But no R. C. Hutchinson, no Elephant and Castle. No Camberton. The rain had dried from the pavements.
Taking a break from transcribing Will Self ’s Beckton Alp interview, I opened the letter from Ken Worpole.
I understand from several sources – including a recent conversation with Will Self – that you are once again engaged in writing about Hackney. You will not be surprised to hear that this interests me greatly.
There are several things I’d be happy to pass on to you, or which I feel are important aspects of post‐war Hackney life which have been under‐recorded. Firstly, many years ago I did a long interview with Alexander Baron for a feature for City Limits. I still have the tapes somewhere, which you are welcome to listen to. They are fascinating about his early political involvement on the left.
There was a time when I considered writing a book about Hackney Council corruption – a long‐standing tradition – truly terrible financial, political and moral corruption, and began to collect material. In the end I hadn’t the legal knowledge or the energy to do it.
Maybe we can meet?
Ken’s flat, a couple of floors up, was in the 1930s block that I had admired on our Hackney circumnavigation. In such a place, with its sanded‐wood floors, its wide Crittall windows looking down on the masts of the trees, I appreciated how clean, simple architecture enhanced lives. The civic possibilities of these connected but independent units made the notion of community viable. I had seen nothing like it in Hackney since I visited the German Hospital.
A plate of fruit on a pale blue table, so highly polished that it reflected the window grid and the pattern of the trees beyond. Its surface floated like a horizontal marine painting, drawing the eye towards the pebbles on the window ledge. I was reminded of the title of one of Ken’s books, Staying Close to the River. The good life in a good place: shelves of books, racks of CDs and silver‐haired Ken Worpole in blue shirt to complement the table. He had been out in the weather, on his boat, his bicycle. His relaxed posture reflected journeys made, a city experienced.
It felt rather strange, and impertinent, to be recording a man who had spent so many years building up an archive of Hackney voices.
We came here in 1968. I’d just trained to be a teacher in Brighton College of Education. My first job was in Hackney Downs. The school where writers like Harold Pinter and Alexander Baron got their education. Pinter’s English teacher, Joe Brearley, was still there. It was a very interesting school, very Jewish. Fifty per cent Jewish. Lots of the teachers had been pupils there. Very strong, the loyalty. Blair’s friend and fixer Lord Levy, the honours broker, he was there. Tony’s favoured tennis partner. He got his start in Hackney Downs.
Alan Sugar and Arnold Wesker didn’t go there. They went to the other school, the one near the Homerton Hospital.
There was a fire at Hackney Downs. A lot of building work was going on. The school went comprehensive. It couldn’t cope with the transition. A very significant number of Afro‐Caribbean pupils arrived. A complete shift out of the Jewish identity. I was there for only four years, it wasn’t my fault that the school collapsed.
I set up Centerprise with a key operator who was black, American: Glenn Thompson. A great hustler. He had been illiterate, got politicized, went into Black Power politics, learnt to read. Then he became a draft resister. He went to Hoxton as a youth worker. Astonishing, really, for a black American to get a job with the Inner London Education Authority in Hoxton. Hoxton was rough, very rough. Glenn befriended two or three lively local lads who had form. The ILEA put money into setting up new approaches to youth work.
Centerprise, on Dalston Lane, was funded as a youth project. There was also a bookshop. And a café behind the bookshop. We did outreach youth work. My role was publishing, oral history. I did that for five years. I left because I felt that I shouldn’t stay too long.
The first book I wrote, Dockers and Detectives, was intended as a recovery of a certain twentieth‐century literary tradition. Which included, obviously, the London‐Jewish novel. Alexander Baron was part of that. The interesting thing is how quickly he was forgotten. In Michael Billington’s biography of Pinter, he can’t work out why Pinter’s stage name was ‘David Baron’. Pinter must have been living three streets away from Alexander Baron. They went to the same school. He must have known Baron’s work. I can’t believe anything other than that he borrowed the name of a successful local writer.
With the whole Centerprise thing, I was very influenced by Raph Samuel: the tradition of oral history and the reconnection with a variant past. Books and authors do vanish. Take Simon Blumenfeld and Jew Boy. It turns out he wasn’t even Jewish. He’s quite open about it. In an obituary tribute there is a revelation that his parents were originally Polish, Spanish. There really is some question about whether they were actually Jewish. Blumenfeld didn’t die until two or three years ago. He was about ninety‐four. His world was dance bands. There were very consciously Jewish dance bands.
We had quite a good library at Centerprise. I collected books, I picked up books from the market in Kingsland Waste. I haven’t been back for years. I also bought stuff from you, lots of it, in Camden Passage. I worked on that exhibition on the South Bank with Nick Kimberley. He lives here now, over the road, the next street.
Nigel Fountain was featured in our catalogue. He was connected with David Widgery, people like that. Didn’t they resurrect the Hackney Literary and Philosophical Society?
When Centerprise moved to Kingsland High Street it was only a block away from the pub which was the meeting place of the Hackney Left in the 1970s and 1980s. In the summer, when the hospitals emptied out, all the crazies and outpatients descended on Centerprise.
Widgery, Fountain, they were there all the time. Doing the crossword. The shop was a meeting place. The pub was occupied by the Socialist Workers Party. Doctrinal disputes. It was the place for about five years. Friendships were forged, ideas exchanged.
I never joined a political party. Well, I was in the Labour Party, but that doesn’t count. Hackney was very important to the Communist Party. There were numerous CP activists in Kynaston Road. New politics were being tried out. Peter Fuller lived in Graham Road. We had every left group: SWP, IS, Militant Tendency. Centerprise ran poetry readings and book launches in the SWP pub. No charge. I think that era is over now.
In the early days, before all this communal activity, I cycled to school. We lived in Stoke Newington. Then I walked, every day. The kids in Hackney Downs thought cycling was a joke. Both our children were born in the Mothers’ Hospital in Lower Clapton Road. I would walk across Hackney Downs in the snow. To the Homerton Hospital where my father was sectioned. One’s life is made from these Hackney walks.
We had a boat on the River Lea. I thought Springfield Marina was a most interesting place. Particularly after the poll tax was introduced. It was an outlaw community. People who refused to pay the poll tax bought themselves any kind of hulk. The Marina had a little bar. It was pure anarchy. Very few of those boats ever went anywhere. They never went out on the river.
There is something mysterious and intangible about Hackney streets. In high summer or deepest winter, there is a tendency to overpower you. Especially when you’ve been living here for forty years. It is a transitional place.
What we have noticed is the reverse of the traditional pattern of urban migration. We bought a house in a little street, Oldfield Road. The street was probably 30 or 40 per cent owned, owned, or in the process of being bought, by West Indians. Who were working for London Transport and so on. They were struggling to buy – and so were we. But their children could never afford to follow them. You have a disrupted story of the onward progress of the immigrant. The children of those very hardworking people were unable to remain in the place where they had been born and brought up.
I took Ken’s Alexander Baron tapes home with me and spent a couple of days transcribing them. The story would fit neatly into this book – childhood, Hackney Downs, street
football, leftist politics, war – but time was running out and I had no ambition to produce a definitive account. I chased down personal obsessions, the way certain buildings, certain people, suggested the rough outline of a fiction that blended history, unreliable memoir and faded cultural traces. I underlined passages in the transcript where Baron appeared to be anticipating my quest or scripting a fresh approach.
I joined the Labour Party. I soon became prominent in Labour politics. I was in the Labour League of Youth. The adjacent branch was run by Ted Willis, the future Lord Willis, and we soon teamed up. We formed a kind of militant tendency – small m, small t. Very soon we were running the journal of the local League of Youth. The circulation was boosted from 2,000 to 30,000, or 50,000 in a good month. We were writing most of the material ourselves, under different names. We’d spend all night, sitting in this little office we’d acquired, writing articles. The most important ones in our own names and the rest under names we made up. I don’t know to this day if journalism is corrupting if you want to be a serious writer. Or if it gives you a fluency of thought and word.
At that time we met this crowd of radicals on the Daily Mirror. In the pubs around Fetter Lane. They told us how you load the whole story into the first paragraph. You’ve got to keep the reader’s attention all the way through. Flair and technique in a writer may be inborn, a talent like my dad’s talent for cutting furs. Perhaps the gift for writing can also be developed by journalism, I really don’t know.
Baron in this passage seemed to answer the questions I didn’t put to Will Self on our hike around the Hackney borders. Baron’s journalism, like Self ’s, had a political or social agenda: survival was the best training. Everything Michael Moorcock developed, in the way of style and technique, came from his years writing and editing Tarzan and Kit Carson comics. He also adopted Fetter Lane, Holborn, Brooke Street, Bleeding Heart Yard as the labyrinth at the centre of his ‘multiverse’. A zone of space‐time anomalies where mortality is negotiable and death never strikes a good character from the story.
My pulse quickened, once again, when Worpole directed Baron towards territory in which Roland Camberton might at last make an appearance.
‘You obviously weren’t going to write the London‐Jewish novel, were you?’ Worpole challenges. ‘Were you aware of a school of Jewish East End writers?’
I was a generation younger than them. I was post‐war. The people you speak of belonged to the 1930s. They were all discoveries of John Lehmann, a part of his attempt to find a proletarian literature. This had its condescending side. The Jewish school had a condescending side too. There is, from Lehmann and his ilk, a homosexual attitude to the working class. It was a valuable enterprise in its time. Lehmann gave these writers a chance to express themselves. The only one I knew was Ashley Smith. He got in touch with me, because he was very lonely and had drifted away from the world of writers.
I lived on my own then in Marylebone. I asked Smith to come up and have a drink or some tea. We became quite friendly in a very occasional way. I took him to lunch with the editors of a new series of books which sent writers back to their original environments. Ashley wrote, I thought, a very good book. He went to live in Bethnal Green, near the brewery.
I knew both the Litvinoff brothers well. Manny had a great success with his trilogy about the Russian Revolution. I haven’t seen him to ask if it was the kind of success one could live on. He used to be married to a woman with a thriving model agency in the West End. They lived in some state outside London, mainly on what she earned. They split up. I don’t know where he is now or what he does. Except that he continues writing.
Oh yes, there was one other. I’d almost forgotten him. Roland Camberton. He died quite young. I saw him once at a party. He wrote specifically about Hackney. I think he was another one who went to Hackney Downs. I have an idea he wrote a book of short pieces about a comic opera staged by the school head. I don’t know.
I don’t even remember when I met him. It must have been fairly early on in my career. I can’t remember whose party it was, except that it was somewhere in St John’s Wood. I didn’t venture very often into these exotic territories. I had this little uneasy talk with Camberton. A strange man. That’s it. That’s all.
Oona Grimes, Dr John Dee and Moby‐Dick
Impossible to tell if Kaporal was dead, the man with a rope around his neck, trouser cuffs wet with dew, in the churchyard of St John’s, or if this was another instance of the shady researcher’s ability to plant false information in the local press (where he had excellent contacts), before absorbing a new identity in a more obscure corner of London. He might even have fled to the south coast, somewhere like Pevensey Bay, Bexhill‐on‐Sea. Kaporal, on the final night in the Victory, said that he had ‘cracked the Conrad code’ – and was reading Nostromo with an eye to simplifying the obtuse prose, changing the names of the characters and shifting the location to East Sussex. ‘Publishers give unsolicited submissions to work‐experience kids. I might cop an advance, hide out in Brittany for a couple of months in Jock’s place. Finish my film. The one about Orson Welles and the Hackney Moby‐Dick.’
With Kaporal beyond my reach, except by seance and planchette board, there was no hope of a refund against the inadequacies of the research file: the way this devious character had inserted fictional asides into genuine documentation, the transcripts of interviews downloaded from the net. There was still a chance that if I went through the box of unconnected papers he supplied me with, for a grand I could ill afford, I might find a clue to the location of one of his lock‐ups or secret studios. The man had more boltholes than Walter Sickert. And nothing to hide.
A morning was wasted in relishing Kaporal’s footnotes and asides: ‘Another interesting Hackney character I came across last night in the Ol’ Sam Pepys was Micky Zipp – a potbellied Scouse waster of fifty or so. His schtick is to say he can do anything you can do, but better. Micky claims to have been a runner for Welles when he was a kid. He also dealt speed for Dr Swan. But mostly it was cab runs up west, Chinatown, for Orson’s between‐meals snacks. He wouldn’t touch the local all‐day breakfast.’
‘It’s official,’ Kaporal wrote, ‘Hackney is more dangerous than Soweto. Figures from the main trauma centres in each area show that while Homerton Hospital in Hackney treats fifty‐five knife wounds each month, the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto – which has ten times as many people in its catchment area – sees only six times as many such cases.’
The trade in body parts, my researcher reckoned, had replaced the more traditional vehicle‐stripping operations in the caves beneath the railway arches and lock‐ups around Ridley Road. ‘During my preliminary investigations, I was shown pictures of bodies plundered for organs, eyes or complete heads. In one example, a woman lies on a slab, her body cut open from the chest downwards, her reproductive organs removed. In another, a child sits bolt upright in rigor mortis, his head removed and placed on an altar, three feet above his ragged neck.’
At the end of an article Kaporal downloaded on ‘The Clapton Messiah’, Henry James Prince, who claimed that the Holy Ghost had taken up residence in his body, the researcher made his one mistake: he scribbled the address of the studio to which a suborned library assistant should send items stolen from Hackney Council’s private archive. Before I set out to find this place, Scarborough Road, Finsbury Park, I couldn’t resist reading about Prince, his successor John Smyth‐Pigott and the Agapemonites. Smyth‐Pigott was a compulsive womanizer who managed to convert (and seduce) numerous Salvationists, nurses from the Mothers’ Hospital. To avoid retribution from the inevitable Hackney mob, he attempted to prove his divine status by walking across the murky waters of Clapton Pond. With farcical consequences. The lettering above the arched stone lintel of the Church of the Ark of the Covenant read: LOVE IN JUDGEMENT AND JUDGEMENT IN VICTORY.
Judgement in Victory!
Start where you will, open any book, explore whichever direction takes your fancy, an
d you must arrive in Vyner Street. The backstreet pub where the dead drink until dawn. And the living, staring into their empty glasses, watch enviously. While texts unravel and words escape to decorate undemolished walls.
Finsbury Park was the next step in my recapitulation of the Will Self walk. Kaporal’s files had a cutting from the Standard nominating Scarborough Road as the ‘fifth spookiest street in Britain’. Spectral children at twilight playing forgotten games. Kaporal combed cyberspace and found a solitary girl, a faery presence glimpsed among the silver birches and long grass at the edge of the railway. There were reports of such sightings, from dog walkers and train passengers, that went back over forty years. In 1953, a local historian made the association with Madimi, the provocative sprite who appeared to the Elizabethan geographer and magus Dr John Dee.
I took part in a cricket match on the over‐springy turf of Finsbury Park. An encounter from which half the players were taken to casualty wards with broken bones. Our team was captained by an Ahab with a tin leg. Mesmerized by the sidling crane‐dance of his three‐step approach, I was bowled by a gentle looper from the artist and Charles Manson lookalike, Ian Breakwell. A Stoke Newington librarian called Richard Boon published an article in which he argued that Breakwell and I were linked: ‘Born a month apart, Breakwell and Sinclair comprise a psychic doubling, similar both in name and pursuit – notebooks, diaries, film and, above all, walking and its observation inform both their practices.’
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 45