Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  I found myself, after leaving the German Hospital under something of a cloud, appointed to the Salvationists’ place on Clapton Road, the maternity wing. It was like being banished to Asia Minor from Rome. The religious aspect should have put me on my guard, the naked passion that goes into that grip on a tambourine. It was a cottage-hospital operation overwhelmed by local fecundity, although many women preferred to get the parturition business done at home, and back to the toy factory or the cleaning job by the following afternoon.

  I knew nothing about women, nothing at all. I came from the better part of Edinburgh. And had been in private schooling since the age of seven. They put me in a little room on the top floor. A nice room with a gas fire. It was terribly cold that year, the pond in Clapton was frozen. When it thawed, I remember, a body was discovered beneath the ice, dead for three weeks. I arranged my books and kept as close as I could to the fire.

  The next morning, I was wandering through the wards, feeling rather rough, a cold coming on. The staff nurse on the ward said, ‘You need your chest rubbing.’ I said, ‘Yes of course I do. When will you come?’ And after supper she did. I was technically a virgin, or something close to it. The episode at the German Hospital was never properly investigated and seemed in retrospect more like a fantasy or late-adolescent projection of something I’d read in a magazine. Penetrative intercourse with a living breathing woman was unknown to me. I was really quite scared. After this first brief and exhilarating encounter, we went out together. Cinemas and concerts. Church too.

  Once, when I was sewing up a newly delivered mother, this nurse stood close behind me. She put her arms around my waist, took out my penis. Discussing the matter with other medical men, at the table in London Fields, I discover that such incidents are not uncommon. In Aberdeen, for example, the venerable figure who retired as senior lecturer in anatomy told one of my colleagues that he picked up men, rough trade, on a regular basis, through the venereal clinic or in public toilets. He regarded it as academic research. He would have no dealings with women. And was reluctant to accept them even as students. He showed my friend lengthy accounts he kept in bound journals, medical students talking about their sex lives. One entry described how a nurse, when she encountered a young doctor on a stairwell, leant over the banisters and lifted up her skirt, pulled down her knickers and invited the man to enter her, there and then, from the rear.

  I was brought off, without preliminaries, as I undertook surgical procedures: blood and sperm, the life juices. Eros and Thanatos. Astonishing! The risks we took excited some of the nurses, the shamanic stature of the surgeon. A very powerful aphrodisiac. That was when I started using pharmaceuticals on a regular basis, to maintain concentration, oxprenolol or propranolol for the tremble in the wrist.

  The hospital secretary was a colonel. Nearly all the staff, permanent staff, were Salvationists. The ward sisters were certainly Salvationists. The nurse I spoke of, her parents were Salvationists, serious figures in the hierarchy. She took me to one of their meetings, a hall. It might have been part of that round chapel. We sat on the stairs afterwards, fondling each other. There was a discipline about the Salvationists that was impressive.

  In the end one develops an unhealthy obsession with danger. I couldn’t dress a wound without picturing a throbbing vulva. Sleep was out of the question. I would volunteer to stay on the wards all night, hoping for an excuse to go into theatre, praying that this particular nurse would be on duty. It had to end badly – and of course it did. Horrible really, the scenes with her parents, the church people. The hospital administrators were much more understanding. I transferred again, out of maternity, away from living things into forensic medicine. Corpses. A custodian of refrigerated meat. An impossible labour without the relief of drugs and alcohol. But very much part, as I know you’ll appreciate, of a great London tradition. Resurrectionism. Salvage. Recycling.

  Before Swanny could describe the incident, in the cellars beneath the Children’s Hospital in Hackney Road after one of their drunken Christmas parties, Anya Gris arrived to collect him.

  ‘Come on, Gramps, I’ll walk you home.’

  This was no casual endearment, she meant it. Swanny had a blood relative to keep an eye on his welfare. Anya covered his expenses at the sheltered accommodation on the edge of London Fields. The refuge was threatened and would probably close, but for now old Swanny was fed, housed, cherished within the borough where he had worked for so many years. And where, to the death, he would remain.

  Anya warned me, as I accompanied her back to Fassett Square, that I shouldn’t take Swanny’s tales too literally; much of his mat erial was apocryphal, borrowed from other quacks, adapted from medical journals or the Paris-published pornography of his repressed and circumscribed youth. He was the one with the Quaker upbringing, a man unhinged by premature exposure to the fecund energies of the metropolis. The bishop at the orgy.

  And the Mole Man too. I should treat that interview with extreme caution. There was a very good reason why the Channel 4 documentary was pulled. Anya was a friend of the writer Stephen Smith who did a nice book on Underground London (Travels beneath City Streets). Hearing of my Hackney researches, Smith wanted to pass on a word of warning. He looked after the culture slot for a late-night BBC news magazine. He met William Lyttle with a view to shooting a filler item. ‘If I might presume, a wee word of caution about Mr William,’ Smith said. ‘He pestered the life out of me to intercede on his behalf with the authorities (Hackney Social Services). But buried in the back story, we discovered, was a serious allegation. I won’t go into who or what it involved, but we felt we should leave well alone.’

  ‘Use what Swanny told you this morning, but forget the rumours about the mortuary film,’ Anya said. ‘Treat him with discretion, please. He’s been stitched up too many times by people who can’t differentiate between truth and fiction. Fools who think cobbled-together interview transcripts make a proper book.’

  SCRIBES AND WITNESSES

  whatever happened to the old men of Hackney

  who sat around a wireless, weeping tears of pride

  at weather forecasts from Radio Moscow?

  – Bernard Kops

  Will Self

  Hackney once again topped the list: it’s official, according to this morning’s radio statisticians, we are the worst borough in London for car crime. Licence dodging. Petty theft. Taking without the owner’s consent. Which is pretty encouraging, I felt. The more cars taken the better our chances of surviving another day. Best practice: remove and destroy.

  Coming from elsewhere and crossing the Hackney border, shock‐waves knock you back. The whiteknuckle, choke‐smoking panic of stopped pod people. Who never, ever, climb out of their vehicles: they hoot for colleagues, wives, ex‐wives, elbows on horns, lighting up, using cellphones as smoke extractors. Spare hand dangling, miming self‐love. Venom, vitriol: give them just half a chance to headbutt cruel fate. Please, please. Make their day.

  They mount kerbs, hurtle into dead‐end tributaries, scrape through on the inside, outside, over the top: screaming, hammering the wheel, hot to kill. Multitasking private chauffeurs of businessmen and media casuals, hopelessly lost, jump lanes, beat lights, investigate improbable short cuts. White vans hunt cocksure cyclists. There are stand‐offs, hideous collisions. Kill me then. Try it.

  Kids leap from behind parked juggernauts. Thief‐scooters and fast‐food scramblers dispute the pavement, using speedbumps as ramps to set them up for virtuoso wheelie demos. There is one spot, part of the afternoon school run (that epic of aggrandizing status war), between a hard left into Middleton Road and a lane‐swerve, picking up speed after the camera, which traps the unwary. Shattered glass, crunched metal, blood, bored police: on a daily basis. They have widened the pavements to make room for insurance‐claim photographers. Will Self had it covered in How the Dead Live: Dalston (his Dulston) as an enclave of the living dead. Sub‐immortals cursed to hang around in our memories, like bats in a foul cave. It does
n’t matter that Derek Raymond used the title fourteen years earlier. In Raymond’s London, a posthumous dream, everybody is dead. Crematorium ash in the omelette, dog fur on the tongue. You stir sand into black coffee, feel the clinker in a scalp wound that is never going to heal. Your wife’s memory is wiped, her babysitter is a television set in a suburban hospital that will soon be a gated community with an upbeat heritage title. Raymond worked his own Hollow Earth system; within the dream of the book, its hallucinated language, were further nightmares. Worse imaginings. And within those nightmares? Hammer horrors to shock us back to consciousness. The romance, Derek Raymond acknowledged, came from his experiences as a night‐shift minicab driver: knife to the throat, lines of Shelley and Keats floating on a loop.

  Will Self ’s cabbies are more human. You’ve met them. They absorb and distort the unofficial history of the city; which becomes, in their accidental and obsessive journeying across it, a physical body. You can map Self ’s mythologized topography, where Raymond’s space is entirely propositional, argumentative, absent. Like an outdated Ordnance Survey of the wrong town. In my eccentric bibliography of the borough, How the Dead Live had a firm place on the shelf (where it nudged against Pinter’s The Homecoming and Stewart Home’s Blow Job). Home, in his interview for this book, talked of a Notting Hill meeting with Self. They didn’t get along, prejudices on both sides. It was visceral, like Brown and Blair. With no requirement, on either side, to fake an alliance. Or Brown and Cameron: seething Scot and Oxbridge toff.

  Self was tall and lean. Sardonic, saturnine. He was married, had children, visited theatres. He appeared on television. And was enough of a figure in the culture to remain in London. Much of his journalistic material came from cycling – epiphanies such as a whale swimming up the Thames – and collisions, rucks with SUV pilots. ‘Who d’jew fink I am, some fucking punk?’ he has the mannerless motor‐fiend shout before he lashes out. And Self is decked.

  Home, shorter in the neck, lower to the ground, was also a convinced cyclist – now a walker – getting from place to place, rather than striding off along the South Downs. A reluctant economic migrant, Stewart was continually sneaking back to town with a new scam, new partner: London was his life, but it refused to support him. These writerly squabbles were nothing: we were, all of us, energy vampires. Predators, in good heart, hoping for the worst.

  Boots on, rucksack prepared, I waited at the kitchen table, fiddling with chopped‐up sections of map. I sensed a reluctance on Will Self ’s part to involve himself with this one‐day circumambulation of Hackney, a yomp of around fifteen miles. The distance was nothing. But would it fit the book? His book, my book. My concept was too rigidly schematic. Will’s walks carried him back to the village from which his father’s family had emerged. His expeditions pushed out from Stockwell like the spokes of a wheel. He relished zones that offered maximum resistance, air terminal to city centre. Poor old Hackney was hag‐ridden, airless. Dulston could be fictionalized but not documented. Had we doomed ourselves to lurch between polemic journalism and undercooked literature? My perverse contention: if it can be commissioned, forget it.

  There was a radio item that morning about a woman whose sight had been restored by a blow to the head. On a 243 bus, as it crept towards Shoreditch. The white assailant, known to the police, was going down for two years: despite this accidental miracle. Meanwhile, in Croydon, a black man blinding a pensioner in a random assault, on another bus, received a reprimand, but no custodial sentence. To the outrage of tabloid commentators.

  River successfully forded, Will arrived on time. And away we went. To beat the bounds. As we eased into it, I recognized that I felt protective of place; the expedition should demonstrate quirks and hidden charms, but it was also a renunciation. To construct a Hackney book, after all these years, was to say goodbye. I thought the walk might teach me how warring postal districts could fit together in a healing arc. Nothing connects with nothing until you spread a little mud from your footprints.

  Will, as he later reported, saw the Hackney peregrination as: ‘a framing device for an anti‐Olympics rant’. That shadow, the imposition of future memory, laid a dark cloud across our solar circuit. The borough, as I pointed out when we checked my collaged map, was made in the shape of England. With Homerton as the London of London, the city’s City. We would roam the south coast of the Regent’s Canal and the white cliffs of Shoreditch, before attempting a bucolic drift through the West Country of De Beauvoir, with its Mole Man. Then the Bristol slave‐port of Dalston, the Lake District of Clissold Park. Gritstone uplands of Finsbury Park and Stamford Hill. The Wash of Springfield Park Marina.

  I tried it first with Renchi. He was ill, pale, clammy beneath his Inca flaps: we misremembered or reinvented the separate pasts we shared, thirty years ago. We tracked a red line someone had painted through Hoxton, while Renchi recalled how he marked out chalk arrows to guide visitors from Hampstead through this unknown land. We found, beside the New River, a memorial to George Bunting, a local sculptor and fellow stallholder at Camden Passage. I hadn’t seen George, a child emigrant to Australia, in years. Now I knew why. He pushed a pram of legal documents, battered London books, from Southgate Road to Islington, by way of the canal. He gave the start to my research collection, providing ex‐library copies of Walter Besant, Lawrence Hutton’s Literary Landmarks of London, Gordon Home, William Kent, London’s Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century by Erroll Sherson. Hackney pamphlets. Recollections of the Elephant Man. All for a few pence. With the gift of a property map of the Springfield Park Estate printed on canvas.

  What struck me on that vernal equinox walk with Will was how the Hackney border was defined by everything of interest being outside, beyond its patronage. Hitchcock in Leytonstone. The mad poet Christopher Smart in his Bethnal Green asylum. William Blake and John Bunyan in Bunhill Fields. And Will himself, the height, the flattened cap, was an exotic outsider: miasma of Arthur Machen’s London Adventure, pipe and pouch, the deep growl. He marked our progress by pissing at relevant points: behind Blake’s grave, in Shepherdess Walk, Seven Sisters, Springfield Marina, Hackney Marshes, the Royal Inn on the Park: a glittering uric ley. Hackney has this diuretic effect on tourists. Samuel Pepys reported, in July 1664: ‘And so we rode home round by Kingsland, Hackney and Mile End, till we were quite weary – and my water working at least seven or eight times upon the road, which pleased me well.’

  There was a boyhood game, a Stamford Hill friend once told me, called ‘Spot the Yock’. Jewish lads hung out in Springfield Park trying to identify trespassing Gentiles, rarer than radium in those days. Stamford Hill would prove the most disturbing passage for Will.

  But first the super‐urban traces: Broadway Market, where squatters have been expelled from a captured café to make way for a fortified box. Which stays empty, bristling with wire, surveillance, dogs, as a memorial to its own lack of content.

  Hackney Road. And the challenging hulk of the Children’s Hospital, sealed for so many years, and now accessed by film crews attracted by the caravan‐friendly spaces of Haggerston Park.

  We encounter a Staffordshire bull terrier attached by a blue string to a (body‐)builder whose tracksuit bottoms are punningly customized with bulldog clips. ‘Name?’ Will demands. ‘Buster.’ Man or dog, I’m not sure. Released from Oxford, Self took a job as labourer/driver with a firm of builders near Clissold Park. He began by filling up the truck with diesel instead of petrol and thereby taking another hazardous vehicle off the Hackney roads. Further disasters followed, wrecked machines, lost tools. Trading on charm, he lasted six months.

  The Shoreditch/City nub of the borough is provisional, uneasy in its new status. In Worship Street I ponder the obvious question: ‘Worship what?’ BRITISH LAND (Bovis Lend Lease) are throwing up a stick‐in‐your‐throat tower. The foundations look like a submarine pen. This sun‐splintering thirty‐six‐storey monster has been ‘meticulously designed by the Chicago office of architects Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,
to meet the needs of both financial and professional occupiers. This development will provide major new public space and galleria, with shops, bars and cafés.’ A sundial‐finger to count down the dissolution of breweries, fruit‐and‐veg markets, rough trade. Freelance pedestrianism.

  Will tells me that he lunched here yesterday with his brother and two of the American princes involved with the project: £600 on the plastic, plus VAT and a stonking tip. These promoters and projectors, with their Nehru‐collar international architects, see nothing beyond the space they intend to carve out and occupy. Nothing coheres. The tower has been presented, praised in its virtual form: building the thing is a chore. Wherever that long shadow falls, across Spitalfields, the railway, Bishopsgate, the Griffin rules. Human dots moving through the chasms of this computer‐generated landscape are the pinpricks Harry Lime gestures towards from his Viennese Ferris wheel: how many share options would you sacrifice to save one soul?