After the agitated microclimate of Tesco’s car park, its beggars and buskers, we pause for breakfast in the Bohemia Café, alongside Joe Kerr’s bus garage.
‘Very weak tea, please,’ says Renchi.
‘Milk?’
‘Hot water with just the shadow of a tea bag.’
I fortify myself with an omelette woven from jute, like a spongy bathmat studded with small greenish mushrooms.
The point where the brook crossed Mare Street is well represented in views of Hackney as a village in the 1730s: the tower of St Augustine, the Eight Bells pub, the footbridge over the river. Then the Pembury Tavern, the riverside gardens, pictorial impressions of early balloon ascents. The selective slideshow of the past throws up a melancholy youth in a wide collar and a black cap leaning on a wooden bridge as the brook slithers unseen down the western perimeter of Hackney Downs. To reach this green table, we negotiate a set of garages tucked under railway arches: drench of paint droplets from respray shops, aerosol obscenities, miracle‐promising messianic franchises, guardian dogs.
They tried to fence off Hackney Downs at the time of enclosures, but the natives were having none of it. Crops were stripped. The privatized abundance of hay and corn was promiscuously harvested. An excuse for riot. Sticks, staves, stones. Wounds staunched in the fouled and polluted river, the coming sewer.
Templar lands granted by William of Hastings. Church land. Land bestowed on courtiers and City magnates. By the seventeenth century, Hackney Downs offered the only arable farming left in the district: Lammas lands. There were rights of pasturage on the Downs, on London Fields, Well Street Common, North and South Millfields. And the Hackney Marsh: much of which was humbra, or sodden meadow, rather than quabba or bog. Free grazing was seasonal, Lammas Day to Lady Day. Asses and mules could be impounded and the tolls paid into a fund for the upkeep of these important wetlands.
Now invisible, but felt and known, the brook was a mischievous actuality as it continued to flood Stoke Newington cellars. The nature of the stream changed as it pulled west in a meander around the edge of the Abney Park Cemetery. This was convenient, because I wanted to show Renchi the place where Edward Calvert was buried. On an expedition with Susanna Edwards, whose flat in Jenner Road was right above the path of the brook, we found Calvert’s green‐stained gravestone. The engraver, who died at the age of eighty‐three, is buried with his wife, Mary. Reading a memoir by Alan Wilson, who grew up, before the Second War, at 12 Darnley Road (Calvert lived in number 11), I was interested to find him recalling his immediate neighbour and childhood friend: a boy called Kossoff. With whom he indulged in ‘primitive theological arguments’. Wilson went on to discuss a doctor who practised in Lower Clapton Road. This man’s gloomy chambers were ‘more like a funeral parlour, or a place for seances, than a surgery’. He looked like Neville Chamberlain, kept his medical instruments in his pockets, and was rumoured to carry out illegal operations. ‘Mother doubted whether he was ever a qualified doctor. He disappeared during the war without leaving a trace.’
Hacking into tangled undergrowth, as clinging, dense and light‐devouring as my book had become, bumping against obscured gravestones and the sharp wings of ivy‐cloaked angels, I remembered what Poe and Arthur Machen had drawn from this area: confusion, doubled identities, a shift in the electromagnetic field. There was a long tradition, beginning with De Quincey, of searching for a northwest passage out of London, away from restrictive conventions of time and space. The route these men hinted at seemed to have an intimate relationship with the course of the submerged Hackney Brook: Abney Park, Clissold Park, pubs named after Robinson Crusoe, the slopes of Highgate Hill.
Machen called this part of London a ‘Terra Incognita’: ‘obscure alleyways with discreet, mysterious postern doors . . . a region beyond Ultima Thule’. There is always a Machen theme, an excuse to draw the unwary in. A search for Edgar Allan Poe’s school: the one he actually attended or the more engrossing fiction from his ‘William Wilson’ tale. Autobiography mulches down to let richer weeds break surface. Those who embark on a London quest begin in a pub. They yarn, they misquote, improvise. They walk out, eventually, through a one‐off topography they are obliged to shape into a serviceable narrative. Language creaks. ‘The dreamy village, the misty trees, the old rambling redbrick houses, standing in their gardens, with high walls about them.’
There is a magic place, close to Abney Park, which nobody can find twice. Believing this consoling fable, I suppose, makes Stoke Newington possible: the self‐confident, self‐contained inhabitants, their nice shops, their historic library and surveillance monitors. Living here allows you to peruse the dangerously vulgar streets of Lesser Hackney and to congratulate yourself on your good fortune. Villas of successful Nonconformist tradesmen survive. Defoe plaques and pubs. We enter the library and ask to be pointed in the direction of the local‐history shelves.
‘There is no local history any more,’ says the woman at the desk. ‘It’s out of date.’
All that’s left has been relegated to a cardboard box kept under the counter. I buy a booklet on Clissold Park that characteristically boasts of a connection with William Wilberforce and the Stoke Newington abolitionists, while turning a blind eye to fortunes built on the dark trade, sugar and slavery. There is a smudged photograph of a policeman feeding swans.
After Clissold Park and the crossing of Green Lanes, the infant brook is teasing and difficult to trace. It passes under the building site that is the old Highbury Stadium and then bifurcates. One branch starts as a hidden spring beside the Holloway Road and the other must be taken on trust, a few hundred yards to the north of the new Emirates space station where Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal thrill their thousands with intricate pattern‐making displays. Renchi crouches in the shrubs of a small park near Tollington Road, pressing his frozen ear to the ground. Long shadows stripe a carpet of fallen leaves. Men with dogs give us a wide berth. That’s it, done. Time for Renchi to head for the station. We’ve touched on a number of themes and resolved nothing. The sun is dropping but I decide to carry on, northwest, in the spirit of Machen’s woozy pilgrims. There may never be a better opportunity to track a passage out of a forty‐year fix: my obsession with a Hackney that never was.
Letting my feet carry me back over Highgate Hill where I struggled, months ago, with a painful ankle, thinking my hiking days were over, I advanced into that half‐light where an orange industrial glow merges with the green rays of the disappearing sun. I like to start early and return for the evening meal. Striding on at this hour, into the night, allowed me to conjure up Machen’s ‘parterre or miniature park’. Somewhere between Finchley and Totteridge – I’m sure I explored the area with Renchi in the period of our London Orbital wanderings – I stumbled on an enclosure that failed, but not by much, to live up to Machen’s copywriting. ‘Before me, in place of the familiar structures, there was disclosed a panorama of unearthly, of astounding beauty. In deep dells, bowered by overhanging trees, there bloomed flowers such as only dreams can show . . . I saw well‐shaded walks that went down to green hollows bordered with thyme . . . A sense of beatitude pervaded my whole being . . .’
And then, like a hand closing around the throat: ‘revulsion of terror’. Flight. The weary, footsore progression of suburban streets at the wrong season. Trim hedges. Winter jasmine. Violas. Pyracantha. Dahlias. The sort of spiky patches I weeded and scraped as a jobbing gardener. We were always let go in November, in time to sign up for the Christmas post.
It was late when I elected to find somewhere to sleep for the night, a pub or bed‐and‐breakfast place. I was still inside a nominal London, the collar of the orbital motorway, close to old Ermine Street, tramping downhill towards Borehamwood, when I was stopped by a helmeted and goggled man on a motorbike. It is assumed that pedestrians know where they are. And especially pedestrians of a certain age. Why else would they be let out? The worst of it being that even on home turf I find it impossible to give a simple answer. I forget the
names of streets. I feel an obligation to send the enquirer on an interesting journey, on the ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ principle. I disregard recent closures, demolitions, compulsory detours. Often, I end up chasing after the lost person with supplementary advice: more, much more than they want to know.
‘Iain?’
The biker knew me. He took off his helmet. Stretched out a hand. We had our conversations on the doorstep in Albion Drive, not here, at night. In different places we are different people.
‘Paolo?’
‘Honest, Iain, this is totally amazing, mate. Borehamwood? I thought, fuck it, no . . . All down to William, god’s truth. Doing a lovely job. Think the world of him. Actors, producers, crew. Asked for me special, William. Tell him thanks. Bottle of wine, that’s a promise. Kids kicking a ball against the garage, Iain. Now this. Amazing. And your mate, Charlie. Lovely feller, diamond. What he don’t know. Fantastic. We’ve come a long way from London Fields, right?’
Paolo pushed the bike alongside me as we turned in at the gate of what appeared to be an industrial estate.
‘I’ll give him a bell. Getting set up for tomorrow. He’ll be made up. A proper worker, William.’
The stories Paolo told were dramatic recitations that compensated for his silence as a supporting artist. He carried his uniform handsomely as copper or security guard. He drove limousines or walked through the soft‐focus margins of a scene looking as if he meant it; as if the repeated transit between fixed positions was an everyday event, anaerobic exercise. Today there had been some business in a bar, near acting, loutishness, a slap from the pop‐eyed alcoholic who ran the place. Paolo knew that it was too much. And he wouldn’t be sorry to have it cut: become too visible and you’re out of work.
It seems that Charlie Velasco, coming around to pick me up for the lunch with Ken’s man at the Pequod, met Paolo loading the van for his stall on Roman Road.
‘Penalty shout. Colchester–Southend third‐round replay. Paolo Cash? Dodgy knee, medial ligament.’ Charlie knew it all. ‘Brought off the bench, ten minutes to go. Wrong club at the wrong time. Never appreciated what they had, the class. Shocking the way Eddie Bailey treated you at West Ham, Paolo. I thought your old man was going to nut him. Right there in the car park.’
The tribute didn’t surprise Paolo, it used to happen all the time, football was conversation. But this bloke, Charlie, was an encyclopaedia. Portsmouth, Colchester. The time young Paolo almost signed for the Dutch mob, over in Amsterdam eating a pizza, glass of wine with his agent, after checking out the complimentary motor, when the news comes through that the manager who fancied him was moving to Spain. ‘I tell you, Charlie,’ Paolo said. ‘That’s was the best fucking pizza I ever tasted. Honest to god, it turned to ashes in my mouth.’
Velasco patted Paolo on the shoulder, said he’d bring around a few of his programmes for a signature next time.
‘Top woman with him, Scandinavian bird,’ Paolo recalled. ‘I tried a couple of months in Finland. Lovely people, Iain, but you can’t play in those temperatures.’
‘Dark? Well built. Five eight or nine? His age?’
‘Tall blonde. Nicely spoken. Twenty‐two.’
Must have been a PR person from City Hall. Too smart to stick around for the Pequod lunch.
The troubling thing was my sense of London being turned inside out, of having trudged all day to arrive back at an open‐ended conversation, with my neighbour, at the front gate.
Then William, grinning, appeared at the security barrier. And Paolo went home. I hadn’t realized that this was where my son was directing his soap opera. The actors and crew had departed for the night, William was blocking out the moves. They churned this material out with multicamera set‐ups and a producer whispering in your ear. Most of the work involved soothing the troubled egos of actors who, in several cases, came through the same schools as my son. He was of the territory, born and bred, in a fashion to which I could never aspire.
There were two hangars. In the first they kept the operating theatres and corridors of Holby City; a series to which, catching one episode by chance, Anna had become mysteriously addicted. The Queen Vic, in truth a rancid hole, was assembled in the other block; with grease caff, nail parlour, allotment shed. EastEnders, in its topographic reality, was an enclosure on the northwest fringe of London, a suburban fake. Closer to Metroland than to Mile End.
Maybe I could kip for the night in Arthur Fowler’s shed? Or down by the war memorial that commemorated people who had never lived? The cast of EastEnders were always vanishing into prison (cosmetic surgery, rehab, tabloid‐scandal suspension) and decanting, like cab drivers, to the Costa Brava. A euphemism for The Bill. Never to be glimpsed again, apart from Christmas specials. Or reappearances with a different face.
Paolo’s walk‐on announced the arrival of new blood, mad sisters, blonde harpies from a beach bar. With no sense of history, or perhaps too much, they decide to open a club called the Double R (for Ronnie and Roxy): in hideous parody of the infamous gangland haunt of the 1960s. Ron and Reg reborn, to their shame and delight, as a pair of feisty, hard‐talking, hair‐pulling females. True drama queens, at last, hosting this never‐ending party in hell. The diva of the Mitchell clan is played by Barbara Windsor, once an intimate of the Bethnal Green twins. The premiere of her Joan Littlewood film, Sparrows Can’t Sing, was held in the Krays’ club.
Much of my London – Fassett Square, Kingsland Waste, the Cat and Mutton, the video shop, Indian restaurant, Manor Garden allotments – has been compressed into this site, a retail park trapped between the M25 and the M1. It is very disconcerting to travel so far and to finish in an architectural crash, a six‐lane pile‐up: chunks of Hackney gravity‐sucked into a dense ball. With no breathing space between square and pub, pub and playground, car dealer and tube. The houses on Albert Square were inches deep, façades that admitted no interior life. Cultural memory, if it existed, belonged to the actors. Ray Brooks, Phil Daniels. The woman who played Mo Slater was Gary Oldman’s sister. Brooks of Cathy Come Home, a social‐realist drama from 1966, found himself performing a part based on a real man who died as guru to the squatters of the M11 extension protest in Leyton. They gave him a boat burial, a Viking send‐off. Ray couldn’t abide his fictional wife.
Rats sprung from tables of fruit left out in the rain, the market never closed. Maud’s bookstall featured real books: Heine, Conrad, Jackie and Wilkie Collins, a biography of Brian Clough. All stuck together in the damp air. The allotment, regularly serviced by gardeners, thrives. Giant sunflowers, runner beans. The swing in the playpark, unused by children, was available to any suicidal adult with a sub‐Ibsen monologue. EastEnders has two modes, shouting or sullen. Giving away the plot on a mobile phone or gobbing a lifetime of grievances into a sibling’s rigid face.
William had a job to do. My northwest passage was over. It had twisted back on itself, into a temporal cul‐de‐sac unimagined by Arthur Machen. With my rucksack of grey fug, a London Peculiar, I was the ghost: a lost father wandering aimlessly around the perimeter fence. Soothed by distant motorway hymns.
‘Is that so you remember who you are?’ William said.
I was wearing a sweatshirt from an American university with the word sinclair in dark blue relief across the chest.
A fly‐pitched poster on the corner of Albert Square advertised a show at the Tate with one of Fuseli’s crouching, red‐eyed demons. I had no more stories to tell. Everything I tried to express was better done elsewhere. This mad fugue, between traumas, was nothing more than a feeble echo of Conrad’s The Secret Agent: when human relationships have broken down and Comrade Ossipon the anarchist, the betrayer of women, walks away from history.
‘His robust form was seen that night in distant parts of the enormous town slumbering monstrously on a carpet of mud under a veil of raw mist. It was seen crossing the streets without life and sound, or diminishing in the interminable straight perspectives of shadowy houses bordering empty roadways lined by
strings of gas lamps . . . He walked. And suddenly turning into a strip of a front garden with a mangy grass plot, he let himself into a small grimy house with a latch‐key he took out of his pocket.’
The Blue Fence
Contact with this woman was made by way of Stephen Gill, emails were exchanged. I was vetted, checked out; a meeting was arranged at the café by Springfield Park. However it went, this would be the final interview. A covert story that shadowed my time in Hackney, but one of which I was wholly ignorant. Paranoia, spookery, involuntary exile. Factory work, gardening. Bomb plots, bank robberies. Lost photo archives. All of this activity – politics and terror, global publicity, flight – earthed in or around Hackney Marshes. And now enclosed or repulsed by the Olympic Park’s security fence. Our new model army of insecurity guards.
Then the phone rings, lesser duties are set aside, and we are, willingly, joyfully, on a bus, the 236. Heading down Queensbridge Road, Pownall Road, London Fields, Mare Street: towards the Homerton Hospital. In that lull before kids are let out of school, Anna beside me, I can enjoy the experience of sponsored transport, the active streets, veiled women, husbands with awkward packages for wives who will soon be returned to them. Nobody lingers in the Homerton Hospital. But this birth, our first grandchild, a girl, is a special thing. The heart does flutter as the news comes through. By this gift we are changed and do not know ourselves. For a day or so, we are our children’s children. We’re not in charge any more. If called on, we can offer tentative advice, but we are also free, liberated, released from one kind of biological responsibility. Hackney, more itself than ever, is an entirely new place.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 55