The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  If, during the May Bank Holiday of 2016, in the lull before the great Euro plebiscite – and banks are never on holiday now, money can’t stop churning around and around, leaking from screen to screen – you were taking the enriched air of the Lea Valley, rambling close to the line of zero longitude, you might have noticed a strung-out procession of carnivalesque time-travellers: Salvationists, Levellers, Hunger Marchers or fugitive outpatients from Matthew Allen’s High Beach asylum in Epping Forest. Limping and strutting and chanting, they advance on the distant rumour of London, city of towers. This is an established one-day yomp.

  So – rat-a-tat-tat – the drum is beaten. They pick up their steps. And it is not, as they are frequently asked, for charity. The march is unsponsored oblivion. Revenge. Superstition. If our feet bleed, we are virtuous. If we cover the ground in Harold’s hoofprints, we must surely win the day. Are we undoing an historic English defeat or confirming it? The excursion will be just as successful as the earlier attempt, by Kötting and Sinclair, to ridicule the pretensions of media-inflated triumphalism by pedalling a fibreglass swan from Hastings to Hackney, by way of the emerging Olympic Park: the chains and helicopters and armed response units. The swan was named Edith in honour of King Harold’s mistress, Edith Swan-Neck. Mother of his children. The woman immortalised by way of an obscure but affecting sculpture, in which she is cradling the mutilated king. A life-in-death embrace. On a cement plinth, beside a bowling green, in West St Leonards.

  The renegade troupe at the start of this five-day walk are stubbled, face-painted like border transgressors. They are the beaters of invisible bounds bedizened in outlandish fancy dress that is becoming noticeably less fancy with every mile endured. Phone-cameras are buzzing around a limited field of action. What’s it all about? A shared midlife crisis or some grim last-punt geriatric spasm? They are resurrected battlefield droppings from a site of infamous carnage. There seems to be no agreement among them on a framing narrative or the spirits they are trying to invoke, beyond the base requirement to push on. They lurch between displays of public narcissism and masochistic ecstasy as blisters pop like seed pods and ill-advised footwear squelches on permitted slipways between the claustrophobic madness of the forest and soft heritage England.

  The procession, if it had been reassembled from surveillance drones for post-atrocity TV coverage, would provide clinching evidence for the VOTE LEAVE lobby.

  This is how the gang musters:

  An alpha male in gypsum facepaint: Andrew Kötting, chief convener in absurdity. He is stocky and bristling in a reindeer herdsman’s ear-flapped felt helmet. His chosen role is bodyguard-bouncer to the buried king. The planks of his upper body, honed by openwater swims between Hastings Pier and Bulverhythe, protest against the confinement of the potato-sack suit he has chosen to wear. Pale cloth defaced with felt-tipped Enochian symbols. An antique Sebaldian rucksack has been bulked with food bombs and reeking tidbits from earlier expeditions. When the weather turns, he will wear a kneelength raincape over the tight jacket and shrinking trousers. To the susceptible along our route, sensibilities heightened in the crisis of public debate, here is a terrible vision of Taliban fundamentalism. Unruly tribes coming down from the mountains.

  At Kötting’s elbow is a young woman decked out like a newly jilted Miss Havisham, stoic with no great expectations. Call her Claudia Barton. As she moves off, swinging gracefully into her long stride, she becomes a shrouded houri. An interior female escaped into the world. Or a brave creature running from her fate, a Woman in White fallen among gypsies. Taken to the road with savages.

  Claudia is a Memlinc madonna with the voice of Audrey Hepburn. She lifts up her skirts and skips in black Doc Marten boots. She dances in daisy meadows, runs at hills. Sometimes she sings with Croatian buskers in tiled underpasses. She is painted with arrows and roses. Her headband is trophied with stiff feathers and roadkill pelts. She takes her siestas in hollow tree trunks, quiet cemeteries and on railway tracks. Her bridal train is a dragnet sweeping up nests of field mice, broken twigs, mole droppings, quantities of sand, chalk, animal blood and filthy footprints. You could hang this garment, unlaundered, on a white gallery wall. And recover the entirety of the walk to the coast. ‘Never will I succumb to Norman rule,’ Claudia says, channelling Edith. ‘The heathens are back amongst us. The world’s a wicked place. And evil days have started.’

  Because they are all musicians and poets with wildly disparate voices, like a shotgun orchestra thrown together in a Chilean prison to make songs of protest, they have no sense of direction, no steady politics, and no purpose beyond forming the sum of their imperfections. They dream of evening pubs and soft beds. The ‘rabbit-light’ of Wallace Stevens, in which, so it seems, ‘everything is meant for you, and nothing need be explained’.

  Nothing can be explained until it’s too late. Done and dusted. Recorded. Reassembled. And reforgotten. Didn’t Stevens compose his ‘Invective against Swans’?

  When our landlocked ship’s orchestra faltered, disputing maps or facing headlong traffic on narrow country roads, they were driven forward by the steady drumbeat of a man dressed in a Guantánamo bodysuit that he had borrowed from a French hunter, who believed that this virulent orange disguise would deflect the bullets of other forest assassins. The drummer’s name was David Aylward. As a registered percussionist, David tested every obstacle he encountered: perimeter fences, cattle-grids, live oaks, log piles. He interpreted the score of territory by way of earthworks, ley lines, family histories and ancestral deposits.

  He was only too well aware, as he took the DLR train from Deptford Bridge to Waltham Abbey, that his ‘agent-orange wild boar hunter’s twin-set’ was casting a dangerous glow over the packed carriage of sweating Canary Wharf commuters, as they jabbered into their devices. Aylward, a card-carrying suspect, was inspired by an eclectic range of influences: Master Musicians of Jajouka, Mississippi Swamp-style trance shamen, Lamberg drummers of Ulster and the Bronze Age battle-horns of Ireland.

  David takes a well-deserved herbal hit from the deep bowl of his Sherlock Holmes briar. The drumming, as a summons to war, or recruitment in time of civil conflict, blocks out the drowsing VOTE LEAVE suburbs and estates. ‘Playing the landscape,’ Aylward says, ‘while it plays me.’

  The man beside him never stops smiling at the wonderful weirdness of it all: Jem Finer. He is said to operate in the interstices between pataphysics and mathematics. A slender gold ear-piercing, like a perversely planted wedding ring, refines folk melodies rescued from torched cornfields, where a very occasional Southern Rail train hums in transit. Finer is operating his ‘sonic salvage system’ by dragging a spiked rotating drum like an Essex golf cart or shopping trolley dressed with bent forks and flattened beer cans.

  ‘Fitzcarraldo Ocado,’ he calls it. The device is a recording instrument, a sound catcher, and an affectionately mocking reference to local leisure activities. ‘An audiotronic aggregator of the flotsam offered up by the road.’ The squeaking cart, in its resistance, reminds me of the splashy machine I used to drag across Hackney Marshes, to paint white lines on eighty-two football pitches.

  At the end of the day’s walk, while the other pilgrims are spread across the verge picking at their sores and tabletting non-essential emails, Jem is surveying the acoustic properties of the latest car park. In short black coat and beret, he’s a Basque bomber measuring the height of curbstones against Euro regulations. The man’s main task, it appears, is to stream the Beefheart song, Ice Cream for Crow, for a Joseph Beuys impressionist in a many-pocketed fisherman’s waistcoat.

  The photographer tasked with keeping a record of the expedition, by digital film and pinhole capture, goes by the name of Anonymous Bosch. He stalks the edge of the frame in a hat made from the lining of Kötting’s felt helmet. Bosch is infinitely obliging, a person who is already halfway to becoming a camera. The technology is redundant. Hundreds of images impose a blurred dignity on the excesses of a Dadaist retreat in the general direction of France. A
n impotent gesture of homage to threatened cultural links.

  Bosch, who came into the world as Anthony O’Donnell, limps in the wake of the action. He is invaluable, a confessor who is always on hand, to find spiritual truth in a portrait. When he lines up the road brigands, he looks like a friendly executioner, a potman from Preston, assisting his publican-employer, through a paying sideline in rope-based extermination. He is Bosch and Breughel. But his butchered feet force him to travel in the van, reading the country ahead and waiting for the walkers to drag themselves over the horizon.

  Left to himself, Anthony catalogues those notices pinned to saplings and lampposts, advertising lost pets. And people. He gathers up scrumpled shopping lists in supermarkets. He keeps an album of seaside eccentrics: thereby measuring the range and speed of social exclusion from London, the failure of ‘care in the community’. In earlier times, he lived in a tent, fell down a motorway manhole into a sewer, stiched a finger back on. He stays young and gluten-free. It is always his birthday tomorrow. And he is too modest to mention it.

  As the scribe to the expedition, I am the person in the Joseph Beuys waistcoat, flapping trousers and funny hat. I have never had much interest in fat or felt. But I am inclined, in this company, to deliver sermons based on jackdaw readings and misremembered histories.

  The familiar I have adopted for the journey is a crow called Odo, formerly Bishop of Bayeux (sponsor of the celebrated comic-strip tapestry) and half-brother to William the Bastard. Odo, after the Conquest, became Earl of Kent.

  On the first day of our walk, the bird perched on King Harold’s grave at Waltham Abbey, dowsing for rotten meat. Arriving at the Olympic Park in twilight, his clawed feet dropped into the Lea and sunk without trace. Legless (in all senses), the ex-bishop thrusts his beak out of a black rucksack, Poe-cawing rubbish prophecies on the fate of England. The crow was shamed to be keeping company with such rowdy wheel-tappers, jongleurs and heretics. His thirst for Italian ice cream could never be satisfied. He scorned any connection with the apocalyptic cartoon talked up by Ted Hughes. ‘Words came with Life Insurance policies,’ the poet said. ‘Crow feigned dead.’

  It was a great thing, now, to find six people, Londoners and former Londoners pushed to the coast, prepared to walk for five hard days, bonded as a group, in a fugue of drumming, reminiscing, engaging with towpath cyclists, accompanying buskers in tunnels, debating with Polish policewomen, explaining the pilgrimage to kitchen workers outside Indian restaurants in railway towns, crossing Elizabethan parks, at a time when the soul of the city was in dispute. When London, in adapting itself to incomers, refugees, economic migrants (billionaires and impoverished), was breaking away, painfully, from the rest of the island. The capital had become an illuminated cruise ship, a floating casino for oligarchs, oil sheiks and multinational money-launderers; a vessel, holed at the waterline, staffed by invisibles on zero-hour contracts, collateral damage of war and famine and prurient news reports, huddled in lifeboats. ‘Crow’s toes gripped the wet pebbles.’

  This walk, Waltham Abbey to Battle Abbey, was also a homecoming, a return to the marble effigy of slaughtered Harold and his eternal consort, Edith Swan-Neck, in West Marina Park, St Leonards-on Sea. The forgotten artificer of this haunting relic, Charles Augustus William Wilkie, was, like Kötting, our own felt-capped Führer, an Anglo-German.

  Here was the pitch: to process from the stone slab at Waltham Abbey that marked the location of the original high altar and, perhaps, the resting place of King Harold II’s divided carcass, as gathered up, lovingly, ritualistically, by Edith Swan-Neck (in one of many versions of the story confabulated by winners and losers after the battle in 1066). To carry the touch of that stone, as directly as possible, to the alternative memorial slab in Battle Abbey (set down by order of the victor: William, Duke of Normandy). And then, in twilight’s last gleaming, to the sculptural tableau: the entwined necrophile lovers in the sea-facing public park at the western edge of St Leonards. Across the road from the Chinese restaurant.

  To what purpose? A short ramble, over stretches of the same ground, a hundred miles or so, to attain some pale afterglow of what was invested in the Saxon army’s forced march to York and Stamford Bridge – and back, almost at once, to Waltham Abbey, Westminster Abbey, so they say, Rochester, Maidstone, Bodiam and along the ridge to Battle. To lock shields, brother to brother. Living and dead. To fight through the long day. To achieve a necessary defeat: corpse-stripping, crow feasts. ‘Everything took the blame,’ Ted Hughes said.

  Our coast walkers, ahead and behind the event, were drunk with loss, severance. The release that comes with the conviction that the bad thing has happened. Will happen again. With worse to follow. So strike out, step up, beat the drum. England was made, not by its victories, its colonial plunder, slave wealth, chemical weapons, broken treaties, oil, wool, battleships, but by heroic defeats. Catastrophes, from the battles of Catraeth and Maldon to the Light Brigade, make for better poetry. In recent times, the writer and artist Kirsten Norrie, in the persona of MacGillivray, honours this tradition, the heady plunge into ‘nutrient slaughter’, with The Nine of Diamonds, a savage repost to Culloden, conjured from tarot cards. ‘I stand behind a frozen waterfall,’ MacGillivray said, ‘comprised of universal blood.’

  When Edith the swan pedalo was hurled back by raging October seas in Hastings, MacGillivray’s keening stilled the waves. Later, she took to the English roads in the black velvet of John Clare’s burnt muse, Mary Joyce. ‘Blood makes me the ghost.’ The colophon of her publisher, Bloodaxe Books, shows a helmeted Viking warrior, shield, axe and apron-skirt, rushing to annihilation.

  VOTE STAY. Those Normans were not for turning. We launch our pilgrimage from a motorway zone occupied by retail-park adventurism and banishment estates, after the French fashion, banlieus for those who are no longer welcome in the centre, in the themed quarters and pseudo-villages of a hustling, digital economy. This benefit-trimmed demographic finds itself embedded alongside the tidy, working-class white folk who moved out to the forest fringes to escape their original inner-city incursions in the 1960s.

  Claudia challenges the status of Edith as mistress. The woman is a queen. She is the mother of a brood of Harold’s children. She is the anima validating a masculine legend. In the marble effigy on the concrete, wedding-cake anvil in St Leonards, the royal couple are a single entity. A serpentine, self-consuming memento mori riding a whitewashed carnival float in a never-ending Day of the Dead.

  Edith, Claudia asserts, was Danish. Julian Rathbone, in his romance, The Last English King, has her coming out of Ireland. The brigand Harold, one of the Godwinson gang, after a bit of bother with Edward the Confessor, is exiled to his raider connections, the Danish settlement in Wexford, where Edith is the wife of a thegn. ‘She remained what she had always been – Harold’s mistress, his concubine.’ This is harsh. Claudia repudiates such casually applied misogyny. It is Edith who holds the story together, just as she collects and reassembles the scattered body parts. The bits she recognises by certain private marks.

  In the necessary purification of blood, Claudia sings. And covers the ground. ‘Travelling only with men has its drawbacks,’ she says, ‘though they are good and brave and have also seen their fair share of blood, from the tales they have been telling me along route. After childbirth, little can shock me when it comes to blood and liquids that surge like oceans within us. Though I would rather take my chances amongst the first warriors in a doomed battle than find myself giving birth again.’

  Facts, slippery at the start of the walk, are completely unhinged by the time the troop invade Battle Abbey. The momentum is with Edith, shroud wife, stitcher of body parts. Claudia Barton, who improvises song as the spirit takes her, is possessed by the mystery of ritual. She picks up the folds of her bridal gown and steps forth. The brute males roll and lumber in her slipstream.

  ‘Shortly after the Battle of Hastings Eadgifu Swanneshais known as Edith Swan-Neck was brought to the field at Senlac by two p
riests of Waltham Abbey,’ claimed the author Carol McGrath.

  ‘It must be true. It’s in the Domesday Book,’ whispers Claudia. Her trump card. As if she had read it. Or written it.

  This is her fairy story: an heiress with dowry of land, Edith the Rich. A wife hand-fasted according to Danish custom. Mother of six: Edith the Fair, bloodless, marble-white. Victim, after the bloody battle, of a burning house, as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. Perhaps, as they say, Edith did return to Ireland. Reverse immigration.VOTE LEAVE. Muzzled cloister-swan. Disobedient daughter of Christ. Pilgrimage-provoking saint: Lady of Walsingham.

  It begins: a pedestrian expedition to tap out the Brexit boundaries of Nigel Farage’s fag-puffing mead-hall England, before the fleet of benefit-scrounging cross-channel winos comes sailing into Pevensey Bay. As gangs of Albanian drug-trafficking white slavers are now reputed to be sneaking ashore on Romney Marsh, at Deal and Camber Sands, on their RIBs, kayaks and leaking air mattresses.

  David, who has been drumming on the rims of barges and the concrete pillars of underpasses, on tyres and cylinders abandoned beneath the M25, turns his attention to bicycles. Out here alongside the reservoirs, where pylons stand proud, cyclists are not such a tsunami of self-righteous entitlement. They are spiky individualists with schemes of their own, affection for territory, and they are prepared to engage with Andrew’s banter. Taking his violin bow from the huntsman’s tote bag, David asks permission to play the spokes of bicycle wheels, to sound the tension. A melancholy drone solo to which Barton sometimes adds her plaintive voice in lament for the dead Harold.

  One cyclist, Sean Sexton, who handed me a card announcing himself as a dealer in ‘Early Cameras & Photographs’, pulled up his red T-shirt to show off the scars of major surgery. The towpath was his lifeline, he said, as he upped his daily quota of miles, returning to health and strength and Pickett’s Lock.