Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Anna carries food, a teddy bear, champagne. The stairs at the Homerton are out of action, we use the steel‐box lift. Templar Ward. Sabina Brown lingered, she was ten days overdue. Now she is very calm and resolute in her hamster tray, sleeping with so many overlapping memories, exhausted after a long tight swim. The curtained corner, beside the window, becomes an occupied tent in which an unprepared London stretches itself to accommodate this new and demanding soul.

  We walk home with Anna leading the way, demonstrating the route she took from her Millfields school, the old Hackney of Sutton Place, the garden of St John’s church where Kaporal was found, and St Augustine’s Tower. I make the call to confirm my appointment with Astrid Proll.

  Stephen Gill met the former Red Army Faction chauffeur at an exhibition of his work in Arles. He keeps a good library in his Bethnal Green studio and he lent me a copy of Proll’s Baader Meinhof, Pictures on the Run 67–77. Which proved to be a cannily edited photo‐novel of a troubled period in German history; a documented fiction of the aesthetics of terror, action and counteraction. Gerhard Richter’s expropriation of the images of the prison dead ‘freed’ Proll to return, after a long period, to snatched newspaper truths that decay into art. Her introductory essay was brief and intelligent.

  ‘We were afraid of photographs,’ she wrote. ‘Nobody was supposed to know what we looked like, so we became invisible and more like ghosts. The RAF possessed neither a film camera, nor picture archives . . . Only later, during the kidnapping of Hanns‐Martin Schleyer in autumn 1977, did our successors make Polaroid pictures and video recordings.’

  Returned to the London of 2007, Proll asked Stephen Gill’s advice about marketing a set of limited‐edition prints of the photographs taken when members of the group were on the run in Paris. They borrowed a tastefully furnished apartment, belonging to the journalist Régis Debray, on the Ile de la Cité. Debray was then in a prison cell in Bolivia. Proll’s café shots, playful, casually framed, capture hip and arrogant young tourists who know how to smoke for the camera. Proll also appears: an alien hand spooning tears of laughter from her eyelid. Thus proving that photo shoots were a communal activity. The camera passed around.

  In a 1968 retrieval from Pictures on the Run, a close‐cropped, leather‐jacketed Proll is seen from above, splayed across the frame, intertwined with Ingrid Schulbert. The photograph features, quite distinctly, a period toy: a Polaroid camera.

  Proll speaks of her band of hunted activists as ‘self‐timers cut off from reality’. They never left the autobahn, radio on, in stolen cars. Andreas Baader was bourgeois‐proud of his white Mercedes. They had a taste for Viva Maria, Louis Malle’s revolutionary Mexican romp, with Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau. ‘We lived a kind of armed existentialism . . . The women did the major part of organizing and thinking. The women did bank raids, too, but more carefully and reluctantly.’ Cameras were self‐timed, so that the whole group could get into frame: as were bombs. Think of The Secret Agent, of poor Stevie, the idiot boy from Soho, who is blown to pieces when he trips over a root in Greenwich Park. And who has to be scraped up on a spade: with rags and bones and bark.

  Setting off down the canal for my meeting with Proll, I was overtaken by Jock McFadyen on his bicycle, the hound in loping pursuit. I shouted, Jock climbed down. The dog, as short‐sighted as its master, sniffed the weeds for fantasy rabbits.

  ‘How was the show?’

  ‘Plenty of punters, no sales,’ Jock said. ‘I’m not expensive enough for serious collectors and too steep for Shoreditch riff‐raff. Thirty grand a pop is an awkward price. I’m too old to start spraying walls and there are major extensions to pay for. So it’s a fucking book. I’m working on a scandalous memoir of my drinking days in East London. I’m calling it: The Confessions of Jimmy Seed. From when I came south to the night you wrote about a blow job in a Travelodge on the A13.’

  I had to push on, Astrid Proll wouldn’t appreciate being kept waiting. ‘I am a bit tired of memory‐work,’ she warned, ‘please send me your thoughts in advance. And also a list of your published books. I have talked too much in recent times.’

  ‘Proll?’ Jock said. ‘She used to live in a squat in Gospel Oak, next door to my ex‐wife and infant son – who is now thirty‐five and managing a repro‐furniture shop in Hackney Road. She was a very diligent babysitter, by all accounts. Got on well with the wife. Who was fucking amazed when Astrid’s cover was blown. I think she was calling herself Anna back then.’

  Walking out here with Stephen Gill, earlier in the week, I asked him about Proll. They had a few dealings through Stephen’s time with the Magnum Agency. She visited his studio when she was in town. Gill saw the best in everyone he met. Even as the Hackney Wick edge‐lands were enclosed, he continued to roam, carrying the cheap camera from the boot sale, chatting to scavengers and wild naturalists. Like all the haunters of the margin he was shocked by the sudden appearance of a great blue fence. And like so many photographers and keepers of documentary records, he was challenged by security, held for several hours (without authority), warned off. Overgrown paths and ancient rights of way were blocked with boards and fences.

  I asked him what it had been like in former times.

  I used to wander the Wick, completely on my own, exploring and taking photographs. Now there are lots of people in yellow coats, boots and hard hats, saying, ‘Sorry, mate, you can’t come in here.’ I tell them, ‘I’ve been coming for years.’ ‘Not any more you’re not.’ Suddenly there are places where you can’t walk. It’s upsetting. They are obsessed with health and safety. They deny access. They say, ‘Can’t let you in, you’re not insured. Health and safety.’

  This area has given me so much. It’s not just obsessive recording, it’s a kind of escapism. There’s no denying that as soon as I arrive, I go ‘Ahhhhh!’ It’s wonderful. It gives me a lot of energy. I don’t always take photographs. Often I go at five or six in the morning. I think: ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ So I go straight back home again. I cycle. I really enjoy that.

  The camera is just part of me. I need it with me at all times, for whatever might inspire me to take a picture.

  These days I do some writing. Things I’ve seen or overheard. Odd snippets in passing. I might take a picture as well. I like the idea that the picture has nothing to do with what I’ve just heard. I’m doing something about the removal of words from notices. A project about deleting words, seeing them covered over. The making of new words.

  I’ve been trying to allow the area to work on my pictures, a collaboration. I’ve been finding objects, other people’s discarded images, and intertwining them with my own. I’ve also been taking my prints back to the wilderness of Hackney Wick, burying them, and allowing the processes of nature to begin. Then digging them up again. They are covered in soil. The element of chance. I’m burying them in places where I think people won’t find them. The excavated prints are in an in‐between state. I use the prints as a base on which to create. I lay flowers over them and re‐photograph them.

  I keep my eye on the weather. Buried photographs can bleach completely in a very short time. I usually allow a week to three weeks, not long at all.

  Somebody did see me burying one of the prints. ‘What are you doing?’ I was so embarrassed. I said I was looking for newts.

  Did you know that Astrid worked out here? You’ll be bringing her right back to her old stamping ground. She had a job at Lesney’s Matchbox Toy Factory, making toys cars, in the machine shop. I collect any ephemera to do with Matchbox Toys. I think they closed in 1982.

  I’m in good time and I wait at an outside table, reading over my notes, preparing myself, and keeping an eye open for Proll – who is walking over from a borrowed house near Finsbury Park. This area, the Lea, the Marina, Springfield Park, is a favourite of mine. At a difficult period, when Farne had been rushed to hospital for an appendix operation and Anna was in another hospital with Madeleine, our new daughter, William and I made the best of it by coming
here for expeditions through the undergrowth, raids on the playpark, cups of hot chocolate in this café.

  As described in her email, Astrid Proll is wearing a bright red jacket. Her face is not as ‘collapsed’ as she suggests. It still easy to recognize her from the Pictures on the Run impressions of a slim, handcuffed young woman in a trouser suit, flopping fringe of hair, strong jawline, being escorted into a Frankfurt court by two men in uniform. Who scratch and blink and stare with vegetative disbelief at the news cameras.

  Beneath the bangles on Proll’s forearm, angry scar tissue is evident. She has a forceful style. I try to express my admiration for the editing job she achieved with her book, the adept use of archive, the economy of the text. ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’ She has no time for food and drink; after a prolonged interrogation of the cold cabinet, she settles for a bottle of mineral water.

  She can’t understand how I, a writer, came to work with Chris Petit, a film‐maker. Which is another category entirely. Radio On she has heard about, but never seen. The graffiti under the Westway: free astrid proll. The connection with Wenders, Hamburg, Bruno Ganz, The American Friend. Yeah yeah yeah.

  Was Patricia Highsmith of interest? It was easy to imagine common ground.

  ‘I have no room for romances.’

  She smokes Spirit cigarettes. Before she came to Hackney Proll had never met a member of the working class. She loved having an English car, a Morris Traveller with wood trim. Hackney was good for pubs, pub life, English beer. Yeah yeah. Great nights.

  ‘We don’t know your writing in Germany. I check on the internet. Tell me, please, what is “Gritty Brits”? Are you dirty realist?’

  Proll didn’t realize, before she came to London, the other meaning of RAF. That there had actually been an outfit in operation a few years before the Red Army Faction. Defending Thames Estuary skies from squadrons of night raiders.

  The archive was everything. ‘Image is property,’ Proll said. ‘Pictures are sold through an agency. Selection is all about victims and – what’s the word? – aggressors. My book is different. I get accused of doing Prada‐Meinhof. Silly journalism. I made the book to explain that film itself was the enemy. I had to throw my camera away.’

  Before I was allowed to start the tape, I faced a series of challenges. ‘So tell me, what is the form of your Hackney book? Do you find stories? Do you find me, for example? Why is my story surprising in the context of Hackney? Yeah yeah yeah. There are all sorts of memories, all sorts of archives. What do you want to hear? Is it only for your book that you took so much trouble to find me?’

  I don’t have to say anything. Proll is limbering up. My instinct is that, like Tony Blair, she will be a shadow in the borough; present and absent, arriving from elsewhere with her own agenda, taking what we have and moving on. Unlike Blair, she worked here, lived, drank, formed lasting attachments. And felt the urge, every few years, to return. To visit old friends.

  I put the pocket‐recorder on the table. She didn’t care. She was more concerned about getting her cigarette lighter to fire.

  Can I smoke? I want people to stop me smoking. I will stop this year. You say you lived in Hackney from ’68? I was here in ’74. I only had a few contacts, I ended up with a women’s movement group. I didn’t know people like Sheila Rowbotham. Not then, not really. I only knew two people. Knew of two people I could trust. One of them was Marc Karlin, the film‐maker. We argued about Nicaragua.

  I was on the run. Some things I did were hard. Lots of things I did were hard. But it turned out to be good. That’s why I’m sitting here with you now. I had to leave Germany. I didn’t know anything about England. I’d never been here. I thought I was hundreds of thousands of miles from the country where I was known.

  England saved me from prison. It also saved me from the RAF. I said goodbye to the RAF. In that sense, coming to England saved my life. I have terrible gratitude to this place. That’s why I come back, whatever my personal relationships are, however good or bad. That’s my main reason.

  I got very attached to England. It’s a great achievement if you know another country quite well. I can’t afford to come back and live here. When I came first, I only thought: ‘Is it safe for me?’ I met people and they lived in this part of London. They helped me. I married. I had to have papers. I was so German. We Germans are fixated on papers. I couldn’t understand that you didn’t need papers. Now you do. Then you didn’t.

  When I got settled, I realized that, healthwise, I was in a pretty bad situation. I run and run, I break down. Like a young kid. I was still pretty traumatized.

  I made very close friendships, as you do. They cuddle you, they look after you. That helps. I was also very cautious, I only met certain people that I didn’t know. In Germany it was only Germans, only white middle‐class Germans. Only the RAF, the police. It was the most narrow experience until I came to England. Here, all of a sudden, I met the whole world. It was a huge experience for me. I was twenty‐six when I came to London. I’d been four years in prison. I was in prison very young. I had been to America a bit, because my mother lived there. I wasn’t completely enclosed. The RAF was such a movie.

  England was not a liberation at once. I could never have said goodbye to the RAF if I had stayed in Germany. The people I knew were talking about actions, about other comrades. Here was a different life. In England people used words like ‘pleasure’. ‘This gives me pleasure.’ I used to shout and say, ‘What are you talking about? Pleasure? What is that?’ Life was struggle. Pleasure for me was a soft word. Most of the first people I met were from a middle‐class background and education.

  Then, once I was a bit settled, I looked for work. I knew people connected to this organization, Big Flame. Their headquarters were down in East London, Tredegar Square. I had friends in Hackney who were part of that group. People I don’t want to mention now. They had connections with Italy. Italy was very strong in the revolutionary struggle.

  I hung around with illegal people, it was my crowd. They did all sorts of things: general politics, psychology, Wilhelm Reich, communal work, housing work. They did strikes. I saw factories. I saw gated communities next to factories. Architecture. My father was an architect. I have a feel for architecture. Here were factories next door to a community where workers live. I was romantic about the working class. That’s why I went into the factory. I needed a job, I wanted to earn money. I wanted to integrate myself. Women did very low jobs. I was young. I could run around in a boiler‐suit all day. I was like a young guy. I was a fitter. Macho. It was all women’s liberation stuff.

  At the Matchbox Toy Factory, I went to the assembly line, with the women, but only for one week. I became a fitter’s mate – which meant that I carried his tools. I thought I was a skilled woman! That was the romance. It brought me into a strange world. I thought that the stranger the world, the less chance I would be recognized. It was a big mistake. You go into a world which is so far outside your experience, you don’t know the codes. I met all this anti‐German racist stuff– which I didn’t know at all. It schooled me, it educated me.

  I was fascinated by the tools, doing something with my hands. I was a year at the Lesney’s Toy Factory. Later I worked for this drug‐rehab programme, helping young people, black people, to become car mechanics. Hackney Council paid for my training. Normal women, at that time, did not run around like that. I was so security conscious. I didn’t live anywhere. The news from Germany was bad. Things happened, the situation got more and more brutal. The atmosphere was affected here too.

  I remember at one point there was a new wanted poster for me on Bethnal Green police station. I couldn’t believe it. It was like Germany was coming here. But everything was so different. Different language, different architecture. I felt I was in a really strange place, but I felt quite secure. Also I could speak the language. If you go to other European countries, you are a person from the north. Here there is such a mix. Freedom. If you go, let’s say, to Italy, Spain, a woman has to be a role mo
del: beautiful clothes, make‐up. It was easier here. It opened up my mind. How young people lived and survived.

  The European Union had just started. That’s why I married. You had to leave the country every six months. There were many people here from America, they started marrying. I thought marriage would give me status.

  I never went abroad in those years. I had enough to see in England. We went here and there – Wells‐by‐the‐Sea, Bridport, Liverpool – but I was always very careful. The people I would completely avoid were Germans. I met one German woman, she became one of my best friends. Certain people arrived to see certain people.

  When I heard about the death of Ulrike Meinhof in Stammheim Prison, I lived in a street that no longer exists, Lamb Lane. Beside London Fields. I lived around Broadway Market a lot. There was a huge women’s movement thing, a whole scene. I was living with women. People came from all backgrounds where they wanted only to do projects. Projects projects projects. Political. Women. This friend of mine became a midwife.

  Before I left London in 2002, I rented a room in a road just the other side of London Fields. You know where the swimming pool is? Between there and Dalston. In earlier times, I used to swim in the lido. It was always empty in the 1970s.

  I did semi‐skilled work, mechanic’s work. I went to get a job with Hackney Council. I was a park‐keeper. Ha! In Clissold Park, my favourite park. At that time parks in Hackney still had keepers. Clissold Park was some sort of centre, with offices, men with bowler hats. I was working with an Irish guy, raking, mowing. They threw us both out, him and me. After six months. They had either to take you on or let you go.

  I had Clissold Park. I had London Fields. I had a little park which was in Shoreditch. It was around a church, a little garden. I had to go out in the morning and open it. I was always scared to go there. It wasn’t my patch. It wasn’t where I was running around. I had this blue minivan. I would drive up, open the gate, jump back in the car. Very fast, but not because I was scared.