Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  In the Queen Elizabeth there was a pharmacy, up some steps. That’s where one of the junior doctors was reduced to tears by this very severe consultant. The wards were so crowded. I remember the back area, lots of shelves, hidden away. Quite narrow. I remember going down this narrow passage with a nurse who was quite responsive to snuggling, to touch.

  I didn’t go to any of the pubs or cafés in the area, or into the little park beside the building. I was aware of other buildings along Hackney Road which were old. I remember thinking, ‘They must be Georgian.’ Now I can enjoy them.

  When we had something to do which was difficult for a child, we would give them paraldehyde. Which has an awful smell. And is a very big injection. They would be wrapped in a blanket and held by one of the nurses, while I did the stitching or whatever. The parents were sent well away. I remember being quite scared by the amount of paraldehyde we gave. The nurse who ran casualty was a man. The injection seemed such a terrible procedure.

  On my way here today, to my daughter’s house, I wandered around a bit and found one of the side streets. Industrial buildings. I’m now interested in architecture. The style of those buildings could have been North African. I realized that, back in my Hackney Road days, if I’d been walking the area, if I’d noticed those buildings, I’d have thought they should be pulled down and replaced.

  I did walk at Shadwell. The river scared me, the pubs. I walked down Cable Street, through to the end. Wonderful smells. As I approached a derelict-looking café, I heard a noise, a scream. Through a crack in the curtains I saw the café floor cleared of tables and chairs. In the middle was a little girl dancing while holding a cap gun and, after each ‘shot’ of this, she gave a scream of delight.

  The space occupied by the deactivated Children’s Hospital disturbed my afternoon circuits of Haggerston Park. The way it glowered across the man-made pond and the little eco wilderness. Chickens pecked in the City Farm, the donkey was too depressed to utter its plaintive yowl. Buildings of such memory-displacement won’t let you pass, freely and without repercussion: I have to notice the broken panes, graffiti revisions, dirty bouquets of stone flowers.

  Brian Catling, rumbling through Hackney Road towards some performance venue in Vyner Street, or new lapdancing experience, paused to interrogate the proprietor of the handbag shop where the old Nag’s Head used to be. The most haunted pub in London. The horse’s head, blacked up, orange eyes, still rests in an alcove: a lurid trophy. We drank here a couple of times. A floor of spongy rubber which threatened to give way, dropping you into the Sweeney Todd pit. The bag-man, Catling confirmed, was reluctant to spend time alone in the cellar. When the building was locked and everybody had gone home, he heard footsteps pacing overhead.

  Public house and hospital sat on the same fault line. And were better avoided. I read somewhere that the prize-winning novelist Nicola Barker once worked in the Children’s Hospital as a cook or dietician. She used to live in the borough. I liked her books very much: she knew how to walk prose across the page. With wit and consequence. One of her characters in Reversed Forecast is employed as a kennel maid at the Hackney track. Like Stephen Gill she notices that the area is defined by a proliferation of betting shops that allow the poor to stay poor in style. It wouldn’t surprise me if the hospital helped forge Barker’s quirky vision: ‘Every story was one story, everything boiled down to a single narrative. Every thought, idea, commentary, fiction, was travelling towards a single meaning. She tried to find this meaning but it was hopeless. It was too big.’

  There was another party on the roof. Ian Askead, who was working the fridges in the Homerton, headbutted Charlie Velasco. Something absurd about the way Charlie was looking at his wife. Two whippets slapping skin and bone. While the rest of us laughed. ‘You fuck my wife, I fuck you.’ A worm of snot from the wronged man’s nostril. Velasco kicking out gingerly to protect his toes.

  Askead pretended his steel comb was a blade. Most of his day was spent measuring corpses, entering their particulars in the register. Making tea. ‘The plugging gets messy, you have to tie the legs together.’ And comb the hair: his weapon of choice. Charlie escorted the drunk mortuary technician’s wife home to Albion Square. As a courtesy. In the Audi. I watched the lights from above.

  Anna brought our daughter, Farne, to the Children’s Hospital, suffering severe abdominal pain. She was a brave and bloody-minded child. They sent her away, not for the first time, saying that it was indigestion. Farne became feverish. We got her to the hospital in Holloway Road just in time for an emergency appendectomy. Anna, overdue with a second daughter, holding off in some mysterious way until the first was through the operation, went into labour. She felt the contractions as she climbed the stairs. These dramas, hovering as we undertake our ordinary routines, arrive in clusters. William and I, in a bereft and masculine house, adventured in the overgrown section of Springfield Park. A day we both remember.

  Neither can I forget the dreadful burger bar on Holloway Road. Hungry but unable to eat, we put on time while the operation took place. And the clock stood still.

  Again. Coming home, after an evening up west, the cabbie began to chat as we hit Hackney Road: to establish cordial relations before the humped bridge and the potential tip. ‘That park takes me right back. My life.’

  He had been new to the people-transporting game. And hot. Bringing a nurse back. God’s truth: the fuck of a lifetime. They broke into the City Farm. Down in the dirty hay. Absolutely amazing. True what they say about nurses: bone-shuddering. She could suck the sap out of a statue. Looking back: it never happened. Blinding. You could hear the goats cough.

  ‘Still there?’

  Park, yes. Hospital, no. Shame.

  The Circuit of Morning

  DEADLY SKUNK FLOODS CITY.

  I make my October walk, solo now, towards London Fields.

  CAR HID A CORPSE.

  Newsprint, pulped by overnight rain, clogs the ridged soles of my Masai Barefoot Technology shoes. The water is off again while they clancydocwra barnacled pipes. So thin. So long in the ground.

  Want skunk? Try this route and you will be forced to admire the dedication of self-administering chemists. By the time I’ve reached the Owl Man’s ruin, I’m floating high from puff of youth: mid-road shoulder-rollers toking as they prowl, sharing the herbal blast. Darkened windows of untaxed silver saloons leak burnt breath. Squad cars converge on messy traces of recent crimes. And coloured screens illuminate dim basements where sleepsuit-babes wait for food.

  My internet server refuses to serve. It’s dubiously installed and won’t stand up to investigation. There are new freelance occupations: young fixers on bicycles, barely languaged but fast-fingered, sure navigators in the virtual world. If my difficulties have to be explained in terms they understand, I’m unlanguaged too. A trip to the internet café in Kingsland Road, down skunk alley, is an education: money flies across the globe, mostly towards Nigeria. Charismatic Christian sects do photocopying, emails, faxes and keyrings: sideline sacraments. Hasids load brown packages into the Volvo as if nothing around them had changed. In thousands of years. The law is the law: even if they have to abandon war-torn Stamford Hill for Milton Keynes.

  Each morning, with Anna, I walk a local circuit: before starting work. For thirty or so years, she spurned the notion. ‘There’s nowhere in Hackney I want to go.’ Away from London, we tramped the Lake District, Wales, and even Anna’s beloved Fens, but treks on home turf were a penance for my wife. To clear her head, she walked to school, beyond the Hackney Hospital, on certain summer days. And caught the best of the light.

  I picked my moment. The promise of an interesting route, a bit of everything the borough offers: Albion Drive with its front gardens (compare, contrast); the informal geometry of London Fields, avenues of broad-trunked guardian trees; Bungalows, the Mare Street café where we enjoyed a full English to celebrate the anniversary of our first circuit; narrow Warneford Street with its contagious spate of loft conversions. Its colour
ful bins. That eccentric end-stopped terrace (like The Ladykillers), before the swing into Fremont Street.

  The proximity of Victoria Park nudges property values, mews developments in places where there had never been stables. From one house, wedged into a tight slot like a hatchet in cake, emerged another pedestrian couple: the woman in white and her partner in trilby and all-seasons raincoat. Two small dogs. We might nod if we coincide, but we try to keep things English.

  This couple, confident in belonging to the community of the park, cut through the private estate where Dr Bruggen’s daughter lived. Anna did attempt a conversation, once, with the newspaper reader on his bench, when she wanted to let off steam about the way her refuge had been made into a caravan park for film crews. The man wore long shorts, a drover’s brown coat and a bush hat. They were shooting some intrusive nonsense about Dylan Thomas’s marriage. (A person who never came closer to Hackney than not turning up to be best man at the marriage of his friend Vernon Watkins, in St Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield.)

  I posed against the caravan with the ‘Dylan Thomas’ card. Anna was too enraged by the generators, the breakfasting crew, the way the grass was dying along the stretch where they parked, to take her indicated position beside the ‘Caitlin’ mobile home.

  While she let rip at the man on the bench, I snapped another sign: SAILOR BEATING DYLAN. The broadsheet reader growled as if ventriloquized by his shaggy dog. There was damage to his vocal cords, a hole in the throat. He spoke with a gizmo that could alarm the unprepared. Who were confronted, all at once, with their own insensitivity. Lack of observation. On some mornings there was a friend, standing close, delivering a précis of news still to be read. The dog looked forward to the chocolates he scattered on the floor.

  Maaaaa-mung-na.

  The dog-man pats the pockets of his drover’s coat.

  ‘I haven’t got any money.’

  Coming into the park through St Agnes’s Gate (Protected by Armour Security) meant so much to Anna: dappled light, confirmation that the trees were still standing. She boiled at the sight of flattened grass, tyre-tracked into spirals by car thieves who torched the evidence. One morning there was a fast-food bike, tipped on its side, crows pecking at the spill. We witnessed Romanian gypsy women in long skirts breaking branches, tearing down wands of cherry blossom, carrying them off: as if the park had been their native forest.

  The rising sun behind us, the towpath was a bicycle track. I counted forty-seven between Canal Gate and Broadway Market, hammering hard in stalled groups, held by a green mum with infants perched around a clumsy rickshaw, front and back. Ting ting. Or, failing that, a whistle before the bridge.

  It was never the same, walking this circuit on my own. In Anna’s company I noticed more of the surface of things. Left to myself, I brooded on work, how this book might fold together. On our last expedition, I’d been thinking about Dr Bruggen’s description of the Hackney Hospital as a drug-hallucinated island. William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard both trained as doctors and carried forensic skills into their alternative careers. Hospitals of the 1950s were colonial outposts, no need to socialize with the natives. Burroughs and Ballard, detached and clinically observant, had the good manners and the mannerisms of the Raj.

  Our daughter Farne was pregnant and due to give birth in the Homerton, so that building, up on the ridge, stayed in our talk. A grandchild, second-generation Hackney, was an unexpected thing.

  SHOOTING INCIDENT. ON SAT 20TH AUGUST 05 AT ABOUT 9PM IN FIELDS ESTATE A FIREARM WAS DISCHARGED CAUSING DAMAGE TO RESIDENTIAL PREMISES. CAN YOU HELP US?

  There is a harvest of dog hair, in thick dry curls, under the bench beside the canal. Freelance canine barbers. The pool table, slung on the path at the very moment they started construction work on the Adelaide Quay development, stayed there for nine months; acquiring a tilth of seagull crap.

  We came to know the wildlife: the heron feigning indifference as it paddles the shallows of the cavern in which narrowboats used to turn, the bullying big-foot coots, the goose who sat for so many weeks on a narrow ledge, attempting to incubate an infertile egg. Every day, with every completed circuit, we peeled away something of our common history and left it behind. Our walks rehearsed an inevitable and fast-approaching disappearance: to be here, always, but not ourselves.

  As we came up the ramp towards Queensbridge Road, Anna gasped with an involuntary spasm of pain. By the time she got home we had to call an ambulance. She was down on all fours. Help arrived, promptly. The examination took place in the ambulance, to the considerable interest of neighbours and folk arriving for the school. Who regretted the inconsiderate blockage of a double-parking space. Pat the keeper told me later he’d had three heart attacks so far, they went with the job. He shouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting any more. Not at his age, it was affecting his golf swing.

  But this was not a heart problem, they established that. Must be a stomach strain from the walking. Take a pill, carry on. To worse attacks, fever, total collapse: enough bile to ensure that something must be done.

  The weekend was endured, sticky with yellow heat. On Monday morning I drove Anna to the surgery (she told me where it was). Every speedbump, and there were plenty, was an agony, a low moan. She didn’t have the strength to cross the road.

  Anna had done this routine many times before and she came prepared, a urine sample in a sesame-seed bottle. The doctor couldn’t find the kit he needed to do the test, but he’d seen enough to call the Homerton. Where his suspicions would be confirmed: gallstones. Calculi, they call them. A shingle beach to carry around, hard pebble-like accretions that don’t rattle.

  Traffic that day was crazy. But normal. The orthodox Hackney hysteria of roadworks, red-fenced holes. Anger-management head-cases were bombing bus lanes, mounting kerbs, shaving nanoseconds from their criminal records: dumping cigarettes, cartons, refuse bags. Playing chicken with red lights. Hurtling out of side roads. Flying from speedbumps. Crunching into potholes. Nudging cyclists who wove, death-defying, through the stalled sections, V-signing their getaways. Bouncing on to pavements. Blind under misted visors. A fools’ procession of men in helmets, acrylic-painted like hardboiled Easter eggs. They slalom though respect-soliciting, mid-road maniacs who are convinced their personal force fields repel accelerating metal. Shattered glass. Petrol pools. Human meat splattered by the amphetamine urgency of pre-emptive policing or dragged in bloody trails beneath bendy buses.

  And all of this shitstorm heading, so it appears, for the high ridge, Homerton Hospital. You can’t park within miles of the sick-store, although everyone tries: cabs bursting with extended families who haven’t yet decided which member needs treatment, Stamford Hill Volvos of repeat pregnancies, dignified Somalis, sweating junkies and their parasitical dealers – with many more who can’t resist the life–death party mood of a great hospital-supermarket where absolutely anything can happen. I get Anna inside and run straight back out before my vehicle is clamped and crushed, or given a spin down to the Lea or Victoria Park by some freelance ecologist in a Nike skullcap. Then, jogging in a fugue of fears and imaginings from Chatsworth Road, where I left the car in the charge of a youth with a small yard and two mobile phones, I found my wife waiting, quite calmly now, though still in pain, in a kind of airport transit lounge. Which was occupied by assorted transients and sufferers, some toying with newsprint, munching apples, keeping an eye on the monitor, departure times. Others, the truly sick, are barely able to tolerate the lingering curse of occupying their own bodies. They count beads and pray aloud.

  Moving through to the Nurses’ Station, a good transport metaphor, we are gazumped by a large woman who announces that she’s about to throw up. ‘You can’t be sick here,’ says the young nurse, ‘this is a hospital.’ Handed what looks like an oversize cardboard boater, kept for the purpose, the groaning woman fills it. And overfills it with an impressive bout of projectile vomiting.

  The inspection cubicle in which Anna is installed is painted with a blue-an
d-purple combination. It’s hot. But the service is good, the nursing care excellent. That’s reassuring. They do listen to what she says. Her urine, in keeping with the scheme of things, has changed from Lucozade orange to deep-grape magenta. She’s clipped and wired. A tall black man, a hospital wanderer, blunders through the curtains. And apologizes very courteously. He’s looking for someone who may have died months ago.

  Paramedics are in soothing green. I can only sit in the corner and read my paperback of The Drought by J. G. Ballard. The large tap on the book’s cover drips loudly in the hospital sink.

  ‘The world-wide drought now in its fifth month was the culmination of a series of extended droughts that had taken place with increasing frequency all over the globe during the previous decade.’

  I marked that passage. Ballard originally published the book in 1965. British weather had taken a few years to cotton on, but now there was no rain or it hammered down until rivers flooded their banks. A number of people, quite independently, were working on drowned Hackney films. I watched one of them when I got back from the hospital: Polly II – Plan for a Revolution in Docklands by Anja Kirschner. Anja produced a leaflet that went with the DVD. As well as transcripts of pirate trials, photographs of Brecht and ‘Spirit’ Grant (the threatened Broadway Market shopkeeper), Kirschner illustrated the enclosures of common land in the seventeenth century. Two men at a public meeting, convened by the Boas Society, protested about ‘being washed out of the area’ by gentrification.

  I am sent home. Anna is removed to the Medical Assessment Centre and then to the Priestley Ward. An agitated dealer in the corridor is telling his client not to use the mobile number, he’s in a hospital. A woman, bemoaning institutional food, accepts the takeaway curry her family bring to her bed. And is loudly, violently sick. Hungry again, she snatches the hospital tray. And repeats the process.