Hobo’s Relics
The tunnel out of Dalston, going west, courtesy of Silverlink, was becoming a regular event. The creeping, grinding halt in which to contemplate our mortality. And the idiocy of abandoning man’s freedom to walk. When time was my own, I dawdled, doubled back, experimented with cafés, pissed in pubs. An hour or two, from Hackney to anywhere, in the way of duty or business. Public transport is a lottery. Easy to forget, in the arbitrary pauses and cancellations, the press of the crowd, voices, rows, your intended destination. Was this journey necessary? Mobile-phone technology hasn’t advanced much from tin cans and taut string. Clients of the overground rail service are convinced that a whisper won’t carry the distance: they shout. Can you hear me mother?
Danny secured permission for a viewing of the Joseph Sickert treasures, at the flat of his relict, Edna. I would reveal nothing of Folgate’s Whitechapel researches: which was a blessing. Nor would I publish the mysterious paper with its coded Grail symbols. The flat, as Edna boasted, was not exactly unknown to London’s rackety bohemians. Most of the convivialists brought home by Joseph from pub or market were civilized, boots wiped, caps doffed. But that Francis Bacon, she wouldn’t have him in the house. Something about the man made the flesh creep. Edna washed her hands in air to exorcize the resurrected stain.
Trapped yet again in the tunnel, I thought of Emily Richardson’s underworld project: car parks, abattoirs, sewers, wartime bunkers. She probed disregarded examples of civil engineering in the expectation that they would offer up a metaphor, film and sound in counterpoint, for this place where she found herself. And for the novel being she housed within the caverns of her body: her son.
Hung on three screens in high alcoves beneath Smithfield Market, grunge Hackney was translated into an image stream, with babbling disconnected narrative: black swine in the buried Fleet River, drowned mudlarks and toshers, troglodytes, blind Morlocks, albino children damaged by radiation, time-slipped wolverines and warlock cannibals out of H. G. Wells, Tim Powers, K. W. Jeter, Neil Gaiman, and Gary Sherman’s 1972 film, Death Line.
The point, brought home to me by the chill of the slaughterhouse cellars, animal fear in crafted bricks, is the profound indifference of the London you don’t see. There is no requirement to absolve pain. Barbecued Protestants. Disembowelled Catholics. Mutilated Highlanders. Those who perished under the knife in St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Panicked cattle. The tunnels we access, holy wells in private basements, wine vaults, are the outer rind of Edmond Halley’s Hollow Earth. A poultice protecting us from the unbearable heat of a buried interior sun.
Was this, I wondered, in the oven of that sticky afternoon, trapped below the skin of Dalston-Kingsland, a verifiable thesis? Could I map the numerous caverns beneath Hackney? The grassed-over air-raid shelters. The crypts. Tiled hospital corridors rented as sets for MTV promos. We were, I calculated, directly under Kingsbury Road, the motorbike shop that took over from the jobbing printers where we laid out and produced the first Albion Village Press books. Another kind of underground entirely. An alternative to the alternative, the Notting Hill orthodoxy of the 1960s: junk conservatism, private-income hipsters dabbling in property, traders in Third World artefacts, premature sex tourists. Alex Trocchi, a terrifyingly detached and sane writer, atrophied into a spiked Gandalf: a chemical connection at the heart of a Middle-Earth labyrinth of lost souls.
After the interview, Emily kept in touch. I met her mother, out along the canal, pushing the baby: and was discourteous enough, deep in my preoccupation with Hollow Earth theories, not to recognize her. Like Jock McFadyen, I’m not really there when I’m walking. And I don’t have the dog that Jock finds so useful for brokering introductions to attractive young women, the students he no longer teaches.
The underworld film project in which Emily involved me continued. In the night, there had been noises like a million mechanized locusts. Emily went out from her Queensbridge Road flat to investigate. Do you remember the Hell’s Angel who was cruising down the motorway when he was shot and killed by persons unknown in a passing car? The body was brought to Dawson Street, a tributary off Hackney Road, to lie in state. Respects paid by various chapters and piratical allegiances, the party began. In the morning, corpse loaded into a hearse heaped with floral tributes from Satan’s Slaves, the bikers streamed off to Mortlake.
Not many folk notice the smart and secure Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club chapter house. With its craft symbol, a machete, hanging above a steel-shuttered door. The Angels rub along, no friction, with speculators smoking outside Mecca Bingo, with new bohemians, close-cropped and tight-jeaned, in neighbourhood cafés. I searched for the building, when I heard the first rumours of an outlaw presence in the area, among the squatted and burnt-out husks a little further to the west. I was behind the times. The Angels have a solid investment portfolio. They occupy an industrial conversion in the media zone, convenient for Shoreditch and Hoxton: two minutes, tops, on the hog.
I admired Emily’s courage, how she’d managed to film her Kenneth Anger tribute to the mourning bikers, while pushing a one-year-old infant in a buggy. When it was over, she adjourned to the Premises for a coffee. ‘The guy who sat next to me,’ she reported, ‘had a completely tattooed face with 666 covering one cheek, “The Beast” scrawled across the other, and “horror show” written around his neck. When he smiled at the baby, he revealed a complete set of gold teeth, top and bottom!’
Bill Griffiths, poet, sometime Hackney resident, even in the bad times, kept a decent piano. Researchers, making his acquaintance, remarked on the blue LOVE and HATE inscriptions that decorated his thick fingers as they flew over the keyboard, ripping through the classical repertoire. Bill was found dead, up north in coastal exile, opera on the radio.
‘He never lived much above the poverty line – and a good deal of his life was spent below it. Years of poor diet no doubt hastened his death,’ wrote William Rowe in a Guardian obituary.
The Hell’s Angel youth was part of the mystique: the beard, boots and jacket, stayed with him, as German guest-worker, Anglo-Saxon scholar, itinerant performer, yelping and growling through the concrete poetry repertoire. Bill spoke softly and slowly, wheezing in later years as if the supply of air in his lungs was precious and must be preserved until the next splinter-thin Borstal roll-up was achieved on the lid of his tin. The harshness of Bill’s existence, his productivity, always on his own terms, made my complaints about unpaid invoices and the pinch of freelance life look peevish and silly. Apart from which, he was the real thing, that human catastrophe called poet. Whose business is difficulty, intransigence, tactical misjudgement, early death.
Unbiked by the time I met him, Bill rode with the Harrow Roadrats from the age of fifteen. Nicholas Johnson, one of Bill’s numerous publishers, told me that the involuntary residency in HMP Brixton came when the poet was discovered in the grounds of a hospital in possession of a knife. He made his permitted phone call to his brother, John: asking him to read aloud from the Bible. Nick reckons that ‘Bill’s obsession for cataloguing, his blotting-paper mind for language, plus his sense of injustice, paranoia and highly strung vulnerability’ emanated from those early prison days.
Nobody I know carried the living plant of memory quite so far under his leather jacket or held it so tenderly: Bill was a rogue classicist, Orpheus in a baseball cap. The balding skull, the silvered beard, seemed to be a way of recalling who he was, or who he had once been, against the accident of the mirror. Or the back of a bright spoon. Dalston was never more than a stopover: unique pamphlets, hand-coloured, were printed in the community workshops of the borough. A small mistake of council funding, soon to be rectified. When Bill transferred to the liberty of a narrowboat, moored at Uxbridge, it went up in flames, along with his books and papers. Bad luck, he insisted on it; dabbling in ghost stories, reworking M. R. James. Calling the demons by their first names.
Coming east, on the train that had me suspended in the tunnel, Bill saw overground Hackney as a erupt
ion of pigment: reds, blues, greens. The community workshop, the silk-screen process. His white pamphlets – nobody knows how many he produced in thirty-seven years of active publication, more than 150, certainly – blossomed with stencil shapes, holograph revisions. These were not little things, his freely distributed starbursts.
Biker wars. Narrowboat shanties. Edge-land rabbit hunts. Appearing, ranter-raw, with the frequency of Murdoch’s tabloids, Bill’s books and booklets were as sustaining to me as the notion of the Hackney Brook. That these works existed, even if I didn’t see them, streaming out from printshops, from Bob Cobbing’s flat in Petherton Road or Bill’s John Bull printing set, his late computer, was a London benediction.
Eight Poems against the Bond and Cement of Civil Society.
War w/ Windsor.
A Note on Democracy.
Morning Lands.
A Pocket History of the Soul.
The Secret Commonwealth.
The violence of Angels, Bill asserted, chapter against chapter, was a ‘valid human instinct’, offering resolution – and in contradiction to the violence of the state. He died upright in his chair. There were no floral tributes from Satan’s Slaves. No return to London. ‘Old faces together in Sunderland for the funeral,’ Tom Raworth reported. ‘Flies drop all round.’
Gospel Oak: there was action on the street, but the moves were unreadable. I went into an Irish pub to wait for Danny and his colleague in paranormal and post-rational studies, Giscard de Wyff. The violence, Bill would have recognized, was civic, tribal: in defence of territory. Afternoon drinkers, fathoms deep in cream-foamed melancholy, built Olympic rings across dark tables with the shifting of wet glasses. They inspected newspapers from which the news element had been extracted. They watched funnels of smoke slide, eel-like, into hairy nostrils and open throats: a carcinogenic communion. ‘All right then?’ ‘Right.’ ‘Right you are.’ ‘Good man.’
Edna, Joseph’s widow, patch on hand, was proud of her place, her children and grandchildren, welcoming. With tea. With offers of burger platters which handsome daughters, drop-in sons, were preparing. The young ones were hungry and deaf. Though the condition did not impinge in any way on social interaction: one of the girls featured in a television soap which went out with subtitles and a woman miming in the corner of the frame. Danny believed that the Gorman family’s inherited otosclerosis was a badge of caste, the living proof that they were indeed the direct descendants of Eddy, Duke of Clarence, and of Princess Alexandra. This Gospel Oak cluster, munching companionably in the galley-kitchen, was the local equivalent of the haemophilia of the Romanovs. (The Sickert surname was down to Hobo: an elective affinity with Walter. The Camden Town Group painter, pupil of Whistler, patron of music halls, confidant of barbers. Hobo’s mother, Alice Margaret Crook, married Joseph Gorman, fish-curer and sometime bare-knuckle fighter.)
The council flat, dense with evidence of Joseph’s scavenging, his Camden Passage and Soho contacts, was accessorized with a large television. A watchful screen babbled softly on the room of deaf ones. Paintings jostled for space: original copies, Sickert hommages, family portraits. A time for roll-ups, egg rolls, brown sauce, awed inspection of the private museum. There was a magnificent oil painting by Joseph that I took to be a vision of Walter, sunk in a throne-chair, crowned with a red paper cap: Ubu or Lear. Banished from the family’s Christmas party. A tribute to Walter’s early days on the boards with Sir Henry Irving? No no, Giscard corrected me, the old fellow was not Sickert; it was Joe Gorman, the grandfather.
So much paint! Turpentine, tobacco, frying onions. Out of this active domesticity, in which Danny and de Wyff were accepted familiars, tumbled conspiracies. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Baignent, Leigh and Lincoln, was the first book Joseph Sickert read all the way through. He was a busy man. Here was a wash-board signed by the four Beatles as a memento of skiffle days with the Vipers. Hobo played alongside Tommy Steele and Jim Dale (who also made his mark on the board). One of the four palettes hung on the wall was said to have belonged to Walter, but there was no provenance.
‘Joseph didn’t smoke or drink,’ said Folgate, handing me a photograph of Hobo at a gallery opening, pint of sherry in hand.
Natural cynicism leaves us wary of too much evidence, too well documented a lie. A small dark cloud rubbed against the low ceiling, the only naked surface in the room: there must be a book in this stuff. Money too. Stephen Knight was the first. His Final Solution, a runaway bestseller, stayed in print years after his death from a brain tumour. Knight had fallen out with his collaborator, the source of his revelations, Hobo Sickert. Others followed, broke the pact, and perished in all the usual ways. The unspoken invitation – write it! – was one I was happy to decline. Giscard de Wyff, elegant moustache and serviceable prose, could activate his own files. Cluttered rooms have a way of becoming autobiographies. And they never let you go. Rachel Lichtenstein rescued me from the detritus of a Spitalfields attic, above a decommissioned synagogue. I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
The solution, for Danny, lay in measurement, hard miles pacing out calculations scribbled on the back of photocopies from public libraries.
‘Joseph predicted Diana’s so-called accident. It’s a matter of establishing your baseline and your co-ordinates, the golden rhombus in a forgotten landscape painting. The princess should never have spun, widdershins, through that revolving door, duplicating her reflection, before plunging recklessly underground in a German motor.’
A memorial photograph of Hobo (22 October 1925 – 9 January 2003) was draped with the silver ‘engrailed’ cross that he always wore: one of his treasures. Then there was the leaf-patterned Japanese box which contained the folded parchment with its mysterious symbols. They looked like shapes cut through paper to make patterns of light on the wall: a cinema for cavemen.
We finished with the painted board that was supposed to hide, within its floating Rorschach topography, the location of the Holy Grail. A legend, recounted by de Wyff, linked Hobo’s murky panel with Shugborough Hall, Scottish Rite Masonry, the Chevalier Andrew Ramsey, Nicholas Poussin, Templars and the rest.
‘The panel is made up of two sections. The tapered softwood wedge that runs down the back is typical of the 14th or 15th century. The reverse bears evidence of worm damage and a red wax seal depicting a wounded panther, rampant. The panther holds a broken lance. There are droplets of blood on the chest. Layers of under-painting are clearly visible but the surface has been defaced and damaged, right down to the wood. What would merit such vandalism? And how did such a priceless object – the studio of Botticelli has been mentioned – come into the hands of Joseph Sickert, a humble picture restorer?’
I was reluctant to stare too intently at the swirling golds and browns. Memorize an image and you become its keeper. I had accepted, without bothering to read the small print, an invitation to take part in a conceptual project that I hoped would offer relief from my neurotic recording of Hackney. Lincoln was quite a step: I would have to drive, there and back, with just enough time to eat a sandwich, undertake my task, present the invoice.
A new building perched on the flanks of an old. You know the scene: budget soliciting content. Empty subterranean restaurant with food-exhibits you hesitate to rescue from their display cases. Tactful lighting in pale-grey galleries minimally dressed with digital reports on subverted water, sad creeks, military detritus. Walls that breathe a soulful muzak of sampled sound: wind in the reeds, geese shaking their feathers, whales in congress.
One modest landscape painting, from a line hooded in black velvet, was exposed. ‘Take a few minutes or an hour.’ I split the difference and went into a trance of intense concentration. The spindly tree. That’s all they wanted. ‘We walk you out into a field and you describe what you have seen, what you remember.’
I studied everything in that picture, apart from the tree: the solitary house, the upturned boat, the mudflats. Memory of memory: had I seen this place before? I would certainly know it
again. I can’t forget. I can’t delete a single brushstroke by that anonymous artist. The stillness. The hour of day. The darkening sky. Human potentialities that seem to have been painted out.
Danny Folgate toyed with Hobo’s ruby, his engrailed cross. He showed me portraits of Eddy, Duke of Clarence. My thoughts were of quite another Eddie, Constantine. That Easter Island face drifting through the decades: with Welles, Godard, Petit. In Alphaville, Eddie drove through the glistening night into the future, street lights playing across the screen of his Ford Galaxy. They say he has arrived from the ‘Outerlands’. He’s looking for a character from a comic strip, Henry Dickson. Who is impersonated by the baggy friend of Orson Welles, Akim Tamiroff.
Lost Kaporal was my Tamiroff. He wasn’t suicided. He was hiding out, not in Alphaville’s Red Star Hotel, but the Victory in Vyner Street. Kaporal had evidence, so he – or a man who sounded just like him – reported in a midnight phone call: Eddie Constantine had accompanied Bob Hoskins on a big night out in Hackney, during The Long Good Friday shoot. They kicked off at the Four Aces on Dalston Lane. Or was it Labyrinth? With Constantine as the growling but warm-hearted minotaur. In that special darkness where poetry is the oldest and truest memory-system.
Constantine kept his coat on when he sat with a woman called Anna and listened while she improved on Paul Eluard: Capitale de la douleur.
Hackney Hospital
King Edward’s Road was blocked by a cop car dressed in blue-and-white ribbons. Like a birthday present that had grown in the night. Some postcode affray, blood-treacle or dog piss on tarmac: another statistical Hackney incident, another excuse for a TV head-to-head between a gaudy T-shirt, new trainers, bangles, righteous indignation (the street) and a suit with a serious haircut, empathizing. Talking firmly about the need to communicate with the community, the gangs who put geography back at the top of the agenda. They were fundamentalists about borders, disputed bus stops, these negative youth affiliations.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 34