Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Our launderette was in the Englefield Road baths. You could still take a bath there. The launderette was at the back, you had to walk through all the wooden cubicles. I remember there was a price for the bath and then you had to pay for extra minutes. They still had ‘Hackney Council’ woven into the towels.

  Stewart Home used to come down to Mortimer Road to stay. He must have been getting around, seeing people like Pete Horobin. And Fabian. Distributing copies of Smile magazine. He was someone that I’d been in touch with in the past. Quite a few people would pop around to the house.

  It got pretty crappy, Hackney Wick. I still used to go up there, but less and less. I can’t remember when the greyhound stadium went bust. It must have happened twice. They had that really big, glass-fronted observatory thing. The oval of the stadium, the purity of it, was wonderful. I loved the way they used the space. There were gypsies there for a while. There were raves in the Wick. There was always overlap: people coming out of a club, piles and piles of nightclub flyers blowing about, gypsies moving up and down, little bits of business. On the scavenge.

  I didn’t go to Labyrinth. I do remember the Four Aces before that. Labyrinth wasn’t really my scene. The Four Aces was pretty . . . black. The Club of Mankind, as well, on London Fields. I remember going home from a party and there was a coach, the driver was a Brummie. A coach full of African blokes and girls, down from Birmingham. The driver didn’t know where the club was. I had to show him. I had to show him where this African club was. I was quite proud of myself.

  I haven’t followed the Mole Man story. I’ve seen a few bits in newspapers and heard Robert Elms mention him on the radio.

  William Lyttle had a skip on Mortimer Road. There was a toilet seat in there, we could see it from the window. Some local characters picked it up. William shouted at them, told them to put it back. He was giving them an earful for taking an object that was obviously waste.

  If you went through the Mortimer Road door, there was a single room with a couple in it. A young Spanish girl. Bill had this idea that she would cook for him. I don’t think he ever managed to persuade her to do it. Bill was down to the left, that was the room we knew he had. I never went into his room.

  There was also a little V-shaped garden at the back, he had a patio door into his room from there. If you went down to see him, he would come to the door. You would never get inside. He used to cook outrageously stinky meat stew that you could smell upstairs. It really did smell like dog food. Foul. I hate to think what was in it.

  I used to lock my bicycle in the little garden shed. There was a tiny lawn. And the concrete igloo in which he did his digging. One time, when my bike was there, I had the front wheel stolen. I’m fairly certain Bill saw someone do it. Probably kids.

  He dressed in work boots. He always wore a grey jacket from a suit. Never clean. He could put up a bit of a façade, like the business about being called ‘Mr William’. He did once have some relatives to stay, when the tenants were away. A middle-aged Irish couple, very straight. Like someone’s aunty and uncle. They stayed for a weekend. They were definitely from the south. I should know where Bill came from, he might have mentioned it. It was very weird when he produced these relatives.

  When I lived in Mortimer Road we never used the words ‘De Beauvoir’. It was too poncey. Now I’m proud to tell people that I used to have a place in De Beauvoir Town. Islington, even then, was creeping eastwards.

  The street markets are pretty much dead, Brick Lane has been captured and colonized. The age of the boot sale has gone. Hackney Wick was the end of an era. One of my flatmates used to collect your secondhand book catalogues. The very last one sticks in my mind. You said, ‘The prices are valid until such-and-such a date, after which time the survivors will be relocated to Dalston Oxfam.’ Ha! It was clear that you were winding things up.

  A few days after my encounter with Mark Pawson, I found myself in the Stoke Newington Library, ostensibly for an event celebrating the rich diversity of Hackney literature, but actually to see if I could follow up Rob Petit’s account of the surveillance-screen bunker. I decided, after a number of false starts, corridors going nowhere, that Rob had confused the library with the municipal offices, just down the road. A block big enough to service outstanding council-tax demands. If local officials had explained to me, years ago, that I was supporting the art practice of Stewart Home and Mark Pawson, and not some flimflam about refuse, schools and hospitals, I would have paid up with a good grace.

  Michael Rosen, who was chairing this event, had recently been appointed Children’s Laureate for the Nation and, more significantly, the Laureate of Hackney. The titles we were invited to discuss ranged from Pinter to Xiaolu Guo, by way of Alexander Baron and Stewart Home. I said a few words in recommendation of Patrick Wright’s A Journey through Ruins and revisited Pinter’s memory-fiction, The Dwarfs. I floated Rain on the Pavements but drew a blank, nobody in that engaged and opinionated Stoke Newington audience had heard of Camberton.

  Among the group who approached me afterwards, with allotment petitions, demolition promos, anti-Griffin propaganda, was an older man, with better shoes than the rest: Anton Spur. Who told me that he lived in Albion Drive and had filmed an interview with the Mole Man for Channel 4. A researcher had noticed a Guardian article – ‘After 40 years’ burrowing, Mole Man of Hackney is ordered to stop’ – by Paul Lewis. And had contacted Spur. The original piece pointed out that this property, 121 Mortimer Road, was now valued at over a million pounds. Ultrasound scanners, brought in by council surveyors, revealed ‘a network of burrows’ underneath seventy-five-year-old William Lyttle’s house. ‘Half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and home-made pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m (26ft) deep.’

  ‘Was the researcher’s name, by any chance, Kaporal?’

  ‘Well, yes, actually, it was.’

  Spur tapped social funds set aside by the council, the evicted William Lyttle was invited to put his side of the story. Amazingly, the reclusive but aggrieved Mr William agreed to talk. By this time, Channel 4 was in crisis: premium-rate telephone scandals, faked documentaries, racism on Big Brother. The whole commissioning process could be summarized as: creative dis-enabling. Commissioners have now, themselves, to be commissioned. The structure is labyrinthine. Proposals pass through more levels and hierarchies than there are ladders in a Piranesi prison. The idea is that there will be no idea: nothing that can be articulated. Boil content until it turns to steam. The age of the meeting as an end in itself – weak coffee at a round table – has been discontinued.

  Anton Spur shot an hour of William Lyttle, his rants and his silences, before the plug was pulled. The news in the Guardian was old news, Kaporal’s short-term contract was not renewed. The Channel 4 commissioner transferred to the Roundhouse in Camden Town, a railway shed dedicated to the erasure of its own cultural memory. Office wits said that the Antony Gormley jumper on the roof was a portrait of this suicidal careerist.

  I was promised a glimpse of the Lyttle tapes, if they could be found: they couldn’t. Spur was preoccupied with an alternative proposal on the life and times of the Hackney Owl Man – who, it was felt, would tick the eco box. A house of wild birds played better than a mad old Celt digging his way to Ireland.

  There was however one major revelation. Spur mentioned that William Lyttle was back. He had slipped through a gap in the corrugated fencing and reoccupied the tunnels.

  I wrote to Mr Lyttle in the refuge to which he had been sent by the council. I supplied a stamped return postcard with a nice picture of a plastic parrot, but received no answer. I visited the house and, failing to make any impression on security, was sent packing.

  DANGEROUS STRUCTURE, KEEP OUT! BY ORDER OF THE DISTRICT SURVEYOR. High fence with mesh barrier outside it. This triangle – Mortimer Road, Stamford Road, Englefield Road – was an exclusion zone. While much of Hackney was being expensively split open by clancydocwra, this Irishman, Mr William Lyttle, was unhoused,
for the crime of digging his own cellar.

  The tall house, additions spreading like wildfire cancers, was forbidding. They said that Lyttle had filled the deserted rooms, one by one, with London clay. Neighbours complained about their power lines being cut, no water in the taps, but that was a given in an Olympic fringe borough. They were terrified, in the pub, that the cellar would collapse into one of the Mole Man’s tunnels.

  I photographed his property from all sides, dirty cream emulsion over grey stone, brown trim for the bay windows. Remedial work by council teams, trying to get to the heart of the mystery, uncovered a dying swan, a mural drooping with sexual symbolism. Painted lemurs peeping from a buddleia and convolvulus jungle. As Marina Warner pointed out, when she discussed the devil as an ape of god: ‘monkeys (singes) are also the masters of signs (signes)’.

  I watched for ten nights before I spotted William Lyttle, flapping trenchcoat, trim beard and frosted shock of hair. Economical with the truth, I introduced myself as a colleague of Anton Spur. Could I follow up that interview? I might be able to make the story part of a book about Hackney, its politics, its corruptions.

  ‘Are you an Englishman then?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Book writer, is it? A Taffy?’

  Into the igloo. Over rubble, a blocked passageway. Tin door draped in sacking: he barges it open. Fit for his age, Mr Lyttle. Sharp, sudden. Then still. Waiting. Catacomb walls with alcoves in which candles have been set. Chalky dry. Quiet as a bell jar with the air sucked out. The clockwork of a beating heart.

  ‘I thought I’d try for a bit of a wine cellar,’ Lyttle said. ‘And found a taste for the thing.’

  He unwrapped a hunk of pungent meat, trapped in a wedge of white loaf. Perched on a broken chair, the Mole Man was happy to yarn about boreholes he’d uncovered along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal, about bunkers beneath municipal buildings and how they linked up with the crypt of the old church in Abney Park.

  He scuttled into the dark, bent over, stooping, although the space above his head was generous. Passages divided, branched out, but he never hesitated. The glow from his lantern played on dripping walls, where snail shells glittered. It was like choosing to crawl inside the hollow trunk of a drowned tree.

  Remarks thrown back over William’s shoulder were of a racist tinge. I felt no shame in letting them pass, there have been no prosecutions, as yet, for those who are rude about the Welsh. Our nation has become a comedy stereotype: stupid, drunk, fat and probably gay. The valleys of South Wales – line-dancing, fast-food binging – stand in, as far as the metropolitan media are concerned, for America. Much safer to mock the disenfranchised tribes of the near-west than the global bully.

  ‘You can call me a natural philosopher,’ Bill said. ‘Curiosity is my curse. If I make a start, I must know where it ends.’

  In alcoves carved into the sides of tunnels were votive offerings, saucers of secondhand nails, nosegays of rusty spanners, mud madonnas. And, amazingly, books. Pawson had got it wrong: William Lyttle, Little Bill, trawled the boot fairs to confirm his thesis. The only highway to freedom is under our feet. Out of sight.

  The Mole Man had built up a useful Hollow Earth bibliography. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, credited to Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, in a Panther paperback. Michael Mooorcock’s Lord of the Spiders. At the Earth’s Core, a Tarzan adventure by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Moby-Dick in abridged pictorial form, Classics Illustrated. William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland, a battered Grafton reprint, with red-ink annotations.

  The inference was clear: where Hodgson’s Wellsian fable placed English incomers in a ruined house in the far west of Ireland, somewhere as otherworldly as the folded limestone pavements of the Burren, Lyttle was taking his revenge by digging a pit beneath Hackney. He was the architect of a fairytale subterrane where former navvies from Galway, Connemara and Sligo made their fortunes hiring out plant and excavating London with the blessing of their oppressors, the British State, and all its grisly instruments.

  Lyttle had moved ahead, into the dripping darkness, when I heard a noise too loud for rats, more like the rush of water: as if our tunnel had breached the canal. I pressed hard back against the wall, sound became light. A single glowing eye, purple-red at core, hot-orange at rim, raced towards us, unstable in its nuclear heat.

  A train.

  One tributary of Lyttle’s civil-engineering project led straight into the Dalston Lane tunnel. Into the world of strategic-planning targets, demolished theatres, 20-storey glass towers. I was the sole witness of the moment when incompatible systems met. I wish I could pretend that I had the presence of mind to take a snapshot, to put alongside historic images of transcontinental railway tracks, slaved over by Chinese work gangs, coming together in the American wilderness. William Lyttle, the Mole Man of Mortimer Road, had something of the dignity, the inner conviction, of pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s Shoshone Indians: lifting redundant weapons while they crouch beside their iron nemesis, the Central Pacific Railroad.

  When the train carried Natches and his Apache remnant into exile, in the Florida swamps, warrior dogs followed the cattle-cars for forty miles. ‘Before they fell away in exhaustion.’ Nobody ever forgot the sound those dogs made.

  Vyner Street

  After that uncomfortable incident in the tunnel, I limited myself to terrestrial tracts of Hackney. I returned to old habits – street markets, afternoon pubs, cemeteries – and always with the intention of bringing my confidential report to a conclusion: unfinished. If I wrote a harmless sentence such as ‘everything was zeroing in on the Victory in Vyner Street’, I struck it out, as over-freighted, lazy and altogether false in its suggestion that my fractured narrative of manipulated facts, poorly recorded and inaccurately transcribed interviews, could achieve resolution. I had been invited to Vyner Street for a wake, the literary baggage that went with that was accidental and should, if anything, be played down: the life of a dead man celebrated by other dead men on parole. Postmortem memory-parties in which trembling and ruined participants drank themselves into blackout and amnesia were the only social events I now attended.

  Patrick Wright talked about an unnoticed film by Marc Karlin in which ‘he imagines a repository for all the tears shed for the late-departed Lady Di’. We were becoming a nation of grief technicians, neutralizing horror by trapping it in cycles of digital repetition. We dressed street furniture with wreaths and smiling photographs. The grimmest estates and the emptiest suburbs were carpets of sweating cellophane-sealed flowers.

  Norman Palmer, on Kingsland Waste, was having one of his better days, a nudging mob of eight or ten irregulars tipping out the boxes. Modernist poetry, experimental fiction, bundles of art catalogues, these were not Norman’s stock-in-trade. But in clearing houses, working with Essex solicitors, he took what he could get, flogged the gems and dumped the rest. After I’d picked up an uncommon William Burroughs first edition and found the crabbed presentation inscription, my interest quickened and I went home with a bulging bag. Annotated film scripts, poetry by Basil Bunting, Ed Dorn and Allen Ginsberg, artists’ books by Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Banksy, Jock McFadyen: all affectionately signed and doodled to one man. In gratitude, with respect. It was Jock who rang me with an invitation to the wake in the Victory, our accountant had claimed his last hire-car expenses. Hari Simbla, financial fixer to the counter-culture, had submitted the final return.

  I think it was Jock who said that Hari had been discovered in a Russian massage parlour in Camden with a briefcase of punishment-porn DVDs, each one wrapped in a copy of the Financial Times. Total fiction and probably based on the flakes of green paint I’d pointed out in Broadway Market, where David Cronenberg dressed a respectable barber shop as a Moscow mafia club for his Hackney shocker, Eastern Promises. Stewart Home laid the blame on Hari’s involvement with Alex Trocchi, laundering illegitimate income, dabbling in property, sorting out contracts that would never be fulfilled
with defunct publishers. As usual it was Chris Petit, a meticulous researcher, who came up with the true version, as revealed in a Guardian obituary: prostate cancer. Basildon. Painful and distressing treatment. A rapid wasting away in the suburbs, the semi-detached home to which none of us had ever been invited. A second wife of thirty years, four children. Framed graduation photographs. No books, no art. An unused piano.

  Petit, always sharp where money issues were concerned, left Hari early, well before the substantial thriller advances. ‘As soon as he moved into that place on Regent’s Park, I knew I’d have to jump ship. It was going far too well, the Richard Hamiltons, the Jim Dines, the soft Oldenburg typewriter. Who was paying for the collection? You don’t live shoulder-to-shoulder with the Pinters without some form of retribution. I like my accountants above a betting shop in the Uxbridge Road.’

  Barry Miles, official archivist of the era, filed the obit. It appeared that Hari was the person responsible for keeping the whole flaky 1960s scene afloat, he was the ultimate enabler. Peel away the bullshit, the Be-ins, Technicolor Dreams, perfumed gardens and psychedelic rabbit holes, and you come down to Peter Rachman’s multi-occupied Notting Hill warrens and Hari Simbla’s creativity with a balance sheet. Hari was the true visionary of the period: unpapered chaos finessed into a valid tax return. He scrambled reality with magical sleights of hand, smokescreens, dummy companies, plural identities. He claimed for lunches that were never eaten, charitable events that should have taken place but never actually did: even though we remember them in intimate detail, those parties in Panna Grady’s mansion to which we were not invited. Baton wounds received in Grosvenor Square were inflicted by an overdose of newsreel footage. And the compensation cheques for months away from jobs we didn’t have.