Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  I knew I couldn’t stay in Walthamstow. That era was finished, along with the interesting and unpredictable students, the freedom to float. It was all paper now: financial targets, research objectives. Issues. Best practice. You keep the same real estate – including a swimming pool which would survive up to the point, forty years later, when the grand Olympic project sucked resources out of the area – but you rebrand: Polytechnic, City Academy, University. You cull the freaks, the wild cards. I was unemployable. A householder, ratepayer, married man: who would have to busk an absence of marketable skills into finagling a living out of a place in which we were strangers who didn’t know the rules. Or the language. And where, by occupying a property, we were legitimate class targets. The only job on offer was as a clerk, handing out or refusing unemployment benefits to others.

  That photograph of Anna sitting in the window at De Beauvoir Road, reading an estate agent’s printout, comes to life. We walk through De Beauvoir Square, those eccentric Dutch houses that now fetch close to a million pounds, past the Metropolitan Hospital, across Kingsland Road, under the railway bridge. To the smell, so specific and ineradicable, of this Albion Drive house: burnt almonds, sour milk, fish stew, orange‐pulp bubbling in a saucepan, mice, linoleum wax, work boots, babies. Dead books. Years of lives. The arrangement of bricks, timbers, plaster, over this ground: the meadow, the farm seen in John Rocque’s 1745 map of the Parish of Hackney. A survey which reveals: nothing. A welcoming gap beyond rotated crops, worked soil. The pastoral fringes of the original city. The undertow of all our subsequent dreams: love.

  When Anna let the Irish builders loose, in the 1980s, they discovered a well or subterranean shrine, a rounded arch of ancient bricks beneath the floor of a potential child’s bedroom. They were digging out a drain. Half the house was rubble. When we took possession, we had an outside privy and a tin bathtub hanging from the wall. The history of London was in the stains around its rim. That’s why new council flats, in tower blocks, were so popular.

  ‘Roman, for sure, ’tis older than you are, boss,’ said the man with a pick, the romantic.

  ‘Cesspit,’ said the gaffer. ‘Bury the fucker now, Mick. Before the council are on to us.’

  I was too preoccupied, detached from the process, the noise, the dust of crumbling walls, the drilling. My father had died, my mother was drifting out of the immediate and back to a sharpened and recovered childhood. She took me, at first, for her husband – and then her father. Anna was in hospital. There were three children to be fed, dressed, taken to school. And I was trying to write, in short bursts, an endless novel called Downriver. To my shame, I let the shrine go. ‘Carry on, boys.’ Before Hackney officials are called in, before the whole dire business grinds to another six‐week halt. Red letters on yellow forms. Men with clipboards. The fine grit of brick‐dust choking my electric typewriter. The Irish came and went at whim, as the weather broke, or more promising short‐term jobs were offered. Our Mithraic cavern was filled with debris, choked in concrete. But we knew it was there.

  You wouldn’t suspect, watching the 1969 diary films now, that Anna was in crisis. The camera tracks out from the kitchen, on to the stoop, to stare back through the window. A slab of Swiss roll held aloft, a cup of tea; then she curls up to sleep, alongside the cat, on the battered leather sofa – which was respectably battered, inherited sheen. The teaching was too much, too soon: a reception class of forty‐two infants who treated new young women as fair game. Most of the kids sprung from the window, and away; others ran around shrieking or lay on the floor in play‐dead bundles. Valium, diazepam: for the relief of anxiety, a drowning numbness of waking slumber. The reality of the city pressed too hard on raw nerves. In ways that home movies, with their affectless recitation of breakfast trays, kitchen debates, picnics on the grass, could not reveal.

  Strings of soft light flatter our youth, the documented evidence of fictional lives. Down the iron stairs they come, Renchi and Judith, Tom and Bridget, the Velascos (Charlie and Syd) – who were married a month before us and now hold up a novel daughter to delight the recording instrument. I served the spaghetti that would become a staple of family life. They learnt, over the years, to humour my surf‐and‐turf revisions, tiny adjustments in flavour and intensity.

  The hand‐held camera, in communal use, circles like a hungry dog. Dappled sunlight. New faces on old ground. The gardens on either side of us are immaculate parlour extensions, every rose accounted for, paths swept, edges trimmed. Our neighbours are venerable, very white, widowed or in partnerships so long established that couples are never apart; on the street, they stop to talk, an excuse to regain breath, as they make the epic 200‐yard traverse to the post office behind the flats.

  Alongside the box of 8mm films, in the metal cabinet, I found a blue folder with typed notes; intended, I suspect, to be read in parallel with the flow of mute images.

  March 19, 1969. The British Constitution class, bored with talk of Ginsberg, R. D. Laing, Black Mountain College, the French Situationists, have asked if they can use the period for revision. I said: ‘Sure – but let me check you off on the register, so I get paid.’

  I am sitting in a classroom that isn’t mine, projector loaded, blinds drawn, radiator full on (can’t be turned off). Loud birdsong. Greenery behind the window I’ve finally managed to open. Drilling from a range of building sites. Train pulling into Walthamstow Central.

  The film this afternoon is David Holzman’s Diary. By Jim McBride. My choice. I don’t expect it to go down well.

  Yesterday, feeling lousy, I accompanied Renchi to a camera shop on Kingsland Road run by a whispering man with bottled red hair. He wore a zipped‐up golfing jacket. We tried out an antique field‐telephone system, but he wasn’t keen to sell. I wonder what the set‐up really is?

  Coffee in the corner place, opposite the Dalston Junction station. The view from the window stayed with me all day. The coffee had no taste. We discussed the idea of keeping a film diary of life in Hackney. I’m nodding but my head’s thick with phlegm, I can’t take in what Renchi is saying.

  I was so far out of it I spent the afternoon sprawled on the sofa reading John Betjeman. He was fond of Albion Square. As was Geoffrey Fletcher, the London Nobody Knows man. Fletcher did a series of pen‐and‐ink sketches of the Square, uncombed foliage and no cars, in 1965. For the Telegraph. Before Betjeman, I’d been flicking through Keats and wondering about the qualities that Tom likes so much, the London essence.

  We’ll begin this diary with ‘songs’ in the style of Stan Brakhage. Portraits. Places. A taped interview with the paper‐seller from whom Anna buys the Standard every night on her way home. Constantly changing f‐stops, varied lengths of shot. Cutting in camera. And we should do something, very soon, about the Orphans project. A trip to Dublin to catch up with the Dr Strangely Strange group: ‘folk, psychedelic, blues and baroque’. Things are fragmenting over there, hippie communards drifting to the West, Cork and Dingle, while others, in Berlin, are becoming politically engaged, getting involved with Rudi Dutschke and student activism.

  As predicted, the afternoon class are comprehensively bored by David Holzman. They can’t be arsed to wonder if it’s a real diary or not. The only spark of interest comes with the fish‐eye shots, the girlfriend in bed. Bare breasts.

  The art students, later on, were most taken with the opening sequence, the atmosphere of a particular district of New York. Films work best, they reckon, before the narrative kicks in. They want me to get hold of Warhol’s Empire. Stoners staring at stone.

  What the camera doesn’t get, pressing tight against the faces at the kitchen table, is the decision to script, finance, shoot and promote Orphans, a documentary about the Dublin bohemians who once lived in a communal flat at 55 Lower Mount Street, but who relocated to Sandymount Strand. Apple, the Beatles offshoot, made noises about encouraging innovative independent production: a dead end. The more urgent quest, under the baleful stare of the three panels of Renchi’s Pierrot le fou
painting, was to make contact with Jean‐Luc Godard. The mix in our proposal, backed by photographs from a recent Irish visit and several rolls of trial footage, was irresistible: the hippie spirit, its paradoxes, and the search for a breakaway band member, lumberjack‐shirted Angus Airlie – rumoured to be living in Hamburg, associating with the cadre who became the Red Army Faction (known to the tabloids as the Baader‐Meinhof Gang).

  In November 1969, although we knew nothing about this at the time, Astrid Proll was carrying out her own diary project, a sequence of photographs in a Paris café, urban terrorists on the run: her brother, the cigar‐chomping Thorwald, Gudrun Enslin, Andreas Baader, Peter Brosch. They mug for the camera, play with cigarettes. Confident reflections in long mirrors. Leather jackets. Enslin’s straight shoulder‐length hair. Dark‐rimmed eyes. Bande à part: the Outsiders. They were aping the Godard movie Tom and I saw in Paris: where the elusive director was not to be found. Proll’s reportage, less than a dozen shots, surviving her period in prison, exile, Hamburg, emerged in the early years of the next century as a boxed set, numbered and signed; an ‘iconic’ work offered for sale through international art brokers.

  The Orphans script never reached Godard. Or, if it did, he chose not to reply; he was otherwise engaged. While we phoned contacts all over Europe, the man was in Hackney, between the German Hospital and Ridley Road Market, shooting British Sounds.

  Now, in 2007, cinema is largely a matter of research, DVDs obligingly provided by The Film Shop in Broadway Market. Frozen frames. Publicity stills. Off‐balance compositions achieved by predators on Vespa motor‐scooters. Flicking aimlessly through the coffee‐table album, Magnum Cinema, to help conjure up a time when the doings of legendary directors were of moment to our lives, I find David Hemmings sneak‐shooting over the green fence in Maryon Park for Antonioni’s BlowUp. I arrived at the location in Charlton, after a haphazard search, in 1969. The magic of ‘Swinging London’ had already faded: it was place that mattered, a natural amphitheatre, paths, steps, wind in the leaves; all of it infected for ever by the process of industrial film‐making. Product is repackaged, digitally enhanced, cleaned up, reinterpreted for a new generation. The thing itself, the repertory movie, has deconstructed into fragments, all trace of the original narrative removed. Homeless ghosts on well‐tended tennis courts. Rough sleepers in the undergrowth. Killings waiting to happen.

  On the previous page of Magnum Cinema, Godard stands beside a fence of sharpened stakes, a corrugated hutch, adjusting his tie, pincering a cigarette stub, wearing a suit. Tinted glasses for a dark world. At his left shoulder is a personalized postbox: velasco. Reminding me of Charlie and Syd: that garden picnic. We didn’t see them again for decades. They were busy professionals, educationalists, advisers. Waiting for the culture shift, the Blair years, when the persuasive talkers, flexible conceptualists, would come into their own. Here, I felt, was a parallel relationship, the Islington version of our own Hackney marriage.

  Syd was an Israeli, intelligent, dramatic, fighting endless wars in committee rooms: for the better life. Charlie, more laid‐back, with a rich chemical history, attendance at Arts Labs and 24‐Hour‐Technicolor‐Dreams, devoted every spare moment of his time to playing, and later witnessing, football. If there was a cup replay in Hull on a wet Wednesday in February, he was there. A Euro qualifier in Iceland? An African Nations match, at which he knew he would be hustled, mugged, and quite possibly left for dead in a sewage stream? Unmissable. As our cracked house acquired its insulation of books and papers, Charlie’s office, the spare bedroom, filled with programmes, used tickets scavenged from the terraces, signed portraits of Cliff Jones, the speedy Tottenham winger on whose game he based his own. It was Charlie who drew Blair out of Hackney, demonstrating that it was time to move on. The next step on the property ladder. Better tennis courts. Fewer guns. Restaurants on Upper Street for deal‐making dinners at which you did not have to eat.

  The Triangle

  Jayne Mansfield, Hollywood Babylon siren, mammal superstar, Catholic/Satanist porno‐pin‐up decapitated by guillotine wind‐screen, in the early hours of the morning of 29 June 1967, on the road between Biloxi and New Orleans, swayed into the low church hall and community centre of All Saints, Haggerston, to declare open a convention of East London budgerigar fanciers. September 1959.

  That’s about as Fortean weird as it gets: the mechanics of movement, the dietary and cultural improbabilities. Yes, local bad boys, George Raft‐fancying Bethnal Green hoodlums, liked to import American photo opportunities, screen and showbiz automata at the end of their tethers; out of favour, on suspension, in hock to the Mafia. Indigent. Tax‐busted. Dope‐hungry. Punchdrunk basket‐case palookas. The mute thrush, Judy Garland. Joe Louis with the wrong kind of shuffle. The monolithic malevolence of Sonny Liston, holes in his dead eyes: as if he were wearing the black pennies before they laid him out in the Palm Mortuary, Las Vegas. Billy Daniels. And Raft himself, trying to remember how he did it, shot the Look across white tables with too many bottles on them. A private wax museum of sleepwalking self‐imitators acting out a twilight existence as their own body doubles.

  The Kray Twins, so John Pearson, their first biographer, told me, gathered a Spanish court of killer dwarfs, dockers in pink leotards and lesbian nurses who did damage on request around them on Friday nights in the Old Horns. By blood, the Krays were circus folk, entertainers. They loved a good knees‐up.

  But that was the 1960s, film and performance leaked into the London night like sewage from worn‐out Victorian pipes; clubs were theatres where group portraits could be assembled by anonymous journeymen to promote status. Celebrity was tactile: shared Winstons, shared sweat. The perfumed gangster picks up an imaginary tab (the protection he offers, insurance against his own spite). The cinema sheet was porous: violence begins everywhere, smiling teeth and lipstick on the glass. No separation between film‐script, newspaper report, novelization: posthumous twenty‐five‐year wet dreams in a solitary cell. The men, the torpedoes, are homosexual, armoured in the brittle varnish of narcissism. The divas, the arm candy, are beards: parodic domesticity, confused gender identity; heavy white furs in monsoon, mob‐crush temperatures. Everybody wants to touch every body: pinch, lick, taste. Prove. Secure a florid signature on lobby prints or legal documents.

  Haggerston was different. Mansfield, an intelligent woman on a global publicity assault, would travel anywhere (including Vietnam) with the same camera‐caressing, Michelin‐lipped smile; the four‐inch heels, transvestite abundance of hair, sheath dress that made walking, limo to church hall, a legerdemain of slithering juggling bodymass, stretched satin and threatened shoulder‐straps. Stateside, there would be two ratty chihuahuas, hairless, trembling, clutched over her exposed breasts. And there would be children with exotic names. And complicated dyslexic lives ahead of them. The dogs were safely behind bars, in Heathrow quarantine. The kids were in the Beverly Hills Pink Palace with a favourite minder. New British pets, sentimental gifts from temporary patrons addicted to reflex generosity (in lieu of proper payment), left their stringy turds and wet splats steaming in thick‐pile hotel carpets. The ones that were not found, behind preposterous dictator‐scale sofas, were the worst: an evil stench of pampered captivity. While Mansfield bathed, publicly, in champagne showers. And auditioned unsuitable, frequently violent lovers.

  She came to austere, monochrome England, her Californian studio career pretty much in ruins, to shoot a noir feuilleton cobbled together, phoned‐in direction, by Terence Young – a Soho face whose James Bond franchise pension was just around the corner. In an era when afternoon‐drinking clubs offered the permissions of ersatz night, Young associated, on clubbable terms, with Eddie Chapman, safe‐blower, triple agent, entrepreneur: a man with a story to sell. The movie encyclopaedist, David Thomson, characterizes the director as a man trading on ‘carnal supercharge’. Young lurched, with no visible strain, between military hardware, parachute‐regiment propaganda and architectural exposés of mamm
al goddesses: Mansfield, Anita Ekberg. Or Ursula Andress, emerging from the sea, a militarized Nordic ‘Birth of Venus’. Such was the topographical scrutiny Young lavished on Jayne’s deftly exposed armature that his little exploitational skinflick should have been titled Mansfield Park rather than Too Hot to Handle.

  Jayne played, in this film as in others, the absence of self; the dim version that conceptualists imposed on her. As if exhibitionism, voluptuous displays of American family values, the body as a deformity of superfluous health and vitality, was the true thing: the residue of a unique human consciousness. When we starved, she was our strawberry milkshake, and from her muscled breasts (not as vast as they appeared, cantilevered from a prominent ribcage) issued forth a gush of stars, sherbet fountains of planetary dust. An innocent era, when Homeric gods and goddesses, brought across the Atlantic by war, might couple, in disguised forms, with the broken mouths and pinched frames of late Europeans. Mansfield, in her bravely borne excesses, was the final manifesto of this mythology: she came to Hackney from the cover of Life magazine, out of Time, dripping from a surf of sleaze stories, sheet‐sniffing voyeurism, eavesdropping technologies. She was an overripe consignment of Marshall Plan aid, a gift‐wrapped Trojan horse intended to secure us in the chains of American cultural colonialism.

  Mansfield, the steroidal Monroe clone escaped from a Howard Hughes laboratory, is the ultimate magnet for male voyeurism, a splash‐Madonna of centrefolds, a fertility‐enhancing Venus of Willendorf in an infertile decade. The cast‐list of this English film implodes. Everybody sleeps with everybody. Too Hot to Handle has an alternate title: Playgirl after Dark. In the movie, Mansfield is an exotic dancer – now her main source of income, Las Vegas: market value plummeting, cash managed by the latest predator boyfriend. The last of a long line is a short abrasive Jew called Sam Brody – who, in an earlier incarnation, played a minor role in the Jack Ruby trial. All the threads of conspiracy converge on Dallas: strip‐clubs, hairy men in sharkskin suits and Lee Marvin dark glasses, disgruntled Cubans, shopping‐mall access to effective death weaponry. Sick politicians who use television like a sunray lamp. Surveillance tapes that nobody has the time to transcribe.