Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  The last time I walked down Queensbridge Road with a tape‐recorder was in 1992, for a slightly furtive assignation with Tony Lambrianou. He was out of prison, on licence, after the fifteen‐year sentence for his involvement with the disposal of the body of Jack McVitie, out of the Evering Road basement. Jack had been a friend, in as much as friendship had meaning in that world of constantly shifting alliances, brotherly love and rivalry: hard masculine embraces, blood spilled, drinks bought, suits admired. Jack, with his buttoned cardigans, shitty loafers, trilby, was a social embarrassment. They called his manners ‘unpredictable’. Which was nonsense. Jack was very easy to predict, he would always let you down.

  Lambrianou was under the plane trees, by the bridge, waiting. A man of about my own age in thin‐rimmed aviator spectacles. Broad shoulders displayed in yellow suede bomber jacket. Black polo shirt with fancy white collar. Handkerchief peeping from breast pocket. Tasselled slip‐on shoes that never walked the streets. Tony kept his fists bunched. Like a resting actor, he projected: righteous gloom. The post‐Parkhurst afterlife was a constant telling of the tale: for a consideration. The logistics of that fateful night when Jack went over the river, suicide by default. Lambrianou had witnessed a drama in which his earlier self was a person he barely recognized and for whose actions he took no responsibility.

  Look over to my right, there’s a block of flats. Look to the middle of them, ground floor: that’s where I was brought up as a kid, Belford House. Looking back on it today, it seems a million miles off. My school was further down Queensbridge Road. It is still there. I can’t get over it. You’d think nothing had changed.

  This is the first block of flats I can remember in this part of the East End. They went up in 1948. I remember my family moving in, to live somewhere like that was a new thing. Unfortunately, coming back today, it’s just not the same any more. The whole character has gone out of it. This was such a part of my upbringing, me and my brothers. You can never go back, that’s the tragedy. The houses, the kids. It’s not the same, it’s gone. I find that tragic.

  The last time we was there was when my father died, we had the funeral. I remember we all stood in the room and we said, ‘That’s the end of it.’ We knew it was over. Now and then I come back to Hackney, me and my Wendy. To have a look round. I show her the buildings and the pubs. It brings back the memories. It’s something you don’t want to never let go of. It’s part of me.

  I’m not the same person. The kids now. It was never like that when I was young. Half of us never had shoes on our feet. At this time in the afternoon, everybody was out and about. There was no television.

  When you look at Haggerston Estate, the flats look pretty modern. But, believe me, it was a rough life back then. Walking up Queensbridge Road from Hackney Road, you pass the coal and coke yards. As a kid I used to go round, and for a shilling I’d get the old people their coke and coal of a Saturday morning.

  It’s like another world, it never happened. And yet it did. The tragedy is: there’s no record. That’s tragic, absolutely tragic. A dream that never really came true.

  My father spoke very poor English. He came over here in 1914. It might have been a bit earlier. All the years he was here – he fought in two world wars – he never captured the language. He used to mix it all up, even to the end of his life. My brothers have gone on to do better things. He would never move out of the flat. He said, ‘That’s where I’ll die.’ That was his attitude to life. You do what you can for your family, bang, finish. The ironic twist: my father’s never been in trouble with the police. My mother the same. They were decent, clean‐living people. Yet me and the boys. . . it turned out the other way. There’s no single reason for that, a tough life. I look back on them days with fondness. It’s not the same any more. There are only a few places left. I find that tragic, absolutely tragic.

  We moved across the road, down the ramp, to the canal. Under the bridge, waves of dancing water‐reflections on the curve of brick. Lambrianou, hands bunched in pockets, eyes moist, took up his position on the path, careful not to brush against the wall with his new yellow jacket. He was possessed, once again, by the location in which he found himself, events he had run over, so many times, during the years of imprisonment. There and not there: a personal history from which he had been banished. The past was an exclusion zone, an enclosure with no entrances or exits.

  As I boy I can remember coming down here to kill rats. A lot of people used to sit by the canal, all night, fishing. I remember seeing the horses, the ponies, when the barges were coming through the bridge. They dropped the rope, so the barges could float free. If they didn’t do that, sharpish, you’d see the horses dragged in. You can still see the slats, what we call slats, the ramps where the horses could come up out of the water, back on to even ground. It was a big thing to see the horses fall in.

  You’d hear the clip‐clop of horses coming along the towpath. Incredible! Absolutely incredible!

  It was said, yes, that the weapons went into the water here, after the murder of Jack McVitie. The main witness, a man called Ronald Hart, came from a flat along Hackney Road. He says he drove up here, that night. There is a dispute about this. Hart said he turned left, directly, as soon as he came over the bridge. A few months prior to the event they put bollards across the entry. If you look, they’re still there to this day. A car could never have done a left. Well, Hart stated categorically that he done it, took a left.

  When they sent the diver down to search the canal, he found two pieces they thought resembled a gun and a knife. It was never proved. It’s like an armoury down there, in the mud, goes back generations.

  You’re calling a witness to the witness box who says he drove to a stretch of canal which is just where we’re standing now. We will never know. But this is where they found the gun and the knife used in the murder of McVitie. And it was said to be done by Ronald Hart.

  I was not part of that. Yes, I admit I did remove the body from the scene, the flat in Evering Road. Hart is said to have taken the Krays, from the Regency Club, down to Hackney Road – over the bridge that is directly above us. And afterwards, Hart said, he threw the gun and the knife into this stretch of the canal. Whether this was true or not, nobody will ever know. He changed his evidence.

  If I’d known what he was putting on me, at the time, I might have had a word or two to say. Fifty yards from the flat where we lived! The place where we shot rats when we was kids. My father who never had a day’s trouble with the law. A total liberty. But I could see the logic of it, the canal was handy. Ironically enough, I threw the keys to McVitie’s car into this part of the canal. The two‐tone Ford Zephyr he had at the time. I came down the ramp, under the bridge, out of sight. Splash! They are probably there to this day. This is the actual spot where McVitie’s keys went into the water.

  The body, wrapped in a carpet, concealed in the boot, went on another journey: under the Thames, Blackwall Tunnel, to south‐east London. It was left there. Arrangements were made with certain parties.

  There have been allegations of other things happening around here, not down to us, going back to Victorian times. Murders, bodies. It’s got a great history, Hackney, when you come to think about it. If you ever dredged this stretch, you’d be surprised what you’d find. Proper heritage. It’s part of the mystery of it all. It’s part of your tradition if you live on the canal.

  Coming back with you today, it’s like being in another world. Part of it I’ve forgotten, but I want to remember. And then again I don’t want to remember. You can never walk away from the past. Occasionally I come back just to say, ‘This is what it was all about. This is where it happened. This is where my career in crime grew.’

  It was tough. The pubs around here were not like discos. They were hard‐drinking pubs. Dockers. You settled your disputes, Saturday nights, round the corner. Down the ramp. All along the canal path. The first fights I saw were down here, between grown men. That’s the way we was brought up. The local bobby was
never involved. He turned a blind eye. That disciplined the lot of us. It’s gone now, gone for ever. It’s not coming back.

  If our disputes involved something a little bit more serious, you went that step further. The razor gangs in the 1950s, we was totally different from them. Guns. We moved on.

  Looking at the area today, you’ve got a very high crime rate. Diabolical really. That’s the tragedy of it, you haven’t got that community relationship among your own people. Different cultures have moved into Hackney. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. When we was kids we never done a lot of the business that goes on today. And look how we turned out. I fear for the future.

  In sombre mood, we walked down to Whiston Road, the swimming pool that played such a part in the childhood of both these immigrants, Erol Kagan and Tony Lambrianou. Both men started their education in the now demolished Laburnam Street Primary School. They shared a proprietorial attitude to familiar streets, the illusion of belonging that is reaffirmed by constant reference to fixed points: the Acorn pub with its ever‐open door and ‘Continuous Sky’, the weathervane boat on the roof of the swimming pool.

  I liked that ironwork galleon very much; it offered us, as inland prisoners, a promise of the Thames, a way out into the world ocean. A wink at the mythical dockers of Lambrianou’s memory: the port of Hackney. The Haggerston pool, with its curved roof and cathedral windows, was where our children learnt to swim; and where, on winter afternoons too wet for a walk, I did my laboured lengths, chlorine‐burnt, white‐fingered, drifting out of time in a reservoir of echoing communal voices: the tolerated residue of something that was too good to last.

  I stood with Lambrianou on the balcony above the pool and then we found our way into a new gym, exercise machines that nobody knew how to use. Too many mirrors: the Lady from Shanghai repetitions of his yellow jacket, heavy head, narrowed eyes, made the old villain uneasy.

  ‘I don’t like the word “gangster”, it wasn’t like that,’ he said. Recalling how he’d sawn off the barrel of a shotgun, on the kitchen table, while his father was otherwise occupied.

  The litany of street names, McVitie’s body carried from Evering Road, down Lower Clapton Road, Narrow Way, Mare Street, Cambridge Heath Road, was a map scorched into his consciousness: chauffeur to the dead, Cypriot Anubis. The story of the hat, the knife, the car keys, was a penance to be swallowed in the lapping waters of the pool. With all our other dreams and fantasies. Before Whiston Road was locked up, sacrificed to the tainted illusion of the Grand Project, the Clissold Leisure Centre which was commissioned to impress: by the size of its debts, the incompetence of its design, its status as yet another hyped New Labour showpiece incapable of making the transit from the computer screen to allotted position in the geography of the city.

  Talk with Lambrianou had run out. Focusing on the rectangle of the deserted pool, the pattern of lights, the echoing hangar, was too sad. But there was one surprise left. I was always asking about the places in my book: Kingsland Waste Market, the German Hospital, London Fields. Tony told me that the boys had no truck with hospitals, socialist medicine: they went private. Old Swanny never let them down. Stitching up wounds. Signing prescriptions blind. Taking care of inconvenient pregnancies. He was a diamond, Swanny. But he liked a drink. The drugs that recent incomers brought into the borough were diabolical. Swanny could be relied on to see you right, uppers, downers, horse tranquillizers to keep Ron this side of a straitjacket, he never crossed the line. He only peddled gear to his own. Educated man, old school, chalkstripe, waistcoat, collar and cuffs. On a retainer, a regular bung. Stood up for Reg in court. Good as gold. And bent as a horseshoe. Retired, dead. Down on the coast. Ramsgate. Southend. Old cunt.

  *

  21 September 2006: no trace of Lambrianou’s cold stores and coke heaps remained on Queensbridge Road. I pursued my hospital quest by asking Emily Richardson about her experiences, giving birth, at the Homerton. A major development, Adelaide Wharf, loomed over the canal like an oil tanker that had ploughed into a wood yard. ‘With its 147 units (prices up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ said Stephen Oaks, area director for English Partnerships.

  Emily’s mother was in attendance, and the new baby, awake, unflustered, was tolerant of my invasion. The flat was still in that magical state of novelty, reassessing itself as a suitable domain for fresh life. Even the coffee mugs seemed born again, fresh coloured, virgin bright, as Emily remembered. And talked.

  I went to the Homerton, when the time came, because I wanted to stay local. At one point I thought of having him at home, but I went off that when I realized I’d have to clear up afterwards.

  I’d never spent a night in a hospital. I’d never broken a bone. I’d never had any dealings with the Homerton.

  I’d done antenatal classes. They were good, matter‐of‐fact. They tell it like it is: noisy, messy. I didn’t try breathing exercises, I did yoga. The classes were packed, you wouldn’t believe how many people are giving birth in Hackney. The room was absolutely jammed.

  We had a midwives’ group. There were no doctors. There’s a birthing pool at the Homerton. I wanted to do that, the pool. But unfortunately my waters broke as we were travelling to the hospital. I was lucky. I got on well with the midwife. It’s really nice to have someone you are comfortable with in attendance.

  I went in on Tuesday afternoon and Augustine was born on Thursday. I had to be induced. I was induced on Tuesday. I started to have contractions during the night. But they don’t class you as being in labour until you’re three centimetres dilated. I went all through the night having contractions quite strongly and regularly. In the morning they were, like, ‘No, you’re still not in labour.’ Twelve hours and I wasn’t even classed as being in labour! They gave me some more of the hormone. And everything ground to a halt. Later that day, it kicked in. After twenty‐four hours, it started up, really quite quickly. I had an epidural at that point.

  They were constantly asking me what I wanted and giving me the options. I felt like I was making the decisions.

  Different midwives, doctors, were coming through. All sorts. That was good. My fear, being induced, was of being in a hospital situation where I lost contact with the midwife. I felt that I might lose control of the process completely.

  We were there so long. I went for walks down the corridor. I could see other people, other scenes. The labour rooms were quite close together. Some of them were adjoining. There was a small sluice room, very bloody. There was a loo door on one side. As you go to the loo, you see the sluicing area. Blood. And the sound. The moaning. This really low moaning. Labour. Sometimes you could hear people screaming. Then you hear the baby cries! I think I heard four or five baby cries, with all the other sounds.

  We paced the corridor, people shuffling around in dressing‐gowns. Quite a strange world. I was only there for twenty‐four hours after the birth. You used to be there for a week. They would teach you about baby care and breastfeeding.

  There was one girl whose boyfriend was still painting the front room. She was hoping that she could stay until the next day. They told her, ‘No, no, you’ve got to go.’ ‘Yeah, but my boyfriend’s painting the front room. I can’t take the baby home yet.’ She got chucked out.

  My son was born at half‐two in the morning. We drove home. It was that strange feeling, like when you’ve been ill. You’ve been in bed with ’flu: after a few days, you go outside and everything is hyper‐real. Colour. It was a beautiful day. Really clear autumnal light. Bright. And crisp. Everything was heightened. I felt like I’d been locked into some other place and was now coming back.

  It’s absolutely there, this special feeling, but only for a short time. The immediate area around the hospital is really odd. Actually, we went up St Augustine’s Tower, in the churchyard, off Mare Street, and we saw what this part of Hackney was all about. How green it was. But that’s not why we chose the name, Augustine. It was a name we liked. Also St Augustine is quite f
ab: ‘Give me chastity, but not yet.’

  When you go up the tower what you notice is how enormous those estates are, near the hospital. And the ones going out towards Hackney Marshes. You see the vast area they cover. Homerton, I felt, is quite lawless. And the bit that goes up to Lower Clapton, Murder Mile. But we’re going to stay. We’re going to stay in Hackney. It’s got all that violence but, at the same time, it has a lovely spirit. Lovely.

  Holly Street

  Over the years, film crews of various dispensations dropped in on Albion Drive to demonstrate that special brand of discourtesy that is their stock‐in‐trade. Although you, the victim, might be the subject of the interview, you are also a nuisance, not part of the team, a major inconvenience. The crew talk over you and around you, as if you were a difficult and temperamental child. Furniture is rearranged. Rooms are dismissed with heartfelt sighs by cameramen in a hurry. The nominal directors give bored and exhausted technicians their head – while they make increasingly distracted cellphone calls. They should have been at the next location an hour ago. It takes most of the afternoon to light the inevitable chair, manhandled out of position, up against the bookshelf, before they remember that there are questions to be asked. It worked quite well, the set‐up, when the runner sat in your place – but now the glint from your naked and rocky cranium, the reflections in your spectacles, the wires threaded in and out of an absence of buttons on the wrong shirt: hopeless. The questioner gnaws the clipboard in frustration, knowing there will not be time to ventriloquize you towards the answers you have already given in their pre‐packaged script.

  Way back, before the digital age, it was an invasion; documentaries required a unionized grump of electricians, who did nothing beyond borrowing your phone to call their brokers, helping themselves from the fridge (while disparaging your taste), then retreating to the bathroom with a newspaper. They talked property, even then: divorces, villas in Portugal. The early crews always featured soundmen who believed they should be cameramen and who set an impressive benchmark in paranoia. They were unlanguaged, spooked by the hideous loudness of the world: on permanent suicide watch. One of them, not content with halting the entire process for a plane circling around Stansted, insisted, like the unfortunate showgirl in the exploding convertible from that virtuoso opening of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, that there was a ticking in the head. Everything was shut down: washing‐machine, television set, radio, fridge, deep‐freeze. No good. The culprit was my cheap watch. The deep‐freeze was not reconnected at the end of the shoot. Puddles over the floor, ruined weeks of food.