The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  Sometimes I’d stand there pinging the balls all over the pub and wondering to myself is that all there is? Am I missing out by not having a ‘proper’ job? But the Free-Jazz Pool Style was also a rebellion against the shiny conformity of the eighties. We weren’t going to play by anyone else’s rules.

  So what happened to the Yuppies? Where did they go? Perhaps they’ve all got Yuppie Flu. Or they were driven out by global warming.

  Funnily enough, most of the blokes I knew who had ‘proper’ jobs at that time have taken their foot off the pedal. Whilst many of those who dossed through the eighties are now hyper rich. The layabouts, drinkers and perpetual students are now the go-getters. Which suggests there are only so many high-powered hours in a man’s life.

  Women are different. All the women I knew walked straight into high-powered jobs in the eighties and they’ve all gone on to success. None of them have fucked up. None of them have burnt out. None of them have formed a country and western band.

  And I know very few couples in which the blokes are the major wage earners. My feeling is that it’s because men have reached a higher stage of evolutionary consciousness – we have rebelled against the work ethic of our parents’ generation and realized that there’s more to life than work. Like what?

  Well, free-jazz pool, for one.

  1 http://wwvv.old-maps.co.uk

  24. Smoke on the Water

  • Effra from Dulwich through Brixton to Battersea

  Musical dream – South London – Culturally aware – Korg MS-10 – Deep Purple – West Norwood – Boring Dulwich – Effra Redevelopment Agency – Crazy Estates – Lumberjack Man – Brixton – Stockwell – Kennington – songs for rivers – world turned upside down

  Last night’s dream was about a musical instrument – I blew into the mouthpiece on a little curved metal tube with a mouthpiece leading into a big box with lots of pipes inside. It might have been water-cooled. Like the rivers. Just as my breath was running out, I could hear the sound of space. Did the instrument represent London?

  The Effra, which flows from Norwood to Vauxhall, is the most culturally venerated of the smaller London rivers. By this, I mean that the communities along its route seem to be aware of its presence and celebrate it, whether through books, art exhibitions or campaigns to get it brought back to the surface. Local history seems to be big in this part of town. I’d saved up the Effra walk until the end of the summer because I was hoping that I might be accompanied by a local historian, the Brixton Society’s Alan Piper, who’s written books and pamphlets about the stream. Unfortunately it didn’t work out as planned – Alan was simply too busy – so I roped in a stand-in historian, my mate Doug, who used to live in Brixton. I had a simple plan. Walk the first half of the river really quickly, meet Doug at Brixton’s Phoenix Café for lunch, then let him take me on a history walk. A few months earlier Doug had lent me a pamphlet about the Effra by Ken Dixon, which described the route in great detail with some handy maps. The stream had several tributaries, but the main one rose in the exciting hills of West Norwood. This meant another rail journey deep into the deep South.

  The Effra is known as a royal river. King Canute apparently sailed down it to take the Saxons from behind (someone had to) and seize London in 1016. And always PR-aware, Elizabeth I sailed down the stream over 500 years later, to visit Walter Raleigh at his house in Brixton and have a smoke on his new potato/tobacco invention.

  I’m beginning to realize that travel writing can’t quite sum up the underground rivers, so I’ve been contemplating using a more broad-brush multimedia approach. This would involve a CD, with a different piece of music for each river. I thought maybe I could get an Arts Council lottery-money grant. So I sent off for all the forms but I just couldn’t be arsed to fill them in. Instead I decided to do one tape and describe it, so that the reader could imagine the music.

  I plugged my Korg MS10 into an amp and pressed a key. Ffffttthhhhhhhhhhhhhhh it went. Sssssshhhzzzhzhhhhhhhhhhhh. Hmm. Sort of riversy. I stared out of the window for a few minutes thinking I might be the new Steve Reich – sswwwwwwweeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssshhfffffffffffffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz gzggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh – then turned off the Korg MS10. Maybe electronic music was the wrong approach. Perhaps I should try and create some London songs, a sort of twenty-first-century Music-Hall style but without any mockernee-sparradom. I should try and write some sensitive acoustic numbers based on London and showcase them at a small acoustic music night in Islington. Strum strum strummity strum Ooooh the rivers flow Ooooh where do they go? But Nick Drake has already beaten me to it.

  (strum strum strummity strum …)

  Going to see the river man

  Going to tell him all I can

  About the ban

  On feeling free

  If he tells me all he knows

  About the way his river flows

  I don’t suppose

  It’s meant for me

  Oh, how they come and go

  Oh, how they come and go.

  See. The same but better.

  It was on a hot and balmy night in the summer of 1996 that, Doug and I formed a country band, along with another friend Matt, called Magic Orange. The name came from an incident on a tube when I gave up my seat to an old Chinese man; in gratitude he gave me an orange, which I decided had magical powers. Our first song was called ‘Girl with the Yellow Face’.

  Girl with the yellow face

  You’re not really a member of the human race

  Are you?

  ‘Moo’ says the cow with the Van Morrison mask

  I’m too shy and polite to ask

  You out.

  With Doug on Paul McCartney-style bass, Matt on a new lead guitar he’d got for his birthday and me on four-chords-but-don’t-know-what-they’recalled acoustic guitar, we practised our six-song set diligently over the autumn until by the start of the next year we were ready. We played our first proper gig at the Hamilton Arms on Railton Road, an old-style pub usually full of old Jamaican guys.

  I come out at Gipsy Hill station, past the Gipsy Hill Tavern, where the gipsies used to meet up every summer before descending on the West End to sell lucky heather to the unsuspecting masses. An old bloke shuffles past me: ‘Colder, innit? Winter’s coming, eh?’ The source of the Effra is around here somewhere. I just have to choose a likely spot. I’m sniffing the air like the childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Except that my sense of smell isn’t that great since I broke my nose. The sound of kids’ voices floats over on the wind. It gets louder as I go down the road – there are three schools right next to each other and it’s deafening.

  (in unison)

  Kids 1: Eaeaaaaa ashout shout areeee!

  Kids 2: Scream yaaaargggh bloowww!

  Kids 3: Eeeeieeeieee oooo eeeee!

  Kids 4: Aaah aahhhhhhh hhhhhhh!

  Kids 5: Screech screeeeeeechhh!

  I pass a bloke who can only have been a burned-out rock star, a handsome but haggard greyhair in denims, he was probably in some late-sixties band like Deep Purple – in fact, maybe it’s Ian Gillan. He still wears kaftans though, I think, so maybe not. Deep Purple were big with the lads who played guitars in school music rooms – ‘Smoke on the Water’ ERR ERRR ERRRRR ERR ERRR ER ERRRR and that other riff da da da daa (da da da da daaa da).. What was it? I’ve asked a few people over the years and they don’t know. Maybe Cream. In 1979 heavy metal was big again, I bought Deep Purple’s greatest hits and had Deep Purple in Rock on tape. And Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous LP, and er, that’s it. But I was a punksoulboy, never a rocker. It’s important for me to say that. Maybe this whole search for underground rivers would be more interesting if it was an ex-bassist from Deep Purple doing it.

  Rockin’ with the Rivers – the magazine for heavy metal fans of underground streams

  Hi folks. John Lord here, looking for the streams underground, like the streams of consciousness when you’re fly in’ high. Me and the guys – Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Paice,
Roger Glover and Ian Gillan – took some instruments down in the sewers. We were just settin’ up for this gig, yeah, but then we saw that Whitesnake were down there as well. Hey guys, this is our thing, said Ritchie. Nah man, said Whitesnake overdude David Coverdale, we were here first, Ricardo. Then there’s this fight between Ritchie and Dave until one of the Thames Water fellas starts gettin angry, ’cos like, he’d taken us down on this trip but he goes I thought you guys were serious river researchers, I’m gonna take you back up now, and we go no way dude, so then we all start running and Ian’s drum kit starts floating away. We take a few turnings to get away from the water man and soon we’re lost and Dave says wow that’s all your fault, Ritchie, you little turd and Ritchie says I’m gonna get you Coverdale, but then me and Gillan say hey, the acoustics in this bit are pretty cool let’s set up here, so we get the amps up onto a big ledge thing and Ian’s using his head for drums but then, shit, we realize we’re totally lost. I’m writing this by the light of a spliff: we’ve been down here for three years living on rats and Whitesnake are about 50 yards downstream so, if anyone gets this note, hey guys, get us out of here…

  Right onto Convent Hill and down a passageway into the wood. Except it doesn’t go into the wood, it goes into a school. A load of kids stand around glaring: ‘What are you doing?’ shouts one boy. ‘This is a school!’ So I retrace my steps past a little orchard and get lost in the maze of streets. Eventually I get out to Crown Dale. A football pitch on the right feels like a good place for the source of the Effra. However, there’s already some sort of river valley here. I cross into Norwood Park. The valley runs almost due south through here – there’s an avenue of oak trees that looks as though it marks the route. I take a photo then skirt through the park, past the Park Tavern, a tatty old boozer, and arrive at Elder Road, which leads into Norwood High Street. The river would have curved around what is now the road. The undulations encourage me to imagine a gentle rural landscape not all that far back in time. And there’s the river valley. No, there it is! It’s over here now! An old fellow stops and asks if I’m lost. Ha ha, I say, I’m looking for an underground river. Do you know it? Very good, young man, he smiles, walking off as quickly as he can. Twenty yards further on a young bearded guy is begging at the side of the road. He too asks if I need help so I show him my A to Z with the Effra’s course marked on it in red felt tip. The thick red line, like an artery, seems to unsettle him.

  ‘See – although it’s actually got more of a curve and a wind than I’ve drawn on the map.’

  ‘O…K,’ he says.

  On the right is Pilgrim Hill and a little cottage called the Boathouse which I presume must have been on the river when it was built in the early Victorian era. I follow the hill down into a housing estate. This is like an eighties recreation of a medieval village, with winding lanes and little houses up to the edge of the path all packed in tightly. I’m holding the A to Z up to my face trying to keep to the route.

  ‘Are you lost, love?’ says a woman coming out of her house.

  ‘I’m looking for an underground river.’

  ‘Ah … yeah … right.’

  But, as if to confirm it, I see a can of Tennent’s Super lying on the path. I go back out to the main road, past the cemetery gate. After the cemetery is Norwood Library so, always keen to get in a spot of extra research, I go and have a nose about. There’s information about the gypsies of Norwood, especially Margaret Finch, the so-called Queen of the Gypsies, who used to sit under a tree on Gypsy Hill with her chin resting on her knees like Olga Korbut, telling fortunes and dispensing wise words. When she died they couldn’t straighten her out so they buried her in a box. The gypsies were eventually driven out by the enclosure acts. That’s what I love about libraries. You find out useful stuff that you can bore people with at parties. There’s also a scale model of the set of the Ealing film Passport to Pimlico, which was built around here somewhere.

  I also learned about an art exhibition on the Effra on in Brixton. It sounds like it’s one of those multi-media jobs in which an artist has encouraged local people to express their own feelings about the river. This is what I mean about river consciousness. I can’t imagine a similar project about the Hackney Brook.

  Towards Dulwich (Old English meaning ‘small village of the very dull Saxon people’), the roads start to widen into villa-style terraces. I give two West Indian grannies directions to some housing estate (remember, an A to Z is power). Although I’m getting nearer the centre of London it’s getting increasingly sub-urban. It’s dull. The railway that runs parallel to the road follows the line of the river. I’m now heading into Herne Hill, past a dead television and a big pile of junk that is possibly part of some local Effra Art installation.

  Before my wedding I’d been thinking about having a stag night. I’ve been on countless stag nights over the last fifteen years and, apart from a rather leisurely and sedate trip to Edinburgh with a crowd of Nick Hornby types, they’ve been pretty miserable – fights, girls in French waitress outfits, headbutts, best man shitting in someone’s garden, fights, vomit, fights. Stag nights are Saxon rituals in praise of the horned God. Who or what this horned God represented I’m not sure. But it’s possibly a result of the blending of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions. In Germany before a wedding they slice each other’s faces with fencing swords then dress up in marble-wash denim and try to ‘tag’ the groom’s mullet. Over here there was the tradition of the Love Stick, a painted mystical branch with carved female and male figures on either end, which portended great fertility and good fortune for the couple in question.

  Going over what I’ve learned from folk history (i.e. some half remembered excerpts from the ITV series Robin of Sherwood starring Michael Praed – the one with the Clannad theme music…Roooooooooooobin – (ding ding) – THE HOODED MAN!!!), the horned god was called Herne the Hunter. Herne lived deep in the forest and spoke with a faintly northern RSC accent. Whenever he appeared, there was lots of mist and atmospheric drum music. A fight invariably ensued soon afterwards. There were witches too with their Northern European voodoo – big soups and stews full to the brim with exotic creatures and herbs of the forest. And dead chickens and lots of blood. I’m not that interested in Robin Hood but the idea of Herne the Hunter is appealing. It’s doubtful that such an important god could have lived in the East Midlands. Herne Hill would be the place. You’ve got the marshy mists, you’ve got the chicken blood pouring out of the shops and stalls of Atlantic Road just a bit further north, the drug dealers, the violence, the vibrant music scene. And a magical river – the Effra.

  A crowd of men on the benches just inside the park are all drinking cans of Skol Super. A fat bloke in a tatty suit is carrying loads more in a yellow bucket. It’s as if they’ve been sponsored by the brewer. Branded pissheads. The Prince Regent Tavern has a massive picture of the Prince Regent at the top of it, looking like Alain Delon. Or Chevalier Recci from The Flashing Blade. This was where Magic Orange would retire to after our practices to discuss strategies for record industry domination. At the crossroads I turn off the main Effra route to check out the course of one of the stream’s tributaries mentioned by Ken Dixon in his pamphlet. It begins at the ponds in Brockwell Park and would have flowed north, then east at Brixton Water Lane, meeting the main branch of the river at the Dulwich Road junction.

  At the start of Water Lane there are some old villas which give you an idea of early nineteenth-century rural Brixton. I walk down past various ponds—brown murky water with a film on top. A really desperate person has tried to paint graffiti on the hedge. After the ponds a little stream appears, a thin trickle with plants and grass growing all round it. This is a recent development – local people lobbied to have this part of the Effra brought out of its pipes. It disappears again quite quickly, just before a kids’ playground.

  The Effra Redevelopment Agency, based in Brixton in 1992, put forward the idea that the river could be brought back to the surface and turned into a local feature. Th
ey took over a disused shop on Norwood Road, under which the Effra flows, and opened a visitors’ centre with models, exhibition and video and encouraged local people to take part in the discussions about the river, describing themselves as ‘redevelopment experts’.

  But it turned out that the ‘Effra Redevelopment Agency’, was actually an art project produced by a London-based group called Platform.

  We executed a local and national press campaign which spread the idea of unearthing the river further (‘plan to revive forgotten river’, ‘river deep – a vision’, ‘dream to make the Effra flow’, ‘wet dark and buried’). Our aim was to have the word ‘Effra’ on as many lips as possible. At a public debate towards the end of ERA’s tenure on Norwood road, heated arguments arose between supporters of the Effra who – for many diverse reasons – had decided to welcome the thought of a river in their part of the city, and dissenters, who worried about – amongst other things – where they would park their cars if a river were to run down their street. More adventurous local supporters began plans to start the Effra’s unearthing at a point where the river ran underground in the local park. Thus, as the Effra Redevelopment Agency disappeared quietly one Saturday night, the debate continued and continues along the river’s banks.

  I follow the river bank back through some neat but plain Victorian terraced streets, towards Coldharbour Lane. A big pub on the corner here is called the Effra Hall Tavern. I explore Coldharbour Lane towards Loughborough Junction. Loughborough Junction is Brixton without the sex appeal, the shouty blokes, the wobbly bike riders, the big-hipped ladieez, the chicken blood on the streets, the obvious drug dealers, the hip little Cafés, the militant squatters and the funky music blaring out of shops and car stereos. So what has it got? Er, middle-aged men holding cans of extra strong lager who stand and stare and big young lads with hard stares who walk quickly along the pavement and … stare, and grimy-looking blocks of flats (from which, I’m sure, all kinds of people stand and stare).