Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘Are we in Hackney?’

  They have heard of Kingsland Road, on the back end of the local news, blue‐and‐white ribbons, flashing lights, but they’ve never had reason to visit it. They sleep here, secure inside stucco units of mid‐Victorian speculative housing contained within the rectangle made by Downham Road, Southgate Road, Balls Pond Road, Kingsland Road. The last generation of confused incomers to rough it: before the London Fields revival, the second coming of Broadway Market. Belgian beers and pre‐famous graffiti.

  But in the troubled sleep of De Beauvoir Town, monsters crawl and swim; memory‐traces of old Hackney bedlams, the shit and straw of satanic madhouses lurking beyond the walls of the City. Blotting up damage. Incubi and succubi attend the recently impoverished with garlands of nightsweat: final demands, failed commissions, overdue novels. A face that is your face in a mirror that refuses to recognize it. Nakedness as the final disguise. Until that story too can be captured, polished and made tame.

  In 1968 we were pioneer colonists, no more enlightened than the Hackney Hardcore, scratching our way through a mess of prejudices and received opinions. We owned nothing, we earned nothing; after four years in Dublin, it was hard to settle to regular work. I was educated to the point of being unemployable. Tom Baker, a gifted carpenter and handyman, had not yet put aside the siren song of the film industry. His credit as co‐writer of the Michael Reeves film Witchfinder General only prolonged the agony. Scrap‐books of the period reveal a group of the accidentally young in random clothes. We had no experience before this of central heating: polo‐neck sweater in brown for Tom, purple shirt for Renchi, probably borrowed somewhere on his travels between Liverpool and London. Short skirts for Anna, Judith, Bridget.

  I couldn’t think who, if anyone, did the cleaning. Anna remembers getting stuck into the kitchen when I was away with Renchi in Dublin, researching a never‐made documentary. Judith, who has a sharp eye for such things, a Jamesian scholar, remarked on this event: displacement activity. Bridget attacked the grease‐tray of the cooker, which, it appeared, had never previously been touched. One evening we noticed a tribe of small brown‐grey mice running up and down the kitchen curtains. After the usual debates and anthropomorphic handwringing, Anna took care of the poison saucers. An activity which would become a seasonal domestic chore. The meaty‐marzipan odour of small rodents rotting behind the skirting boards was a given in Hackney life.

  We took it in turns to cook, the women doing more of it than the men: you never knew how many people would pass through or sleep somewhere about the place. Renchi in particular had the habit of scattering invitations to all and sundry, using the offer of a meal as a way of ending an awkward telephone conversation with good grace. There were outpatients and occasional vagrants brought in from the streets. Some of them stayed for months. Sent downstairs in the middle of the night to investigate noises coming from the kitchen, I found an Irishman in a string vest and unlaced boots, nothing else, burning a pan of bacon.

  In Dublin, and before that in South London, I ate in cafés. I was a frying‐pan cook with a sideline dropping kitchen scraps into packets of processed soup (which I had been known to heat on the stub of a candle). Primitive spaghetti improvisations were also possible. My fish stew was thought to be an acquired taste. It involved a cauldron, hours of simmering, scaly lumps and tentacles chosen for their colour from the soused slabs of Ridley Road Market. I would chuck in herbs as they came to hand (from among the cat‐perfumed garden weeds or growing free in the cracks of kitchen tiles). And enliven the bubbling sludge with unpeeled potatoes, sweating onions, sour wine, HP sauce, soy sauce, a worm of tomato paste. Kill or cure.

  Tom was fastidious about his omelettes, the timing, the ingredients. They fluffed up, buttery and rich. His standard dish, we never tired of it, was chilli con carne. Budget mince and beans with a hunk of bread. Renchi was an inventive cook, dishes to be eaten as and when they appeared at the table, in no particular order. The inspiration was painterly. His themed green meal foundered when the jelly pie melted in the oven, slippery gunge leaking through ill‐fitting doors to add to the psychedelic revisions of the black‐and‐white, op‐art rubber floor.

  The men never did any cleaning, Anna reckoned. But she was wrong. In Gozo, where there was time for such indulgences, I painted a little portrait of her sunbathing, topless, reading Voices from Women’s Liberation. Liberated from false memory. I turned up a photograph of Tom, white jeans like David Hemmings in BlowUp, sweeping one‐handed around the sitting room – where Renchi and Judith slept on a sofabed – with a Hoover. And here is Renchi drying dishes at a heaped sink. Oh yes, we did our share. Even if, most of the time, we talked film, floated schemes, played cricket in the garden, and took off for walks up the Lea Valley – while Anna and Judith did the crash course that would give them direct entry to primary‐school teaching. The women dressed respectably for their commute while the men lounged around, brewing coffee, smoking and failing to land a single commission. It wasn’t enough to live in a successful film‐maker’s house. The glamour didn’t rub off. I remember the feel of the vacuum cleaner bumping over coarse hessian when I manoeuvred it around the grey box of the record player. Frank Zappa: Cruising with Ruben and the Jets.

  There were discussions about the events of ’68, but nobody left for Paris. Direct action never got beyond the screenplay. After a morning scouring South London markets, we read American comics in the park, near Waterloo, waiting to meet Judith and Anna on their lunch break. Tom chews his thumb and frowns over Army War: Sgt Rock (DC’s Startling New Combat Team).

  I had been in Grosvenor Square with Tom, demonstrating in favour of a study of crowd behaviour, tidal movement, involuntary peristalsis, as much as anything else. The shock of the horses, their size, coming straight at us: the lengths to which the state would go to protect American interests, the embassy with its oversize eagle. I didn’t understand how these streets worked but it was clear that we had been boxed in, there was no way out. The violence, if you weren’t in the front line, those who attempted a direct assault on the embassy, was spasmodic. Unconnected frames would have to be edited together, much later, to achieve meaning.

  Tom was trapped in this demo because he was researching politics for a film that would use the Irish Troubles as a backdrop. The producer, Michael Klinger, who was looking for a new project for Michael Reeves, suggested that they exploit the success of Bonnie and Clyde – an inspiration to Germany’s Red Army Faction – by finding a suitable plot involving Thompson sub‐machine guns and blood‐spattered, slow‐motion bank raids. Tom suggested Belfast or Dublin in the 1920s.

  While we were penned in the gardens of Grosvenor Square, Tom told me a story about Paris. He’d heard it in Rome. This man, a scriptwriter fallen on hard times, decided to kill himself. But first he wanted to enjoy a great meal, premier cru, at a favourite neigh‐bourhood restaurant. He chose his bottle, poured a glass, lit a cigarette. He opted for the steak, the biggest they could provide. This was, he told the patron, a special occasion.

  ‘Another film, perhaps? For the Americans?’

  ‘Much better than that. Believe me.’

  ‘My congratulations.’

  Prime beef overspilled the white of the plate. The patron, satisfied, went back behind the bar: polite conversation with the standing drinkers. The suicide took up the steak, slippery with butter and garlic and, gagging, crammed it down his throat – until the passage of breath was stopped. Tom didn’t say if the writer went blue or if he choked on his own vomit.

  We had our disagreements about film, but the major area of competition in that De Beauvoir Road house was sickness. Strategic malfunctions. Freak‐outs. With mild hay fever brought on by a day’s walk to Waltham Abbey, I was the loser: nothing interesting to report by way of symptoms, no doctor’s surgery visited in years. Tom did headaches, stomach cramps, career‐doubt, money‐doubt, cosmic‐doubt: the existential horror of taking a decision on choice of socks. Could he risk the pleasure o
f an overland journey to Nepal? Or would he prefer the ecstasy of denial (cash set aside for a greater expedition in some impossible‐to‐imagine future)?

  Renchi had his fits to trump us both and a history of visions, epiphanies that might provoke his art. On the pine sideboard stood a savage, fold‐out Bicknell triptych based on Godard’s Pierrot le fou: a mash of teeth, eyes, hooked hands, smudged lettering. Taken back to West Cork a few years later, borrowed by an American friend, this strident cartoon was allowed to weather in an outhousebyre: cracked, mulched, warped with damp. In front of the De Beauvoir Road painting, on a straw mat, was a Bolex 16mm camera – presumably liberated, by me, from Waltham Forest Technical College.

  In the scrapbook images of 1968, the young women are well presented, all of them. Alert, alive and of their period; a time when it was possible to manage style on little money. Bridget, with her long tumble of hair and vestigial skirts, brought villages to an awed paralysis, men and women, when she visited us in Gozo and wobbled across the island on a borrowed bicycle. Judith’s hair, cut somewhere fancy, one of those places with two lower‐case christian names, was a geometric fringe, reddish; an Anna Karina quote or approving acknowledgement of the actress Macha Méril from Godard’s Une femme mariée. The eyelashes. The enigmatic flutter. But Judith might disappear under the bedclothes, while Renchi talked on, unconcerned, with the latest trawl of dinner‐table vagrants. Bridget could faint on demand or tumble down the stairs. Anna, brought up in a hard school, managed her ailments; they were not to be discussed – up to the point of a complete breakdown when confronted by the feral energies of her first infant class. The way they jumped out of the window when she came into the room, or carried on with their mayhem, treating her as a temporary nuisance from another world.

  Thinking back to the early days in Hackney schools, Judith recalled, with astonishment, how they had been allowed to take two little black boys, Albert and Canute, to the cinema to see a Morecambe and Wise romp, then home to the De Beauvoir Road madhouse for high tea.

  The laurels for sickness drama went to Renchi, very soon after our arrival, when an agonizing attack, carpet‐chewing pain, far beyond his commonplace petit mal seizures, had me rushing him around the corner to Kingsland Road’s Metropolitan Hospital (now a secure nest of workshops, offices and funded hobbyists). Acute appendicitis, the knife. They gave me a black plastic bag to carry his clothes home.

  ‘Sorry. That’s all that’s left,’ I said to Judith, in a clunking reflex of ill‐judged humour. She screamed and ran upstairs.

  The small, tightly sprung, close‐bearded nurse who presented me with the bag, I wouldn’t forget. He was smoking a large spliff and was dressed in the nicotine‐brown overall of a storeman. Dirty plimsolls without socks. And jeans that looked as if they’d been borrowed from a very slight woman. They were kept barely decent by premature‐punk safety pins.

  This character saw me trying to read the title of the book wedged into his pocket and he pulled it out. The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich. A Panther Book in a light blue cover.

  ‘Your mate should make it, cut and chuck,’ the man said. ‘Not one of mine. I do the stiffs. Down below. Come round any night. Ian. Ian Askead. We get plenty of fresh meat, especially weekends.’

  Askead was one of those figures who turn up in the tabloids, arrested for impersonating a surgeon, carrying out intricate procedures, quite successfully, good kill rate, for five years. There were more London hospitals in those days; walk in, take your chance, quacks free to run their private kingdoms, body‐snatchers on the loose, casual employment for urban terrorists. If he had possessed a business card, it would have read: The Accused.

  He had a wolf ’s smile. ‘The energy source of the neurosis,’ he quoted from Reich, ‘lies in the differential between accumulation and discharge of sexual energy.’

  He liked the way I filmed Renchi’s pain‐pinched face. And then the night street from the high window.

  ‘Come down to the morgue,’ he said. ‘For a cup of tea. I have a notion that you could channel the dead by way of long‐exposure prints. Postmortem portraits absorb subject and photographer into a composite other. Or so I’d like you to prove.’

  WASTE

  His landscape would always be Hackney or Dalston . . . he would always, on hot, passionate summer afternoons, be kicking his way through discarded cabbage‐leaves in London markets.

  – Roland Camberton, Rain on the Pavements

  Rain on the Pavements (and Hair)

  I kept returning to Roland Camberton and that provocative 1951 Hackney novel, Rain on the Pavements. Provocative but unopened. I re‐read the lightly fictionalized account of a young Jewish writer’s childhood and education, the discovery of another London beyond the memory‐ground that would continue to haunt him. After making a collection of useful extracts, I put the book aside. It was now an object: to be touched, handled, as proof that such a work was possible. Autobiography. Humour. Topography. Resolution. Zany characters who never outstay their welcome.

  John Minton’s cover illustration is not quite Mare Street. He sketches a domed building that is neither the Central Library nor the old Hackney Empire. A yellow cloud leaks a shower that falls everywhere – except on the pavements; where children play with hoops and marchers make their non‐specific protest. No point of vantage offers that precise view: not the roof of the Town Hall, nor St Augustine’s Tower. Minton, a drinking companion of Camberton from Soho, has levitated over an idealized Hackney: six years before his suicide. And before the unexplained disappearance of Camberton. Who never published another book.

  I took a paragraph from Rain on the Pavements as my statement of intent. The book was in code. Secret instructions laid down for future investigators. Camberton was like Akim Tamiroffin Godard’s Alphaville: a heroic but embattled survivor from an earlier culture, hiding out, unshaven, his final report decaying in the orange box of some obscure street dealer. Stalls where urban poetry shares space with pulp and porn.

  ‘It was necessary,’ Camberton wrote, ‘to know every alley, every cul‐de‐sac, every arch, every passageway; every school, every hospital, every church, every synagogue; every police station, every post office, every labour exchange, every lavatory; every curious shop name, every kids’ gang, every hiding‐place, every muttering old man or woman whose appearance alone was enough to terrify them. In fact everything; and having got to know everything, they had to hold this information firmly, to keep abreast of change, to locate the new positions of beggars, newsboys, hawkers, street shows, gypsies, political meetings.’

  Tamiroff was an associate of Orson Welles; he has a wig‐juggling cameo as border‐town pimp with bootlace tie in Touch of Evil. A pre‐Hackney alien, Akim could do Mexican, Turkish, Russian on demand. But this was a dead end. Who could imagine Welles on Camberton’s Mare Street? Close the file. Having given up his memories to the researcher in Confidential Report, Tamiroff dies.

  I would begin my quest, learning about every stone, every small business, by walking north up Kingsland Road and logging barber shops. Barbers were the best indicators of minuscule shifts in the culture. Immigrants could always beg or borrow a pair of scissors, a chair, a broom. A cut‐throat razor. They could aspire to pomade, rubber goods for the weekend. A fancy mirror. A flag. An inscribed portrait of a nightclub singer. A landscape of the old country with mountains and sea.

  Barber shops were clubs for the unclubbable, for deviants, professional gamblers, musicians for hire, hustlers and silkshirt mobsters who would not be accepted for membership anywhere else. The reinvented, the tellers of tales. A morning refuge for pimps, night‐workers who had to find new ways to fumigate dirty money. Barbers were dumb recipients of all the city’s secrets. Once qualified, apprenticeship served under a harsh regime, they could move easily between countries. The only language required was the warm towel, the deft flick across the chair, mimed subservience. Barbering was a Yiddish trade. Old working men, like sheep, grew their hair for winter war
mth and were shorn for summer. Barbers were unofficial ambassadors, running linoleum‐floored embassies, making fellow villagers welcome: synagogues for the secular.

  What I sensed on Kingsland Road was that barber shops represented singular attempts to make a living, own property, build up funds with which to return home in glory. The betting shops that shadowed them – and often took them over – belonged to companies, combines. The council, naturally, were more sympathetic to slot‐machines, horse‐race monitors. Politics is for gamblers. The illegitimate enterprises of a previous era become the new orthodoxy.

  ‘A gambler’s day goes pleasantly enough. He gets up late . . . His first call is at the barber’s, where a long session is as much devoted to business – discussing the afternoon’s race‐cards with the boys, telling them how he got on last night and hearing their stories – as to the pleasure of lying under hot towels.’

  Life is truly golden when you don’t have to do your own shaving. You are one of the elect. Alexander Baron’s 1963 Hackney novel, The Lowlife, catches it beautifully, the society of the post‐war barber shop: the intimacy of strangers, professionally soothing chat (no politics), perfumed air (coconut oil, pine tar). Click of the scissors. Peer‐group banter. An improved self‐portrait emerging from the mirror above the washbasin. A confirmation of status.

  In working‐class districts of Hackney, like Shacklewell Lane, regulars had their own numbered shaving mugs. Lew Lessen, the man in the blue overall, served a long apprenticeship with punishing hours, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. – before he was let loose on paying customers. He practised shaving by lathering a beer bottle and working the razor until there was no clink. Shaving came cheaper than a trim, but was often a harder task. On Friday nights and Saturday mornings, labourers brought in their sandpaper chins, their barbed‐wire stubble, for the full treatment. Good barbers, as a mark of respect, were balder than their clients.