impressions, splintered anecdotes, granite boulders and commissioned totem poles. He didn’t want to pause on the approach to Norwood Junction, the final fold of my London Colour Street Atlas. The cafés were wrong or insufficiently Italian. It could be that he didn’t eat before sundown. One coffee with a dose of sugar at La Cigale carried him through the day. Soon we would lose ourselves, it would be terra incognita. Penge Road, the A213 heading south, was solidly Afro-Caribbean. And in play: noisy, street-feeding, fly-posted, familiar. Occupied. Railway connected. Awash with blue bags and polystyrene cartons and all of the traces of active existence banished from those deadly dormitory avenues.

  There is no obvious station café. Its place has been taken by a blistered hulk with blind windows: JR IMMIGRATION LTD. PROVIDING IMMIGRATION SOLUTIONS WORLDWIDE. The foot tunnel under the railway, through to the clocktower, has been dressed with photo-impressions of the journey we have just made or are about to make; a slow-cinema panning shot through which Stephen and I, as today’s token pedestrians, are obliged to provide the action.