I witnessed an altercation between a policeman and a police‐woman, safe in their car, and a black youth, walking down the middle of Albion Drive. How it escalated, this battle for respect. The apology the youth demanded for what he perceived as racial abuse.
‘Why you cuss me, man?’
The way the police defend their status, as motorists, right up to the point where they are forced to exit the vehicle: physical confrontation, rolling on the ground. Cuffs, restraint. No winners, much hurt.
‘I know street law, man. I want to know your law. I want to see the book of conduct.’
It floods back. 30 November 1984: the incident when armed robbers tried to hold up the school payroll van. A bungled, sold‐out operation. The sorry villains were surrounded, unmanned, handled with extreme prejudice. Whatever daylight they possessed was stomped out of them as they lay, trussed like chickens, on the pavement. When it was over, the plainclothesmen leant against macho motors, chatting and smoking, while they waited for the meat van to remove the living bodies.
I took a few snapshots, made a note for the files. And went back to work, preparing that week’s trawl of used books for market. I had a mint copy in dustwrapper, from Kingsland Waste, of Elephant and Castle, a London novel by R. C. Hutchinson. But not much hope of selling it. Unless I could find an angle, a way of talking it up. To find the extraordinary in the apparently mundane, that’s the gimmick.
After appearing in the Hackney Gazette, interviewed in Abney Park Cemetery, poking about, trying unsuccessfully to locate the grave of Edward Calvert (engraver, disciple of William Blake), I received a number of curious communications. One of them, from Ann Jameson, I followed up: immediately. Ann lived in Middleton Road, opposite the newly revised mustard‐brick, neo‐suburban Holly Street Estate. Pretty much at the spot where the car of angry barbers confronted me, patting their pockets.
Ann wanted to offer testament to her passage through the borough (and life). I was the wrong Iain. She confused me, as I soon discovered, with the man Jonathan Meades described as ‘the master topographer’. Ian Nairn. Who was long dead. But in Hackney that’s no disqualification. Walking the perimeter, the dead are always with us, interrupting our meditation, making the invisible audible. Those medical men, Dr Benjamin Clarke and Dr William Robinson, local nineteenth‐century historians, were often at my shoulder: especially in Abney Park. Stoke Newington was a bone of contention. Was it part of Hackney? Clarke, a generous man, allowed it a coda in his book, an extra chapter to demonstrate colonization by the land‐greed of the borough. He needed the old burial ground as a source of anecdotes. He recalled, for example, the Turkey merchant and governor of the Bank of England, Mr Cook, who died in a Stoke Newington mansion in 1752.
‘And by his will ordered that his body should be carried to Morden College; that there it was to be taken out of the coffin, wrapped round with a winding sheet after Eastern fashion, and buried, standing upright in the earth; and the coffin was to be laid by for the use of the first pensioner who might need it.’
What Meades prized in Nairn was ‘the feeling of communicable joy at being employed and paid to indulge passionate curiosity’. If I was the shadow of Nairn to whom Ann Jameson could make her statement, I was happy to play the part: take tea, sit on the lawn, listen. Her softly spoken voice, rushing then hesitating, giving way to abrupt laughter, weaves through my tape beneath the usual auditory thatch of planes, ambulances, sirens, motorbikes, horns.
The major hook was that Ann Jameson happened to be the daughter of R. C. Hutchinson. A reforgotten London author – whose work I had sold but never read.
Now I’m having a very happy section of my life, because for the first time I’m not only on my own but I’ve got heaps of money and heaps of time. And I don’t have to move or do any of the things that widows have to do. I feel extremely lucky.
I bought the house, with my husband, Don, in ’85 and we had it all done up. It was a complete mess, multi‐occupied, all the doors smashed. We made the move in November ’86. It was just twenty years ago.
I could hardly persuade Don to move here at all. I was moving from a little almshouse, one of the Trinity Green Almshouses in Mile End Road. I’d got a 1695 house. I’d been living there for a few years before we moved to Hackney.
Don had another marriage and lived in posh Essex, Buckhurst Hill. I had to buy this house when he was very ill. I took a chance. I was in a position to do it. Another stroke of luck: when I first went to Trinity Green, I was paying £2 and 10 shillings in old money, as a tenant of the LCC. Then the right to buy came in – 1980 – and I bought for £10,000. The value of my property went up 600 per cent. The rise wouldn’t have done me any good if I had to go on living there – as my old neighbour still does.
Not only did Don have his property, I had mine. We had plenty of money to make good this place. We bought it for £62,000. We spent £40,000 refurbishing it. The only bathroom was down in the basement and was used by all the flats.
Holly Street has changed to an amazing degree. I thought they had knocked down all the Victorian houses like this one. I thought they’d been bombed. I was horrified when I found out they’d actually been demolished in order to make these horrible blocks. My brother witnessed them being built or assembled. We did have a couple of burglaries from the Holly Street flats. They’d seen us going out to the car on a Saturday morning. One of them broke down the front door and came in. The police didn’t dare to enter Holly Street. That was the end of it.
But Hackney has been wonderful too. Don, instead of calling it the OSP, Other Sodding Place, called it home at last. He couldn’t get over the area. He grew up in East Ham. They were taught to think how awful Hackney was.
I love the recent changes. It’s very difficult to separate them from my growing confidence, the good luck I’ve been having. There’s been a wonderful change in neighbours. When I first came here, there were three generations living in this house. The middle generation had been born here. They had two adolescent children and a horrid little dog that never got used to us. It stood on its lean‐to kennel, yelping, day and night. They moved out eventually and Jack and Gary came. Gary was a builder, he gave us a side wall to our garage. And a roof. We didn’t like him particularly as a neighbour. He was very, very odd. He used to have odd ways of celebrating the girls who came to stay with him. He’d sit on his Harley‐Davidson bike indoors. He never used it outside. What in fact he used it for, well . . . Ha! We heard, through the wall, everything that went on. The bike, the girls. He put in a lot of lovely German cooking equipment, but never cooked. He would go off to his mother’s. Not a happy man really.
When my husband was in hospital for many weeks, before he died, the doctor said, ‘Why don’t you bring him home? He’s only having palliative care.’ This was support for something I wouldn’t have had the courage to undertake on my own. It meant having a feeding pump, carers coming in. It was much better to have Don at home. Much better than going to see him in the morgue at the hospital, the Homerton.
We had a memorial service in the church, All Saints, just behind where you live. I never set foot in it before. They’ve got a very friendly vicar, Rose. An awful lot of people knew Don. Far more than I realized. He’d been going around on his electric buggy. He did the shopping for me. Although profoundly deaf, he had relationships with everybody – which I hadn’t managed to do. All these people came up, after the service, to say he was a very good friend. We had a hundred people.
Another friend of mine went back to All Saints the other day, for its 150th anniversary. She said there were only blacks.
I’m very rational now. I’m not a Christian at all. I think religion does an awful lot of harm. But my brother Jeremy is a retired vicar. His longest time was in Hackney, at St John the Baptist in Hoxton. They moved into the vicarage, having lived in the south part of Mortimer Road. He’s too saintly, my brother. He followed my mother. We were brought up to be very Christian. Going to church every single Sunday. And not only
that, but having to teach at Sunday school. It was unspoken devotion.
We didn’t see much of my father. Morning and evening, he worked. It took him about three years to write each book. You can come up and see them if you like. Very well crafted, just crafted, that’s it. He was interested in style. We have got his seventeen‐year‐old’s schoolboy’s diary – which shows that he did have doubts. When he married my mother, Margaret, he didn’t dare to be other than very, very devoted. I think he would have been a better author if he hadn’t had all his characters becoming so unnaturally good.
He gets his background, even for a London novel like Elephant and Castle, from a book. He didn’t wander round the streets. He was completely the opposite of you. Nearly all his books are set abroad, it was only Elephant and Castle that is really in England. And it didn’t do so well. He got the Daily Telegraph prize for the book he wrote before the war.
It’s just chance that I have any connections with London. When I was looking for accommodation, as a single girl, the Mile End Road almshouses happened to become available to people other than social workers. I found out about this and managed to get one on Trinity Green. Otherwise I had no connection with the East End. It does annoy me when journalists talk about Hackney in the national papers and they say that it is in the East End. I wish we had kept to the NE postcode. Our postcode should be NE, North London.
I do use Kingsland Waste Market. I was very surprised by one of the market women. She said, ‘Aren’t you the one who used to go round with the old man on the scooter?’ I liked talking to her. One of the things Don left behind – he was very parsimonious about a lot of things, but not paper, stationery – was about thirty rolls of sticky brown tape. I thought I would give it to the market girl, the first stall I found selling such things. So I came home, got the tapes and took them back to her. She started talking about her difficulty in getting married. I suggested she try the internet. Haha!
I know Norman of course. His stall is a treasure trove. We had him take away some things we’d had for years. I got him to take away Don’s latest chair. It was very comfortable, but it wasn’t what I like. The authorities take all the wrong decisions over the market – but then you can’t expect people who want to be local councillors to be all that bright, can you? I don’t really understand why we have local government at all. There are so many different areas within each borough anyway.
The best houses in Albion Square would go for a million now. I feel very, very lucky that we’re not right in that space. I wouldn’t like to see those people every time I come out. I’d very much rather be a bit outside. I’ve been a real outsider all my life. You’ve been an outsider too. I’ve never seen you at the Square party. I only realized you lived so close at hand when I saw you in the Hackney Gazette.
One of the Albion Square ladies was very supportive at the time of Don’s memorial service. I decided to take her to Dalston for lunch, the Shanghai. She’d never been in Dalston before. She’s very frightened of the area. She saw my bag was slung a bit carelessly over the back of my chair. She said, ‘Be careful with your bag.’ She was scared, very scared.
We went inside. Ann Jameson had set herself a task more formidable than my Hackney researches, she was archiving family histories from untold mounds of hard evidence: letters, photographs, internet trawls, her father’s books and papers.
She led me upstairs to a workroom. It was organized around her files, the computer. She was a professional when it came to downloading clues. Almost all Hutchinson’s novels, in multiple editions, with and without wrappers, had been retrieved from Kingsland Waste Market, from church jumble sales and charity shops. As I blundered around, recording and transcribing Hackney, so Ann Jameson gathered up yellowing memorials to her father.
I was born in Norwich, three of us were born in Norwich, because my father didn’t feel he could rely on his writing at the beginning. He got a job with Colman’s Mustard. He was an advertising manager. They were recruiting Oxford graduates. We had to stay in Norwich until 1935. Then we moved to Birdlip in Gloucestershire. A house that happened to be going, Kingsholm Cottage.
We were always different somehow. We didn’t have neighbours. Then Ray – I call my father ‘Ray’ now – had to take us to school. He wrote in the Cheltenham library because he had to bring my brother Jeremy home at midday. I came home in the afternoon. My father didn’t find that easy.
My mother was very shy, she wanted her family to herself. They were different personalities. They were an Oxford couple. My mother didn’t have many friends. In 1938 we moved to Hampshire. My mother wanted Ray to herself. She would cry when she didn’t get a letter from him, whenever they were separated. And she would tell him about the crying and the cause of it.
I did determine not to use the word ‘mad’ when I talked to you, because I’ve just been reading a book about Virginia Woolf and how she wasn’t really mad.
I sometimes wandered into the Holly Street Estate. My husband never would! I liked the adventure, finding new ways through into Dalston Lane. It’s so wonderful on my bicycle. I scoot up there, down the road that runs into the back of the Sainsbury’s complex. I’ve got a bike that takes an awful lot in the basket.
Before I leave, Ann presents me with an American first edition of Elephant and Castle: A Reconstruction. I won’t sell it. The book is far too wrecked for that, on the wrong side of a ‘reading’ copy. Spine flapping, Boots Lending Library label partly removed. But I will read it, one day, a complex epic (Hutchinson was in thrall to Proust) of 658 pages. A length no reputable publisher would now countenance for a literary novel.
The status of Hutchinson’s text hovers between document and fiction. There are real and contrived letters, walk‐on cameos by the author. A novel of substance, unpopular with reviewers in its own day, Elephant and Castle has been banished to charity shops. And to Ann Jameson’s narrow Middleton Road studio. A duplicate city reinvented in a Cheltenham library.
‘Events trail shadows larger than themselves,’ I read. ‘Much that people afterwards said about those days came from springs of imagination almost free from the pollution of fact.’
Kingsland Waste
The Waste lives down to its name, it’s a market of markets; intensely local and of diminishing interest to outsiders, fetishized collectors. In the 90s (John Major not Aubrey Beardsley), I would sometimes run into Rachel Whiteread, who lived just beyond the west end of Albion Square, alongside the Duke of Wellington pub. Rising with Hackney, she was soon to outgrow it, moving south to a reconditioned synagogue on the border of Bethnal Green and Spitalfields. Dressed down, bibbed and booted, Rachel would be inspecting, without the predatory eye of the bargain hunter, goods spread across a ramshackle improvisation of stalls and boxes by Norman Palmer. Everyone knew and respected Norman: as the last of the dealers who presented accidents of plunder on a weekly basis. A managed illusion of novelty kept his punters hot. He had an eye for oddities and his prices were always reasonable. In the dirt, near the stall, were a series of storage trays and tea chests, Whiteread auditions, stacked with books that had to be lifted out, item by item: there was no easy way. The market floor became a swamp of rejected volumes. At the end of the day’s trading, ahead of the council carts, scavengers advanced, raking over spurned libraries, slippery dunes of paper: refuse is a commodity that is never refused.
Rachel’s browsing, her Saturday‐morning market walk, was a standard East End reflex for off‐duty artists: drift as a stimulus to future projects. Goods were scanned with peripheral vision. The meandering stroll offered relief from studio discipline, the strain of explaining and promoting work that was instinctive and arbitrary. The Kingsland Waste Market was a private view, open to all, a Royal Academy Summer Show of installations, photoworks, wrecked medicine cabinets. It combined the functions of sponsored exhibition and gift shop. There were traditional elements (racks of jeans, tools, budget cosmetics, CDs, DVDs, batteries, sticky tape) and also late‐surrealist innovations. A stuffed goat
mounted on a lawnmower. A diver’s helmet filled with goldfish. A tray of keys gouged from an ancient typewriter. Whiteread was happy to avoid anything that might inspire her art. She was following a routine, a sanctioned route: off duty, in her place. Difficulty was the motif, storms raged around her current commission, the Holocaust Memorial for the Judenplatz in Vienna. A frosty casting of reversed books, a blind library of unwritten texts.
In earlier times, late 1960s, when the Waste heaved and seethed with knock‐offs, electrical parts, rusty spanners, the apprentice sculptor Brian Catling made his stately progress, towering over Cockney aboriginals, beachcombing for objects to be pouched against future constructions: machines that were also sets, lethal gifts for godchildren and for the children of patrons who kept him fed. The market was a stream of cargo cult goods in which Catling knew just how to wade.
Kingsland Waste had been long established on these wide pavements; by the 1970s, it was running at more than a hundred stalls, with attendant parasites, fly‐pitchers, watch‐flashers, inside‐the‐jacket men with necklaces, gold coins, parrots and pornography. The kind of merchandise we lost soon after our arrival in Albion Drive. A street fund to which, through our first two or three burglaries, we were involuntary contributors. A policeman, sniffing around after the original break‐in, muttered sympathetically that it was ‘terrible, terrible, absolutely shocking’ to see a room left in that state. Not realizing nothing had been touched, this was how I worked. Up to the elbows in books, papers, paints, maps, stones.
When I fished out a bag of unlabelled tapes from one of Norman Palmer’s boxes, I found a recording of Basil Bunting reading a selection from the Cantos of Ezra Pound and some Wordsworth. A haunting conjunction, the living poet ventriloquized to great effect by the dead. The only way I could actually play the tape – and I did constantly, wherever I went – was in the car. All my other machines were wrecked or sitting on the pavements of Hackney waiting for a feeble‐minded cash buyer. Two weeks into my possession, Bunting was gone. Quarter‐light window smashed, Friday‐night toll: no car radio to be had, bag of tapes snatched. To find their way back, I assume, to the mounds from which they came. Look on the episode as cultural rental. Premature recycling. But if you should encounter this Bunting cassette on your travels, let me know. I’m in the market.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 9