Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  This was fascinating, it was exactly what I expected. If I could have persuaded the bricks to speak, the bagel shop, the small Jewish burial ground on Lauriston Road, the traces of human fat in curls of hair swept from the floor of the barber shop, this is what they would have said. Houses expand and contract around families eager to acquire new bloodstock, before they reconfigure and move on.

  Mr Kirsh has Rachel’s gift for making the best of what has happened, seeing autobiography as a Dickensian novel, arbitrary but inevitable. Dressed by coincidence. Harsh with sentiment. Table tennis, I had forgotten, was a very Jewish game, played in industrial premises between competitive firms and clubs.

  Sid’s story, once I had reassured myself that the recorder was picking up this light voice, sailed on through fading newsreels of courtship and war. Human dramas that informed the room in which we were sitting, with the clutter of photographs and trophies.

  I had a job, just before the war broke out, down in Cadogan Terrace. Know it? Bottom end of Victoria Park, before you get to Hackney Wick. That’s how I met my wife. Coming down King Edward’s Road, I heard a sound as I walked past one of those buildings: plip‐plop plip‐plop. Table tennis. I was quite young at the time and hadn’t taken up the game seriously. They were really playing, playing the table, when all I was doing was patting a ball across the net. When I went down to the club, there was a girl, a young lady, standing talking to a lot of other onlookers. I looked at her and she looked at me. Next thing, I went to a wedding. And there she was, a guest at another wedding that was happening in front of ours. The place was crowded. I got a seat and she was sitting there opposite me. We smiled at each other. And she went out and that was that.

  I got this job in Cadogan Terrace in a barber shop and the barber had four daughters. One was married, three of them were not married. Their ages ranged from about thirteen to nineteen. It was a Ladies and Gents operation, men and women.

  One day I finished a customer in the Ladies and walked into the Gents and the oldest daughter, with a friend, came in through the door. The friend was her, the girl from the wedding. This time I spoke to her. Courted her for quite a while, then war broke out. She wrote to me every day. My kitbag was full. Every time I moved on, I had to throw the letters away. I had nowhere to put my clothes.

  I stopped getting letters. My parents informed me that where she lived, this girl, it had been bombed flat. We lost touch with each other. I was asked to go down to London by my commanding officer, to pick up some things for him. I was in Aldgate when the bombing started. It didn’t affect me. I never thought I was part of the war. It was like watching a film. The bombs were falling but I knew they were not for me.

  As I walked along, I saw a woman in a doorway, crying her eyes out, screaming. I said, ‘What’s up?’ She said, ‘I’m frightened, I’m frightened.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you go down the air‐raid shelter?’ I stood with her for a while, until the sirens went. She thanked me and walked away.

  After I left her, I went down into the tube – it may have been Aldgate – to get a train. The girl from Cadogan Terrace, the one I lost touch with, was on the platform with her parents, stretched out. They’d been bombed and hadn’t got another place yet. I spoke to her and told her she’d better come up to Hinckley to stay with my mother. She came up and we eventually got married.

  He doesn’t show it, the aftermath of recent invasive surgery, the excavating of painful memories, but Mr Kirsh must be using up his strength. The war years were the highlight of so many lives. The aftermath, the social history of this part of London, was a slow decline. Even in 1969, when I began digging my front garden in Albion Drive, I uncovered pieces of rusted shrapnel, fins of some kind of bomb, along with the stones and bones of generations. Mr Kirsh felt an obligation to tie up loose ends, to carry his narrative forward to the point where it would dissolve into the view of the small garden beyond his milky window.

  The barber shop wasn’t there any more. The council made a compulsory purchase. The docks were closing down. I wasn’t too unhappy about it. I thought I’d get a nice sum of money, but I didn’t. The brickwork was appalling. I had done up the inside beautifully, the glass, windows, everything. The outside wasn’t so smart. I remember on one occasion I had to put a nail in the wall and the brick went right through. When the council came to see my premises, they said, ‘We’re giving you nothing for the building. We’ll give you something for the rest of your lease.’

  Time went by, my wife died. My children got married. I was stuck in a twelve‐room house on my own, Victoria Park Road. It was a Crown Property. The caretaker of this place where I am now said, ‘Come down and have a look.’ He showed me this one. I’ve been here ever since. That’s virtually the end of my story.

  The wife used Victoria Park more than I did. I never knew anybody around here. It was a predominantly Jewish area, especially Gore Road. The Lauriston Road shops were Jewish, mainly delicatessens, wet fish. It was a thriving area.

  If I had to shop, I’d tend to go down the East End, Mile End Waste, Cannon Street Road, stalls all the way. When my father, years ago, told me we were leaving the East End for Hackney, I was really upset. I felt we were going miles away. I wasn’t, when I was a young man, much of a synagogue‐goer. When I was a little boy, my father took me to a synagogue in Jubilee Street.

  When we moved up here I went to a synagogue in Brenthouse Road, off Mare Street. My father went to Ainsworth Road. It’s called Skipworth Road now. He belonged to a different part of the religion. I went to my synagogue with my brother on high days and holidays.

  We’ve got a Jewish cemetery up here, Lauriston Road. There’s two or three of them around the East End. I’ve got a plot, out by Epping Forest. I buried the wife there. And I bought the plot next to it. If I could get building permission I’d be a rich man. I paid £25 for that plot.

  The synagogue that I belong to now, it’s huge and beautiful. My religious beliefs are beyond belief. But it’s my tribe and I support them. There are only about fifteen or twenty of us left, mostly women. They’ve all moved away. There are very few Jewish people in Hackney. There used to be four customers for the Jewish Chronicle in our paper shop. Now there is only me.

  There’s a little house by the burial ground in Lauriston Road, there was a woman there. She could tell you something about Hackney. She was there, with her parents and grandparents, it was all fields. She died. Now they’re thinking of closing down the synagogue. They’re wasting their money.

  Shadows from the five trees in Sid’s garden play on the net curtains. As the small room darkens, I feel the heat of that voice as it is squeezed and compressed into my silver box, the pocket‐recorder. Anecdotes become fictions, playlets: table tennis, chess, dancing. Mr and Mrs Kirsh went to clubs in the West End, they loved to tango. Hotels were hired. ‘A nice sociable crowd,’ Sid said. ‘We dined out. We used to go on boat trips, things like that.’

  Victoria Park, always at the edge of vision, was as good as the English Channel. Who needs Bournemouth when there are benches on which to enjoy filtered sunlight? Rose gardens. Enclosed meadows. Like so many barbers of the 1930s and 1940s, Mr Kirsh exploited the only hour of the day available to him, to step out into the park. Early mist on the water, a pink sky lightening over the trees. A time that was his own.

  The park has changed. They used to have a penny ride on a motorboat, round that lake. There was a pagoda on one of the islands. I used to get up, before work, and take a skiff out. It was a special price, early. A single rowing boat. I used to enjoy doing that.

  We used to go up to that big monument and have a drink. You can’t do that any more. It was my walk. I went up about a month ago, all fenced off. No fountain, no water. And what about the swimming pool, the lido? I used that quite a lot when I was a young man. I don’t know where my middle‐age has gone. I was a young man up to a couple of months ago.

  Charlotte Street

  There had been some loose talk about Jean‐Luc Godard in Hackney.
Montague Road, they said. Another Jewish enclave, near Ridley Road Market. And way back in the 1960s: historic time, archive time. Budget programming. The TV people, the last of the cultural salvage men, were maundering on about a pre‐Olympic Hackney night for BBC2 (or: 3, 4, 5, 6). Griff Rhys‐Jones. Barbara Windsor as Marie Lloyd. Rappers and snappers. Pete Doherty, obviously. Genesis P‐Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti in their Beck Road bunker. Rock against Racism in Victoria Park. The Angry Brigade. David Cronenberg, who had finished shooting his fantasy about Russian Mafia torture freaks infiltrating the most attractively grungy corners of Broadway Market, was now scouting locations for a revamp of Martin Amis’s London Fields. The point being that Hackney was the new Notting Hill: the stolen name on the map, the drovers’ patch, could be returned to its place of origin, rescued from its outing up west.

  They called in two directors who wouldn’t get the gig, steady‐hands of yesteryear with substantial but cryogenic back catalogues: Chris Petit and Paul Tickell. Nobody did exhaustion, world‐weariness (justified), better than this pair; competitive and centimetre‐calibrated degrees of stubble. They dressed down in classic leather coats, Stasi tailoring. The coats never came off. They didn’t want to look as if they were staying, that degree of commitment to restaurant or bar might be interpreted as a full‐blooded endorsement. Wardrobes were near quotations of obscure but significant films. They spent hours on Jesuitical buzzcuts and hair‐memories that could be exhibited in public without embarrassment. And they knew how to listen, these men. While appearing to stare out of the window. They relished crafted soundtracks, nameless bands, doctored retrievals.

  The menu, in this high‐end, Charlotte Street Indian restaurant (in which no Indian ever set foot), would be treated like a first draft script: sent back unopened, worked with despite serious reservations. Opening your mouth at a table of more than two people was a doomed enterprise. Petit, given the choice, would dine alone, beer and bone marrow, with L‐F. Céline’s London Bridge for company.

  The game was up, but last lunches, dark olives and warm bread in baskets, might run on, unchallenged by accountants, for a few more years. Nothing was going to be commissioned or even discussed. Our man, Neil Murger, would be the last to arrive, as I would be the first, pecking order in reverse. Murger was old school, semaphoring for house red before he sat down, French‐blue shirt coming loose; happier to talk than to listen. He was too thirsty, too well settled into his body mass, to flitter between channels, jockeying for preferment. The veteran producer, it struck me, was strategically deaf in one ear (which one depended on where he was sitting). The fact that nobody expected anything from anybody else, no auditions, no tantrums, rescued what might otherwise have been a funereal occasion: a wake for slippery names extracted from a foreclosed memory‐bank. I was there – why was I there? – for no good reason, beyond the boast that I’d begun, of late, to assemble a comprehensive filmography of Hackney. Not a lot of television researchers knew, or cared, that Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out, with James Mason as an IRA gunman on the run through an expressionist Belfast, was shot in Haggerston Park, E2. The history of this public garden, when it belonged to the Imperial Gas, Light and Coke Company, had been set aside, as we paid our respects to the gate from which Mason staged his dying walk into the snow. The misappropriation of Gas Company funds, the falsifying of stock accounts, the illegal payments to council officials, way back in the 1820s, had no bearing on current urban politics.

  The Kray associate, Tony Lambrianou, who grew up in the nearby flats, Belford Court, and who got his start nicking coal and coke from this site, loved Carol Reed. The little Wolf Mankowitz fairy tale, A Kid for Two Farthings, which Reed shot, a mile or so down the road, in and around Brick Lane, was a favourite topic for Lambrianou and his chums, when they met in the Belgrave Arms. Or the Black Bull on Livermere Road. Where Tony sorted out business with Jack McVitie.

  ‘Diana Dors? Remember her, Jack? Lovely woman. A real English rose in a mink bikini. And that kiddie, the little girl, passing over? The unicorn? Incredible, incredible. Brought tears to my eyes. Just incredible.’

  Jack groaned and washed down another handful of pills with a brandy chaser. Before trousering a fat envelope from the landlord, Scotch Pat.

  The Gainsborough Studios, along the Regent’s Canal, on the edge of Islington, documentarists registered that one: Hitchcock. A local author, under the alias of Sebastian Bell, self‐published a novel in which he tried to prove that Hitch filmed the opening music‐hall sequence of The 39 Steps in the Hackney Empire (instead of the studio). Bell has a wish‐fulfillment cameo of the portly director, on a Mare Street bus, lining up a scene that never happened – but which is happening now because this writer has introduced it into the borough’s subterranean mythology.

  ‘We’re clearly meant to understand,’ Bell says, ‘we’re in a rough old place. Strange though – what would Hannay be doing in Hackney? How would a visitor to London from Canada end up in Hackney? Hackney, after all, is one of London’s twilight zones, neither fish nor fowl. It’s not North London, neither is it the East. It’s by no means easy to get to. It has no tube, is poorly served by buses and its railway stations are on lines that link only to the hubs of other twilight zones.’

  A second bottle appears, a third; our starters are imminent. Nobody can remember what they ordered. Did we order? Or do the waiters, after a fixed interval of time, eavesdropping on overlapping monologues, the dry crunch of poppadoms, fine linen smeared with gobs of chutney, choose for us?

  None of the film‐makers have heard of Bell, his book, or his theories about Hitchcock. They only thing this trio have in common is that they appear in Stewart Home’s Memphis Underground. Petit and Tickell under their own names and Murger under a flag of convenience. Tickell has been floating Home projects for years without much success. Petit shot Home in an aluminium suit so electrostatic that it threw his camera into convulsions. He rather liked the effect: epileptic strobe. The suit gets its own chapter in Home’s novel. Perched on a flyover, beyond the Blackwall Tunnel, on the morning after Diana’s fatal crash in the Paris underpass, Stewart was a skinhead turkey basted in Bacofoil, spouting conspiracy theories in a tight‐throated amphetamine whine.

  Hitchcock in Hackney? The yawning indifference of my audience flatly contradicted Bell’s assertion. ‘The fact that Robert Donat, Hitchcock and the crew were once right here in Hackney is not without interest.’ You could tell when Murger switched off: he forked in a blind mouthful. And action‐painted with a husk of bread.

  But my Godard anecdote stood up. Mainly because nobody had seen the film. If you fancy building a mystique, bury your archive. Announce that you have only six months to live and let the critics, serial sentimentalists, do the work for you. This Godard thing was called British Sounds. The assembly line at Cowley. A union meeting in Dagenham. Leftist students at Essex University. And a nude descending a Montague Road staircase. Colchester, Cambridge, Hackney: the covert 1960s triangulation. Especially that part of Hackney around Cecilia Road and Shacklewell Lane. Sad bedsits of Graham Road. Amhurst Road: a study in amnesia. Oversize houses, divided into multi‐occupied flats, creep towards Stoke Newington. The area, as it lost its Jewish identity, was caught by Alexander Baron in his novel The Lowlife. Anarchists, poets, self‐publishers: they went to ground. Cultivating pubs, plotting, picking up benefits.

  Godard wanted the feminist, leftist writer, Sheila Rowbotham, to deliver a reading from a Black Dwarf polemic, while walking naked up and down the stairs. Rowbotham was having none of it, the walking part. A model was brought in. Or so I heard. The film, commissioned by London Weekend Television, never broadcast and rarely seen, proved elusive. I knew a woman who had witnessed it, in her student days, at MIT, the high‐flying Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or it might have been Harvard. Godard announced to this gathering of the future elite, technocrats, think‐tank philosophers, that they should consider themselves co‐directors of the documentary they were about to see. Films w
ere never more than provocations of discussion, fuses for direct action. The questions after the screening, respectful at first, probed the director’s use of sound, the complexity of the mix. The din, the postgraduates had to admit, was impenetrable. Godard, affronted by this impertinence, stormed out, cursing, horse‐snorting yellow smoke.

  Murger, dismissing the waiter who was swooping on his unguarded plate, picked up the Rowbotham reference. He had worked with her; before television became a branding exercise, the promotional apparatus for puffing other promotions, conferring celebrity on those who are capable of burnishing product. Media only recognizes those who appear on the media.

  ‘Couldn’t catch a word she uttered,’ he said. ‘Like trying to hear snowflakes fall. Godard should have got the model to read the tract and Sheila to do the walking. Handsome chick.’

  Older than my fellow lunchers, I was nostalgic for the era of challenging documentation associated with film‐makers like Marc Karlin. Karlin had been permitted, as a sort of elegy for a vanishing era, to shoot portraits of Rowbotham and the Limehouse GP, David Widgery. You witnessed them, alive, moving across a London landscape, involved with how the city works (or doesn’t). Widgery hauls himself through cold‐water tenements, threatened hospitals. He talks sympathetically to gaunt, dying men, as they enjoy a cigarette on their way down the ramp to the outpatients’ clinic.

  ‘Do you drink alcohol?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘Wise man. Much wiser than me. We’re getting older. How little time we have on the planet.’

  The limping doctor is in dialogue with the invisibles, unregistered or unlanguaged immigrants hanging on, by a thread; cave dwellers in pre‐privatized tower blocks. And with his own demons too. Dark spirits of place. Wounds of capital. The urge to write, perform, sublimate in speech: as he soothes and reassures confused patients or argues with bureaucrats. The camera enjoys his madness, the energy. The sharp bones and creases of his skull.