‘We’ve got three generations in the one bed,’ says a proud Irish mother. ‘All in work.’
The Vietnamese wife, waiting for a husband who does not return, looks downriver at new lights. And, through an interpreter, admits that she is too scared to go out. Perhaps he went to another building? They are all the same.
Mr Joseph Murphy slept in the toilets, when they were open, in Ridley Road Market.
‘The police took me in a couple of times. I would never lie to you, doctor. It was only the cider, special brew. They told me to touch my nose. They’ve ruined the country, the Tories.’
‘What colour is your phlegm?’
From the top of his bus, heading south down Mare Street, the bravura opening of Some Lives! A GP’s East End, Widgery might have registered them, the wealthier incomers, Sebastian Bell’s transatlantic tourists. I had a rational explanation for the presence of Canadians in Hackney. They were lost, definitively. They turned to me, when I was walking, in the cocoon, as they shuddered from taxis, clutching maps all‐ways‐up, cologne‐saturated against the bite of post‐industrial air. ‘Excuse me, sir, we’ve gotten ourselves a little confused. Could you direct us to the Burberry franchise?’
Canadians, Japanese: so white, so pale. So fresh. They are after factory prices, discounts. A shield against radiation, dirty bombs. Germ‐repelling prophylactic wraps of 1940s film noir. Coats styled from the trenches for ghosts who would never return from France. And now endorsed by Kate Moss, an honorary Hackney bride, guesting at the Empire with Pete Doherty. Regular lock‐in drinker, indoor smoker, at the Dolphin on Mare Street. An image too wise to open her mouth.
After Burberry‐questing Canadians, blatant as CIA stringers in Berlin, had been nudged east into wastelands of defunct civic buildings, fenced properties waiting on development packages, where they hoped to exchange current rainwear for newer versions of the same at bargain prices, I saw a man spill out of a Vietnamese restaurant on the corner of Ellingfort Road. He sprinted, jacketless, white‐shirted, into the maelstrom of traffic; believing that, in his suicidal dive, he would become invisible. I lost him behind a bus which was nudging out into an unbroken line of cars, white vans and lane‐weaving motorcycle messengers. The runner disappeared, but I heard the horns, the screech of brakes, a metal‐on‐metal shunt. Nothing out of the ordinary. The soothing muzak of managed rage: horn choruses, sirens.
The window of the restaurant in which I caught my own reflection, a camera‐cyclops, was dressed with photocopied recommendations, neon part‐words, paper lanterns and a written account, in two languages, of a recent murder – which seemed to be, ahead the event, a short fiction based on the drama I was now witnessing.
On Thursday 17th August 2006 at about 4.10pm, Minh Thanh Nguyen was attacked in Mare Street, Hackney, E9, by a group of men. He suffered stab wounds and died of his injuries shortly afterwards. A silver Audi and another blue or dark green car was seen to leave the area at speed.
In his pink‐on‐red autopsy passport, Minh Thanh Nguyen seems very young. And grateful to be where he is, welcoming the camera’s intrusion. He has prominent ears and a broad smile. With lipstick traces. A face so simple in its design that it might have been sketched on the back of a thumb.
Explosive laughter is cancelled as the restaurant door closes. A large woman, at a table of partying town‐hall bureaucrats, jackets off, shudders and shakes, opening her throat in a now silent roar. The Vietnamese boy, lying in the street, is a waiter who didn’t want to wait. Slow‐burning resentment reached a critical state. The men who jumped from the Audi could have been helping him, staunching the blood on his white shirt, or puncturing flesh, kneeling on his chest to rip out his heart with their bare hands. It was impossible, at this angle, to tell. But they did, as the official account foretold, drive off at speed. The dying man managed to crawl a few yards, and then he huddled into a ball: watched by other men in white shirts from the doorway of the restaurant. You could smell fish, snails in garlic, and various acrid, permitted smokes.
Not here, not in Charlotte Street. Where, in fit‐for‐purpose times, restaurants empty by two o’clock. We’re alone and loud. Murger doesn’t have the concentration to follow my rambling anecdotes. There will be no film, no Hackney night. No book. The lunch has outlived its occasion. Old lags meet to keep the rituals alive, simply that. We approve the release of tension that comes when there is nothing to pitch, no patronage to dispense. We proselytize new diets, exercise regimes, mortality postponed for an hour. Mineral water is ordered with a flourish but untouched.
The unexpected bonus for me comes with Murger’s own tale: that’s why he’s picking up the bill. He has nothing to offer by way of employment, it’s the other way round; he wants his Hackney testament to be taken down. He wants to become part of the apparatus of research for a book that will never be written. Reality, for Murger, was lodged somewhere close to Lauriston Road and Victoria Park. Deep memories, as mapped and validated as those of Sidney Kirsh, were Irish and Catholic. The producer talked of his childhood, schooling; of serving at mass, beating the bounds of the parish. Catholics and Jews lived side by side, contiguous biographies with few points of contact or difference. Comfortable migrants who did not notice the existence of any person outside their immediate tribe.
If you searched now for Catholic traces, they were still active: the hospice for which Murger collected coins. You saw the white Madonna, posed on a balcony like a debt collector, as you advanced down Beck Road. St John the Baptist had a sloping roof of wave‐pattern tiles above dirty red brick, gold spikes on black railings. Cardinal Pole, a substantial enclosed property, backing on to Well Street Common, enjoyed an ambiguous reputation, academic achievement with rumours of bullying among the pupils. High walls around a turreted building that looked like a Victorian public school. Children would be marked by these establishments, their rituals, for the rest of their lives. There were more Hackneys, stepping off my usual paths, than I could ever know.
Tickell had attended a seminary; he was an inquisitor distracted from his vocation by the sirens of punk, seductive noises outside the cloister. Chris Petit, up in the Yorkshire wilds, had been schooled with Antony Gormley, Julian Fellowes and other high‐Catholic aristos, spooks, priest dodgers. I was the only Protestant, Welsh Methodist, at this heretical second‐ or third‐generation Irish table. I was badly out of key with the times, the counter‐reformation of Tony and Cherie Blair, when private devotions became public property and strange beliefs can justify political adventurism and foreign wars. The film‐makers, having broken free of dogma, had only special forms of abstinence to offer, by way of heritage: drink taken, swiftly, thirstily, as they came out of a lasciviously prolonged Lenten denial. Cool beer before the conviviality of wine. Sin postponed is so much sweeter.
I couldn’t be certain, searching the Lauriston Road area for relics of Murger’s Irish past, what status that church, St John of Jerusalem, enjoyed. Its sharp green spike, noticed through the trees of Victoria Park, had drawn me on. Opening times were eccentric and irregular. Parish Mass was at 10 a.m. every Sunday. The tympanum above the porch published a chopped legend: do not be afraid. Jesus walked across the waves. His left hand was missing, a sacrifice. He gestured with an empty sleeve.
Lauriston Road
I have never worked with a researcher. And I never will. I couldn’t afford it. And anyway my research is the book. With optional feints and flourishes. I’d be happy to hire a pro to take care of the daily grind, the writing, but I want to hang on to the business of gathering material, that’s the fun part. I’m useless at libraries, prejudiced against Google‐slurry, but eager to carry home junk from the road: pamphlets, snapshots, conversations with hangers about, dog walkers. The story is accidental. It tells itself – if we don’t mangle that complex elegance through faulty memory.
Those were my beliefs until an insinuating character sidled up to me, after a reading with a celebrated London author, and said: ‘I write his stuff. And I could
do it for you.’ The novelist, a selfless craftsman, was far too busy with his media commitments to drudge through reference books, trade directories, letters, manuscripts: he did the style. The concept. The marketing. While his oppo, for a decent bung, tramped the hard miles, filing detailed reports from internet cafés. Conducting interviews. Getting hassled by security.
It was time for me to join the real world. I picked up the phone to call the man that Chris Petit, with some reluctance, had recommended. ‘He’s not bad – if you know how to handle him.’ Writers, exchanging these tips, are pretty much announcing their retirement. It’s like handing on a mistress. You have to recognize that most of the material on display in the windows of the book chains has been put through an assembly line more effective than Dagenham. Author portraits are as fraudulent as those brief biographies. The unnamed are the ones who are doing the work, out there, embedded in a fiction that is not of their making.
Petit’s former researcher, a person called Kaporal, was part‐Breton, part‐Pole, mostly South London. Herne Hill. He was reputed to work fast; in and out of America, when they let him, hire car and Holiday Inn. Driving alone, sweating profusely: chasing rumours. Badlands, motowns. He maintained contact with a network of other ‘risk assessment’ technicians, who fronted as television journalists, reporting on earthquakes in Ankara, plague in Quezon City, unusual cellphone traffic out of Frankfurt. Conspiracy was a given: you learn to knit with electricity, prints of prints, to arrive at Xerox truth. Nothingness. White noise. The sludge at the bottom of the virtual world is always the same: child pornography, weapon fetishism, debased forms of the occult. Inland empires in which the midnight sun, like a prison bulb, can never be shut off.
Kaporal was a bounty hunter, trading dubious information, toying with a rosary of plastic skulls, which had been looped through complimentary keyrings from middle‐European Turkish restaurants.
‘It’s a thousand a week,’ he said. ‘I can give you the bones of Hackney in seven days. Land deals: Russians, Saudis. The City guy in Broadway Market, Dr Whatever . . . sounds like Rotten. And the child abuse thing, Trottergate. Voodoo cults. Trade in body parts. Bush meat in Ridley Road. Deaths in custody. The assassination of Harry Stanley. Cashmoney OK? In advance.’
The man was a virtuoso of the keyboard. Through a steady glugging of coffee, I could hear the keys rattle, sharp pings of the incoming messages: Kaporal talked through a blizzard of mal‐information, warped statistics. The sewage of hyperspace. My only problem was his fee. The researcher would begin as soon as he was paid, a coin‐in‐the‐slot monkey. Who was on the point of flying off to some forest in Finland, taking a cargo boat to Hamburg. There was never a shortfall of risks to be assessed.
It took me three months, not the work, the promises, but actually getting my hands on the cheques. I accepted any commission that related to Hackney: barber shops for a style magazine, off‐message Olympic soothsaying, radio punditry from the Lower Lea Valley. I knocked out whither‐London rhetoric for plausible Irish architects in the pay of American museums. I marched late‐rising, yawning students down canals, across parks, through allotments. I peddled notebooks. I flogged boxes of manuscripts, letters from the dead, the druggy ephemera of countercultural exiles.
The institutions were the worst, invoices never went to the right place. Curators who had issued the original invitation moved sideways, Tate to National Portrait Gallery, Hayward to Tate again, before you could get past the answer machine. Reliable payers, once the piece made it into print, sat on reviews for nine months, a year. Meanwhile, bills spiralled, council‐tax demands doubled, utilities were competitive. Storage, if you tried to hang on to an archive from which to work, cost more than Rachman paid for a terrace of houses in Notting Hill back in the 1950s. Storage is the growth industry, twinned with the cult of minimalist lifestyles; empty apartments kept empty, as a long‐term investment. Entire blocks, Kaporal assured me, were being bought, in advance, by West Ham footballers as a hedge against the annual threat of relegation. Money has its own architecture. Money of a kind that Kaporal refused to recognize. He liked getting his large hands dirty, pressing juice from greasy coins. He could read the curve of the future in the temperature of human touch.
On his way to a private screening in Wilkes Street, Spitalfields, the elusive researcher agreed to drop in at the Royal Inn on the Park, Lauriston Road, with a bag of files, material he could forget as soon as my brown envelope was in his pocket. The pub was another grand Hackney facelift: white and flower‐decked. But this was still the bar where ‘Big Jim’ Moody, a South Londoner on the run, was blown away by an unknown assailant. I decided to take the opportunity, walking in that direction, closing in on Kaporal, to interview Rachel Lichtenstein. Respectful of earlier waves of Jewish migration, a blue plaque on Old Ford Road for the ghetto novelist Israel Zangwill, Rachel tried to find a family home in the Lauriston area, in Victoria Park Village; and before that in a new estate on a slope beneath the gloomy Hackney Hospital, at the edge of the Wick.
Chasing Brick Lane witnesses for her current work in progress, Rachel was back in town. It was no longer viable to live, with her husband and two young sons, in Hackney. She commuted, stayed with friends, took the train to Leigh‐on‐Sea; a new beginning in the area where she had grown up. Those huge skies over the widening Thames Estuary. A setting in which legends of London, remembrances of a Polish or Russian heritage, could find their necessary form.
Rachel, who had been carrying out a project, that morning, with the children in Lauriston School, was waiting for me in Frock’s, a bar‐bistro that had recently changed hands. This was where my son William got his first job: just before his fourteenth birthday. Nothing like keeping up old traditions, we thought; child labour, kitchen slavery. He learnt to cook buttery scrambled eggs, to wash dishes, serve at table. And he was rewarded with trips to France. The pupils in Lauriston School were assembling a book. ‘It’s astonishing,’ Rachel said, ‘they speak fifty different languages.’
In November 1948, Oswald Mosley, founder of the Union Movement, made a speech at Lauriston School to five hundred supporters, mainly women and young girls. His theme, he announced, would be ‘the development of the Party’s new policy of union with the peoples of Europe against the threat of devastation from Oriental forces, and to Britain’s recovery by exploiting the wealth of Africa’.
During the war, prisoners from Victoria Park, undergoing a denazification programme, were allowed out in the evening to attend meetings at the popular fascist pitch in Gore Road; where the burning of synagogues was advocated. Harry Hynd, MP for Hackney Central, offered to stand guard in Brenthouse Road.
4 May 2006. With long, lightened or sunbleached hair, and wearing spectacles (the cost of hours at the computer) that gave her an air of authority to go with her position as householder, archivist, Rachel relished the buzz of being back in town. It was hard, she said, to juggle the pleasures and duties of domesticity with the hunger to spend hours digging out stories, recording the voices of those who were fading into whispers, or were timid of the instrument placed in front of them on the table.
We moved to Hackney Wick because it was the only place we could afford that seemed big enough for an expanding family. I wanted to be in East London. We bought this house before it was even built. A brand‐new estate. Quite big houses, up on this hill. The estate looked very green in the brochure. We moved in and, very quickly, it went wrong. I absolutely hated it. I felt like we were stuck on a remote island, surrounded by darkness. It was a rough area. The Hackney Wick station was terrifying. People were always getting stabbed and raped. There were no shops.
Within a couple of months of moving in, we put the property back on the market. I couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t part of anything. You didn’t want to walk around there. All of my neighbours were broken into, trashed. I was pregnant with Daniel. I was at home, hot and pregnant, listening to the sound of doors being kicked in all around me. I remember hearing this burglary happening next
door and being too scared to do anything about it, all this crashing and banging and breaking glass.
I liked the idea of socially mixed housing. It was half housing association and half private, but it didn’t work. The estate wasn’t maintained. It was all nice little gardens when we started, but the rubbish bins weren’t emptied. The litter! You’d open the front door on this wasteland, rubbish blowing around your ankles.
Some very scary people moved in and I wanted to get us out as quickly as possible. Right behind the estate was a drug‐treatment hospital, right at the back of our garden. When we moved in the garden was lovely and we had some really good neighbours. Very soon it collapsed, became impossible, frightening. Uninhabitable actually. It was a prison island in the end, locked in by motorways and crumbling hospitals, stalked by disturbed people. Who would have thought of planting human beings in such a place?
We moved as soon as we could arrange it to a strange house near Victoria Park. I always seem to live alongside Jewish cemeteries or bomb‐sites. This place had been bombed. It was a Victorian street that had been flattened and where mews houses had been built, originally as studios. I chose it because I felt threatened in Hackney Wick, our property was exposed at front and back. The new house was a kind of cave, with no windows at the rear. It was big. The estate agent described it as ‘lofty’. It wasn’t. It was a cavern.
The other people around us were young and trendy. They were internet designers, fashion folk. I wanted to be near the park. I wanted to be near the school. The house became too small for us very quickly. We lived in Victoria Park for ten years, the park was part of our lives. We were always in the children’s play area and the One O’clock Club. You’d meet people in the park, there was a sense of community. Obviously, my family had lived in this area before, Uncle Sid – Sidney Kirsh – was around the corner in Gore Road. I felt connected to that little piece of ground.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 5