Stephen gave the impression that he never ate. He took daylight food on sufferance. He had his own coffee places and there were certain ceremonies and obligations that went with them. It was a part of his relationship with Sebald that they met and indulged at McDonald’s, near Liverpool Street. A cup of tea. With such fastidious men, I can imagine a single cup shared between them. The refreshment was taken so that Sebald could express his solidarity with ordinary people ‘who had little other option’. In his turn, at the end of a long ramble through the cemeteries and spectral terraces of Whitechapel, Stephen induced an unenthusiastic Sebald to join him for a curry at the Dhaka Biryani House in Mile End.
It is my contention that poems are Stephen’s food, his breath, his existence. Sometimes they are walks, stately dances around the memory of an honoured person, relative or friend. They are written tastes and smells; the drama of notable meals recollected in tranquillity. ‘Fresh pasta & spinach… another coffee… cabbages, aubergines, lemons, pears… orange peppers and okra… plantains and sweet potatoes… bread… mushrooms and moss… polenta and a fistful of cloves… lemon in lentil… unbone the ilish-fish… slabbed carp with blinded eyes, raw dog-fish… aniseed loaves looped on poles to dry.’ Scents and anticipations of flavour melt in the mouth, in word-recipes, as thought forms. The ideal kitchen is the space where the dead go through their preparations for the meals of childhood. Nomad poems of hungry migration down endless roads.
We were off the map but inside the pull of Croydon. THE PICCOLO – ‘A little piece of Italy in SE25!’ – SANDWICH & PASTA BAR, CAPPUCCINO & ESPRESSO COFFEE. Norwood Junction. Blue and white oilcloth tables. Quartered mirrors. Movie star portraits from another era. Big hair and ambitious bosoms for Mediterranean women. Lounge-lizard men with loose black ties and white shirts. The proprietor was not Italian, nor easy to place: Mongolia, Kazakhstan? One of Stephen’s globe-straddling nomads come to rest, and opening his tent to display his produce on the fringes of what the poet was now calling the ‘Southern City’.
A rather peculiar and ripe-smelling ecumenical curry, with Vietnamese aspirations, was bubbling away as the special of the day and the proprietor was pushing it. Timidly, we settled for variants on the early-afternoon breakfast and more coffee. Or I did. Stephen, feasting on remembered herbs, the wild garlic of Irish tracks, settled for tea. Fingers interlocked, elbows on table, he prepared me for a detour to his grandfather’s grave by telling me something more of his family background.
Stephen’s father was English, northern and in local government. He came south to Wallingford, where he met his wife, an Italian, through mutual friends. The poet’s own life-voyage carried him downriver to Shadwell, Thames cormorants, a sniff of the Estuary and the open sea.
After Sebastian Longhi’s premature death, Stephen’s grandmother left the Croydon Creamery and relocated to a quieter place. ‘Wisteria and summer jasmine melted their scents in that yard.’ Those scents are memories that do not fade. Stephen’s quest is to recover the ground of his mother’s childhood. And from that, the rest. ‘The body leaves the body with such suddenness, such speed.’
On the oilcloth table he unrolled a stiff scroll: the monochrome record of Coloma Convent School in Tavistock Road; now migrated, he suspects. He points out his mother among the regimented ranks of trimmed pudding-basin hair, the starched white collars. Daughters of god in the charge of nuns. Polishing his spectacles to scan those ranks of serious faces, Stephen succeeds in identifying his mother as a young girl, against bare winter trees. Hundreds of stilled faces. Hundreds of white collars shining out of the fog of time.
‘Somewhere after the platform at Anerley,’ Stephen said, ‘we lost forty minutes. It’s gone. Did you notice that all the clocks have different times now?’
Coming off the map has liberated us. The person I describe, sitting in Il Piccolo with a mug of coffee, is not the person who wandered around Shadwell, waiting for Stephen Watts. Each episode is a fresh invention, drawing on what went before. By the time we step into the public library to see if they have a plan for the road into Croydon, we are in a quite different story. There is no self outside the written self. And the mysterious fugues that happen between incidents deemed worthy of report.
Before we find the station, there is the sealed church and the burial ground. IN LOVING MEMORY OF SEBASTIAN LONGHI. DIED 4th DECEMBER 1924. AGED 51 YEARS. ALSO NINA, HIS DEVOTED WIFE. Grey stone. A cross on a three-step pedestal. Nicely tended grounds. A scatter of red-brown leaves. The company of other Italians. The poet pauses, photocopied section of map from the library in his hand. His jersey complementing the colour field with a splash of blood-dark red. We detoured to Tavistock Road, unwinding the scroll, and testing the photograph of the massed girls against various backdrops, but nothing quite fitted. The southern city had excommunicated its past, in favour of a rash of speculative towers, the latest ones with blade-like prows. Small winds ramped the chasms, as Stephen tried to identify the bureaucratic blockhouse where immigrants have to apply for their necessary papers and confirm their resident status for another few weeks.
SAME DAY SIGNS: a swaying tin notice in orange against an orange wall, anticipations of the Ginger Line station. QUALITY SIGNS. BUILDERS SIGNS ONLY £12. UNION ROAD.
In St James’s Memorial Garden where we paced the paths looking for traces of the removed Coloma Convent girls, a reward was being offered for a LOST BLACK 7” TABLET MOBILEPHONE. Frowning, blue biro-cap in mouth, Stephen made notes in his ledger and took down website addresses.
Beyond West Croydon station, and a precinct of deleted shops with pop-art Mexican gods in red and white on black shutters, we found the row of crafted buildings with decorative brickwork, tall curved windows and Masonic symbols, where the Creamery had offered refreshment to travellers. Current traders were resolutely downmarket in yellows and pinks: BEAUTY QUEEN, BODY & HAIR PRODUCTS, NEW FASHION LOOKS, HATS, HANDBAGS, LUGGAGE, JEWELLERY, T-SHIRTS, FANATIC CLOTHING. Retail dyslexia.
No fanatics were kitting up, just then, for a run to town. But plenty of rucksacks, less noble than the Austerlitz example carried by Stephen Watts, swung in the doorway.
The poet headed off, to find a library in which to pursue his researches. Or to experience another fugue, lost time in a lost place, out of which a pattern of words might emerge. Some of the poems, Stephen said, were related to the Alpine rock drawings. His method was a form of rubbing against the resistance of place. Poems could also favour the essence of pictographs, involuntary movements of the hand.
I took the Haggerston train. It was less digitally agitated out here, better insulated with abandoned newsprint. In late August 1912, the 37-year-old composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor collapsed at West Croydon Station. Overworked and fretted by financial worries, he succumbed to pneumonia. He died a few days later and is remembered by a heritage plaque on his house in St Leonards Road. Coleridge-Taylor’s mother was an Englishwoman, Alice Hare Martin. His father, Dr Daniel Taylor, was a Creole from Sierra Leone, of mixed European and African descent. The boy was brought up in Croydon, before studying the violin at the Royal College of Music. Touring the USA, Samuel became interested in his father’s lineage, the connection with African-American slaves freed after the Civil War. A modest man with a fondness for pale waistcoats, floppy bow ties, and the occasional thin moustache, the composer liked to collaborate with poets. He left an unfinished opera, Thelma, themed around deceit, magic and retribution. Recovered from a manuscript in the British Library, Thelma was given its world premiere in Croydon in February 2012. The composer was buried in Wallington.
Back home, I was delighted to find that Anna’s problem had been completely cured in Borough High Street. Now she could hear rather more than she wanted about our walk. So there were minor disadvantages to consider. The world was suddenly loud and close. The dogs. The drunks. The door.
I laid the tribal mask from Forest Hill on my desk. It was a relief map of the journey we had made: uphill along the ridge of the nose, then into the
maw of Croydon. Reversed, the mask became a leaking boat, holes for the eyes. With my fingers I could feel the strokes of the chisel or blade, the force of the original maker.
DOWNRIVER
‘He explained to me that night in Paris that madness is a geographical location inside the self.’
Kay Boyle
Making landfall at Gravesend – like the dying Native American princess Pocahontas – and wobbling up the raked walkway in a stiff breeze, I have to duck very sharply to avoid the menacing swoop of a tethered crow. This is a malignant spirit in an evil wind, in a defeated place loud with absence. On such a day and at such an hour, I’m on the lookout for symbols and portents. The funeral rites of Lady Thatcher, the great leader, permafrost warrior and motorway ribbon-cutter, celestially upgraded from her complimentary suite at the Ritz, began as our ferry, the Duchess M, butted out, crosscurrent, from the container stacks of Tilbury Riverside (Maritime). The vessel was transporting an elderly couple, huddling close against the breeze, and one distracted, finger-scrolling young man. The service was too useful to survive on such modest pickings without the financial support of the revived Port of Tilbury. Back in August 2007, the Lower Thames and Medway Passenger Boat Company Limited, owners and operators of the Duchess M, were fined £18,000 (with £9,000 costs) for transporting more passengers than their certification allowed: 90 Essex-fleeing migrants were crammed aboard. Here was a metaphor for much that was to follow.
Gravesend feels like the kind of place where people without papers, without credit, are forced to wait. An English Calais where fig trees thrive on the heat left in the walls of abandoned riverside industries. An old established port, downgraded into a camp of refuge or imprisonment, hoping for regeneration from some outside agency. Or total clearance. Bulldozers. Plexiglas hit squads. Journalists. Celebrity squalor tourists. There is such a morbid history, you can smell it in the air: entrapment, putting on time, being caught between tides, fleeing from one post-colonial horror, but unrequired in the, as yet imaginary, better place.
‘The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.’
Joseph Conrad coming across the river from his retreat in Stanfordle-Hope: Heart of Darkness.
‘We looked on, waiting patiently – there was nothing else to do till the end of the flood.’
Marlow, the one who has ‘followed the sea’, seems to be channelling its voice, becoming voice as light fades. He drones on with the authority of the river itself, through the smoke and sediment of a nightmare dusk, about the impulse to capture, dominate and improve. ‘They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a grand scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.’
The Gravesend Heritage Quarter, with its ironwork security gates, is in receipt of bad news. A care-in-the-community reservation for a community that does not care. Not one jot. They are otherwise engaged in strategies of survivalism. The charity shops are shut. It would be a charity to send their contents upstream to the landfill dunes of Rainham. The nail parlours are spurned. And the Ground Zero cocktail bar is bereft of punters willing to suspend their distaste for the tactless title in order to raise a frosted glass to the memory of the golden-maned Boudicca of their pushy neighbour, Dartford.
Dartford is where Margaret Thatcher, like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, launched her career as a world-stage performance artist. A mummified icon of Britishness. Yes, icon. Abstracted symbol. Lipstick automaton. Sleepless and hyper-energised on regular hits of intravenous Scottish firewater. With age, Thatcher and Keith Richards recalibrated their Deptford years with fat biographies and autobiographies; bad behaviour – pissing on petrol station forecourts or sinking the Belgrano – ameliorated by extreme wealth. Both, if we buy the spin, have been gentled; drooling not spitting now. But while the Stones are still working hard in support of their properties and investment portfolios, Lady Thatcher’s twilight was infolding and static: as she struggled to make her perceptions conform to the world as she remembered it. Lear-anguish well ahead of the intersexual grandeur of her political opponent Glenda Jackson’s assault on the role in the production directed by Deborah Warner at the Old Vic in 2016. Lady Thatcher was no Vegetative Buddha, sofa-bound, waiting and witnessing: the epitome of her time and place, her city. She became instead a destination to be visited, afternoon tea taken, like a famous rock or lighthouse. In her statuesque final act, more mask than meat, Thatcher was revealed as a fallible old woman whose sharpest recollections were of childhood, the tight Grantham years of strict Methodism and endless homework, before she lost her essential self in becoming a voice-coached projection. ‘O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’
A mantle of sullen silence had fallen over land and river. The elderly couple, propped on a hard bench, resting, enjoying their £2 concessionary ride across the broad Thames, offered no response to this moment of national bereavement. The funerary procession by limousine and gun-carriage, out of Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral, had the appearance, on news updates streaming unwitnessed into the cafés and pubs of Gravesend, of a triumphalist reunion for veterans of the Battle of Orgreave, at the British Steel coking plant in 1984. A reunion attended, in true Brit fashion, by a stubborn knot of anarchists and committed leftists willing to confirm the special status of the dead woman by turning their backs on her. Without consultation or consensus, we were all chipping in to cover the millions required for this solemn state occasion, the public acknowledgement that a career politician could symbolise the best of the nation: conviction, courage, shellacked coiffure and limitless, unapologetic self-interest. What is good for business is good for Britain. Good for me and mine. For all. For all of us.
This was, as the clatter of media types, up at dawn, primped and powder-patted, insisted, an arguable proposition. In borrowed black, they stalked the perimeter of St Paul’s Cathedral – where the Occupy protesters had been permitted, for a brief time, to pitch their tents, without nuisance to paying customers or the secure moneyman behind their barricades in Paternoster Square.
One by one, or in contrasting couples – Ken Clarke and Shirley Williams – funeral attendees were interrogated about the Legacy. Rarely can such an Alice in Wonderland charivari of stereotypes have been assembled. Some of them, like David and Samantha Cameron, were quite obviously having a good time, social smiles and quips and politic handholding. The front pews were a woodpeckerish nip-nip of Judas kisses, blood enemies pouting stiff lips towards cold cheeks. They were all there: from the inherited formaldehyde dignity of senior royalty to the public faces of smug and comfortably suited former cabinet colleagues, along to be sure that the Lady is really in the box. To broken bullies blinking back tears under an unruly thatch of eyebrow. To the shameless court of right-opinionated entertainers still at large. To ennobled perjurers, medal-snaffling athletes with drug exemptions, well-connected arms dealers, coup plotters, City bagmen, honourably wounded veterans, and such foreign dignitaries as could be persuaded to take a mini-break in one of springtime London’s riverside towers.
This cartoon sketch, assembled from TV footage witnessed by cricking my neck in the fug of downriver cafés, is unfair. Exaggerated. And accurate. The spill of black, massed through Wren’s state cathedral, had its own dignity. The melancholy of a congregation considering mortality and loss in an echoing vault. The guilt of survivors. The marking of years. The knowledge that they were contributing to a historically significant event. End of innocence.
But dead means dead.
The only obvious sensitivity in this circus – so unlike the private funerals of Attlee and most of Thatcher’s predecessors as First Minister – was that the funerary flotilla kept off the Thames. Churchill could be invoked but not so directly challenged. Military honours for the painful losses of the Falklands adventure couldn’t be promoted alongsid
e Churchill’s aristocratic bloodstock and martial history. And, in any case, the Palace would certainly have vetoed a return to the water for the Duke of Edinburgh, after the long, cold and wretched hours of the Diamond Jubilee river pageant and their effect on an aging prostate. On this day, above all others, the Thames was the safest place for dissenters, those who wanted to keep well away from the reverent silence of Westminster and the muffling of Big Ben.
In Gravesend, on the stroke of twelve, the clock-mechanism of St George’s Church, where Pocahontas is buried, sounds the hour. Distant chimes, rippling across the cataleptic town, respond in a celebratory chorus. At the Towncentric Tourist Office, where they have decided to reboot the whole zone as ‘Gravesham’, the latest update from the funeral is so soft that the manager’s radio makes no impression on the reveries of leaflet collectors. The main attraction of Gravesham seems to be its easy access to the Bluewater shopping hub in its excavated chalk quarry and the getaway Eurostar link at Ebbsfleet.
And what about the name of the ferryboat? The Duchess M, trundling backwards and forwards across the river, between the bustling international container port of Tilbury and the legacy-encumbered sump of Gravesend, is a subliminal tribute to Thatcher. Perhaps there is a nudge in the direction of Jacobean tragedy, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi? ‘She stains the time past, lights the time to come.’ That black crow, savaging migrants as they step ashore, is revealed as a thing of tatty plastic, a loud fake, a deterrent. It shrieks in the wind, lacking claws and beak. Passengers heading for the pier even don’t notice it.
The Last London Page 21