Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Money, stuffing our hollow earth, is the only reliable marker of time. We age into increments of poverty, owning more without having the leisure to enjoy or exploit those holdings: books in storage, cans of acetate film stacked as a fire hazard under the stairs. Bills quantify status, mortality telegrams printed in red. The more you owe, the richer your life experience. Complexities of debt evolve with each passing year. Negative equity grows parasitical warts and fistulas. The more you lie awake, sweating through the long night, the richer you must be in claims made upon your person, your imaginary credit. No relief until the account closes, we are life‐expired. The dead reckoning. The disappointed creditors.

  ‘Don’t open those envelopes. I have to get over to Kentish Town right now. Sheila Rowbotham. Two hours clear, before I’ve got to be in Aldgate, to walk through a poem for an online literary jukebox. Paid? Apparently. Eventually. Finish by six, to do the radio thing. The one we had trouble with last time, the fee. And tomorrow, once the Rowbotham tape is transcribed, I will deal with the post, I promise.’ Brown letters with mean little windows hiding the name of the guilty party.

  The council were taking me to court, reminders never delivered, not sent out, saving the borough a few pence on postage: threats, interest charges. I saw them, privatized bailiffs indistinguishable from drug collectors, kicking at a door in the flats behind us. Heaping up goods that can no longer be slung in Hackney’s municipal dump: we don’t have one. The eco‐conscious, who prefer not to make use of the forecourts of decommissioned petrol stations, drive over to Holloway Road, the processing plant operated by Islington.

  There were bills from the Whitechapel depot where I rented a tin cupboard to store my archive of papers, home movies going back to childhood, photographs, paintings. Research materials that would take a skilled researcher years to locate. There were surcharges, from a tax office I’d never previously come across, based on earlier bills I had never seen. ‘Not our responsibility,’ they said. When I eventually reached them: phone number on the letter invalid. The sum they required was not mentioned. It was up to me to make an informed guess. And the final insult: a stroppy invoice from my invisible accountant, the man who was supposed to sort out this mess.

  Hari Simbla, give him his due, was good at invoices. They looked very professional, thick paper, nice font. Hari specialized, when he was still in Kentish Town, above the family minimart, in writers and artists. His walls were covered with unapologetic junk that he imagined would one day be worth a fortune – but which, for the moment, made his den look like an Indian restaurant of the 1970s. There was a brother, Henry. We never saw him. But his name stayed on the letterhead: Hari and Henry Simbla & Co., Granville Chambers, Kentish Town Road. The Co. turned out to be Dubliners, employed for a season, to produce a figure from thin air which they submitted to the peripatetic tax office. They made ludicrous claims for materials and services which they took to be necessary accoutrements of the writer’s life (theatre tickets, magazine subscriptions, club membership) and massively underplayed the real credit‐vampires (ink for the printer, books, breakfasts, walking boots, inflatable kayaks). It would even itself out in the end, Hari promised. I signed whatever they put in front of me. If a balance sheet is elegant enough you can pin it on the wall like an artwork. It’s all in the presentation.

  The crisis arrived, as these things always do, at the very moment when I could at last see my Hackney book finding a shape. Several of the stories I’d been worrying at were on the point of resolution. I had the British Sounds DVD and – thanks to Patrick Wright – an appointment with Sheila Rowbotham, the woman Godard invited to walk naked up and down the stairs.

  I was summoned for examination, somewhere in Moorgate. I should have time, after the Old Street Magistrates Court and my brush with Hackney, to make it, black bag of bank statements and cash‐receipt notebooks, to the tax interrogation; my seven‐year retrospective, in an anonymous office block. I wanted Hari with me. Every season his address went further downmarket while his invoices climbed in compensation. Now he was perched, conveniently, around the back of Dalston Lane. The next move would be the last, for both of us.

  In my excitement at securing British Sounds, I was prepared to see it as a solution to the problems of the post‐revolutionary period: 1969. Coming to Hackney, moving east, was one small step on Godard’s long march, closer to Mao. The red plastic book in the Lavender Hill porn shop. A well‐chosen quote, in translation, acquires a poetry of distance. British Sounds supplied fragmentary glimpses of a real city: workmen, holes in the road, cows waiting for slaughter, landfill barges on a dirty river.

  Agitated, in denial, Godard groped for a methodology that would disguise the sentiment of the streets, the infallible eye on which his career had been founded. Cinema was his medium and cinema was a tool of the bourgeoisie. Even Euro‐chic films had to be commissioned, budgets approved. For a brief instant, in the madness of that era when gentleman Maoists and Trotskyists infiltrated the system, trading on Oxbridge connections, commercial television channels found the perfect way to write off a substantial lump of money they didn’t have: give it to an art‐house director who has absolutely no intention of telling them what he would do with it. The only way you know you’ve achieved a major career, in serious cinema, is when you have to move to another country to avoid prosecution over unpaid taxes: Bergman, Rossellini, Joseph Losey. It’s the movie version of the Nobel Prize.

  I understood now why the Orphans script we sent to Godard was ignored: it was too long, too detailed, five pages was excessive. The synopsis offered by Godard for a sequel to British Sounds, sixteen years later, Images of Britain, got the whole thing down to:

  1. old super‐eight

  2. today VHS

  3. still stills

  4.

  5. queen police tea

  6. windows and gardens

  au capital de 300.000 f.

  Exemplary. A description, by accident, of our own Hackney diary archive, carrying through to my present vision of a borough in which all the gardens, green spaces and public parks would be joined together in a single unblinking tracking shot. Which would, as if by magic, return us to the days of the Hackney Brook: the allotments, the hothouses of Conrad Loddiges and his exotic blooms. Leaving that fourth chapter of Images of Britain blank was the masterstroke: we need breathing space, somewhere nobody can find any good reason to regenerate.

  British Sounds opens with a controlled drift down the assembly line of the BMC plant in Abingdon. Splashes of metallic red. Layers of cacophonous noise: grinding, screeching, submerged conversation. Workworld. With interventions, crude intertitles, a child’s voice repeating details of significant episodes from radical history: dates, names. The virtuosity of Godard’s aesthetic abdication is painful to watch, a riposte to the romance of British post‐documentary realism: Albert Finney acting (very effectively) in the cycle factory at the opening of Karel Reisz’s film version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Sound, for Jean‐Luc, is truth. Punctuated by silent flashes in which the ill‐rewarded labour of the city continues and is observed. Sometimes men with picks and shovels stare right back at the camera.

  And then the stairs: white walls, a naked woman (borrowed from the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill) performing a zombie‐walk, out of one door, in through another. Sheila Rowbotham’s voice reading from her Black Dwarf polemic. In her book, Promise of a Dream, her memoir of the 1960s, there is a photograph of Godard, up against a high wall, lighting one corn‐yellow cigarette from the stub of another, standing inches behind his cameraman. The crumpled raincoat, the polished shoes: a British winter. Posters have faded to blanks. The wall could be anywhere in London.

  Essex University: students sitting around penning agitprop revisions to a John Lennon song. Colin MacCabe, in his book on Godard, notes that ‘some of those filmed subsequently set up the Angry Brigade, Britain’s only terrorist grouping’. A voice lists the currently active cells: ‘Cambridge, Essex, Bristol’. And Hackney. A
lways Hackney. Poets, squatters, bomb‐makers: theorists.

  This unseen film, commissioned (and killed off) by London Weekend Television, resulted in the sacking of Michael Peacock from the LWT board. Followed by the resignation of Tony Garnett and Kenith Trodd and other programme‐makers. The board decided on a realignment, a serious grab for ratings. They brought in – sympathy for the devil – an Australian newspaper proprietor: Rupert Murdoch. Great result! As Godard may have thought: collapse of liberal consensus, the well‐made drama, the illusion that television can tolerate any real form of dissenting content. Welcome to the coming age of robot celebrity, reality shows like CCTV with sequins, crash footage from motorways as entertainment, not news: the prophetic visions of J. G. Ballard made manifest. All‐day TV to complement all‐day British breakfasts.

  After visiting Hari Simbla’s office – the self‐assembly desk was still quilted in bubblewrap – I turned right off Cecilia Road and found myself, camera in hand, looking up at Sheila Rowbotham’s communal house: 12 Montague Road. Sheila had long since decamped for Kentish Town, where I would be interviewing her later that morning.

  Hari’s secretary, a stunning but minute black girl, who could have been any age between twelve and twenty, took the boredom act to new levels of refinement; not painting her nails, nor leafing through her magazine, denying any knowledge of my appointment, or the whereabouts of Mr Simbla. We had spoken on the phone, ten minutes before I left the house. She did not recall the incident. She was obliged to take calls from a whole mess of people in the course of her day, that’s what she did. She may have been family, a schoolgirl taking time out. Her tiny feet, in thonged slippers, did not reach the floor. She stared out of the window at some kids who were breaking into Hari’s latest Merc.

  ‘Can I wait?’

  She gestured: no chair. I stood for as long as I could bear the shame of my awkward, overburdened height, her flawless, doll‐like presence: the indifference. Then I walked away, bumping into one of Hari’s red‐headed Dubliners, back from the Three Compasses, tearing up a betting slip, stubbing out a cigarette in the receptionist’s immaculate white triangle of sandwich (which she would never, in any case, have touched). The Irishman went through to the office and got straight on the phone. I gave it up.

  There was only one painting left on the wall of the inner sanctum, a pantomime horse gazing morosely at a motorway. Jock McFadyen must have fallen on hard times. Hari Simbla had secured one of my McFadyen favourites, Horse Lamenting the Invention of the Motor Car. From 1985. But it wasn’t quite right. It was too small. Either Hari had chopped a foot off, to fit the available space, or, as sometimes happened, Jock had produced a duplicate, to fill an order. When the pinch was on he painted by numbers: like a Chinese takeaway. Hari’s tuna‐coloured Merc, with its personalized number plate, had been slipped in among the circling traffic flow, as Jock’s private wink towards his absent patron.

  I found a manifesto for the ‘English Revolutionary Party’ pasted to a junction box, next to a flyer (from the same source) offering cheap removals.

  A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS MUST ARISE IN ENGLISH PEOPLE. A NEW IDENTITY TO CHANGE THE WHOLE NATURE OF THIS COUNTRY. A NEW MOVEMENT WHICH IS NON FASCIST AND REPRESENTS THE PEOPLE’S REAL NEEDS. THE KEY AREAS WHICH MUST BE ADDRESSED ARE: IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM. ENGLISH NATIONAL IDENTITY. THE PROMOTION OF CHRISTIANITY. THE MONITORING OF RACIAL CRIME COMMITTED AGAINST THE WHITE COMMUNITY. THE DEFENCE OF WHITE WOMEN WHO ARE BEING SEXUALLY ABUSED AND HARASSED. THE PROMOTION OF ENGLISH CULTURE

  Tall houses, once favoured by Jewish families escaping from Whitechapel, were now multiple‐occupied by various communities, black, Turkish: anyone prepared to appreciate the rich plurality of sounds and smells from the Ridley Road Market, the interactions of the street.

  Montague Road was a retreat, a curve leading to a synagogue that was now a gated development. I watched a Vietnamese woman raking a sharp‐edged gravel bed. Sycamore and ash offered shade, dressing the broken paving slabs with green. Houses outlive their occupants, as the city outlives the houses. When Sheila Rowbotham emailed me, to arrange our meeting, she said that she had returned once, a few years after she’d left: ‘and was delighted to find young people there who seemed like spiritual descendants’. Properties test out those who elect to occupy them. Many are found wanting. After ten or fifteen years, you arrive at an accommodation: inhabitants learn to serve the structures that give them shelter.

  No. 12 was nicely proportioned, bricks pointed, paint fresh. Black steps to a pale blue door. Decorative plaster surround. A trellis awaiting climbing plants. The bay window was a Georgian quotation. The consoles, above the door, were clawlike abstractions, more ornamental, less dramatic, than the muscled torsos of the Hercules figurines further down the street. Historic traces, the justified pretensions of the original speculative builders, found a suitable advocate in Sheila Rowbotham. She contributed, struggled, made a life, wrote books, moved on. Godard came here, out of his car, up the steps, to argue the case for a naked appearance in a film about the impossibility of film; a strip of evidence that argued, forcefully, with the matter of London. And lost.

  Sheila Rowbotham was barely a street away from Marina Warner. We sat at her kitchen table, a jug of coffee, a view into the garden beyond. Women, I felt, carried the memory‐burden of their cultural heritage more effectively than the men: less ego, less noise, intimate details of ordinary life lightly held. The force of attraction in this legacy was much in evidence: the illumination behind Sheila’s eyes. Her generous recollections of male absurdity held no illusions. So many men of the 1960s had creased and crumpled, waiting for the tide to turn. Incubating disaffection. Nourishing unpublished memoirs, boxes of dead photographs. Unrequired confessions.

  I liked the story of how the Montague Road property was found. Rowbotham’s partner, Bob, applying occult logic – and echoing, though he didn’t know it, Ford Madox Ford – set his compass blades to the map: ‘an arc drawn around Liverpool Street Station and King’s Cross’. He organized a series of expeditions into unknown territory. Until one particular house drew them in.

  Sheila was the first person I’d interviewed who had direct experience of Tony Blair. In Hackney. A person who started where he was to finish: as self‐appointed mediator in an irresolvable dispute. The flashing cuffs, the gerbil grin that doesn’t synchronize with panic in fearful eyes. A wide boy used to busking it on charm, expecting to be found out. Biding his time.

  I came across Tony Blair at the time of that dispute at the Market Nursery. The nursery was near London Fields. It was squatted, then it became official. Blair was visibly horrified by his first encounter with Hackney politics. More complex, more lethal than the Balkans. It was all so absurd. Bernie Grant, the union guy, was a complete pain. He was humiliating the black woman who worked at the nursery, because she didn’t know all the latest terms for race analysis. She was a real Hackney community worker.

  People were threatening the two lesbian women who opposed whatever was going on in the nursery at that time. They didn’t think they should side with them just because they were lesbians. They believed in the nursery. They were getting threatening phone‐calls for deserting the lesbian cause. They used to live in Broadway Market. It was a very popular location for lesbian communes.

  There were five rooms in the Montague Road house. One of which was divided by wooden doors. That made six rooms. I can’t believe how many people lived there.

  Godard approached me at the time when the women’s movement had just begun. I had this uneasy feeling about the film. I thought: ‘I’m not quite sure.’ People were going on about the objectification of women. Also, even then, I thought I was a bit floppy. I didn’t know if I wanted to be shown naked coming down the stairs. Godard had this idea that he could make these rather quick films and give the money to radical causes. He was in the process of denying his role as an artist.

  He still had that intensity. He sat on the sanded floor of my bedroom in Montague Road and he talked
to me. I can’t remember how he arrived. He wouldn’t have driven. I can’t remember if I’d met him before this. I can’t remember the sequence of things. Mo Teitelbaum, one of the producers, knew him. I spent time in other parts of London when Godard was shooting certain sequences, I remember watching him work.

  I do remember this figure sitting cross‐legged on my floor and the odd feeling I experienced at the time: ‘This is the famous director.’ He challenged me. He said, ‘You think I can’t make a cunt boring?’ He was so angry. I thought, ‘Oh dear, here’s me daring to criticize the great man.’

  There were comments about the naked woman from friends who saw British Sounds at that time. Pete said, ‘When that shot first appears, you think: “Wow, crumpet!” And then it just carries on and on and on. With that droning voice. You lose all interest.’

  I recorded my voice‐over in somebody’s room. I had this thing about West London, it was so alien and strange to me. It was such a trip just to get there.

  There was no filming in Hackney. Now that I think about it, I do recall: Godard arrived in a black cab. He spoke in English. I do speak French. But he spoke to me in English.

  I went down to Essex University with him, in winter, trailing about, keeping my maxiskirt out of the mud. The students were unimpressed with Godard. They chucked him in a fish pond. I wasn’t there at the time. My memory is very bad.