Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  To say that these men – women too – are unappreciated is to state the obvious. Like Eichmann in Jerusalem, they are prisoners in perspex cages designed to frustrate the ire of fare‐dodgers, the vocationally disgruntled, new girl gangs. Rappers of counterfeit coins who block your airholes with gum. A mob who insist on riding, fifty or sixty yards, from one stop to the next. It has become a class issue: the wealthier you are, the further you walk. In order to avoid viral democracy. The yatter, the multitongued babble. Window seats are protected by large persons challenging you to get past them. Respect. Respect: an invisible but electric exclusion zone.

  BUS STOP: that frequently ignored command. The street is so quiet I begin to think it has been closed off for one of Danny Boyle’s post‐apocalyptic fantasies. I can hear a man shouting: ‘Give me the keys. Give me the fucking keys.’ A house on the south side of Graham Road. Right next to the Turkish Cypriot Cultural Association (Education, Counselling). And then a woman, her screams. No twitch at the dirty muslin curtains.

  The screaming stops, the muslin moves and a tall slim black man in a white vest glares at me. We’re in a Rear Window scenario, the snoop and the potentially misinterpreted drama. Should I act? I’m not stupid enough to use the camera. Years ago, innocent of Hackney ways, I intervened when a child was smashing milk bottles and positioning the jagged shards beneath the wheels of the parked cars of schoolteachers. His mother, in conversation, looked on indulgently. Now it would be very different: I would stand trial for my reckless challenge, no question. I’d find myself on the register, featured in the Gazette. We’d have to leave London. In the 1960s, I copped a tirade of motherly abuse: wait‐till‐my‐bloke‐comes‐home. Hearts of gold, those tigerish mums. That night, my first car, a distressed red Mini, was battered into a heap of scrap. A sound ecological gesture that brought me into the age of the bicycle.

  The 242 draws up. The driver, who rang me to advise of his imminent arrival, is a veteran of this route. I present my orange holder with the Hackney Freedom Pass, the sole reward for survival in the borough. I hang on, trying to talk through the perforated screen, as the vehicle accelerates to recover time lost in a confrontation with a black youth who flashed a Video Library card and then jumped off, promising retribution, when challenged. This was nothing, the driver reckoned. What he can’t get used to is the way some of them spit, so venomously and accurately, through the constellation of holes in the perspex.

  He recalled his final night‐run in a 38, that much lamented casualty of Ken Livingstone’s bendy‐bus fetish. As he cruised down Dalston Lane, alongside the burnt‐out reefs of Georgian terrace, the abandoned family businesses, he heard a loud pop. His conductor was on the floor. Buses, in those over‐financed days, still had conductors. This one, trembling slightly, said that he had dodged a random bullet. Which passed ‘laterally’ through the vehicle, leaving a star‐shaped exit wound. A bandit salute to the 38, queen of the road, Dalston Lane to Victoria Station. Our passport to the wider world.

  Roland Camberton’s journey towards self‐knowledge begins with bus excursions into mysterious outlying suburbs: ‘Hampstead and Purley and Wandsworth and Richmond.’ And then, with a schoolfriend, the extending of local boundaries as an act of initiation: ‘Stamford Hill, Stoke Newington, Clapton, Homerton, Cambridge Heath, and Bethnal Green. . . Highbury, Islington, Hoxton, and Shoreditch.’ The beating of bounds. The streets and trees and small parks that are lineaments of an evolving body: blood, tissue, memory. Until you are ready to break away, cell by cell, to the heat of Soho. ‘So they walked along Old Compton Street, as populated and animated as three hours before, and caught a late bus to Hackney.’

  Joe Kerr, who headed the Department of Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, was happy to spend the rest of his week driving buses. Like the 242. Forced to chose between academic status and Clapton Garage, he wouldn’t hesitate: goodbye Kensington Gore. If the buses paid a living wage, he would commit, full time. The life was pure romance. He saw the Routemasters, he said, as a symbol of the best of our city.

  Joe was a solid, four‐square, smiling man with deep‐set eyes and the greying hair of a life lived to the full. He had worked, before university, as a conductor. After qualification, he came back as a driver, just in time for the last days of the Routemasters: before their banishment to ceremonial functions and the Transport Museum in Acton. They told him, the old hands, that the behaviour of passengers improved as you moved west through London. And so it proved. No bullets in Belgravia. Joe used a Routemaster, pampered and polished, for his wedding. And sometimes offered nostalgic tours from Tate Britain.

  I asked, as soon as I met the man, if he would be prepared to take me on board for the Hackney portion of the 242’s route. He responded, at once, by email.

  ‘I ought to warn you that Clapton bus garage is being partly mothballed next month, and as a consequence a majority of drivers are being moved to other garages. This means that next Monday and Tuesday are my last days working there before I head to Tottenham garage. I won’t be leaving Hackney altogether, but instead I’ll be heading north–south across Dalston Junction on the 76s and 243s, rather than east–west on the 242s.’

  ‘Driving,’ Joe says, ‘frees the mind.’ He’s unshaven. That easygoing independence uniformed specialists manage. He is able, at whim, to decide when to allow rain‐soaked supplicants on board and when to steer those huge wheels through a puddle. Slim specs perch, pilot‐fashion, in wiry hair. Joe steers and chats, as I sway with the stuttering momentum, recovering my bus legs.

  ‘They call this the “old codgers” route,’ he explains. Across the neck of Mare Street, Amhurst Road, into bandit country. Foothills of crack craziness: Clapton, Millfields. Sink estates like islands occupied by pirates. It’s a Conradian voyage to bring the bus through, back to the garage. ‘Africans and Poles, they don’t mix.’

  I move away to the deserted upper deck, to let Joe concentrate: a panoramic window on discriminations of blight. Pete Doherty would be the titular figure, holed up in a one‐bedroom flat, after collecting his methadone at the Homerton. The jellyfish‐white romance of urban squalor: Rimbaud on Ritalin. Pete should have stuck with the buses. Every time he slides into a car, he is pulled.

  The road sign for Millfields, horribly mangled, alerts us to trouble ahead. Scratching against overhanging branches, we navigate streets that were never intended for buses. We are very close to the school where Anna taught for so many years. At the back of the old Lesney Matchbox Toys Factory. Alongside Hackney Marshes, where I had that great job, painting white lines on football pitches.

  Daubeney Infants’ School. When I needed that name, to my shame, I couldn’t bring it to mind. William and I had been playing football, sweaty, bedraggled in sagging tracksuits, when I realized that we were locked out of the house: the spare key left with a neighbour who was at work. We jogged across London Fields to the Central Library in Mare Street, where it was no problem, in the days of an active local‐history section, to find a list of all the schools in the borough. It clicked, Daubeney. Morning Lane, Homerton High Street, down towards the Lea; we found the school, blustered into Anna’s beautifully controlled classroom. The expectant faces: that we were street entertainers, keepers of exotic animals, professional storytellers, musicians. I’d been invited into Islington schools to talk about my weird and wonderful life as an itinerant bookdealer, to read from samples of the product and to gift a few duplicates to the library: but never in Hackney,

  I listened, over the years, to so many of Anna’s stories – poverty of means, unexpected life‐altering successes – that I experienced, by proxy, the way the system collapsed. The crucial moment being the handover of control from the Inner London Education Authority to Hackney. Budgets were decimated. Bureaucracy increased by quantum leaps. Teachers didn’t receive their pay cheques. And the managers were so remote they didn’t even live in London. They were premature multitaskers, running businesses in Manchester and Birmingham, whi
le advising on race and gender, accepting doctorates, hanging out on first‐class trains and still finding the odd moment to invent new torments for the foot soldiers in the trenches: the wretched teachers. A change of syllabus. More tests, more evaluations. Risk assessments. Scientific demonstrations. Revisions of history. No competitive games. Withdrawal of special‐needs teachers. Withdrawal of classroom assistants. Education, education, education: let’s trash it. Turn rundown Victorian barracks into state‐of‐the‐art building sites.

  I listened while Anna cooked. The horrors had to be rehearsed, played over as an exorcism. Confrontations with single parents who felt themselves wronged. Ragged children who arrived hungry, denied the provision of free milk by Madame Thatcher, and lurching out of control. A boy called Leon was brought to mind: how Anna had been able to slip him an extra bottle and how much calmer he had become. The instruction from above was: let them buy biscuits. Even the ones, lacking underclothes, who wouldn’t do PE. Then the reformers, the rationalists, cut library budgets and increased class sizes. For a time, Anna bought her own books and kept the children supplied. But pressure increased with every term. Incomers, such as the Chinese, even when they started without a word of English, shone. Some of the Muslim children, fiercely disciplined at the mosque, treated this liberal classroom as a chance to let rip. They didn’t find it easy to accept the control of a woman.

  Thirty years was a healthy span of service, it was enough. Anna’s late career became a mirror‐image of my own: in reverse. I’d started with hit‐and‐run teaching, part‐time, low pay, and moved on to manual labour, parks, ullage cellars, warehouses on the river, mud yards by railway tracks. Then: street markets, scruffy book catalogues, visits from Californian millionaire dealers. And, finally, the surface respectability (in some European cultures) of being a published author. Anna, as an established teacher, was the one to put her name on official forms: mortgage, car insurance. I was a fiscal leper. In cutting loose from Hackney’s patronage, my wife found herself coaching the children of aspiring families in tower blocks or teaching English to a constantly shifting group of asylum seekers in Peckham. All of this was at the edge of charity: the willing volunteer in a collapsing system that depended on the altruism of good‐hearted individuals.

  Search for what’s on offer, given age and over‐qualification, and you are soon conducting dubious surveys, door‐to‐door in dangerous places. Statistics to be manipulated. The fascination, Anna found, was not in the material she gathered but the glimpses of unknown lives, the way flats were decorated. The stories people told, the lonely confessions. The tea and sweet cakes they offered.

  Then: books. The bane of her life. Now she was filling our house with boxes of unsold stock. The ironies multiplied. She spent her days blagging her way back into the school system to peddle children’s books. Or visiting the secure nurseries of merchant banks in the City. Labouring at the broad base of a pyramid that offered a return only when you persuaded other lost souls to work for you.

  The ultimate job was a complete mystery. Anna would leave, early in the morning, but she refused to tell me where she was going and I knew better than to push it. This continued for a few months. As usual, I was buried in some book, letting the activities of the real world have whatever minimal attention they required. The regular payment of council‐tax bills, for example, before – being a week or two late – you were surcharged, taken to court. Kathryn Hughes, under the title of ‘The Secrets Police’, wrote about this in the Guardian: how she had responded to her Hackney summons with a ‘stream of letters, emails and phone calls’: none of which were answered. She locates ‘moral bankruptcy’ at the heart of local government and the application of ‘shame’ as a device to blackmail the middle classes into paying up or selling out to developers. The tax collectors and authorized bullies bleed bleeding‐heart liberals to support vanity projects: inactive swimming pools, perpetual road‐works and a splendidly refurbished Town Hall.

  What Anna was up to, in a backstreet by the canal, was training as a bus driver. With a supportive bunch of bandits and recidivists: on forged licences, fake passports, novel identities. Along with the victims of corrupt and dangerous regimes. Somali surgeons. Turkish economists. Hoxton robbers. Getaway‐wheelmen honing their skills. The strength required to operate the lift at the back of the disability minibus was a challenge; but she managed it – giving the clients, as part of her training, a run to John Lewis in Oxford Street. She took her road test out near Epping Forest, where a dope‐smoking follower of Haile Selassie banged the big coach, hedge to hedge, around tight curves, through virgin estates, on to the M25, without dropping his m.p.h.: the perfect audition for the Sandra Bullock part in Speed. Anna came through, she passed. And decided life was too precious for such excitement.

  *

  There is an official pit stop outside the Homerton Hospital. But you do not walk away from the bus. The box in which Joe should have parked is occupied by a trashed and abandoned motor, which has been ticketed by a street patrol and then left in place. ‘Drive shaft’s gone,’ he says. Outpatients from the psychiatric department are scattered over the road like the random debris of an air crash. They can’t decide whether to retreat or to get in the queue for a bus they won’t take. Joe wants a nostalgic snapshot for the album, it might be his final run on this route. He leans back against the comforting bulk of the 242: Clapton, Hackney, Dalston, Shoreditch, Bank, Holborn, TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD. The bookdealers’ special. One artist, I discovered, based a project around listing every tree she saw from the window of the bus on her journey into town. And there were plenty. A skinny forest ameliorating diesel insults.

  Joe checks the upper deck, sweeping under the rear seats. I assume this is a cosmetic exercise, tidying away the cartons and foil trays of the mobile cafeteria. It’s not: Joe is under instruction to search, meticulously, for suspect packages, bombs. A duty he has better reason than most to fulfil. His wife, Gill Hicks, was travelling to work, on the Underground, the Piccadilly Line: 7/7/05. She was lucky to survive, losing both her legs. She was brought to St Thomas’s Hospital, where she received immediate and expert care. A few months later she walked down the aisle with Joe, before they had a celebratory ride in a Routemaster. She had been standing, so the Standard reported, ‘only a few feet away from suicide bomber Jermaine Lindsay when he detonated his bomb, killing himself and 26 people and severely injuring dozens of others’.

  Joe was unhappy about the response from the British authorities, who did everything in their power to pretend that such atrocities had no connection with events in Iraq. In contrast, high‐ranking Australians – Hicks came originally from Australia – visited her as soon as was practicable and made proper gestures of support. She had been admitted to hospital as: ‘one unknown’. By 7/7/07 Hicks was back at St Thomas’s, to present them with a cheque for £13,000, raised by the charity for which she works, Peace Direct. Too traumatized to use public transport, she has been presented with a Renault Scenic, the keys handed over in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. It will be driven by Joe Kerr.

  We went for lunch in the canteen of the Clapton Garage. The street was the usual Stanley Spencer resurrection of yawning vagrant drinkers, off‐vertical men holding themselves upright against St Augustine’s Tower. Red buses were stacked the length of Narroway, so that drivers could be switched. Joe points out the tram insignia on a manhole cover. This used to be a tram depot, now its cavernous interior finds room for one brightly polished and restored Routemaster (for private hire) and a lesser vehicle, a burnt shell. Which was not, in this case, one of those spontaneously combusting bendy buses. The driver had been pushing to make his schedule, taking her too fast down Rosebery Avenue, when he felt the wheels go over something soft. A soft thing was caught beneath his vehicle. He stamped on the brakes and nothing happened. The mattress chucked in the road, his flabby drag‐anchor, burst into flames.

  Joe, as a scholar of architecture, is taken with the no‐nonsense brutalism and noble intent
of this threatened structure, the bus garage. He tells me, as we select our brimming platters of steamed fish, that he has to complete three ‘rounds’ a day; starting at 6.40 a.m. and finishing at 4 p.m. The radio is a welcome companion, warning of burst pipes, filtering national and international news. A gang of stone‐throwing kids waiting at Clapton. A white‐haired maniac in an electric wheelchair who is hogging the middle of the road. Curtains of flowers, left for the dead, woven into wire mesh. A man killed as he knelt down to leave his tribute. Many hit‐andrun incidents are unreported. A standard 242 bus costs £170,000. A bendy bus costs £250,000 and returns no profit. The authorities keep that fact quiet.

  Joe enjoys his food, enjoys cooking. Like driving, he says, it liberates your mind. There is nothing quite so satisfying, run completed, plate licked clean, tea sipped, than watching the trains from this rounded window. We can’t see into St John’s churchyard, so I don’t learn about the man in the walled garden until I get my copy of the Gazette, from the Turkish minimart, as I walk home.

  A refuse collector has told of his grisly discovery when he found a body hanging in a Hackney churchyard on his way to work.

  John Sylvester, 44, of Chatsworth Road, Lower Clapton, spotted the body of a man in St John at Hackney churchyard.