The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  Public information: The cat we got to replace Fred was called Willie. That was my great-grandad’s name as well. One of the Countesses of Oxford was married to Edward de Vere who, allegedly, wrote all of Willie Shakespeare’s plays. Spooky.

  1 In the Find Your Porn Name game, in which you use the name of a favourite pet and your mother’s maiden name to find what you would have been called in the sex industry, I always used Morecambe. Morecambe Sowden has a certain English end-of-the-pier raciness, I feel.

  SUMMER

  13. Acton Baby!

  • Stamford Brook – Wormwood Scrubs to Hammersmith

  Hogarth dream – confessions – Weedon and Arthur – three streams in one – Hammer Man – St Elmo’s Fish Bar – Ravenscourt Park – Hammersmith Creek – ‘Rule Britannia’ – Hitchcock’s The Birds

  Dream: I was travelling around the dark cobbled streets of eighteenth-century London with the illustrator William Hogarth. ‘Fancy a drink?’ he said. ‘I know a good bar.’ I followed him through slums and winding lanes, then up some rickety stairs to an old wooden shack. Hogarth (whose face looked as though it had been drawn by himself) rapped on the door until a light came on and a tired-looking landlord came to the door. He led us through to the bar (behind which was his bed and living quarters), and made us some cocktails. It was dark and sleazy inside. As we sipped our drinks, the bar started to fill up and a George-Melly-style jazz band began to play. Then Hogarth took the mike and started to sing.

  Confessional writing is big business these days. Reveal a big secret, something bad that happened to you, and people love it. I want a bit of that My Life Used To Be Shit action. Here goes.

  I lived in Acton. Phew, that feels better already. It was only for three days but it’s stayed with me. I’d just returned to London after a year in South America and after kipping on friends’ floors for a while I just sort of ended up in Acton. It was a small B&B which seemed miles from anywhere and certainly miles from London. Now I’m going back, on a river walk. I’m very excited. I’ve got two books in front of me. One is Ludgate Monthly 1893–4, which my parents kindly bought me as a birthday present to help with my research. At the back is an advert for Mellins Food Biscuits, ‘for infants and invalids’. Lots of poor portraits of men and women staring out at the camera and looking startled at the fast onrushing twentieth century. And photos of two of the top comic actors of the day, Mr Weedon Grossmith and Mr Arthur Nelstone. The other book is the Oxford Dictionary of London Place Names, edited by A. S. Mills. It says:

  Stamford Brook: Hounslow. Marked thus on the Ordnance Survey map of 1876–77, district called after a small stream (now covered in) flowing into the river Thames just east of CHISWICK, recorded as Stamford Brooke in 1650 and named from Staunford 1274, that is ‘stony ford’ from Old English stan and ford. The original ford was probably where the old main road to the west crossed the stream.

  Weedon: Chiswick? It gets on my wick more like.

  Arthur: How’s your father?

  Weedon: Exactly.

  Arthur: No, I really am enquiring after the health of your pater.

  What we river enthusiasts now refer to as Stamford Brook is actually three streams. The main branch, the Stamford Brook that would have been forded over Goldhawk Road, started at Old Oak Common in East Acton at what is now Wormwood Scrubs. The second Stamford Brook, which locals called the Warple, rose near present-day Acton Main Line Station. The third Stamford Brook, known sometimes as Bollo Brook, rose in what is now Park Royal. All three branches joined up around Ravenscourt Park then flowed to the Thames as the Hammersmith Creek. Life is far too short to do three walks in and around Acton so I choose the two main branches, Stamford Brook and Bollo Brook – and leave the third as just a permanent sad blue line in my A to Z.

  I come out of the tube at East Acton, then turn left and left again up Erconwald Street, crossing over Wulfstan Street. A wiry, shaven-headed bloke with a really long neck is walking in the opposite direction on the other side of the road, brandishing a large hammer. Every time he goes past something hard he hits it. Whack. I glance briefly at Hammer Man and he stares back as if to say, ‘YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH ME SMACKING THINGS WITH THIS HAMMER, HAVE YOU, MATE?!?-EH? EH!?!’ I do that looking-down thing with the eyes which says, ‘Ha ha no, Hammer Man, I am thoroughly tolerant of others who like to hit metal objects with DIY tools and now I’d just like to go somewhere else quickly please’, and I walk on. Taaaaaanggg!!!! I look back. Hammer Man has hit a post box. It’s as if I’ve come face to face with a modern incarnation of Hammersmith (a Marvel Super Hero, a slightly less-than-fantastic Germanic deity and contemporary of the Viking god, Thor). He turns a corner, out of my life (and, unfortunately, probably back into someone else’s), and I continue to the end of the road and come out at Wormwood Scrubs.

  Wormwood Scrubs is a great name for a Dickens character. It’s also a strange, wild, windswept open space. Not really a park so much as some land that the developers didn’t get to build on due to some obscure sub-clause in a medieval land lease. I really like it, especially in a contrast to the manicured and designed areas that are the majority of London parks. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, mind.

  Weedon: Ooh the poor liberal Guardian-reading fence-sitting writer doesn’t want to hurt the feelings of any of the park keepers.

  Arthur: Mustn’t upset the park keepers!

  The first thing I notice are what seems like hundreds of ravens, all standing in the grass facing west. Though they might be crows. A few flap off lazily as I walk through their midst, but most stand their ground. They’re like the little cousins of pterodactyls. And I can’t help thinking, quite unoriginally, of Hitchcock’s The Birds – I’m glad I’ve got my shades on, so if they do try to peck out my eyes at least I’ll have some protection. But if they really decided to try and have me they would, no bother. Why am I so on edge? Could it be the preponderance of Germanic/Norse symbolism already – the Old English street names, the raven gods, the comic book hero Hammersmith I have just seen.

  To the north is grassland, like the Serengeti, but full of sunburnt fatties slugging beer rather than herds of wildebeest, then a artificially raised high bank and the main depot for Eurostar trains, which looks down over the Scrubs like an elongated space-age castle.1 These spaces are wider and more open than I’m used to, the sky much bigger. It helps that it’s hot, the cyan sky is empty except for the billowing vapour trails of Heathrow jets. I quickly draw the geometric patterns they’ve created, looking for some interesting signs. i + v x w. And then there’s the kites. Wormwood Scrubs is full of kites. Two of the red-torsoed lads, the indigenous creatures of the Scrubs, stand transfixed as their kites billow and swoop in the thermals. Further back a bandy grandad in slacks shows his grandson how to control a model aeroplane. Just behind them, nestled into the remaining clump of trees, are a couple of small dome tents. Their owners stand and sit in a line in front, two skinny boys with bare chests smoking spliffs watching the kites, the well-built girls stripped down to their power bras, sunbathing. In the distance, over to the left, past the Linford Christie Stadium and Wormword Scrubs prison, is the Post Office Tower.

  Hard to believe now, but Wormwood Scrubs was once a fashionable hang-out. Except that two hundred and fifty years ago it was called Acton Wells, a trendy spa resort for the primped, cosseted, heavily made-up and bewigged denizens of west London. And their wives. Dr Johnson used to visit regularly.

  The river was, like many of the others at the time, a crystal-clear brook. It’s amazing that it got snarled up so quickly. Quite possibly Dr Johnston did one of his gargantuan turds, which would have dammed it pretty much straight away. The good doctor’s travel book Shitting My Way Around London’s Rivers (alas) never saw the light of day. It was a diary of his long-term project that involved him trying to clog up every river in the city, in the hope of winning a wager he’d made in a pub with Tobias Smollett:

  Excerpt from Johnson’s diary: Today was estimable in the extreme. In
the morning I breakfasted at Highbury on hog’s head and chaffinch lard cakes, then a brisk three-hour walk to Acton Wells, one of the few livulets not yet to feel the effects of my fervid stool. Flesh is good as the stool then sinks to the bottom of the stream, rather than the floater as created by too much bread in the diet.

  The Stamford Brook rose just north of the park at the eastern end of the Eurostar depot and that’s where this walk begins. A track seems to follow the course of the stream that I’ve jotted down in my A to Z. It could be that this is a regular pilgrimage. I walk west in the direction of some more trees in the distance – the remnants of Old Oak Common. A church spire suggests a village and a sense that I’ve only just missed some evidence of ancient London. I pass by the school that stands where the Acton Wells pavilion used to be.

  Acton. There’s so many to choose from – East Acton, North Acton, West Acton, Bloody Acton. I cross over the huge Western Avenue, constant traffic, the sweet smell of car fumes and impeccable Tudor styling on the houses. I start counting the amount of cars with only one person (90 per cent) then write an imaginary letter to a newspaper but that’s too melodramatic so instead I send it to my old penpal Denis, over in France. ‘Cher Denis, il y a beaucoup des autos. Incidentement, merci pour le lettre à Nathalie.’ (When I was thirteen I’d asked him to write me a letter to the local small-town French beauty I’d fallen in love with on my first exchange visit. He was too enthusiastic, turning it into a piece of porn literature.)

  A police van, with siren blaring out, roars past. A Muslim woman with long black robes and just a tiny slit for her eyes goes by with a couple of kids. I’m staring at my A to Z with the river drawn in and suddenly a man appears asking if I need help. ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’ ‘Are you sure?’ he asks rather quizzically. ‘No, I’m OK.’

  Cross over and down Askew Road and I can see the river valley, first on my left and then on the right. Past Adam’s Café, a high-class couscous joint and St Elmo’s Fish Bar. St Elmo’s Fish Bar could have been a low-budget British version of the famous American movie of the eighties. Phil Daniels would have been in it, as well as Patsy Kensit and William Roach, though it would more likely have been a soap opera.

  Ravenscourt Park is full of activity. Kids sitting on benches blathering on their mobiles, guys chatting up schoolgirls, rugger types huffing and puffing on the basketball court, posh kids running around the smart play area. A load of hippies are sitting around a pollarded tree, meditating, playing guitar and being beardy. I sit down near them and draw a sketch. The big pond in the middle of the park is where the branches of the river meet up before heading to the Thames. On the other side of the small park, on King Street, is the sign from the Black Bull pub in Holborn (demolished 1904) – a realistic bull, with Mithraic overtones, though most of the outer plaster has peeled off. It was featured in Martin Chuzzlewit and bought by William Bull, the local MP, who also gave the park to the people of Hammersmith and wrote articles about local streams for the parish magazine of St Mary’s Stamford Brook.

  I’m hungry so walk down to Hammersmith Station to buy some sushi and noodles. The station is like a beating heart. Every couple of minutes or so, a huge tide of people come spurting out of the entrance. Then other travellers move in the opposite direction. People are being pumped out over towards King Street, and Shepherds Bush Road. I then go past the Hammersmith and City line tube to Paddenswick Road, where a branch of the brook called Parr’s Ditch snaked around east Hammersmith towards the Thames.

  Next to King Street. What used to be Hampshire Hog pub (it appears on an 1830s map of Hammersmith) is now called the Hampshire and has had a lick of paint, and a trendy new bar installed (well, they – the dunderheaded modernist designers – think it’s trendy) and some bland new tables and they’ve changed 150 years of history. For what? A couple more affluent punters and some wine bar girls? It’s sad. There should be a Pubs Czar to deal with all this shit.

  This bit of Hammersmith is great, a mix of restaurants and Cafés, little second-hand places and crap pubs. And an art deco cinema that used to be called the Flea Pit but is now like a glistening thirties neon marshmallow. I headed down Nigel Playfair Avenue where Hammersmith Creek – the name of the lower reaches of Stamford Brook – was culverted in the thirties in order to create land to build the Town Hall. The building’s sixties addons are desolate concrete post-modern stuff with walkways. The coat of arms is a castle or crown with two hammers. Hammer Smith? It’s a bit literal. Of course they might not be hammers, but dowsing rods.

  And then to the beautiful A4, which splits Hammersmith in two, and quickly under the subway, where there’s loads of standing water, to Furnival Gardens, where the creek met the Thames. The traffic sound is like the sea bashing against high cliffs. Looking back I see an old building with Friends Meeting House written on top. It would be nice to think I could go in there and find all my lost mates. I stand out in the now sheeting rain with my sushi and noodles and stare out at the river. In the distance is Hammersmith Bridge and before that the big houseboat community. Some of my noodles get caught in the wind and fly off into the Thames. I look over the river wall and watch them hit the low-tide mud down below, bizarrely forming a unique noodle-based river map in the sludge. Then I look around and see the creek, or the remains of it – a big arch, the size of a canal tunnel, with shut iron sluice gates and a sludgy channel down to the Thames. There it is. I feel like I’d just found Tutankhamun’s remains. No, not on the river but in a pyramid. Yeah, OK, so they’re in a museum. I mean finding them. I know I wasn’t born then. Look, fuck off will you.

  I’m very excited. This is a magic bit of London. I am floating, this has made it all worthwhile – the crap walk, in fact the whole project. Magic. A bloke jogs past space-style, on his toes, taking huge Juantorena-style strides. Magic. But anyway, here we are in the twenty-first century with our clean water and clear air and Hammersmith Creek looks like slimy sludge. What would it have looked like 100 years ago? My romantic view of Hammersmith’s past takes a bit of a knock. I always imagine the past in colour, but now it becomes black and white. I have a spring in my step. Sometimes I wish I lived by the Thames again.

  The Jellied-Eel-Art Beardy Socialist William Morris also lived by the river in Hammersmith. He pegged it in his front sitting room there, exhausted after a life making hand-printed wallpaper for his mates (‘Oh, another home-made card, William, how, er, lovely!’).

  There’s only one thing left to do. I repair to the Dove, the nearby seventeenth-century public house, with the smallest snug bar in Britain (4 ft 2 in by 7 ft 10 in), where Charles II shagged Nell Gwyn and where Hemingway used to get smashed. It is, however, most famous for being the place where ‘Rule Britannia’ was composed by the, er, composer James Thomson. Britannia rules the waves. But what kind of waves? Brain waves? I go in and sample a few pints of ESB, Fuller’s fine and hallucinogenic strong ale, and my own brain waves start to scramble nicely.

  I then tried to compose my own tune, a new national anthem, along the lines of the old Grace Jones track: ‘Slave to the Rhythm’. Britons are Slaves to the Rhythm.

  Slaves to the rhythm

  Hurrah for the Brits!

  Obsessed with the Germans

  And page three girls’ tits

  Slaves to the rhythm

  Britons always always always shall be

  Slaves to the rhythm.

  Film Idea: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Byrds

  At a magic well in London bathers are being terrorised by flying floppy-haired country rockers. Dr Johnson defeats them by cleverly laying little packets of pure heroin for them to find and soon they are all addicts. Everyone retires to St Elmo’s fish shop to celebrate.

  London Stories 11: How to Fuck Your Knees Before You’re Fifty

  * * *

  As Dr Johnson would have said had he a decent pair of training shoes, was about four stone lighter and the streets of the eighteenth-century city hadn’t been completely covered in horse shit, there is no better w
ay to see London than while jogging. In fact, whenever I move to a new part of the city I always put on my smelly old trainers and go exploring the housing estates, terrace-lined streets and little scrubby parks. I’ve jogged in more bits of London in the thirteen years that I’ve been here than I’ve had hot dinners at expensive Italian restaurants. And although I’ve occasionally stepped in equine manure (on Wimbledon Common, while ‘checking the form’ of a runner in front of me), the experience has mostly been a positive one. I’m healthy and my knees and ankles are only a little bit fucked.

  Granted, not all my runs have been jogs as such – running for a bus, or because you’re late for an interview, or because the big bloke in the pub didn’t like the way you said, ‘Your lips were made for kissing, angel features,’ (to his girlfriend), doesn’t really count.

  One of the great things about jogging is watching other people. First there’s the normal jogger like you or me, with tense, red faces screwed up with effort, wobbly and knock kneed, their dough-like buttocks seeping over the top of maroon tracksuit bottoms. And then come the proper runners, who glide past you gracefully with barely a sound, slim-hipped and spare, the fucking bastards. And why is it that attractive people of the opposite sex only ever see you right at the end of a long run. You want to say to them, ‘Hey, I’ve just done ten miles!’ And then, of course, you start sprinting. It’s a reflex action. Ridiculous, but you just can’t help yourself. Knees up, shoulders back. But how many women, when asked about what attracts them in a man, would reply, ‘Someone who runs on his toes with his knees up.’

  The occasional straight-backed chap will shout ‘MORNING!’ very vigorously as if he’s wearing a bowler hat and swinging a golfing umbrella under his arm. And then there’s the thick-necked centre-threequarters from a local rugby club, blasting through fifty or so short interval training sprints with an expression of pure agony on his face as he atttempts to beat his personal best (before heading off to the gym, to work a bit more on that neck). They’re usually too tired to say anything other than ‘Bleeuaargh!’ But I never talk back, preferring instead to adopt a feeling of Zen-like calm while trying to make it look easy. The most imperceptible of nods usually is enough.