The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  I guessed that Wilf was regurgitating this stuff from the National Front pamphlets that he’d just finished delivering in the local area, and as he rattled on I started to move away. Just then another old boy came down the steps from Bowling Green Lane, effectively cutting off my getaway.

  ‘Hey,’ said Wilf to the newcomer, ‘do you know Tom? George’s son?’

  The new old bloke looked me hard in the eye and scowled. I could tell he thought that I was pulling Wilf’s leg.

  ‘Never seen him before,’ he growled.

  A few days later I was walking a bit further north, down Rosoman Street, past the little Spa Fields park near what used to be the Thomas Wethered pub but is now called the CrapChrome Bar (or something), with its neatly clipped hedges, rich and damp aroma of flowers. I stopped for a couple of minutes taking in the sound of the birds and sniffing the heavily scented air. Some kids were messing about on a big tyre in the play area on the other side of the road.

  ‘Yeah, I can smell it too. It’s urine, innit?’ I turned round. It was Wilf. I smiled weakly. I sensed he had been waiting behind a bush for several days, until someone walked past whom he vaguely recognized. (‘Great it’s George’s son! Time to turn on the charm.’)

  He shook his head. ‘They come out the pubs and they just piss against the wall and into the road. Disgusting.’

  SPRING

  7. The Pot and the Pendulum

  • The Moselle – Hornsey High Street to Tottenham

  Northerners – two lost streams – loads of nurses – Ray Davies of the Kinks – Littlehampton Boys – Alain de Botton no no no – Dickens’s Sex Thriller – a short history of Muswell Hill – ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ – pot and pendulum – Hornsey Church – Wood Green Shopping City – Spurs are rubbish

  When northerners come to London they need to acclimatize first by staying in a halfway house, somewhere that isn’t the sticks but isn’t quite London either. A place where they can kip down for a couple of weeks, get used to the accents, then continue their journey to London proper. Muswell Hill is such a place. Real Londoners don’t bother going there. It’s so far north that it seems as though it might be in Yorkshire. Yet if you stand on top of Muswell Hill, in front of Alexandra Palace, and look down on London you’re somehow fooled into thinking the city is much closer.

  Up here it’s London suburbia-by-numbers, everything knocked together by the same architect in the first half of the last century; a Broadway here with a roundabout there, thirties shops with flats above, piece of piss, lah de lah, time for lunch, do a bit of the Charleston. The Victorians didn’t get a chance to cover it with their gloomy urban vision. Muswell Hill has two underground streams: the Muswell goes to the north on the far side of the hill; the Moselle is much bigger and runs west – east to the south.1 That’s one for locals and one for newcomers.

  As well as lots of northerners, quite excitingly Muswell Hill has the highest proportion of women to men in London. Most of the area was built up in the twenties because of the influx of nurses, who invaded London between the wars and decided to stay. The nurses come out on Mayday and dance around a big pole in Alexandra Park, until they are whisked away one by one by rich city traders.

  Maybe this is why a lot of celebrities choose to live in Muswell Hill. Such as Maureen Lipman and Tom Watt (Lofty out of EastEnders). OK, scrub that theory. Ray Davies of the Kinks was brought up here and is still probably Muswell Hill’s most famous son. Some of his lyrics seem to try to make sense of the rural/suburb/city aspect of Muswell Hill, making him feel like an outsider on the edge of town.

  Got no time for Muswell town

  Gonna look around now

  My old town was good to me

  But oh …

  Guess I’ll say so long now

  Don’t even say a word

  I’ll turn my back and walk away, but oh …

  The day that I’ve seen everything I promise to return

  So long, so long

  Now I’m on my way

  So long, so long

  See you all some day

  So long, so long

  Now I’m on my way

  So long, so long.

  ‘So Long’, Ray Davies of the Kinks

  Music/Rivers critic says: Ray Davies of the Kinks recognizes that Muswell Hill is an epicentre of nurses but says that although he has had a few nurses in his time – and let’s face it, who hasn’t? – he is not ready to settle down with one yet. But it is also a reference to the buried Muswell Stream, which has had enough of being used as a sewer and has retreated far underground. ‘See you all some day’ suggests that the river knows it will one day come back to the surface. The nurses might represent the public health fears that forced the river to be buried, which is why Ray Davies of the Kinks is angry with them.

  Muswell Hill was my halfway house. In 1988 I moved to London and into a house with three other blokes who were also recent arrivals. The Scotsman was an old mate from university who let me camp down on his floor. He’d legendarily walked around the City for weeks in a pinstripe suit two sizes too small, looking for a job. Everyone wished him the best but didn’t hold out too much hope. So when he got a job as a Eurobond dealer at a Japanese bank it was a major triumph for all of us wasters. The bankers had been impressed by the fact that he was a regular in the London Scottish first team. Which was true in the sense that he was Scottish and lived in London.

  Living with the Scotsman was an intensely cultural experience:

  film review – Midnight Express. The Scotsman has got a big lump of dope from a local loudmouth but I tell him it’s not dope, it’s part of a stock cube. We can’t agree so, to resolve our argument, we eat half each. I’m taunting the Scotsman for his naivety and watching the bit where Brad Davis bites someone’s tongue off when the next thing I know I’m lying on the floor laughing my head off and the Scotsman is laughing too and every time one of us opens our mouths the other pisses himself. The film is the funniest one of all time, though I can’t remember what happens.

  My other new flatmates were the Swede and the Canadian. I’ll call them The Chessmen. The Swede was an Edward Fox clone with ultra-blond hair. The Canadian was a thick-set fellow with a big toothy smile and a big selection of heavy knitwear. Together they played chess morning, noon and night. Speed chess, with a clock. Nice blokes. Things started to fall apart in Muswell Hill when The Chessmen got new employment. One evening they took me and the Scotsman out for a drink and told us they were moving to Costa Rica, I presumed for a big chess tournament, but no, it was some kind of property scam, er, I mean business development scheme. The Swede was the sort of person who in a previous era would have been an eccentric Victorian explorer. It was his sort of scheme. Great, we said. Good luck. They asked if we’d like to go with them, but I was too busy writing on my old forties typewriter to bother with trifling concerns like having a job and the Scotsman was too busy earning proper money and shooting up champagne in City bars. A few months later they returned, lucky to have escaped with their lives. Money owed, guns to the head, crazy women who turned into snakes in the bedroom, magic galleons in the street, butterflies everywhere etc. etc.

  The departure of the Chessmen had meant that I moved into a room of my own. It also meant a new flatmate, one of the most fascinating characters I’d ever meet. I’m not sure how we got to know the Businessman – he was a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. Of a friend. He looked like a Brat Pack actor and had his own folk song, which he’d sing at moments of high emotion:

  Littlehampton boys, we are here

  Shag your women and drink your beer.

  La la la la la la la la la.

  The high point of Littlehampton Boy Fascination was when Anneka Rice appeared in Arundel, just up the road from Littlehampton, in that programme she used to do with Kenneth Kendall, him standing in a room with a load of middle-aged saddos and her bouncing around breathlessly in a tight tracksuit. That was avante garde TV in the late eighties. The Business
man was ecstatic.

  ‘Littlehampton boys! Littlehampton boys!’ he screamed at the TV. Anneka went running down a street he knew. ‘Littlehampton boys, Littlehampton! beeeeeooooooooyyyyyeeeees!’ squealed the Businessman. I think he might have ejaculated in his trousers after that, but I had to leave the room. For a while, after that episode, the Businessman became my mentor. We went to the pub and he told me about his theories of personal development.

  ‘Tim, when you shake someone’s hand you should squeeze it really hard to show them who’s boss. It’s called “body language”.’ He even did the ‘rabbit ears’ thing with his fingers. I sipped my beer and nodded silently, happy to be in the presence of a guru. An interesting thing about the Businessman was that he had a powerful animal magnetism. What some might call a strong ‘personal scent’. It may have been a ruse to attract females, but I wanted to talk to him about that. Could he, possibly, do something about it? A friend of mine had stayed in his room, while the Businessman was away drinking beer, singing folk songs and squashing people’s hands in Littlehampton, and nearly asphyxiated from the fumes emitted by one of the Businessman’s shirts.

  The Businessman was quite proud of his system. He’d wear a shirt for a week then hang it up and start wearing another one. When it was time for the first shirt to come back into rotation he’d spray it with aftershave. He’d have three, maybe four, shirts on the go at any one time and slowly the pheromonal odours would build up until it was like a stink glacier, smashing everything in its path. Of course, there’d always be crowds of women hanging around outside, strangely attracted to our flat, though they didn’t know why …

  In the Muswell Hill days, unable to leave behind my northernness, I used to sit and stare at people on tubes trying to make eye contact. People don’t like you looking at them. One evening I was reading Portnoy’s Complaint on the way home, I laughed so much I banged my head against the wall. An old woman sat down next to me and started having a go. ‘My daughter’s dying of cancer. How can you laugh?’

  ’Cos I’m a Muswell Hillbilly boy,

  But my heart lies in Old West Virginia,

  Though my hills are not green,

  I have seen them in my dreams,

  Take me back to those Black Hills,

  That I have never seen.

  ‘Muswell Hillbilly’, Ray Davies of the Kinks

  Music/Rivers critic says: Ray Davies of the Kinks is referring to his unrequited love for Olivia Newton John – West Virginia (she sang ‘Take me Home, Country Road … ) but he is a yokel ‘hillbilly boy’ unversed in the sophisticated ways of the world. ‘I have seen them in my dreams,’ he sings, perhaps suggesting he is using an online dream analyst.

  It was good to be high up on a hill and every morning I’d go for a walk in Alexandra Park and look down on the city. It seemed easy then to fix the idea of London in my head, to encapsulate the city in one thought. Not so easy now, of course. ‘There was London. I lived here. Whatever was going on in London was whatever I was doing.’ So whether the ‘happening’ was drinking ten pints of bitter in the historic Green Man pub at the top of the hill, trying to avoid the eye of the local nutter who had loads of dogs, talked to himself and allegedly owned several machine guns, or whether it meant a shambolic evening of improvisation at Finsbury Park Community Centre or just sitting in watching TV with a pizza, that was the only thing that was happening in London at the time. At the risk of paraphrasing Lou Reed really clumsily, if you’re brought up in a small town you get used to the idea that not much happens. And if it does happen and you witness it there won’t be anything else going on so don’t worry. Fuck. Sorry, Lou Reed.

  And there’s a tap by a reservoir, leading to a stream, that turns into a river estuary that eventually opens to the sea.

  ‘London Song’, Ray Davies of the Kinks

  Music/Rivers critic says: Ray Davies of the Kinks believes that the world needs to be healed, and this can be achieved by everyone visiting the old Mossy Well in Muswell Hill. This was a healing spring and became the subject of pilgrimages from far and wide. The stream could be the Muswell Stream or the Moselle.

  A research day. I walked from Highbury to Muswell Hill library, through Stroud Green and Crouch End. From the top of Crouch Hill the City looked like Manhattan. Well, a bit. At one stage all the traffic was held up because someone had burst a water main – a plume of water rose 20 feet in the air like a geyser.

  Naturally, I hadn’t rung up to check library opening times and naturally the library was closed, so I went down the hill a bit and stood outside our old flat. Everything seemed much neater than I remembered. I decided to go for a quick pint. The old local, the Green Man, had been a pub since 1552 and would have been my normal preference, but I was concerned I might run into Dog Gun Bloke, so I went for a pint in the Swiss Village across the road. I sat with a pint of Guinness, crap R&B playing on the jukebox. The Swiss Village has a deep red carpet with a black pattern (could be William Morris, hard to tell – did he do pub floors?), worn away around the bar area. In 1988 it seemed brash and new.

  I sipped my beer and read a few pages of Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy that I’d picked up in WH Smith’s half an hour earlier when I’d needed to get some change for the phone so I could find out if Highgate library was open, which seems like a bloody expensive phone call when you analyse it, but at the time I thought hey it’s on special offer so I’m making a saving here. A loud Cockney bloke at the bar was telling his mates about the operation he’d just had on his stomach.

  And then something dreadful happened. Something that often happens when you read books that try to make you think. I thought to myself, ‘What is my philosophy of life?’ Arrrgh, fuck. Before I had time to put my hands to my ears and shout ‘LA LA LA LA LA!’ or hurl the book over the bar and leg it out of the pub, I was thinking ‘Hmmm. Bingeing on love, sausages, beer, art and country music while transcending capitalism in some way.’ After some deep breathing and heavy concentration, I managed to get back to my former state of mind, a sort of shallow reminiscence mixed with an inability to concentrate on one thing for very long. And casual eavesdropping. And I relaxed. Aaaahhhhhhhhhhh.

  My mind started to wander again and I looked at a photo screwed onto the wall, a portrait of a Victorian bloke, 1860s or 1870s at a guess, with short hair, a big moustache, clipped beard and fuzzy whiskers. Posing at an angle of 45 degrees he looks slightly startled as if observing something that’s happening out of the shot, say his collection of rare butterflies were being stolen, or the Corn Laws had been unrepealed. He then started to look at me and I went into a stream-of-consciousness thought process, thinking about how lots of travel books these days follow in the footsteps of some intrepid explorer from the past. Particularly if it’s a posh Victorian. And you’re far more likely to get a book reviewed in the big papers if it’s a biography of a dead posh person (preferably from the eighteenth or nineteenth century). Maybe this is because the descendants of said posh Victorian are now working in the literary pages of the press. Now, that’s a good idea. I decided his name was Charles Foster (‘C. F.’) Talgutt and, in the space of about seventeen years in the mid-nineteenth century, he was almost solely responsible for the covering over of London’s rivers. Talgutt had hated running water ever since a rabies scare he experienced in India. Talgutt was a vicar’s son from the Midlands who had moved to London in the 1880s after a failed love affair with a wealthy landowner’s daughter. He became a Victorian renaissance man – a muscular Christian who liked the ladies, martial arts and visionary writings, who wrote bad poetry and did mediocre watercolours. A writer, poet, fighter and musician. He sailed a boat through Clissold Park, boxed Jem Mace, the Swaffham Gypsy, was a friend of Dickens, had affairs with actresses. One of his most strongly held views was that a man should not ejaculate during intercourse. Connected to his phobia about running water, perhaps. He did have a theory – that the semen went to a large storage container in the afterlife, which would come in handy when y
ou eventually pegged it as all the other old duffers would be pretty much spermless by then. Dickens was going to write a novel about it but instead wrote Little Dorrit. Shame. Talgutt was a mystery man. He hadn’t produced much work but he had somehow achieved mythic status. He was seen as a philosopher- poet, and various Talgutt societies had sprung up in Ireland, Britain and America. Even in France there had been an article in Paris Match entitled ‘La Philosophé de Talgutt. Qu’est ce que c’est et qui est il?’ His poetry was beginning to be taught in universities and schools. Maybe, though, Talgutt existed before, not before the nineteenth century, but before in my head. I did invent what literary critics call a madey-uppy character a while back when I started writing a novel about Lincolnshire, set in the nineteenth century, with the working title of Dickens Sex Thriller. Dickens visited Lincolnshire a few times and slagged it off. He had an un-named travelling companion who got into scrapes with local ne’er-do-wells. Dickens Sex Thriller got shelved when I gave my old Amstrad to my brother and bought an Apple Mac. The Amstrad disks were incompatible with any other computer and I couldn’t afford to transfer all the data – thirty quid a pop from some little bedroom computer shop in Hanwell. I still have them, somewhere. Maybe I could do this rivers project as a novel from the point of view of a Victorian who was obsessed with covering up the rivers (for whatever psychological reasons). As well as the main story, the book would contain pictures of Talgutt, his drawings, old maps, old photos, his inventions and old posters.

  I had another sip of my beer. No, it’s a rubbish idea. I had to kill off Talgutt before this went any further.

  London is a metropolis of open pustules, running sores that blight the fair city’s visage. A foul stench permeates the surrounding areas, a disgusting wetness. How grand it would be to walk down the course of the evil Fleet river and not be waylaid by the rotten fluid.