Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  We read too much of this stuff, gossip. Peddled by spooks to scandal magazines funded by outreach agencies of the state. Kaporal tried to lend credence to his fictions by topping himself in a graveyard. A dire tautology. That was beginning to work.

  Welles was never sure if he had in fact written the novel published under his name – no copyright line – by W. H. Allen in 1956: Mr Arkadin. The book of the film, which is also known as Confidential Report, was cobbled together by a Welles associate, Maurice Bessy. In Paris. Borrowing dialogue from the script. With minimal infusions of local colour. It was written in bars, describing bars. On the move across Europe: searching for a narrative. Like Antonioni with The Passenger. Enervated art‐house films, played out against architectural backdrops, are quests for locations. The big decisions – where to find a camera, where to eat dinner – become the movie. A dubbed mistress, offered English lessons in exchange for the parts she won’t get, is paid off with borrowed costume jewellery, stolen furs. Vienna, Budapest, Madrid: actors stranded in third‐rate hotels, unable to pay their bills. No money for a flight home. No change for cigarettes and whores.

  When Peter Bogdanovitch, interviewing Welles, found the writing of Mr Arkadin ‘beautiful’, the jowly, cigar‐sucking director chuckled and wheezed: ‘Maybe, I did write it at that.’

  In those drifting, mendacious years, when Welles ran up tabs and kept his troop of actors on standby, you could expect him anywhere: but not Hackney. Not Sylvester Path, at the back of the Empire, alongside the Old Ship pub. Not dressed like a bingo caller with a shiny jacket, wide lapels and limp bow tie. Bill Haley cowlick kiss curl. I had to run the DVD over and over to convince myself that this was not a missing sequence from F for Fake, a body‐treble, an impersonator. The actorly twinkle in the conman’s eye. The weight of an alien presence, hobbled by bright shoes a size and a half too small. It was Welles all right and he was here, the heart of Hackney, in 1955. The year of Mr Arkadin.

  I was in Broadway Market, trying to find Jayne Mansfield programmers, sounding off about films shot in the borough. Hitchcock, Carol Reed, Jean‐Luc Godard. Clive Donner’s version of Pinter’s The Caretaker. The Swedish guy, just back from a festival on Bergman’s island, put up Phil Collins in Buster and a Danny Boyle viral‐catastrophe shocker. He mentioned that David Cronenberg had dropped in that very afternoon, checking locations for a thing about Russian Mafia involvement in the borough. Cronenberg signed a poster of The Fly. And would I like to sample the footage Orson Welles produced on Mare Street?

  Like Godard, a decade later, Welles accepted an English television commission. From Associated Rediffusion. They billed the London element: ‘Chelsea Pensioners’. The person writing notes for the DVD talked up Around the World with Orson Welles as a seminal piece that anticipated the improvisatory realism of the French New Wave. ‘Somewhere between a home movie and a cinematic essay, these short films have been described by Cahiers du Cinéma critics as the missing link in Welles’s work.’

  In Paris, we are introduced to Juliette Greco, Jean‐Paul Sartre and the hardboiled American actor Eddie Constantine: who is wearing his hat in a nightclub and giving the camera a trademark unblinking stare. Then, on cue, the big wink. Welles and Constantine came together ten years before Eddie’s career‐defining turn in Godard’s Alphaville. And twenty‐four years before he sailed under Tower Bridge with Bob Hoskins (a proper son of Hackney) in The Long Good Friday. Barrie Keeffe’s script required Constantine to reprise one of the Mafia figures brought over by the Krays, in anticipation of New Labour’s strategic initiative: bigger casinos on more polluted brownfield sites. The political climate of Thatcherite politics is laid bare in a film made in the year of her accession to power. The way villains laundered money through Docklands developments. Corrupt relationship between planners and ambitious gangsters. Dave King, as a bent detective, makes a premature Olympic pitch: with racist remarks about black athletes doing the long jump on derelict industrial land.

  Limping badly, he’d fallen off the stage the night before, Constantine effected a farewell to European art cinema in Chris Petit’s 1983 film, Flight to Berlin. A production written and planned for Paris. The exercise was unintentionally psychogeographical: in the way that the Situationists would navigate Montparnasse with a map of Venice.

  Welles drops in on a left‐bank bookshop where Lettrists recite concrete poems. By shooting on the spin, avoiding scripts, letting it happen from a moving car, Orson steals a march on all the coming trends: Situationism, film‐as‐essay, the cult of Moby‐Dick. That’s what he was doing in the Empire, rehearsing a play from Melville’s masterwork, plotting to turn it into a film. It never happened. He did deliver the Jonah sermon, as Father Mapple, in John Huston’s respectful and bleached‐out version of the hunting of the white whale. A single take, that was the myth. After climbing a rope‐ladder to the whaler’s pulpit. Welles rewrote the script, improved on Ray Bradbury: improved on Melville. Or so he said.

  The actor/director emerges from the stage door at the rear of the Hackney Empire. He has invited Joan Plowright, Laurence Olivier’s third wife, to play Pip (the cabin boy on the Pequod). He stayed with the Oliviers while he wrote the novel of Mr Arkadin: taking the blight off an English country weekend. There had been a brief liaison with Vivien Leigh in New York: where Welles played Lear for the youthful Peter Brook. Now Patrick McGoohan did Starbuck. And Kenneth Williams was in the cast, whinnying about the lack of professionalism, the fat American director’s ‘filthy tribe of sycophantic bastards’.

  Taking a breather from this nest of viperous egos, Welles steps out into Hackney light. Which is to say: old stone anxious about demolition, bollocking afternoon drinkers incapable of counting their own fingers. Late history just starting to scratch and yawn.

  A small flock of greying women, prepped and permed, are waiting at the entrance to the Spurstowe Alms Houses. A charitable foundation which will very soon disappear in a council‐sponsored cloud of dust. The building has been in place since 1666 and time is up. This refuge for ‘six poor widows of good life and conversation’ was originally funded by William Spurstowe, a clergyman namechecked by Samuel Pepys for delivering a very tedious sermon. The almshouses were rebuilt in 1819.

  The brief report by Orson Welles opens with a general view of the Hackney Empire and its ladies for hire signage: sonorously, the director invokes the music‐hall tradition of Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd. ‘We’ve been shooting a film across there. And before that we’ve been rehearsing a play.’

  The Spurstowe spokeswoman, high bosom decorated with pearls and cameo‐brooch, handles the banter effortlessly.

  ‘I belong to the British Legion. I’m an unrepentant old Tory. And I belong to the Conservative Association. And I was Divisional Chairwoman of the Women’s Section for seventeen years, now retired in disgust. We’re all true Blues.’

  A privet hedge divides the almshouses from the stage door, a few locals have massed on the terrace at the end of Sylvester Path. A policeman in a peaked cap keeps order. As if expecting an immediate transfer to Rillington Place.

  Welles says that he has come to know and respect the ladies and ‘their lovely old house’. He wants us to read the inscription above the door: ‘Settled for ever certain Lands in y said Parish on several Trustees.’

  For ever, under law.

  The ladies admit that they cook, but not for each other. They go out to picture shows at the Empire. One of the friskier widows asks to be remembered to Jack Warner when Welles gets back to Hollywood: he’s a cousin.

  Cue big close‐up. Orson delivers his piece, with deep and growling sincerity, straight to camera.

  ‘All too often there’s another sort of loss involved, a loss of dignity, a loss of the sense of individuality. And that’s why I think British people should be so proud of institutions such as this alms‐house we’ve been visiting with the six poor widows of Hackney, who are maintaining their individuality with a vengeance.’

  To gather my thoughts for th
e Chambers Bequest dinner, I dropped in at the Old Ship. I ran through the elements I wanted to bring into play, the anecdotes, quotations scribbled on envelopes. It wouldn’t cohere, even after a couple of brandies. The plaster model of a ship would have to be pressed into service as a metaphorical whaler. Welles’s Hackney intrusion displaced too many ghosts.

  The almshouses – Nos. 1–11 Sylvester Path – had gone, but the fading prints remained, the Hackney Brook, the little bridge over Mare Street: Rural Hackney in 1738. The kids, smoking skunk outside the pub, wore black wool caps with the Nike tick.

  SAVE SYLVESTER PATH.

  Roland Camberton described an episode from the 1930s when, as a bright Jewish history student from Hackney Downs, his character David Hirsch went up to Oxford for an interview.

  ‘What do you think of the new Hackney Town Hall?’

  The boy considers the implications of this Art Deco novelty. ‘It looked all right. The stone was bright and clean, but he supposed that before long the London smoke would turn it grey.’

  Anna joined me at the bar; she had agreed, reluctantly, to take her place at high table, alongside the mayor, the lady mayoress, Hackney notables (notable to themselves) – and the New Labour minister (weather and sport), who had drawn the short straw. Bicycle people in gypsy skirts, hoop earrings, black trainers, yellow tabards, luminescent Alice bands, wheeled their machines up the disabled ramp, into the Grand Assembly Hall. Where they clustered like iron filings, ignoring the suits, hammering into trays of drinks. They ignored us too, as did the council mob, who remained tight within their own cliques, content to mutter and bitch. Rain had been falling steadily all afternoon – and falling within the building. There were puddles in long corridors hung with unsmiling portraits, as I tried to find the person with the promised cheque. Which I hoped to post, immediately, through another door: an instalment of overdue council tax. And an invisible carbon footprint worthy of mention in the latest green‐headlined copy of that free nuisance sheet, Hackney Today.

  Before my sponsor could be buttonholed, I was summoned to high table and placed between the mayor, an orthodox Jewish man from the northern reaches, capped and chained, and his pleasant but confused wife. What was she doing here? Where was the food? The concession, to deliver lukewarm trays of airline pap, had been granted to some meals‐on‐wheels outfit – who did what they could with reheated leftovers from the geriatric run. We tried to make a decent fist of carving rubber meats with white plastic cutlery: thereby protecting ourselves from the suicide option. Our thimble‐tumblers were kept free from contamination with clingfilm seals. We were served in random order on a pass‐it‐along basis, the caterers making it very clear they were here on sufferance. And overtime. To punish us, they would hold back the wine.

  Anna, who is able to get conversation from toothless mouths lost in the deepest of beards, gave up on her council statistician, and stared out at the lively time the art folk, who set up this jape, were having at their little round tables, down below. Elevated, exposed, we were the performance, an ill‐assorted rack of gargoyles, unable to begin until the mayor received his tray.

  A disaffected Hackney Tory told me that the empty place was being held for the minister. Who was out there, lost. And hopefully trying to prove the safety of the streets by walking his minders through Murder Mile. New Labour, so recently come to power, had no interest – beyond putting the financial bite on a clappedout regime – in eastern parts. How that would change! It appeared that the celebrity guest was a political turncoat: and also, although I couldn’t be sure of this, above the menagerie racket in the hall, a gender migrant. When the man did arrive, scarlet‐necked, walnut‐varnished beneath an immaculately calibrated hair decision, he made it clear his words would have to be delivered right now; he was passing through, on his way to something more important in Islington. Like a decent meal.

  Kosher airline dinners take time: we waited and waited. The lady mayoress told me about her children. And grandchildren. Dry‐mouthed and sober, I got to my feet to deliver my under‐cooked diatribe about lost libraries, Roland Camberton and Harold Pinter, archives built by working men. None of that emerged.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said, ‘about the Hollow Earth. Do you know about the Mole Man of Mortimer Road? Or Edmond Halley’s demolished manor house? Halley stood before the Royal Society, late in the year of 1691, to read a paper proposing that our earth is hollow. Three concentric spheres lie beneath the surface, nesting within each other: the kind of symbolic topography Dante imagined. One entrance, I have discovered, is through the abandoned public baths in Whiston Road. Do you have any idea what we should do about that?’

  MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS

  There were stories that the tunnels went for miles. There were monsters down there, blind reptiles and insects that had never seen the light, there were hospitals and brothels, and horrible things . . . dead babies, assassinated priests.

  – Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

  Victoria Park

  When I switched on the computer everything blew. Clambering, old-person-unsteady, on the blackwood Jacobean chair, to flick the fuse: relief. An immediate return to the peeling hallway, the swaying walls: Old Hackney. Followed, once again, by foreclosure, darkness. The stench of rotten icing sugar and wet feathers might be explained by electricity burning up dead things; the bugs and cockroaches that give this 160-year-old property its pulse of life. How many times do you change a shirt, dripping with intensity of composition, before you admit that the fetid rot is external, part of the structure? Not your fault, not this time.

  Saucers of poison were taking their toll. Consequences follow from conical powder-dumps left out for greypelt co-tenants of Albion Drive. Spiked chocolate drops. A treacherous toxicology for nocturnal tourists: mice, fleas, wintering wasps. Who pass without prejudice from property to property. Living and twitching cat snacks. Tails and pink eyes. Salty with horrible stomach-scorching additives. An exploding necrotic pregnancy when red guts hang inside out: fig jam. Cheese-coloured burger cartons to make addicts of bag-ripping feral dogs. Before the blue fence went up to remove the Olympic Park from the map, its Angel Lane boundary was identified by the stiff corpses of murdered foxes: fur ruffs picked over by maggots brave enough to carry the vitriol down an ever-extending food chain. They die our deaths, the tunnellers.

  Oh! The noises in the roof cavity when we sit down after supper to bask before the grey glow of the screen: the crunching, scuttling, slithering. Floorboards creak like a venerable whaler entering the pack ice. I close the curtains to hide the zizzing head-shaped splurge on the window; stepping with care to avoid a corpse-carpet of spray-zapped flies with tiny tortured lungs. A faint scratching at the front door? It’s only our neighbour, who can’t, at any price, bring herself to prise the half-gnawed mouseling from her wicked tabby’s salivating jaws. I keep a rusty spadehead with broken handle to remove fatalities and to bury them, my slippered feet wet with nightdew, in a mouse cemetery by the nettle patch. Where they will be dug up and recycled by ever-watchful predators.

  Spike the builder, called in when we were left in darkness, in the retch of death’s insulation beneath floorboards and skirting-boards, had his own complaints. His life on a new estate in the backdraught of the M25 at Waltham Abbey was not as gracious as the brochures had led him to believe. Spike’s thumb trailed a dirty bandage: his girlfriend wilfully damaging his fist with her head. She had been overdoing it, socially, on the estate, while he put in all the hours. A slag, to state the case bluntly: deranged by retail parks, boarding kennels, furniture redundant before it’s out of the cellophane. Spike didn’t want to spend his only free day screwing glass lids on Ikea coffins. She’d been good as gold, his Nita, in Bethnal Green. Now she wanted custody of the Rottweiler.

  ‘You was dead lucky,’ Spike advised. That gas smell, it was gas: a leak from which a single spark could have ignited a major incident. ‘You bin stitched up by cowboys. They’ve took out the old heaters and never sealed the p
ipes. Diabolical really.’

  He was right. Spike and his dad (retired to a Portugese golf course) had done the job, twenty years earlier. Shortly after the junior partner was let out, paroled to employment supervised by a reputable craftsman: his old man. With whom he went toe to toe on slate roofs and wobbly ladders. The father cursed. The son, eyes blazing under the peak of his baseball cap, took his revenge softly. Muttering anathemas on the father’s deaf side.

  ‘They’re total crap,’ Anna said, back from school, three kids, disbelieving of the latest bodged repair. ‘But they’re reliable. They come when you need them.’ But only to make more work, I thought, insurance for the future, an effective pension plan. Like the kids who flogged Anna her Ford Escort, keeping the spare keys, to nick it back two days later. She loved that car, her first.

  He wasn’t racist, Spike, but he couldn’t abide Poles, sleeping rough and screwing all the best jobs. In twenty minutes flat, he knocked out enough of the wall to reveal a large, barbecued rat, victim of auto-erotic excesses. It tried to lick hot wires, biting through the wrong colours: cooking itself in a microwave blast, mouth melted in ecstatic rictus as it fused the household.

  I left Anna to make Spike’s tea, before he headed off to take care of some other long-term incomers whose bits and pieces he had been fudging and bodging for decades. I had a date with Danny Folgate the dowser, in Victoria Park, by the Burdett-Coutts fountain. Danny had an exciting discovery to unload. It would, he was convinced, recalibrate my Hackney researches: which, from what he’d heard, were in danger of becoming bogged down in mounds of irrelevant detail; politics, art. Contradictory interviews cancelling each other out. I was forgetting the only important element: place. Energy. Lines of force. A complex mapping like the crow wires that had been knitted, unseen, around my crumbling house.