If you travel against the flow of inrushing City workers, the mob decanted at Fenchurch Street Station, then a railway excursion to the Thames Estuary is a pleasant affair. I climb aboard for my return to Tilbury Town. A young woman, having let the crowd disperse, leaving a monstrous tidewrack of throwaway newspapers, jumbo coffee containers and breakfast-bar wrappers, finishes her complicated make-up routine and adjusts her tight skirt. The Thatcher funeral doesn’t make the front page of Metro: PUTTING SEX BACK INTO BALLET.
I decided to pay my respects by time-travelling into the geography of Thatcher’s pomp, the heartlands of resentment where she brewed and bottled the bad will of a disaffected populace – while doing her best to handbag the benefit-coddled, socialist sinkhole of metropolitan London. ‘Drain the swamp!’ Big-hair Trumpery learnt its first lessons about the post-truth culture here. Murdoch populism and a chorus of lynch mob slogans. ‘Drain the swamp!’ Thatcher was the revenge of the suburbs, delivered from a position of established privilege. She might have made an investment in a Dulwich retirement property, but she wouldn’t sleep in it.
But I shared a guilty secret with Margaret Thatcher: the worst of times was also the best of times. Without her presence and personality and the way she brought the crisis of London into sharp focus, I would never have become a novelist. I was obliged to recognise that painful Oedipal conflict by attempting to revisit the romanticised estuary of my book Downriver. I carried a copy of the first edition with me on the train out of Fenchurch Street, the one with the reproduction of Ludwig Meidner’s Apocalyptic Landscape of 1913 on the cover. This vision of a ruined city came before the bombs fell: dying sun, turbulent river and collapsing riverside towers. I planned to annotate succeeding chapters as I travelled through the day, pasting contemporary snapshots over the yellowing print of the original. On the blank page alongside the opening chapter, I tipped in an agency photograph found in a Buddhist charity shop in Bethnal Green: Jimmy Savile, bottle-blond hair and dark glasses, gold necklace and white tracksuit, presenting a grimacing Mrs Thatcher with a fistful of cheques, on the doorstep of Number 10. The chippy entertainer is delivering a humorous aside, reflex banter. Thatcher, unamused or not getting the joke, has her bulging eye on the cameras.
In the 1980s I began to explore the derelict deepwater docks of the Isle of Dogs and Silvertown (already being floated as a future Olympic site). Margaret Thatcher, in the person of the ‘Widow’, was a dark deity presiding over a dystopian version of England; channelling our worst impulses, our meanest prejudices, our fear of the alien. In those days the hoofprint of the beast was clearly visible on the ravaged edgelands between A13 and the river: discontinued industries, Rubik-cube towers in jazzy colours rising on the toxic compost of deregulated financial markets, primitive surveillance systems protecting speculative retail parks. First glimpses of future fashion statements: the electric-orange hi-viz jumpsuit. And the exhaustion of low-paid guards, often black, more prisoner than protector.
Thatcher was an abiding presence. Pervasive as the smell of the Thames: oil spill, river-rot and yellow mud. Along walls and embankments, rabid slogans and anti-Thatcher curses were large and scarlet. In hideaway pubs, inscribed photographs in polished frames signalled their allegiance to pre-Farage demagogues who could hold a pint.
Now, from the window of the empty train to Tilbury, there was nothing. Inside carriages where edgy clients kept their eyes open for ticket inspectors, I heard no mention of this day’s funeral pageant. Thatcher’s legacy was smeared over container stacks, retail parks and hollow estates under drooping pergolas of pylons, but the woman was forgotten.
Tilbury is as much a two-finger salute now as it was in 1988. But while Dock Road remains the essence of entropy, the rebranded Tilbury Railport, protected by high walls and security cameras, thrives in a rumble of lorries churning up dust. In windowless sheds specialising in Logistics. In red, brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. When I researched Downriver, I was enthused by local piracy, the hopeless scams of dealers in trashed electrical goods, small businesses trading in fire sales and offering cold-water dormitories to paperless transients. Tattered notices recalled the ghosts of unions exorcised along with the industries in which they once played a dominant role.
There used to be a junkshop flattering a Thatcherite fiction of the past, made up from chipped colonial artefacts and blatant fakes. Everything looked like an Arthur Daley smokescreen for whatever villainy went on in the backroom. There were mountains of washing machines dripping acid and being made ready, so I was told, for export to Nigeria. Armadas of stolen cars were sliced and reattached by Dr Frankenstein’s scalpel. Otherwise, the only action came from bankrupt mini-cab firms offering the fastest way out.
Travellers’ horses, chained and hobbled, cropped the rubbish-strewn fringes of the defunct railway. There was no sign of life in the Dockers’ Social Club. The Stallions fastfood restaurant offered kebabs or burgers. A cash-for-gold pawnshop will remain closed for the foreseeable future. ‘Sorry for the Pinconvenience’ is a neat coinage. A trade sign for SUNLIGHT SOAP can still be deciphered.
Peckish now, I opted for a coffee in the Dock Café, where I hoped to pick up on Tilbury Town’s response to the national day of mourning. This bright, clean facility was certainly an improvement on what had been here before. The starred item was the Olympic Breakfast at £5.80, with two eggs, two sausages, bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, bubble and squeak. I settled for a cappuccino and a vegetarian fry-up. The breakfast crowd were rigorously monocultural, razorcropped and upbeat in laundered leisurewear and new white trainers. Very young children, the inheritors, ran about between tables, or sat on them, dipping into the enticing mess on the plates.
‘Watch out, mate. She’s a little devil, that one. She’ll nick your toast,’ one teenage mum warned. Too late.
The place was an amiable, extended-family crèche. If you transcribed some of the dialogue – as I did – it sounded bad, but the tone, the spirited banter, neutralised the venom. Laughter drowned phone-music and TV funeral news.
‘I told her, you don’t want to do that,’ a jobbing builder reported. Of his estranged partner. ‘Then I whacked her across the front room. Silly tart. I’d rather fuck my sister.’
Workers without work, or immediate prospects, plated up for the morning. There were no obvious trickle-down benefits here from the thriving dock zone. The café crowd did not represent a severed community as much as total decapitation. An in-the-shit-together endgame behind steamed up windows.
Just as I was about to leave, to make my way over the railway bridge and down to the river, a young woman staggered through the door, hugging a heavy tripod and an oversupplied bag of camera kit. She wore her name around her neck on red and white ribbon. My idea of sounding out Tilbury for sonar echoes of Thatcher was not so original. The new face was Angie Walker of BBC London News.
Angie was pleased, she confessed, to be invited to cover the funeral. She had hoped for a prime spot in Westminster, if not actually inside St Paul’s – only to discover that they had banished her to Tilbury Town. This was a very long haul from her home in Windsor. And now that she was here, there was no here. She couldn’t find anything open: not a docker, not a UKIP cheerleader, not a single card-carrying leftist willing to be sound-bitten. Delighted to have bumped into someone ready to talk, she offered me a coffee – before she realised that I was in the same dubious trade, trawling for exploitable copy. No patrons of the Dock Café had the faintest interest in Margaret Thatcher or London’s remote and contentless television ceremonies. The dead politician meant as much to them – zilch – as royalty. Queen Elizabeth I, so they were told, schlepped down here to deliver a rousing speech to the troops at the time of some Spanish invasion. They didn’t watch that one. They were relatively innocent of digital technology, the TV monitor had about as much appeal as a machine for zapping flies.
Tilbury Railport, on the far side of the tracks, was booming, but passenger transit from the far-f
lung reaches of Empire to London was over. All those railway platforms – plangent ruins at the time of my 1988 visit – were now enclosed, privatised, part of the container colony. In the three hours since I had left my house in Hackney, I found not one image of Margaret Thatcher, subversive or supporting: the glamorous granny of punk was without honour in her own country. The fabled Iron Lady was reduced to a rusting footnote in a culture that had abolished history. Or a tethered lamia in the form of a flapping black crow on the gangplank of a riverside ferry.
Gravesend has a witchfinding, female-fearing pedigree. Anne Neale, known as an ‘ill-tongued’ woman, was accused of witchcraft and sent for trial in 1675. It was discovered that she had ‘several excrescences or buds on various parts of her body’. On closer examination, these minor blemishes exhibited signs of having been ‘regularly sucked’. Or so I discovered in the neo-classical Town Hall, where choice anecdotes of place have been published in ‘Discover Gravesham’ pamphlets. Flicking through bullet-point highlights, it can be seen that the Poll Tax hearings of 1990 replayed former times when a Gravesend mob responded to inequitable tax demands by hauling fire-boats through the narrow streets. Two hundred persons, denying and repudiating Thatcher’s Community Charge, were summonsed to appear before the Gravesend court. Thirteen presented themselves. An inherited antipathy to rules and regulations imposed from elsewhere was still strong.
The port of Sheerness, at the mouth of the Medway, is terminal. And it glories in that status. In atmosphere and aspiration, it is an assisted suicide trip. End of the Medway. End of connection with London. End of hope. Point of departure. The ideal landfall for an amnesiac in a black suit, found dripping-wet, and resolutely mute, wandering on a road by the shore. Had he fallen overboard? Had he come here to kill himself? Was he inventing a new identity, as he emerged from the water, like John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend? They called him ‘Piano Man’ and removed him to the Medway Maritime Hospital. Why Sheerness? Where better?
The undrowned man, the bridled alien in the black suit, had located Kent’s nearest equivalent of the Kara Sea. A nuclear junkyard over which a red sun pulses like a dying bulb. The station is deserted. The depression of those railway platforms, between Gravesend and Sittingbourne, is critical. Solitary, pacing figures are wired for sound, instructions from elsewhere. Some of them hold up books like radiation shields. But they never turn a page. Convalescents, between hospitals, between refuges, are exposed to the unforgiving river. To regimented ranks of dwarf fruit trees. To migrant work-gang shadows in polytunnels. To evidence of collapsed degeneration projects.
It was like talking to the grateful dead. Climbing out of the train in Sheerness on a late afternoon in April is as close as it comes to understanding the postmortem visions of Emanuel Swedenborg. You can talk to the limping ghosts but they do not hear you. You are always the intruder, the thing to be stepped around on a return from the pub. Stepped around by the lucky ones who can still unstick themselves from their benches. Canvassed opinions, beachside, disclosed reflex responses to Margaret Thatcher’s demise: admiration for her strength, discomfort over the council house sell-off and the Poll Tax.
Council Leader Andrew Bowles said: ‘She turned the country around. It was going to the dogs.’
Down at the waterline, with casino-city Southend gloating across the Estuary mouth, the dogs have won. They swagger and shit on sand, dragging bent walkers against the slapping wet breeze, the sting of salt. Concrete steps leading down to the beach have been painted with bracing prophecies of doom.
BURIED IN THE BELLY OF ITS LIBERTY. YOU CAN SEE THE END OF THE WORLD FROM HERE. MARK THE WATER. BEYOND ALL HELP. GREET THE WALKERS IN THE MORNING.
Poetic fragments reference the American Liberty ship, SS Richard Montgomery, wrecked off the Nore, with 1,400 tonnes of explosives on board. They say that if the Montgomery goes up, the detonation will take out Sheerness. Three masts of the death ship are visible and sanctioned with a warning buoy. Afternoon strollers, overdrawing the last of their strength, come here to watch and wait. One man, stripped to the waist, is filling a blue plastic bucket with sand, and carrying it, time and again, to his car.
Those thermoplastic letters across the risers and treads of the stepped wall, impregnated with tiny glass spheres, will become more reflective as the sea and the weather do their worst and rub away their impertinence. The broken sentences do not have the innocence I wanted. They are of course an art commission.
The poet Ros Barber said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do some sort of public graffiti – sanctioned graffiti.’ Which is just what graffiti cannot be: it must bite, it should be anonymous. If it is not condemned to be washed away by indignant high-pressure hoses, it has failed. This latest intervention is a mediated response approved by the Medway Swale Estuary Partnership (MSEP), Arts Council England and Kent County Council. The architect Simon Barker, Design Advisor for Design Excellence in North Kent (DENK), worked with his team on the technicalities of getting the poet’s words on the steps of the promenade. Nicola Barker, a committed haunter of liminal places, came to Sheppey looking for something else, the strangeness that became her novel Wide Open. ‘I left – when I finally left – quite undone,’ she said.
Patrick Wright, a graduate from the University of Kent who lived for a time in Hackney, and who investigated these places with me, when I was writing Downriver and he was assembling A Journey through Ruins, uncovered the hard facts behind Uwe Johnson’s decision to relocate – after Berlin, Rome and New York City – to Sheerness. A mysterious career diversion for a respected European novelist and translator. Canetti took up residence in Hampstead. Céline, shrapnel splinters in skull, had his picaresque Soho nights. Sebald lived, worked and died, around Norwich. But Sheerness? The Medway port was altogether too much. It was several sets of ellipses too far… even for the deranged momentum, hopping on and off buses, hanging around dock gates, of Céline and his idiot crew.
In 1974, when I was cutting grass and picking up broken sherry bottles in Limehouse, Uwe Johnson put aside his Jahrestage project, after three published volumes, and found a terraced Victorian house on Marine Parade. Wright, in his pursuit of the German author, noticed that ‘Sheerness was often stigmatised as a place of industrial dereliction and defeated people.’ But that was its strength. The old Millwall, Thatcherite boast: ‘Nobody likes us and we don’t care.’
Cultural migration to the Isle of Sheppey now looks like a smart decision, carrying the questing and troubled author to the bitter edge of things. Silence, exile – and gallons of brown ale in the Seaview Hotel. Or, more probably, regular crates of decent wine delivered to his doorstep. Johnson’s wife and daughter moved out to another property. He liked to stare at the sea. This was his return to the Baltic of despair. They say that, in his forties, the writer had the lightning-struck look of a premature pensioner. That polished, hairless skull. The close-set and unblinking eyes of a ferret. Spectacles, pipe and pen. Leather jacket, leather tie. The established Sheerness drinking classes were suspicious, then welcoming. Johnson was one of their own. He had made his choice: abdication, solitude, liquid witness. A nail through the tongue. ‘Call me Charles,’ he said.
Call him whatever he chooses. Call him the Estuary Ishmael. The great European novel, Johnson knew, was to be lived but not written. And lived at the end of its tether. On a small island, loosely affiliated to a larger island. Waiting to cut its cables. To sever all connection with the continent.
Occasional scholars found their way to Johnson’s door. There were no satisfactory answers. He took his all-day breakfast and put on solid English pounds. He sketched the particulars of economic and social collapse. He was one of the sitters, the stickers. The watchers who no longer fret or speak. He liked the way the English said ‘thank you’ when they bought a train ticket, in order to escape.
The novel Johnson never wrote – he had other business, he came to Sheerness to atrophy and die – was the Piano Man: a fugitive German by the name of Andreas Grassl. Grassl was a
nother unexplained émigré. Another spoiled artist squeezing his art out of place. In hospital, Grassl banged away at the piano they provided and made some drawings. He was reluctant to engage with his interrogators. The story was nothing more than his sudden appearance, the enigmatic Kaspar Hauser of Sheppey, on the foreshore, in a wet black suit – and a fugue state, a vegetative pathology or performance. Tabloids represented Grassl as an asylum seeker, a threat; a useless economic migrant draining valuable health service resources. He made marks, unintelligible symbols in his sketchbook. After he produced one coherent image, a grand piano, they called him ‘Piano Man’. And worked back from that: the fictional biography of an idiot savant, a busker, a spy. A lost soul washed ashore.
In the chapel of the maritime hospital, the paperless stranger obediently attacked his instrument, while the doctors made notes. If strangers approached, he would roll up into a ball and edge towards the nearest corner.
Tirez sur le Pianiste.
They wanted him to be Charles Aznavour in Truffaut’s film, the saddest man on the planet. The classical musician busking in a zinc bar. Black suit, white shirt. They wanted that freeze-frame from Truffaut’s first feature, Les Quatres Cents Coups, when the reform school escapee, Jean-Pierre Léaud, turns his back on innocence, the grey sea.
Charles Dickens, our most celebrated London walker, came to a halt down here. ‘There are some out-of-the-way landing places on the Thames and the Medway, where I do most of my summer idling. Running water is favourable to day-dreams, and a strong tidal river is the best of running water for me.’
The weary author is suspended between sky and shore. He is watching ‘without obligation’, when a boy appears out of nowhere. Dickens calls him ‘Spirit of the Fort’. He seems to speak out of the centre of the spreading circles from a stone flung into the river.
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