The Groundwater Diaries
Page 14
I walk round into Pimlico Gardens. It’s much warmer now. Half-naked lasses lie spread-eagled on the grass. There’s a statue to William Huskisson, MP for Morpeth and President of the Board of Trade, whose fifteen minutes of fame came in 1830 when he became the first man ever to be killed in a rail accident – he was run over by Stephenson’s Rocket during the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester Railway.
It really is the back of beyond here. Why did they build these shit roads right on the river, when any urban planner worth his salt would have made it into a continuous market of indie record stalls, good pubs and cheap second-hand Paul Smith clothes.
Westminster Abbey
Dear Sir/Madam
I’m currently writing a book about London’s underground rivers, one of which, the Tyebourne (or Tyburn), used to flow very close to Westminster Abbey. Is it known if there was any significance in the fact that the Abbey was located near such a stream?
Yours faithfully,
Tim Bradford
Subject: the river Tyebourne
I am not sure about any particular significance of having a river around the Abbey boundary other than the fact that obviously the monks would have needed running water to power their mill, to flow into their fishponds, to flush the sewers and drains etc. around the monastery. As the river and its tributaries ran on three sides of what was known as ‘Thorney Island’ this was very convenient. The other side was bounded by the Thames. Drinking water was piped by conduit from Hyde Park and St James’s Park.
But maybe the water was for more than fishponds. So if, as some dowsers have claimed, religious sites’ spiral energy lines (they call them dragons) appear over underground water, over wells and streams because of energy, plus all that ace chanting from the monks, it might add to the divine feeling of a site. What do you reckon?
There is a theory that the masons who built the great cathedrals believed that the energy of moving water could be accumulated in other material and that people could act as capacitors for this charge. ‘Their position near water streams support their standing energy contact. The water pipes below churches were able to regulate energy of the matter and the building by numerous megalithic constructions.’ (Cosmic Energy, Miroslav Provod.)
It was now time to do some dowsing so I make my way back to the abbey. I find a spot under a tree in front of the church and crack open my can of Tennent’s Super. I’d been playing around with the optimum dosage for a while and had come to the conclusion that one can was about right for dowsing purposes. I take some deep breaths then have three or four swigs and almost straight away start to enter the altered Superbrew state known as urrrrrrgggghhh. I begin to observe characters at the north side of the abbey. A group of Japanese tourists talking very loudly become medieval monks chanting in strange harmonies. A team of red-shirted scouts are a band of knights. A statuesque blond woman walking past in slow motion in a long black dress is a twelfth-century princess with alabaster skin, tall and proud with long flowing hair, on her way to give Henry II a good seeing to. The bloke with the 8th Army shorts and Hawaiian shirt, sitting under a tree with a can of beer and eyes rolling around in his head, is a crazy fool.
On the face of the abbey are a few figures, some knights, a couple of bishops, some kings – a giant’s chess set. They’re all having a right laugh, vogueing, holding poses and bitching about the tourists.
Thomas à Becket: Look at the fat-arsed Yanks. (Sigh.) Don’t you think fashions get worse?
King Richard: I don’t know why they cleaned us up. I preferred being black.
Henry V: That’s like that Steve Martin film.
Thomas à Becket: The Man With Two Brains – I like that, especially since I had mine kicked in.
Henry V: No, The Jerk.
Thomas à Becket: So I got it wrong – there’s no need to get personal.
Henry V: It’s a film. Called The Jerk.
Richard: So it’s about someone who didn’t want to be sandblasted?
Henry V: No, he was white but thought he was black.
Richard: But I am black. Or at least I was.
Everyone else on the lawns is drinking foaming frappucinos or Coca Cola. I’m the only patriotic drinker here, with my Tennent’s of Glasgow beverage. Brewed since 1556, served to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army just before they, er … lost.
And then it’s time travel time. I walk across the lawn and lean against the cold wall of the abbey and try to go back to the era of Edward the Confessor, to get some tips as to how they built the original abbey on such marshy ground.
Here’s how it works. The Superbrew has kicked in. Listen to the traffic noise, then imagine your ears getting wider and wider apart until they’re about half a mile away from each other. Then you concentrate the centre of the mind that’s left, and try to imagine what the scene would be like at a particular time. Then imagine that you have two little toggles, one on each side of your brain, that you can push forward to go into the future and back to travel into the past. Slam them back into overdrive then slow down as you reach 1200 so you can finetune it to arrive at in the 1050’s.
But I’ve reversed too quickly and gone back too far, to a time when Thorney Island is little more than a dark, desolate swamp. All I can see is a broken tree, dead, with two branches and some men with beards underneath it discussing the weather. Maybe they have antlers on their head. Are they worshipping the horned god, who is manifested in the branches of the river? Or is it a pagan stag night? Can they see me? I take another sip and am blasted back to the present.
I open my eyes. The red scouts have become blue scouts, now there are twice as many of them and they’re all fat ZZ Top lookalikes.
‘Religion is the Special Brew of the masses,’ says Karl Marx.
‘Get the beers, in beardy!’ replies Engels. I throw some bits of food to the pigeons and suddenly I am surrounded by birds, a sandwich bar St Francis of Assisi. A huge semicircle surrounds me. Outside that is a semicircle of people.
Time to have a bit of peace and quiet in the abbey. But – God – it’s now £6 to get in. I say God. God? He’s not listening. Too busy counting the readies. So I sit for a while and stare at the can of Tennent’s. The beer is still playing tricks on me and the circles on the front look like the lines of energy emanating from the river. The little ‘put-your-litter-in-the-bin’ logo seems to represent a man dowsing over a well with some kind of rectangular force-field in between them. And the big red T in the middle is like a dowsing rod. Or a Druid’s oak tree. Or a bloodstained cross.
When I was a kid a mate of mine wrote a letter to the Queen asking something about the swans in Lincoln. She wrote back, of course, saying, ‘Yus. Ay doo own the swans. It is a craym for inywun to kill a swun.’ etc. At the time I thought his letter was stupid and arselicky (as well as a way of getting free publicity in our local paper for the pub the kid’s father owned), but I now, with the benefit of hindsight, realize it was a piece of inspired communication. Now it was time for me to do the same. I felt there was only one person who could sort this out for me. I needed to correspond with someone high up who might be an expert on the Tyburn. Someone – a sort of celebrity, perhaps – who grew up near its course, and would be in the know about the various histories involved. I decided to write to Ed, Prince Wessex of Windsor, head honcho at Ardent Productions (TV company) and former inhabitant of Buckingham Palace.
FAO: Ed Wessex
Dear Ed
I’m currently writing a book about underground rivers in London, called The Groundwater Diaries. The idea started out as research into a local stream which runs pretty much underneath my house in Highbury.
Recently I walked the course of the Tyburn from Hampstead/ Belsize Park area to the Thames and, as I’m sure you’re aware, it splits almost directly underneath Buck Palace before going onto the river in three branches near Westminster Abbey, Whitehall and the Tachbrook Estate.
I’m writing to you to find out if you know of any information regarding the Royal Famil
y and the river and also whether you personally have any memories of the Tyburn while you were growing up (floods, strange noises, dampness, mad dreams, etc.).
Yours sincerely,
Tim Bradford
He didn’t reply.
Later in the summer I picked up a felt-tip and traced the course of the Tyburn, with all its heads and branches, onto the back of a bank statement, then asked my daughter what it looked like. A bird, she said. Hmm. It looked more like a short-legged big-lipped rabbit to me.
Once again, I decided to embark on an expedition that involved walking a tributary of the Tyburn which used to flow from London Zoo and joined the main stream near the Regent’s Park ponds. I took along a crack team of research assistants. Cathleen (two), her cousins Amy (seven) and Hannah (five), my brother Toby (thirty-five) and my sister-in-law Michelle (thirtyish). Well, when I say ‘walked the other tributary’, I mean ‘went to the zoo and had chips for lunch’. At the end of the walk I asked them all what was their favourite animal:
Cathleen: The lion. And the monkey. And the gorilla. And the monkey.
Amy: The lion.
Hannah: Nothing.
Toby: The gorilla.
Michelle: The giraffe.
Me: The buff-cheeked gibbon.
Film Idea: The Underground Prince (maybe a Disney kids’ cartoon)
Westminster Abbey. Aliens say Tyburn is a power river. Royals go to live underground after revolution. Become reptiles again as predicted by people like David Icke. Meanwhile, in Baker Street Super Sherlock Holmes is a Japanese-anime-style cartoon.
‘Put you Watson. Kung fu.’
Dr Watson has a magic Beatles plate. Meanwhile, Moriarty is in the tunnel of the Tyburn singing Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’. Holmes has a bath and snorts charlie from the cover of a violin case. Moriarty appears from the plughole and tries to strangle Holmes. Big martial arts fight scene, lots of jumping in the air.
It’s not all bad. Prince Edward is a goody who is on the side of the people. At the end they go back to their planet. Like the end of ET. Edward has been befriended by a little boy, modern version of Tiny Tim. Called Timmy. He is injured but makes it back to the last escape pod. Tearjerker ending. Edward played by Brad Pitt. Sophie by Kate Winslet. Holmes by Alan Rickman. Watson by John Sessions.
London Stories 7: Our Man in a Panama Hat
* * *
I was very skint when a woman at an employment agency said, ‘Do you have experience of working in a property office?’ so although I heard myself say ‘no’ what actually came out of my mouth was ‘yes’. I was given the job of Sort-of-Surveyor.
‘You’ll have to wear a suit,’ she said.
‘No problem,’ I replied. On the first day I turned up in an Oxfam suit, Panama hat and pineapple kipper tie to the offices of London Transport Estates where I was given my own desk and a little tape recorder. I talked into the tape recorder, ideas for novels and songs, and then gave the tape to some nice girls in the basement who typed up my thoughts as letters and gave them back to me so I could sign them and send them out. And I travelled around London, in my Panama hat and be-pineappled kipper tie with my special LTE tube pass, visiting property owners, sorting out boundary disputes, pinpointing the exact location of watercress beds, and talking some more into my little tape recorder. Then one day, a couple of months into my work, after we’d been to the pub (I think to celebrate the settling of yet another boundary dispute between two MOT garages under the arches near Latimer Road), the boss said ‘Ha ha have you really had experience in a property office?’ and I said ‘Ha ha – no,’ and the next day I was told that ha ha ha the job had ended.
But because I’d helped the LTE cricket team when they were short of players by drafting in various Lincolnshire refugee friends and members of my family – in fact given them Rob, my half-Trinidadian fast bowler gerbil-breeding cousin who was destined to play for the West Indies at cricket until he was cruelly relocated to the wilds of small market town Lincolnshire – they took pity on me and offered me alternative employment. Superintendent of Shepherds Bush and South Harrow markets. This was a big job with a lot of responsibility. I had to wear a suit without a Panama hat and pineapple kipper tie and carry around a big leather briefcase, collect the rents and sort out problems. I am no good at sorting out my own problems so I won’t be much good at sorting out other people’s, especially hard-bitten market traders’. But I didn’t say this out loud because my big mouth had already lost me one job.
They took away my little tape recorder and in its place gave me an assistant. Afdab, a middle-aged Moroccan with a pencil moustache. Afdab was eager to please and would constantly be bringing me mugs of tea – a pint mug with the teabag, water, milk and sugar all in together and generally flapping about in a late-seventies-sitcom manner. And he’d turn up at the little bullet-proof window of my office saying, ‘Tim boss. Problem.’ Actually when they’d first told me it was bullet-proof glass I’d laughed and said. ‘You’re joking.’ and the boss had laughed back and said, ‘Ha ha no I’m not.’
On my first morning there was a huge bag of frozen chicken drumsticks outside the office with a note from one of the stallholders saying he hoped I enjoyed my ‘stay’ at the market. What was I supposed to do with those? I’d been told not to accept presents so had to decline.
Later on, the psychic palm reader came to pay his rent and offered me a tenner to ‘have a drink on me’. What had I done to deserve this? Or perhaps I hadn’t done it yet. I thanked him for his kind offer, but told him that I was paid a good enough wage by London Transport (a lie). But then he should have known that already.
But I wasn’t much good at the market stall business, particularly the wearing a suit-being bossy-getting up early on a Saturday morning bit. So after about six weeks I handed in my notice. On the last day I left in a hurry and left eight grand in a black zip-up holdall on the train. Noooooooooo!!! I screamed in slow motion and ran back to the train, just catching it as it was about to pull out of Hammersmith Station.
But when I told them at the office, they just laughed.
1 Only joking.
9. Danish Punk Explosion Dream
Some Danish punk bands – mad lyrics – letter to Morten – Morten replies – more Danish punk
‘The Danish monsterquartet the Burnouts is putting the rock’n’roll into the punkrock and they bring loud’n’noizy two-chord action filled rock down to the basics, showing you rocksters what it’s all about. Energetic, raw and dirty entertainment you can trust. Out from the dark Copenhagen underground scene they come flying on a shimmering, flaming turborocket.’1
Pooper scooper
Fast, melodic and Danish punkrock/skatecore.2
De Knòtne Hòttentòtter3
‘Actually it all started in seventh grade when Kasper wanted to make a band because … well because it would be cool. Kasper told his friend Laust about the idea, and there you go a new band was formed. Neither Kasper nor Laust could really play on anything (ANYTHING???), but they both wanted to play the guitar. After working hard and saving money they could afford to buy their first electric guitars (Kasper actually didn’t work at all, he got some money as a present and bought a guitar with them). Kasper and Laust figured that they needed a drummer, so they picked up some bum called Martin in a club (actually they knew the guy, and he wasn’t really a bum, anyway). The three guys now needed a bass player, so they had about five people coming to Martin’s place at the same time to find one. But hell no, it didn’t work at all so they decided that they didn’t REALLY need a bass player.’
‘Boyfriend’
She’s got a boyfriend, i thought i were the only one.
Of course i knew that i wasn’t, she just made me believe i were.
Find the guy, crush his head
Find The Guy, Make Him Dead.
The Hangdorks
‘Balls’
I don’t know why i feel the way i do
even though i try i can’t talk to you
<
br /> i hate myself ‘cause i’m way too shy
i feel even worse now as the days go by
I wish i had the balls to talk to you
but like any normal guy i only got two
I wish i had the balls to talk to you –
but like any normal guy i only got two.
I wrote to the editor of a Danish music fanzine:
To: morten@
Subject: The Origins of Danish Punk
Hi Morten
I love Danish punk music. Unfortunately I haven’t actually heard any of the music yet, it’s more the idea I’m into.
A long time ago (1982) I nailed my copy of Bullshit Detector Volume 1 (Crass compilation album) to a plank of wood and sailed it off down our local river in the English East Midlands. Eventually, I surmised, the record would make its way to the River Humber and then the North Sea.
I now realise that the record must have floated all the way to Denmark, was picked up by a fisherman or farmer who, on hearing the music was inspired enough to sell all his possessions, buy a guitar and some amps and start off a high-energy Scandinavian punk movement.
How close is this version to the actual historical truth? Has anybody in Denmark heard Bullshit Detector (Volume 1)?
Yours sincerely,
Tim Bradford