The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  All these walks intersected, east to west, north to south, at Greenwich. David Aylward drummed incessantly. Claudia sang her melancholy songs of defeat and love-beyond-the-grave. Jem Finer, who dealt in recordings intended to run for a thousand years, gathered up acoustic footsteps to process on his computer. The refugees did not drum or sing, but their walk, by the hard miles achieved, the nights sleeping on schoolroom floors, became much more than a worthy concept. I was a tourist among them, covering ground where my fictional self, Norton, began his career, by eavesdropping on the murder of Christopher Marlowe.

  ‘Norton wants to be out on the river. Wants to be free of London, all the trash of history. Voices, whispers, busking ghosts, comic-strip chimeras.’ Ground over which the Canterbury pilgrims walk and re-walk their stories.

  We were heading for St Mary’s Church in Deptford, the grave of the Pacific islander, Prince Lee Boo, brought to London as an exotic import, left to die. David Herd’s brochure said: ‘Reports on Detention and prison work. Eyewitness accounts of Greece and the Calais jungle. Free vegetarian lunch.’ I fell into conversation with a man from Ghana who said that he had never learned to type, but that he was applying for a job as a computer programmer at the University of Greenwich. There are around eighty walkers, one for every mile they have covered. Herd, with a smile, tells me that yesterday’s march from Gravesend felt like being transported into ‘a post-Brexit Downriver’. There are new Silbury Hill mounds on our path, bad public art, viewing platforms to showcase Canary Wharf and a willed destruction of the old ley lines, sightlines, paths of desire.

  Before I perform again, in a small park, I listen to a Tamil deportee, trapped for sixteen years in legal process, held in limbo on £35 a week, which is restricted to a card that can only be used in certain approved stores. But he is calm, resigned, and he will not give up the ghost. They bring out a birthday cake for a man brave enough to blow the whistle on a gang of people traffickers.

  ***

  Those future memories are with me, as much as the stories I am telling Claudia about gardening days in Limehouse, as we climb towards the statue of General Wolfe on Greenwich Hill. David pointed out areas where ancient trees had been lost in preparing the ground for the equestrian events of the London Olympics. He claimed distant blood kinship with Wolfe, the man who introduced freemasonry into North America. And he told us to experience, at this notable viewpoint, the surge of energy from the ley line running down the broad avenue from Blackheath.

  We detoured to take in a set of rough mounds that our guide glossed as Iron Age earthworks, set beside an established trackway. When he struck up on the drum, security moved in. The two officers, one male, one female, were sufficiently impressed by David’s antiquarianism to allow the troop free passage; to play on, with muffled discretion, while the park guardians lockstepped out of earshot. We celebrated by positioning Claudia, in her wedding weeds, in the sunken bath reserved for queens of England. The red rose tattoo on the inside of her right wrist, swollen with resting blood, came to life and sprouted in a bangle of thorns.

  We had crossed the river, come far enough from Harold’s Essex tomb for the battlefield dead, down by the coast, to decide how they would channel our marchers. The warrior king insinuated his cussed stubbornness of purpose – always moving, always plotting – beneath Andrew’s felt helmet. Claudia was the lament of Edith Swan-Neck, ensuring that councils of itinerant males respected her status and her saintly afterlife: ‘All this, a medewe wete with dropes celestyall.’ David’s lineage went back much further than Wolfe, to the minstrel Taillefer, the juggling swordsman who rode out in front of the Norman army to spill his Chanson and mock the enemy.

  Brief acknowledgement having been made, as we passed over Blackheath, to Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt (war taxes, inequitable governance), we picked up the pace, and reversed the journey of the disaffected 1381 rebels by marching towards Kent. Saturday morning coffee sippers, alfresco on the narrow pavements of Blackheath Village, looked askance at this unmannerly intervention of freakishly dressed individuals grouped around a deserted bride, without proper charitable accreditation, robotically following the drumbeat of the man in the orange jumpsuit.

  Suburbs unspooled into ribbon-development respectability. Parks and proud oases around persistent rivers like the Quaggy broke the tedium of our advance on Chislehurst. Somewhere in the neurasthenic tranquillity of Bromley, a French woman, with whom Andrew engaged in rapid-fire Franglais banter, was holding a garage sale in her front garden. I came away with a bag of three-legged cows and genetically modified sheep, pigs, bears, elephants and albino tigers, to populate the abandoned garages and unoccupied Euro-funded farms I’d already scavenged from the Hackney streets for my grandchildren. And for myself, I couldn’t resist a toy that might have charmed André Breton: the severed head of a fox, to which had been grafted a pair of binoculars. By tweaking the beast’s right ear, it was possible to view a carousel of surrealist images. A generic Alpine scene of transhumance. A Judex figure in a catacomb much like the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. The post-apocalyptic North Downs as barren as the Sahara. A dog with floppy ears against a night sky. A farm hut surrounded by sinister canisters. Three figures gathered around a grave. I – of course – interpreted the sequence as a prevision of our walk. Andrew reckoned it was a marketing spin-off from Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. Closer inspection revealed that the merchandise had been produced in China for the McDonald’s burger franchise.

  The walk became personal, an exercise in edited autobiography for our captain. The past, which he can butt against but not improve, makes him melancholy. ‘One can imagine everything, predict most things,’ Andrew said, ‘save how low we can all sink. My outward movement is indeed a return to the now with potent hindsight.’ He reminisced about family and a runaway brother who slept rough in the holly bushes beside a pond – while we feasted on preserved beetroot balls and miniature pork pies, and dribbled over Co-op cheeses and tubs of messy coleslaw.

  Here was the school in which the sturdy infant Kötting pulled himself up to the window to gaze on his first love, the Mary Joyce of his immortal longings: a never-aging sprite called Philippa Wells. Here were his primitive initials gouged in redbrick in a prescient gesture of artistic vandalism. Here was the sturdy oak where he buried the placenta of his beloved daughter. ‘In the years since I have come back to it,’ Andrew said, ‘the tree has grown to become part of me. It is held together by memories, even as I am falling apart.’ He shed a single tear. Lost, for a breath or two, in former times, he clutched a reproduction whalebone box containing a model of the embracing Harold and Edith from the Bulverhythe plinth. A trickle of blood ran down Kötting’s self-wounded cheek, as if he had been scratched by the painted thorn on Claudia’s wrist.

  The second day’s tramp ended at a busy roundabout at Green Street Green, on the edge of Orpington, with a hallucinatory lurch into a tease of country lanes that carried us back, after thirty minutes’ slog, to a point twenty yards from where we’d started. Already I could hear the hissing derision of the M25 as it subverted the Pilgrim’s Way.

  The only VOTE REMAIN placard I’d registered in this phoney-war period was back in Hackney, propped against the head of Buddha in the basement window of a Victorian villa. The only BRITAIN STRONGER IN EUROPE sticker was pasted on a green recycling bin at the end of my road.

  Leaving the peaceful village church at Chevening behind, a necessary detour to pay our respects to the memorial stones for Andrew’s father (subject of his Deadad project), and his paternal grandparents, we ran up against the first major white-on-red VOTE LEAVE board. It was propped against a rustic fence like a border warning. When we processed over the multiple lanes of unseeing M25 traffic, we were committing ourselves to another country. Jem’s cart bleeped a warning as it bounced over the uneven surface. There were hard uphill miles ahead to the Sackville park at Knole. Anonymous Bosch found a shop selling gluten-free cakes with which to celebrate his birthday. Andrew encouraged ch
ildren in the care of a distinctly Europhile young woman in a grey Jean-Luc Godard Masculin Féminin sweatshirt to make felt-tip additions to the primitive art on his baggy suit.

  With the dappled acres of Knole, deer lying in the cool shadows of oak avenues blatantly tarting for heritage TV serials, long straight paths, and the descent by tangled hollow way to Samuel Palmer’s visionary Underriver, we became fugitive figures in a particular kind of English pastoral. Footpaths opened up without the blessing of our various and contradictory maps. We meandered by quiet fields, groves of flopping gunnera, remnants of haunted woodland, into the outskirts of Tonbridge.

  In the golden hour, we emerged alongside Tonbridge School, where the privileges of private education were demonstrated by immaculate cricket pitches that rivalled anything in the professional game. Delivering a talk at this school, back in 2015, I was astonished not only by the well-equipped theatre and the boutique studio in which an interview was filmed, but by the precocious intelligence of 15-year-old pupils who had taken the trouble to read my books before the event.

  Between Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells, we cut across the devastation of deadline-abused road improvement schemes and through buttercup meadows in which Claudia might have been expected to break out with a life-enhancing aria from The Sound of Music. But, as the musty breath of Edith is cold on her neck, she sings of loss: husband, lord, land. ‘We’ll sing for your soul, these evil days.’

  Our joshing, jaunty walk darkened beneath the rounded redbrick arches of the 1845 Southborough railway viaduct, where a legend in purple capitals had been sprayed: JACK DAVIS GOT RAPPED UNDER THIS BRIDGE. Had Jack been the subject of a boastful sexual assault? Or had he been rapped at by ravers, tortured with loops of disco banality familiar to Guantánamo detainees?

  Soon afterwards our footpath disappeared into a deserted farm from which there was no obvious exit. Even the convex roadside mirror marking a dangerous bend had been stolen, leaving a dull pewter shield. NO LIVESTOCK WILL BE ACCEPTED DIRTY!!! The sheds and outhouses stank of slaughter. We found a pen of sheep crammed together, bleating helplessly, untended, in an open barn. We splashed through puddles of blue disinfectant and yellow shit. A point of absolute confusion: beyond the city and far from the shore. ‘London was, but is no more.’

  Royal Tunbridge Wells is taken as the exemplar of a certain strand of spa-town respectability. We felt its undisguised hostility. Our access road trenched through a yawn of car showrooms and forecourts in which gleaming vehicles were penned as close as the sheep. MOTORLINE: BUSINESS AS USUAL. Waxed Skodas come with a self-satisfied number plate: APPROVED.

  The uphill miles of colonised estates to be negotiated before we struck out for Wadhurst, with David in the vanguard, drumming for his life on blind corners, had been freshly planted with bungalows struggling for air like those shrublings in tubes beside new bypass schemes: a cardinal procession of VOTE LEAVE signs. A rally for the not-so-silent majority. When I paused to photograph our knackered troop, on their dumb crocodile ascent, with one of the scarlet signs in the foreground, a large lady shot from her house to warn me off. Her discreet advertisement, the size of the widest pub-screen TV, was not intended for unapproved consumption. It stood on private property. How she and her shaven-headed partner, hovering with menace in the doorway, intended to vote was their own affair. I had misunderstood the sign’s function. It was an order: fuck off.

  At the summit of the slope, more signs loomed over brutally barbered privet. They twinkled like the boasts of estate agents out of picture-book English gardens. Peter and Jane Explain Brexit.

  David’s drumming never faltered, the bride never missed her step, but the road into Wadhurst was the longest mile and a half I have ever encountered. We were encouraged by the friendly interest taken in our expedition, and especially Claudia’s part in it, by the cooks and waiters who congregated outside an Indian restaurant. They were quite prepared to follow in our wake with trays of takeaway curry. More than any of the disgruntled – and, so they felt, disenfranchised – native villagers (retirees from city and colonies), the tandoori chefs recognised our ritual intent, a last-ditch celebration of eccentricity; the wedding procession to the battlefield, before a divorce from reality.

  There were more adventures ahead, and many more red hoardings of uniform dispensation in the tidy hamlets of Kent and East Sussex. This election would be a close-run affair, with Scots and metropolitans slanting one way and the rest, stirred by tabloid-inspired visions of unlicensed immigrant hordes, Magna Carta liberties lost to faceless European bureaucrats, opting out. This time the Normans were going to lose: Brexit meant Brexit. Nobody, apart perhaps from Odo the crow, knew where we were going or how long it would take to get there. But we all smelt meat on the smoke. Our throats were red with dust. Whichever way the plebiscite falls for plebs, peasants, drones, rentiers, bishops and bottlemen, we can’t leave this place. We can’t revise the human contract. There is no small print. ‘The croaking of ravens at their feast,’ Claudia sang. ‘In thousands they lay, corpses mangled and torn. One of them yours.’

  The site of Harold’s fatal battlefield was still in dispute. Andrew tried to muster enthusiasm for a group portrait on a busy roundabout that flattered some recent advocacy for Senlac Hill. Now we understood how wrecked those shield-locking warriors must have been, after a forced march to York and back. The military commanders, the piratical Godwinson siblings and their allies, rode between engagements, and then parked the horses.

  We were welcomed into the single-street tourist town by a yellow AA sign offering: BOWS, ARROWS & BATTLE TACTICS. After protracted mobile-phone negotiations, we were given permission to round off our expedition with a photograph at Harold’s other monument, inside the grounds at Battle Abbey. Escaping from a lavishly stocked giftshop, we were confronted by a flustered female official who immediately withdrew the original offer. The commemorative slab was covered in tarpaulin, scaffolding was in evidence. English Heritage do not permit images of scaffolding. Many of the other buildings were also forbidden, while restoration work took place.

  Odo cackled. Odo preened. ‘And Crow yawned – long ago / He had picked that skull empty.’ I wedged him on a stick and he bestrode the hill of slaughter like the triumphant symbol of a Roman legion. The crow was the Geiger counter for the ionized radiation of this bloody shambles. He could sniff out a succulent eyelid at fifty paces. He preached merciless annihilation in his best dog Latin.

  The black negation of the crow. The distressed white of the bereaved bride tasked with assembling the scattered limbs of her husband and lover. The silenced troubadours.

  Hopelessly lost, challenged in our communal identity and purpose by acceptance of the coming horror, we straggled over the battlefield, where no physical evidence of battle was ever found. Harold, I concluded, was an Anglo-Saxon Osiris, his body parts distributed across the country. Some said he was buried under a cairn of stones at the shoreline. A mound on which, Viking fashion, Duke William climbed to assert his sovereignty. Bosham laid claim to assorted limbs and Waltham Abbey took the head: a peeled autopsy skull-lantern with lidless eyes. Later legends had the king surviving the battle and living out the rest of his days as an anchorite in Chester.

  According to the Dr Who Annual for 1985, Harold was healed of his wounds. He took on the convenient identity of Hereward the Wake in order to fight a guerrilla campaign against paperless invaders. According to Alan Moore, in a speculative essay called ‘Wake the Dead’, published for Arts Lab Northampton, Harold is ‘a barebones signifier of resistance’. The sacrificed hero tried on many masks. ‘He can be everyone.’ Including a Fenland Straw Bear. A felt-capped performance artist. Boris Johnson. Nigel Farage. Or a carved lump of weathered marble in the corner of a municipal park, between the toilets and the bowling green.

  A Siberian wind nips as we circle the sculpture of Harold and Edith Swan-Neck in St Leonards, before laying out our battered tributes: the whalebone box, the roadside chaplets of native weeds and fox bones. I
notice, as I push against the breeze on the promenade, that the laminated map of Normandy, which stood for years decorating a car park and tempting us across the Channel, has been removed in a gesture of intent, leaving nothing but two bare posts.

  A few days later we heard that three Iranian men had been rescued by the border force vessel HMC Seeker just off Hastings. ‘The group will now be processed,’ a spokesman said.

  But this is just the beginning of our understanding of what we are giving up. We are moving into an era of strategic postponements, professional obfuscations and six-figure-salaried providers of counter-narratives. Politicians are falling on their rubber swords. David Cameron, who believed in setting policy by the whims of public opinion, has been undone by that public’s perversity. He’s gone, Cotswolded into a premature afterlife of well-rewarded speechmaking. Boris Johnson, who believes in himself, and nothing but himself (VOTE LEAVE), and who championed Brexit to see if he could, is now Foreign Secretary. Teresa May (or May Not), whose rise was as subtle as John Major in drag, is giving nothing away: as slowly as she can. A Schrödinger cat, simultaneously living and dead, May is the form mistress of equivocation. She staggers into a booby-trapped future on unsuitable heels, trying to keep the political agenda to serious topics: expensive leather trousers (her own) versus the designer handbags (of her critics). The real story, we now know, votes being counted and recriminations begun, is called THE SIX PROUD WALKERS.

  There were six of us on the road. But the road doesn’t stop in Hastings. And it doesn’t vanish into the sea.

  In the teeth of the Brexit news, we were travelling on, by crawling backwards down what Alan Moore locates as a psychic trench between Northampton and London. It was agreed among us, journey done, that we should bring the bones of our story to the Northampton cave in which Moore produced all those books that became films that put legions of protesters and occupiers on the streets of the world’s cities in V for Vendetta masks. Unmoving, steady in purpose, Alan was a growling, chuckling analogue oracle. ‘I believe politics must always be driven by culture, not the other way round,’ he said.