Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Hari helped R. D. Laing and the anti-psychiatrists by locating properties in Hackney as outstations for voyages through madness. Charlie Velasco was his fixer, he had an in with the council and an unlimited supply of the raw material, acid-casualty crazies. Many of the early communards made the seamless transition from sitting around smoking dope to sitting around acting out psychodramas for future medical papers and plays by David Mercer. My old colleague, Tom Baker, hammered by the stress of cinema, became the caretaker and general handyman of a Laingian house in De Beauvoir Square. Thus, very neatly, making a connection with the Hogarthian asylum run on the same turf by Warburton.

  The Barry Miles obituary revealed the fact that Hari had been with the Inland Revenue, a Tax Inspector. He learnt his trade from the inside. ‘Things did not always go smoothly. Hari’s unorthodox approach sometimes caused mayhem. Many clients left, horrified at unexpected tax bills. Others had problems getting their papers back – there seemed to be a black hole into which his files vanished.’

  That black hole, for today, was the Victory in Vyner Street. To walk there, across London Fields, picking up Jock at his studio, was like clumping through the trenches. Local topography resembled nothing so much as the barranca or ravine in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano: a ditch for dead dogs. With the guns, knives, populist murals, bands, firecrackers, barrios, Dalston was Mexico City: without the justification of a successful revolution. Simbla, I discovered, got his start with Margerie Bonner Lowry, Malcolm’s widow; a woman who wrestled with trunks of feverishly composed Lowry fragments, while necking as much booze as her tragic partner. The posthumous works belong as much to Margerie as to her addled castaway husband.

  Chris Petit, the first man at the bar – he would have to get away sharpish for the school run – was not drinking. Straight tomato juice: to the evident disgust of a dwarfish barman. An unlit small cigar was sniffed and returned to its flat yellow tin with an erotic gesture of renunciation. ‘This is the finish,’ Chris said, tapping an item in his paper. ‘Michael Winner promoting a diet book at the London Review Bookshop. That’s it, the last gasp of the culture.’ In many ways he was right, any pretence at finding a successor to independent bookshops like Indica and Compendium was ridiculous. A matter of geography. Bloomsbury was for American academics, thesis trufflers, tourists. Camden, always ugly, had now achieved a critical state of colonization by sponsorship and mindless development. Post-junk architecture soliciting unexplained fires.

  For years Petit had been convinced that the two English careers worth investigating were Jimmy Savile and Michael Winner. He was determined to live long enough to see the pair out, with his magnum opus beyond the reach of libel laws. The files, provided by Kaporal, were extensive.

  ‘Winner’s no fool. Looking back, he’s been very canny with his investments. Made the right moves at the right time. He knew how to operate a franchise. Just enough controversy to keep his name in the tabloids. And cult credibility by importing Brando and Mitchum. I used to see him, cigar in mouth, parking the Roller as close as he could get to one of the alternative cinema clubs. He knew his Fassbinder. And paid for the dinner by dictating a few choice insults to a secretary. Admirable.’

  With the arrival of Jock’s friend Paul Burwell, riverboat pilot and percussionist, the wake livened up. And Petit slid towards the door. Then Catling in loud pinstripe and Hawaiian shirt occupied a corner table with a group of acolytes, students or children. Hari was honoured in readings, songs, anecdotes. We were soon wet-eyed, garrulously fond and forgiving, remembering the parts of ourselves we had lost. Most of the company were of an age to regret the National Insurance contributions they had volunteered to ignore.

  Stooping to recover brown change from the bar, I met the snake-eye of the potman. Leering, he sucked smoke while he waited for recognition to dawn: it was the taste of hot nicotine flakes filtered through a scrub of demi-beard that did it. The way he twisted a length of white cord around his little finger, doing it and undoing it. Chewed lips in a salve of Guinness froth: Ian Askead. The feisty Glaswegian I met in 1968 when I took Renchi into the Metropolitan Hospital with his grumbling appendix. Askead played a part in our lives for maybe four years, then stepped aside, never to be seen, or thought of, until today.

  He’d moved in on us, with wife and infant, occupying any vacant spare room. They shared a mattress on the floor, the three of them. Along with assorted lovers and co-conspirators. Askead’s baby-minding techniques were borderline criminal, a pint of Guinness to put the two-year-old to sleep, then off to the pub, the anarchist meeting in a cramped basement. I can’t forgive my own complicity in this or forget the diary film sequence in which the half-naked babe pisses through the bars of the cot, in the grand house Ian was minding. The child, so I heard, turned out well: sleek-suited adviser to the Treasury or some such.

  Through Askead we were roped in to document squats in Ellingfort Road, by London Fields, and out in Redbridge. An interview, sound only, with Ron Bailey. Assignations with fringe Angry Brigade cadres in Stamford Hill. Without him, I would not have experienced these manifestations before they decayed into late fictions. Never imprisoned, never named in books or newspaper articles, I assumed that Askead was a paid informer. That was how he could afford the drink, the cabs he insisted on taking, between dole office and bomb factory. The permanent ciggie, the speed.

  The hospital job provided a place where he could hang out at night. And where, as reward for introducing us to activists, dangerous madmen, we agreed to film the corpses. I persuaded myself this was a Stan Brakhage routine. The virgin dead in their white plastic wraps were a valid part of any record of the city. Lovemaking, childbirth, death: the proper content for a diary. Along with mountains climbed, trees chopped and meals taken. But Askead had another agenda, he was peddling autopsy footage, mortuary frolics, to unrevealed contacts within the hospital, for cash. Or drugs. Which would be traded for weapons. Immunity from prosecution. A complicated equation into which we had bumbled. And put from our minds as soon as Askead was gone.

  Two women approached. They were not family or intimates but they seemed to require a friendly mime, a raised hand, if not the full embrace. Standard Hackney types? Intelligent, focused, aggrieved: belted and booted, conforming in nonconformity. One favoured red, the other black. Kaporal followed, trying to slip an arm around their shoulders, hoping to sacrifice the pair as a buffer to my wrath. ‘You know Alice and Anya from the German Hospital?’

  I do. Now. The Conrad prompt: Victory. Part Three, Chapter 3: ‘We lodged in the north of London, off Kingsland Road. It wasn’t a bad time.’ Or so the fatal woman says, the travelling musician in the novel. And you believe her story, because she is following in the author’s wake. 6 Dynevor Road, Stoke Newington: 1880. Just where Kingsland High Street becomes Stoke Newington High Street. Joseph Conrad rented a room from William Ward – WW – as if in tribute to Edgar Allan Poe’s doppelgänger, William Wilson, from the tale set in a Stoke Newington private school. Roads bifurcate, lives too. I explored this ground when I tried to trace the meanderings of the lost Hackney Brook.

  The Victory, with its classic L-shaped bar, was a working canal-side dive that sustained a downbeat air of welcoming its own and offering savage indifference to the rest. Kaporal fitted in: like a dying fern in a chipped chamber pot. He wouldn’t give back any part of his research fee, when I exposed his lies (creative re-imaginings), but hinted instead at further revelations, not included in the original contract. Available for the price of a drink. And, in due course, a percentage of the royalties.

  What Kaporal had not grasped is that I would investigate, on foot, every inch of his documented research. Including poor Harry Stanley’s final dérive, from the pub to his encounter with the state-authorized shooters.

  ‘I walked the last stage,’ Kaporal had written, ‘from the Alexandra pub on Victoria Park Road (no. 162) towards Mare Street – and saw the spot on the corner of Fremont Street where Harry died. Beside a fading wreath of plastic
flowers around a bollard, there are some holes in a low brick wall which some have said were made by the bullets.’

  Kaporal expanded on stories he had heard while drinking in the Alexandra, how the police managed to insert into one of the inquests the fact that Mr Stanley had ‘a bit of previous, a marginal role in armed robberies, back in the 1960s’. Two days before the fatal shooting, he had been given the all-clear in his battle with colon cancer.

  I strolled out, one afternoon, to see if I could track down Kaporal’s informants. There was no Alexandra. The pub had changed its name to the Lauriston; rebranded to appeal to a new clientele, wealthy incomers. Kaporal’s tale was manufactured, quite accurately, from the internet and phone calls to bent detectives.

  The ashes, when the time is right, will be scattered over Culloden field, a sorry place for Jacobite clansmen and highlanders, but visited by Harry and his loving wife, Irene. When the man from Lanarkshire was gunned down, a hundred yards from home, a dish of traditional Scottish ‘stovies’ was waiting in the microwave.

  Most of what Kaporal now offered, after major sessions in the Dove, the Cat and Mutton and the Dolphin, was off the record.

  ‘Too late and too little,’ I said. ‘I’ve got another month before funds run out. I’d rather have fifty quid on the bar than yet another uncorroborated Hackney conspiracy. When you’re writing fiction, ethical standards are higher.’

  ‘Bushmeat? Trade in body parts?’

  ‘Seen the film. It stank.’

  ‘A Clapton newsagent married to a Jamaican, she’ll give you the works on the battle between the Yardies and the Turks for the heroin trade.’

  ‘Flog it to The Bill.’

  ‘Did you know the top enforcer on Murder Mile is an orthodox Jew? Women love the guy and he scares the shit out of the lowlife. They call him Kosher Ken, the people’s mayor. The adjudicator. Wears leathers and a skullcap (with skull and crossbones). Roars around Stamford Hill on a hog, chewing a cigar and breaking legs to order.’ ‘

  Please.’

  Anya came to Kaporal’s rescue. Her latest architectural project, conceptualizing a structure that would never be built but which would resonate in the memory, was Labyrinth. She saw the benefit in starting from a flattened meadow of rubble and aggregate. She liked my Hollow Earth stories.

  ‘I’m going to record the accounts of everyone I can find who visited Labyrinth, the Four Aces, the old cinema, then bury sound-boxes in tunnels that connect with the railway system.’

  She showed me a lovely sequence of Labyrinth photographs – posing celebrities, bluesmen – she had rescued from oblivion. Bob Hoskins with Eddie Constantine, fedora tipped over the eyes. She had Orson Welles with a bloated young man, who looked like Dan Farson, striking a pose alongside Francis Bacon in a slippery, high-zipped blouson. Surrounded by clubbers in zoot suits and co-respondent shoes, Orson might have been auditioning for another Harlem Macbeth. Dark voodoo in a dark place.

  ‘The clincher,’ Kaporal said, ‘is the film. You know Welles did that interview at the back of the Hackney Empire with the old biddies? Right. But nobody has ever viewed the Moby Dick footage, the scenes with Welles and McGoohan which Chuck Berg compares with the Kane/Leland exchanges in Citizen Kane. Wolf Mankowitz put up the readies for a trial reel, to see if he could raise proper finance. They shot for three days, before Welles took off on a monumental Hackney bender. A collector, living out in Ware, responding to my internet enquiry, said that he bought four cans at the Wick boot fair. The label said: Moby Dick – Rehearsal. I have those cans out in the car. And they’ll only cost you another grand.’

  Ian Askead tucked something into Kaporal’s breast pocket. White string. In the shape of a noose. Pure theatre. The researcher’s story deserved a bottle of fizz. I signalled the bar. The old boy who cleared the glasses brought the bucket over, moving very slowly, weaving through the drunken mob. Askead shouted: ‘Come on, Swanny, for fuck’s sake. You’re not in the morgue now.’

  There was a startling poster on the wall, advertising a show at the Alma Gallery, down the road. An eye on fire. A stark black globe veined with blazing rivers. Athanasius Kircher. 1665. Mundus Subterraneus. With a Marina Warner quote: ‘Part Illuminati poetics, part dazzling scientific analysis, part alchemical and zodiac magic, part cabinet of curiosities . . . all-encompassing airy space.’

  Swanny

  A game of swans: that, apparently, is the collective noun. A pair of birds who had migrated to Hackney, west from the Lea or east from Islington, squatted on the ramp of a stinky cave beneath the Mare Street Bridge. An enclosure fetid with pigeon droppings and hardened crusts of green-white slime. Then we noticed a solitary cob swan patrolling the area, soliciting sodden, oil-dunked bread; his mate was not seen again. On some mornings, when we paused in our walk to look at the first colonists of a many-windowed block, as breakfast preparations became a theatre for curious pedestrians and flash-past cyclists, the basin by the lock-keeper’s cottage was a ruffled carpet of crusts, sliced white, tipped from sacks by Broadway Market cafés.

  For alchemists the swan is the symbol for mercury. Quicksilver imaginings. Transmutations. A notion laboured over with considerable energy, and buckets of paint, by the guerrilla muralist known as Sweet Toof (or the Dentist) and his associate, Cyclops. These men track development along the inland waterways and into the Olympic Park: wherever a pseudo-wharf is laid out, a salmon-curing shed demolished, Sweet Toof will spray a graphic tribute in the form of a giant pink mouth loaded with monster molars. His serpent forms, Mayan in ferocity, devour glitz and offer blight the kiss of life. Near the meadow of electric-green scum that chokes the Lea Navigation at Old Ford Lock, a swan with a Philip Guston bite has been painted in loud acrylic along the entire length of a doomed warehouse. It resembles a feathered eel whose every twist and wriggle maps the bends and creeks of the threatened river. Sweet Toof, a white boy, lives somewhere in the edge-lands: where he was arrested, and held until first light next morning, for work that was not his own. As Jock McFadyen remarked, ‘The sodding graffiti on the shutters of my studio is worth twenty grand more than anything I’ve got stored inside.’

  Stephen Gill, who cycled this area on a daily basis, travelling between his home near the filter-beds and his studio in Bethnal Green, produced two books that recorded major losses: the dog-track boot fair and land captured by the Olympic Park. The first book, Hackney Wick, opened with a single swan, a white signature on dark water, drifting under the louring concrete mass of a road bridge. In its successor, Archaeology in Reverse, an anticipation of future stadia and opportunist cities, the swan is dead: a mess of feathers, spirit evaporated, on a lifeless green canal that is neither land nor water. Pylons have not yet been hidden under the ground and the melancholy of the scrublands is not disguised by a tall blue fence.

  The swan is the messenger. And the swan’s head has been cut off. Nasty anagram: sawn swan.

  At Hari Simbla’s wake I met an old friend, the musician and book-dealer Martin Stone. Who was strategically suited, fit, twinkling with good humour beneath beetling brows that made him seem like an erudite grasshopper. Living in Paris and trading out of Nice and Cannes, he no longer required the beret. He had adopted in its place a squashy pork-pie jazzman’s hat: like Hackney’s own Pete Doherty. After three months on a health farm.

  Not only was Martin keeping his fingers supple with the occasional gig, but he’d been booked to appear in a big-budget Euro extravaganza in Zurich. A German rock’n’roll opera featuring an armada of hundreds of swan-pedalos on a Swiss lake. The pitch, Martin thought, was based on the myth of a young boy who has his cock bitten off by an angry swan. The scary Leda in this multimedia spectacular would be Tina Turner. Martin, outfitted in a skintight suit of feathers, stood in for the dead Ike. Coincidences were commonplace, as Bad News Mutton (who used to busk the Paris Metro, another labyrinth, with Martin) reminded me in daily phone calls. ‘Morphic resonance or what, man?’

  When Leda was ravished by Zeus in the guise o
f a swan, she gave birth, from two shining eggs, to sets of twins. ‘The swan,’ wrote J. C. Cooper in An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, ‘combines the two elements of air and water, the swan is the bird of life. It also signifies solitude and retreat and is the bird of the poet; its dying song is the poet’s song.’

  As I pursued old Swanny, my dumb muse, keeper of secrets, I logged swans that marked Hackney’s borders: from Swan Wharf, where the subterranean Hackney Brook still gushes into the Lea, to the plastic swan in a canalside garden that confirms Danny Folgate’s Victoria Park ley, to the flame-feathered swan on the pediment of a white building on Bethnal Green Road.

  And soon, I hoped, Swanny himself would arrive for his breakfast appointment at Eddie’s Café on the corner of Mare Street and Andrew’s Road: within spitting distance of the murky swan cave. He would put in a courtesy appearance at his club, the blue-bag drinkers’ table on London Fields; then shuffle along, folded Telegraph in pocket, for a full English and a debriefing. No bribe was necessary, Swanny had been waiting for this moment: he couldn’t recall Dr Bruggen, but he knew Widgery (as a writer) and claimed to have tried my own Lud Heat. The history of Limehouse fascinated him but it was too painful now to tramp down to the Thames. Suburban Hackney was a sorry substitute, but the company was excellent. London Fields at dawn, afternoons on a reserved bench by the canal. You would be amazed how many medical men from how many diverse cultures found themselves with time on their hands. Along with a cigarette and a blue can.

  Tinned tomatoes, a boiled egg. Mug of hot sweet tea. Eyelids drooped, the Adam’s apple bobbed. Swanny was tall and brittle. I was frightened when I shook his hand that it might come off. He had a dry cough that he countered with long sucks at the surface of the pale brown tea, which was never quite cool enough to swallow. He steepled his fingers and, keeping a watchful eye on the pocket-recorder, began by confirming Dr Bruggen’s impression of the local hospitals as colonial outposts operated through military or public-school hierarchies. The drug part of it, a minor perk, kept you going: the horrors were real. Coming down from Scotland or the provinces, you were shocked, at first, by the brutality of London life. And the matter-of-fact bravery of the underclass. The pantomimed sentiment, the forelock tugging. Extraordinary. The same cap-doffing characters who would rob you blind. There was true scholarship among the basest working men, library Marxists, natural philosophers. It was the lack of inhibition that Swanny never learnt to handle, the rutting, casual adulteries undertaken between shifts and meaning no more to the participants than blowing their noses on their sleeves. Sex, Swanny admitted, had been his undoing. He was criminal in one thing only: his innocence. His shame. That never-extinguished torch burning a hole in bulging, semen-stained corduroys.