The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  I’m approached by a leathery old guy with smiley eyes, who comes right up to me and says, ‘Are you looking for wildlife? I thought you might have heard about the kingfisher.’

  ‘Is there a kingfisher? I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘Well, I saw one. Just a bit further up. Just the other day. And I thought to myself the river must be getting cleaner if the kingfisher is about.’

  He beams brightly and tells me he’s lived in the area since 1936. It was his parents who moved in wearing their Sunday best. I tell him I’m walking the river’s route. ‘Do you know there used to be an avenue of huge elms here when I was a kid, they used to go all the way up to Morden Priory. I think it was a kind of ceremonial path. I remember there used to be minnows and sticklebacks in the forties. I’ve fallen in it a few times. When I was six or seven it froze over and we played Scott of the Antarctic down there on the stream.’

  I’m nodding enthusiastically. I ask him if it had always been so overgrown. ‘No, it was more accessible in the old days.’

  We both look off into the distance for a few moments.

  ‘So … ’ he says, ‘are you going to look for this kingfisher then?’

  ‘Yeah … maybe.’

  We say our goodbyes and I watch him speed walk off towards the centre of Worcester Park. Further up I sit down on the bank for about fifteen minutes and look for the kingfisher, but all I see are two Carling and Fosters cans side by side, squashed on the riverbed, and some ducks.

  As Green Lane heads towards woodland there’s an abundance of wildlife and birdsong. The road becomes shitty tarmac in terrible condition, then fades into an old track going through the forest. Unfortunately it heads off at right angles to the river, possibly towards Morden Priory. To the left are what look like ancient hay meadows. A sign says ‘No right of way’. A small malt kiln sticks up above the woods in the distance, there are horses, hayricks and kids’ laughter from the nearby school, floating on the wind. I walk down a farm track then across a field to the river. There are two huge electricity pylons in the field, ugly giant metal insect legs things.

  I wade down through tall grassland towards the river at the end of the field, and walk along its banks in jungle grass as tall as me, surrounded by birdsong. Under the pylons something like a wave goes through my eardrums and ends in a deep, dull ‘crump’ sound. The sound of my brain being cooked, perhaps.

  There’s a Beverly Brooks who is a careers and life coach for high achievers and potential leaders in the UK business environment. And a Beverly Brooks who is in charge of a big army tank depot in Alabama. And a Beverly Brooks who works in a history of art museum in Illinois. I hoped to be able to get the Beverlys together and get them to do a fun run along the banks of the Beverley Brook. How to do it without them thinking that I’m taking the piss? It could be called the Beverley Brooks Classic.

  There’s a road of strange bird-like houses with big chimneys in the middle of the roofs, sloping tiles, Elizabethan beams – what are these houses trying to say? Is it harking back or a more positive statement? It’s small-time English nationalism manifested in architecture – end-of-empire melancholy. Either that, or they’re statues to a giant suburban turkey god. (Who might the turkey god be? Possibly an Egyptian lesser deity.) There is an Environment Agency van, and two wiry blokes in green overalls are heaving shopping trolleys onto a mesh trailer which is already full of trolley brothers and sisters covered in pond weed.

  I go over to talk to them/annoy them with inane questions. ‘Are you fishing them out of the river?’

  ‘Sure am,’ he says. Maybe it was anti-supermarket eco-warriors, a supermarket trolley liberation group who set the trolleys free. I think how easy it must have been in the old days to clog the rivers up if, even in today’s supposedly more enlightened society, we are callous and lazy enough to just dump things anywhere. It’s human nature, I suppose, to pile wheeled shopping carriers in watercourses.

  Further up, a crowd of executives are whacking balls to relieve the stress at World of Golf. World of Golf is open to the public seven days a week. I wander in, and look around the strange artificial world of the World of Golf. A sloped fairway raised up to green plastic greens. Four-wheel drives stand in the car park.

  The river has disappeared from view. Down below, almost underneath the road, is a strange settlement, a funny little world down there in the ‘catacombs’, like a forgotten mountain village. On the path is a single red rubber glove. What does that mean? Some sort of fetishist Loyalist paramilitary group? Nearby is a V reg. Mitsubishi Colt with a KKK number plate. The little main street of the village runs pretty much parallel to the river before it sweeps to the east and crosses under the A3.

  I’m walking past a nice garden and notice an old woman and decide to go back and talk to her.

  ‘Excuse me. I was just wondering … do you ever get used to the traffic noise round here?’

  She looks up slightly surprised and puts down her garden sheers. She has fierce but friendly eyes, a hook nose and a big smile.

  ‘Oh, you get used to it. I don’t even notice it these days. In fact it would seem strange if the traffic disappeared. It’s like an old friend. I’d feel very lonely without it. When my husband and I moved in here after the war the main road was just three lanes. You could cross over to go to what then was the other side of the village.’

  ‘What’s the village?’

  ‘Combe, I suppose it would be called.’

  I explain that I’m walking the Beverley Brook and ask if she knows anything about it.

  ‘There was a little river, or I should say more of a stream than a river, which joined the Beverley Brook on the other side of the A3.’

  ‘Can you remember what it was called?’

  ‘Think it was the Po.’

  ‘Isn’t that in Italy?’

  ‘Is it? Oh well. It’s something like that.’

  She then tells me about her experience of the war years in real time.

  Half an hour later and I’m on my way into Raynes Park. I haven’t been back since I left in December 1996 in a van driven by a racist middle-aged bloke. It’s a nice day and Raynes Park doesn’t look half bad. Have I forgotten how bad it really was? The centre has had a facelift – or maybe just a bit of regular moisturiser. There are more new shops on the main drag, a couple of new Cafés, and the big Raynes Park Tavern has been painted.

  I cross under the subway to my old bit of Raynes Park and it’s a different story on ‘Grand’ Parade. If anything it’s gone downhill. Even more of the shops have been boarded up. The little grocer’s shop near Dupont Road, which had been run by two elderly gents since the end of the eighteenth century, has closed down and been replaced by a timber warehouse. Has someone spotted a gap in the market? Are we all running out of wood? It’s sad. Twenty-five years ago, most of Britain was overrun with little grocers such as this, shops run by hairless old men with specs who stocked only four or five products, covering the basic nutritional requirements. These minimalist general stores were as ubiquitous as McDonalds today. And those old fellows in shops always had stories to tell – of runaway steam trains and daring dawn raids on Jerry (or in some cases, dawn raids on the Boers).

  I used to enjoy going in the little Raynes Park grocer shop for a ‘packaged food nostalgia browse’. The main item was jelly. They had several flavours, in a nice display. Jelly, as these two clever businessmen no doubt realized, always comes in handy. They also had an extensive range of soups, covering all the flavours that matter – tomato, vegetable and exotic oxtail. Sometimes there were cornflakes too. As in many such pairings, one old gent was nice and one was nasty. But I could never tell which was which. And I suppose now I never will.

  The model railway shop is also not there, nor the tiny, frail homeless man. My head starts to ache at the mental torture of the suburbs. Now there’s graffiti everywhere, and not of the good or interesting kind. When I go into my old newsagents, the tall man behind the counter says ‘All right there?’ as i
f it’s been three or four hours since I last came in.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he says. ‘Hey, see that guy that just went out – he started banging on about ganja. Hey, all the rich people smoke it, I’ve got nothing against it. Everyone in the House of Lords has to smoke it by law, you know.’

  ‘I thought so,’ I say. He still goes off at tangents. He’s older and more knackered but has still got a spark. His wife, the famously foxy-eyed one, also looks knackered and they’re both greying but holding the fort.

  ‘Or the Fortean Times, my friend, ha ha ha,’ as the newsagent would say. I go down Dupont Road to see my old house again. I look in the window and the whole thing is being renovated and painted. It feels weird, I can’t remember living here. Maybe I never actually did or else I’ve wiped it from my memory banks. I feel melancholy. It’s time to move on.

  I sometimes get the feeling that I am living parallel lives. Or at least that alternative versions of my life are running simultaneously to this one. I’ve lived in many parts of London and when I visit them they’re all pretty much the same as when I lived in them – except for the fact, that I don’t live there any more. I’m like a visiting ghost. And it makes me think that if I’d stayed there I wouldn’t have known or thought about the other Tims. Except that now I’m travelling around, I’m seeking them out. They have to hide away when I’m around. But maybe I never really left the places I lived in – Muswell Hill, Walthamstow, Stamford Brook, Westbourne Park, Raynes Park, Hammersmith – just dreamed it, and kept dreaming about moving on. My worst nightmare is that this is all a dream and that I’ll wake up and I’m stuck in the past. Would it cause big problems if the other Tims and I met up? Like Michael J. Fox when he goes back to the mid fifties and is on for giving his mum one and the other Michael J. Fox has to stop him, but can’t meet him face to face and … never mind.

  I head towards Wimbledon Common along the A3 briefly, with endless, mindless streams of traffic flowing past. This should all be renamed Woodpark City. A small stream runs into the trees. Woods and forests are often full of Cubs and Scouts out camping. I spent a few years brainwashed by that sect, with their strange practices – toggles and woggles and badges, tying knots. We were called Wolf Cubs, but wolves have pups not cubs. So what’s going on? Baden Powell was the God of Cubs. Wasn’t he a proto fascist? ‘Cubs do your best, we will do our best,’ we’d say, then sing the national anthem as the Union Jack was lowered at the end of the evening and we’d clutch our little uniforms. Or was it the Lord’s Prayer we said? I’m surprised we weren’t given weapons. We were basically a private army.

  Richmond Park is grassland, with avenues of trees along the little roads, and cars roaring past on their way somewhere important. It’s a through road, like a national park rather than a typical clean-cut London park. Over on the left are deer, old and young, basking in the shade of a something tree (check up in my I Spy Book of Trees when I get home). Their heads look like lots of branches sticking up. I get closer to do a drawing, but not too near. They see me and some stand up as if to say aggressively, ‘Whit the fuck ir you lookin’ it, pal?’ Glaswegian deer. They watch me as I retreat through the wild grass.

  You get a good idea of what the now buried rivers would have looked like before the development of London by walking along Beverley Brook – trees on banks jut out into the river and the park stretches off to the north-east as far as the eye can see – browny green grassland, lots of trees dotted around and the odd bit of traffic streaking by. I cross over the road and continue alongside the river. This is the pure essence of summer feeling that reminds me of being a kid, stuck in the car in intense heat, being driven to some park or monument or country house, feeling car sick, arguing with my brother, the back of my legs sticking to the plastic seats, the smell of ham sandwiches, melting ice cream in your hands, sand in your toes. All that rushes into my mind when an old green Austin Maxi, so similar to our old car, goes past. It should have a soundtrack by Teenage Fanclub.

  Here, Beverley Brook goes under a wall through a metal grille. I could go right over the bridge out of the park or keep going on this side of the wall. I keep going (though this turns out to be a mistake). I cross over a little dried-up tributary stream that goes into the wall – it’s very marshy round here, what’s on the other side of this little wooden plank?

  There are voices coming from behind the wall – well-bred Roehampton and Richmond types. At last I come out at a gate, but it’s the wrong one – it’s East Sheen. I’ve gone too far. I turn into a backstreet and it’s pre-war semis world again. A kid – about eleven or twelve – in full hip-hop regalia, superbaggy jeans and sloppy T-shirt, is doing his skateboard moves. Except he’s shit. There are crazy East-Sheen-style crap tags on the bottle bank and water hydrant. These crazy middle-class kids live in a smart rich suburb and they’re hooked on US black urban culture.

  There in front of me is the Beverley Brook, slowly meandering along. Over Creek Bridge then through into a little meadow with grass already brown. Zippo’s Circus is here. A stalwart of the London park scene, Zippo has been to Stoke Newington and Finsbury Park in the last year. Clown, Ringmaster and Cockney Pearly-King urchins hang out in the parks.

  The final stretch of Beverley Brook goes through the playing fields of private clubs which are all locked up. I have to go back through Barnes Common past Zippo and his mates again, who are bound to laugh, because they’re all clowns. ‘Hiyaa hiyaaa,’ says a circus bloke inside the big top. Through old Putney Cemetery now, which soon becomes thick forest, and I’m treading on gravestones. I stub my toe on a little cross sticking up from a gravestone. There are lots of topless skinhead biker muscle boys hanging around. Maybe it’s one of those Hardcore-Drum-Beating Men’s River Walking Societies.

  I turn into a playing field with a gate at the end, past a small circus tent – maybe the clowns’ private bar – and up into another part of the wood where a bloke and girl are looking for somewhere to lie down. The river suddenly gets wider and opens out into a lovely pool. And then the last stretch, under a little humpbacked bridge – at last, I see a tributary stream enter the Thames. It feels good. Now I’ve lived. Determined Germanic-looking men and women jog by in tight lycra. Up on the boatyard balconies toothy fleshy people look down on the passers-by.

  About three days after the walk, I finally got several films developed and there was one set with lots of eight-year-old photos of Raynes Park. Me in an old life, different house, different relationship. Same haircut. The film must have been kicking around in an old box for years. Very weird. Very Hole-In-Pan-Dimensional-Space-Time.

  Film Idea: The John Major Story

  A four-hour epic, directed by Oliver Stone. John is at nets practice when he’s seduced by feminist water nymphs like the scene in O Brother Where Art Thou?, and his team mates are turned to stone and sold as garden ornaments. He vows to become Prime Minister to avenge them and has many triumphs along the way. Eventually there is a big naval battle at the mouth of Beverley Brook which Major wins.

  George Clooney – John Major

  Holly Hunter – Norma Major

  Helen Mirren – Margaret Thatcher

  London Stories 13:30-Love in the Time of Henmania

  * * *

  How was tennis ever invented? I imagine fops at the court of Louis XIV pranced about one day at Versailles. See, it’s called a court for that reason. It’s a metaphor for courtly debate, knocking an idea backwards and forwards. Public-school types like debating societies and public-school types like tennis. Anyway, it was hot and one of them happened to drape his fancy cloak across the room. Then, as they were wittily and cruelly discussing some subject like, say, whether a man will save his wallet or his wife from a burning building, with lots of savage but subtle attacks on each other, someone said, ‘Chaps, let me have all the knicker elastic in the room and I’ll scrunch it up into a ball that can represent the multi-faceted strands of our conversation.’

  Wimbledon fortnight was always a depressing time
of year. Strawberries, cream, hot weather, suffocating Englishness, suburban life, mowed lawns, flies buzzing in the kitchen, egg sandwiches, salad cream mingling with the vinegar from pickled beetroot. It always got me down. Wimbledon is also a brilliant metaphor for Englishness in the sporting arena. Plucky English lads and lasses galumphing about with their big legs and rosy cheeks and getting walloped by the more sophisticated sporting machines of the USA, Australia, Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe, France, in fact just about anywhere.

  And then there was the one success, that insane hallucinatory year of 1977 – government crumbling, just got a loan from the IMF, Lib-Lab pact keeping them in power, Queen’s Silver Jubilee sandwiches and little Union Jack flags, the Sex Pistols getting to number one (not that anyone in Lincolnshire noticed it). But Virginia Wade, average and nice, won Wimbledon. She somehow subverted Englishness, manifested by the milkmaid looks and jolly hockey niceness of Sue Barker. Virginia Wade was sort of Italian-looking and, according to my gran, ‘a gilwill’. I presume this must be an old English tennis technical term.

  Anyway, here’s a typical interview with the current darling of the scene, Tim Henman.

  Interviewer: Tell us about the game, Tim Henman.

  Tim Henman: Well, I was pleased with my game. Thought my serve and volley was good. He’s a difficult opponent. I had a plan and I followed it through. ‘This is Tim Henman’s game,’ I said to myself. My carbohydrate glucose levels stayed constant throughout the match. The carbon tungsten fibres of my racket held up well. Tim Henman’s got to be happy with that.