Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  I found Lauriston Road, with all the cafés and shops, difficult – particularly when David started going to school. I enjoy chatting with all sorts of people, I cross barriers very easily. There was a real divide between the very middle‐class, just‐moved‐into‐Hackney, tons‐of‐money parents, who would clique together, and the young families who had lived here all their lives. That street was a weird mix of posh little restaurants, bistros, boutiques, delicatessens and all this other regular stuff that was going on. I felt a lot of people were there because they felt Hackney was a bit edgy and cool. Actually it was a middle‐class enclave in which we couldn’t afford to live. That was one of the reasons why we were forced out. I also found the crime in the immediate area very alarming.

  When Daniel was a baby we had a nanny. She was coming back to the house one day with the children. David must have been two and a half. They approached the front door. I was upstairs, transcribing Whitechapel interviews, with my headphones on. I didn’t hear them. The nanny opened the door, David went inside. She stepped back to get her stuff from the buggy. Somebody came up from behind and attacked her. David shut the door in her face. This tiny little boy! She was mugged on the doorstep, viciously, pushed over. She was screaming so loudly that I heard her and came down. It was crazy. David at two and a half . . . I was really cross with him. But he was protecting his baby brother.

  We had this neighbour, right opposite, a big boxer, a black guy with dreadlocks. I told him about it. He said, ‘If I’d fucking seen him, I’d have chopped his arms off with my Samurai sword.’

  I felt the darkness closing in. It was leaking into my home. Walking the kids to school, you’d be going past all those blue‐and‐yellow tin signs advertising the most recent outrages, assaults, rapes, hit‐and‐run drivers. When that girl, the artist, was murdered in the park, it really did something to me. We were already thinking of leaving. We were struggling financially. The killing of Margaret Muller stopped the park being a sacred space. I couldn’t let the kids run free any more. I was nervous of the trees, the wide‐open spaces I once loved. It was such a horrible incident. She was a young painter, about the same age as me. It was devastating.

  There were several entrances to the Royal Inn on the Park, as ‘Big Jim’ Moody discovered: four shots in the chest, point‐blank range, from a Webley .38. Sudden silence. Burnt air. Before the sirens, which were sounding now, a chorus Hackney dwellers accept as confirmation that they are in the right place, back home. If they send for the red chopper, from the roof of the Royal Whitechapel Hospital, you know you’re in bother. Nothing more than a nick from a blade, a cleaver embedded in the skull, and you can walk to the Homerton like a proper man. Hop a 236, if you’re lucky. A lovely ride, monitor screen in colour, carries you right to the door.

  I had no idea what Kaporal looked like.

  ‘Used,’ Petit said. ‘In the way Americans describe old books. Leathery. Black T‐shirt if he’s out for the evening. Bulky, but not wobbling fat. Eats on the hoof with his fingers. Could be exjob.’

  There was such a man, at the bar, sandwich in hand, waiting on my nod before he ordered his pint. Grinning: like the shock therapy was beginning to wear off. No bags, no box files. No socks.

  ‘I hit the Victory in Vyner Street on my way over,’ he said. ‘Major crim hangout. Quiet drink with an informant, bowl of crisps, pickled egg, saveloy. Motor pulls up, two heavies get out. The little bloke is carrying a rolled‐up newspaper at a very strange angle. Hackney Gazette. I picked it up when they left. WEBSITE LINK TO TERROR. CALL FOR INVESTIGATION INTO EVANGELIST GANG. TV STAR BITES HOMELESS MAN.

  ‘This guy, the dwarf with one arm, is lifted into the air by his mate. He pulls a machete out of the paper and brings it down, hard, on the head of the man on the stool next to me. Landlord grabs ice cubes for the wound and refuses to send for an ambulance. It’s his ear, chopped clean off. Bloody cubes roll across the floor and are licked by the pub dog. Who sniffs the ear, then swallows it – before the geezer can move. We had a good laugh. The guy sat there, watching the racing, holding a bloody towel of ice cubes against his head. The landlord, fair play, gave him a brandy on the house.

  ‘I saved you the newspaper. It’s outside in the car, with the rest of the stuff. Everything you need in 211 pages, basic. Make it a Grolsch, thanks.’

  Kaporal completed his confidential report into Hackney in six days; on the seventh, he hit the pubs. Those were his methods and they worked. He understood how to get inside the belly of the beast. Say the words ‘Hackney Council’ and humans freeze; loud but unproven rumours of incompetence and corruption are a given, forests of self‐justifying prose in fifty languages, but nothing to be done. We have been bored into submission. And boredom is where Kaporal starts. The truth is out there, if you have the stamina to pursue it: buried deep within documents like the ‘A to Z of Hackney Council Services’. A cyberspace wasteland that only idiot savants are prepared to investigate. Boredom as the ultimate firewall of terror.

  ‘I experience a pulse‐quickening, physical thrill,’ Kaporal said, ‘when I submerge myself in lists. Once you break the protective flak down into an alphabet, it comes to life. I’ve highlighted the promising items for you. I always know when I’ve plucked the cherry, I have to break off for a wank.’

  • Dangerous Structures – see Planning Service

  • Dead Animals – see Pest Control

  • Defence Policy – see CCTV and Emergency Planning Service

  • Deportation – see Refugees/Asylum Seekers

  • Drug Action Team

  • Dumped Rubbish and Abandoned Vehicles

  • Empty Properties – see Council Housing

  • Faith Groups – see Religion

  • Filming in Hackney – see Hackney Communications Centre

  • Fraud – see Audit and Anti‐Fraud Division

  • Fraud Hotline (Council Housing)

  • Hackney Marshes

  • Hackney Mortuary – see Mortuary

  • HIV Related Brain Impairment – see Mildmay Hospital

  • Illegal Trading – see Trading Standards

  • Income Collection and Recovery (Right to Buy)

  • Infestation – see Pest Control

  • Listed Buildings – see Local History

  • Mice – see Pest Control

  • Noisy Parties – see Noise Service

  • Paralympic Games – see Lower Lea Valley Regeneration

  • Pools – see Swimming

  • Racial Harassment

  • Rats – see Pest Control

  • School Absence – see Education Services

  • School Exclusions

  • Sewers and Drains

  • Sexual Abuse

  • Sheltered Housing

  • Stray Dogs

  • Street Furniture

  • Substance Misuse Team

  • Table Tennis

  • Tourist Information

  • Traffic Calming

  • Turkey Meat – see Environmental Health

  • Unfair Dismissals – see Trade Union

  • War Memorials

  • Welfare Food Sales

  • Whistleblower Hotline – see Audit and Anti‐Fraud Division

  • Women’s Refuge

  Squeezing poetry out of lists, that was Kaporal’s singular gift. Showing us fear in a handful of dusty files. The man was a late‐modern master who had taken the ego out of composition. The world was his forest. His hired car rattled with foil trays, reeked of saturated fats and cigarette smoke; he was late for the next appointment. Coffee and sausage sandwich under the halogen lights of a night football enclosure: listening to gossip, anticipating violence. A cushion of unopened airmail letters in the back pocket of his elasticized jeans. A wife who didn’t outlast the honeymoon.

  Before I parted from Rachel, who was going up west for lunch with her agent, I asked for news of Sidney Kirsh.

  ‘He’s frail, but lively as ever. He won’t walk down to
the shops now. Not since he was attacked on the street.’

  Whenever I passed Mr Kirsh’s flat, in my afternoon wanderings, I checked the gauzy curtains for signs of life. Movement. Somebody staring back at me.

  Rachel was shod in slope‐soled black trainers, which she said were inspired by the stance of barefoot Masai warriors. They had cured her back, put the spring into her Achilles tendons. Removed to the seaside – whelks, prawns, on‐shore breezes from the oil refineries of Canvey Island – she had the freedom to write. While the boys were in school. With the garden door open, she heard once again the racket of street traders, unlicensed scholars, Yiddish poets, anarchists, tailors and barbers.

  ASYLUM

  They come here seeking asylum and discover a madhouse.

  – Matthew De Abaitua, The Red Men

  De Beauvoir Road

  They are dangerous things, if you look too closely, old photographs. The configuration of a lovingly observed face will change. A death‐in‐life instant begins to breathe; as your own breath, while you hold the print so tightly in your hands, stops. The shutter snaps its sexual trigger. It is not the vision released by acrid chemicals in a shallow dish that is fixed, it is the prurient attention of the image‐thief. No two people witness the same scene.

  There is a photograph of Anna, now framed, from the summer of 1968. It stays down on the coast, in a flat where there is room for such things. She is sitting, balanced, at an open window; sunlight behind her, the backlit effect I was going for. Her hair has been reconsidered for her new job as an infant teacher. Trees in full leaf. Fine white cotton blouse, pale green bolero: colour as memory. The print is monochrome. Anna in her early twenties. She smiles. Concentration flickers between the letter or document she is reading and this intrusion: I am a camera‐cyclops, overemphasizing the moment. A woman, holding a book, perched on the ledge of an open window: a genre piece. A painterly quotation signalling a new intimacy with the model.

  ‘I was so young,’ she says.

  Catching me with the photograph, Anna remembers the occasion, what it meant: that she was resting the sheet of paper on a thick and forgotten paperback. An estate agent’s list of Hackney properties, the house in Albion Drive. The only one I ever agreed to visit: the place where we would live for the next forty years.

  We couldn’t manage Golders Green. We’d been away, through the winter, a rented house on the island of Gozo that cost less than a room on Haverstock Hill. We visited the Ionic Cinema on Finchley Road and I bought an Incredible String Band LP, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, but it didn’t take. The brownness of North London furniture: we were paying guests who had outstayed our welcome. Without this banishment to a land of sugared cakes and crisp European newspapers, the time it took to get anywhere we wanted to be, Anna would not have agreed on the Sunday‐afternoon excursion to Hackney. I had been there twice before: once as a film student tracking down a Joseph Losey film, The Criminal – by bus, tube and bus again, out of West Norwood; and once on foot along the canal from Camden Town. That walk, with two friends, was the clincher: how London takes its meaning from water, warehouses with broken windows, humming generators, wood yards, muddy paths open to trespass. Waterways were protected from the public, from potential thieves and vandals. We were expelled at Islington, over the hill to pick up the canal as it emerged from the tunnel at Colebrooke Row: now there were green, creeper‐draped gardens, narrowboats; the City Road Basin with its startling view of Hawksmoor’s white obelisk at St Luke’s, Old Street, on the southern horizon.

  We reached what I now know was Victoria Park. Far enough. Far enough away from territory I knew, that northern spine: Stockwell, Kennington, Waterloo, Charing Cross, Leicester Square, Tottenham Court Road, Camden Town, Chalk Farm, Belsize Park. Brixton Market, on foot, to the National Film Theatre; to the Everyman, Hampstead, for its Bergman season. Even when we lived in Rudall Crescent and on Haverstock Hill, with the bistros, pub lunches, bookshops, bank where you didn’t have to queue, we knew it couldn’t last. But the uncharted scale of this East London park, without tourists or celebrated views, was mysterious and alluring. Anna and I came away delirious, appreciating that there was much more to discover. About London. And about ourselves.

  Hackney streets had no use for us. We had invaded a zone with no self‐consciousness, no conceit. A working place that didn’t, in the pinch of the time, work any more. We settled in a pub called the Old Ship, at the side of the dirty pink block of the Hackney Empire, a defunct music hall. There was a sloping, tiled passageway and a dark bar in which to absorb the experiences of the walk. I could disappear into this, I thought, without effort: afternoon drinkers nursing pints, a curtain of smoke to keep the street at a safe distance. Hampstead, Camden Town, The Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation in the Roundhouse, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, a life in documentary films: it drained away. Those things were diary entries written by a stranger.

  There are few cars in this part of Hackney, which is scarcely Hackney at all. Incomers resolutely face west: the N1 postcode a proud boast. I’m intrigued and a little alarmed by the notion of occupying an entire house; six people, potentially. Three couples. We’d be stretching it to call ourselves a commune. How it worked was that Renchi had sisters in Islington, contacts, they knew a man, a film‐maker, prepared to rent out his property. Renchi decided to sublet to Dublin friends. The meal, on that Sunday, was the first of many.

  We did not, in 1968, have any proper sense of local industries, street garages, betting shops, churches peddling Cliff Richard‐franchised Christianity. Or the outstations of R. D. Laing’s anti‐psychiatry movement: arks of insanity incubating insanity. Or ghosts of great houses with formal gardens. Independent printing presses. Markets. Future marriages, alliances, schisms, children. In the sour dark of a late afternoon in February, a young couple not knowing who they are, or where they are going, find themselves in a very specific place that is suffering from the same amnesiac condition: De Beauvoir Road.

  A square white house in a wide street punctuated by naked and spindly trees. Three steps up to a grey‐green door with brass knocker and thin vertical slit for thin vertical letters. Generous front window, its ledge decorated with ironwork curlicues that match the colour of the door. And white pillars, I’d forgotten those: twin Corinthian columns, one on each side of the porch. Moving inside we encounter the coarseness of hessian underfoot. A round white table. White walls. Pine cupboards. I sense already the damage we are going to inflict; but I want it, this new place. The host couple offer us the best bedroom and, spoilt creatures that we are, we accept. I’m excited by disorientation, the life that is not my life: unearned furniture, telephones without coin‐slots, a garden. There would be much talk, many disputes, managed silences, at that smooth table.

  Years later, out of the blue, I was contacted by a De Beauvoir woman who invited me to talk to a book‐discussion group, the Hackney Hardcore. It being a local event, in a weak moment, I accepted.

  ‘Where will this happen?’

  I imagined, from the confidence of her tone, that there must have been another revival of the Hackney Literary and Philosophical Society, a hard‐drinking leftist cabal who used to gather in an upstairs room of the Prince George in Parkholme Road to listen to scholars like Professor Bill Fishman.

  ‘The Groucho Club,’ she said. ‘Dean Street. Table booked in the restaurant.’

  You couldn’t hear yourself think, let alone talk, but it was obvious there were scores to settle. The Hackney Hardcore, being media folk, faces and former faces, were able to make a passable stab at eviscerating my book, its competence, its blatant flaws, without having to actually open it. One of the Clerkenwell architects thought he might skim a few pages of next week’s choice, by a man who had a previous connection with his third wife, to provide himself with sufficient ammunition for a character assassination.

  New Hackney, De Beauvoir Town: it’s an edgy address on the way to somewhere better; part of the classic Blairite traje
ctory – leading right back to Tony himself, who sat out the early Thatcher years in Mapledene Village, a sanitized ghetto of tax lawyers, helmeted City cyclists and black T‐shirt comics with production companies, tucked between Queensbridge Road and London Fields. Chelsea tractors giving birth to a litter of tiny silver pods who feed, by hose, from the teat of electricity.

  In the communal taxi, after the Groucho Club farce, we negotiated the broad avenues where I lodged in ’68. I realized that my host for the evening, a lively arts presenter, was also a person very much in the news. She had rescued a stalled career by publishing the definitive account of how to become a cash‐starved property millionaire. A platinum‐card pauper. London houses, holiday villas in Tuscany and Provence: they accumulate. Impulse buys after a good lunch. Shoes, handbags, war‐zone orphans. You know people, you have access to unlimited credit. Relationships founder, extended families extend. New Hackney is a columnist’s wet dream, autopilot angst with cycle lanes, but you pay a premium for frontier life. Stonking council tax. Heavy storage and insurance bills. Quarter‐light windows smashed every Friday night. Taxi accounts. Black cabs everywhere. Back from town and in again. Media downsizing: old hands marginalized or laid off. Threatened with Salford. Slow payment and non‐payment for freelance work. And suddenly you can’t afford a bottle of milk. No freebies at the minimart. Credit cards shredded. Or cloned. You are one of them, the faceless others who are stabbed on late‐night buses. Self‐exiled to Crusoe’s island (Stoke Newington): with a potential fortune in bricks and mortar, zilch in the current account.

  As we have a whip‐round to make up the cab fare, I ask my fellow travellers where they go for a drink, or where they eat in this area. At home in Hackney.