London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  • The breasts, which are removed from the carcass before cooking, are cooked very quickly and served close to rare – dependent on individual taste. I cook the breasts on a skittle over a medium heat in a little butter and olive oil. Once cooked they are sliced and plated – they are served with a sauce which is made from the stock of the boned/legged bird and sometimes finished with cream to thicken.

  • The vegetables I like to serve with this dish are roughly mashed potatoes, fresh fine green beans and carrots.

  It’s not just a Carl Hiaasen menu of birds and hedgehogs and foxes, it’s fish. ‘Impervious edges to roads,’ as journalist Sanjida O’Connell reports, ‘increase the flow of water from the road into streams – leading to a build up of sediment, increased water temperature and pollution’. Salmon, apparently, are very sensitive to irregular ‘flash flows’. Salmon loss affects many other species, including bears and orca whales. The chain of interconnections is alarming: Moby-Dick threatened with extinction by the Art Nouveau filigree of Junction 5, its run-off into the River Darent.

  Highway chemicals leech into streams. Heavy metals overwhelm motorway–fringe wildlife. Rock salt, used in road gritting, is toxic to many species of plant. Fish are unwell. Song birds, sensitive to the M25’s acoustic footprints, back off. Vibrations from the constant, twenty-four-hour madness of traffic persuades earthworms to keep their heads down; leading to an excess of crows – and crowkill – as birds try to prise their breakfast from unsuspected depths.

  Now seriously peckish, almost ready to dispute crow-spoil, we lengthen our stride. If we stick with the Pilgrims Way, the first refuelling station will be Westerham; which is over the Kent border and about seven miles on. Sometimes we’re in deep countryside, no settlement in sight, no trace of the road – other than a continuing sense of unreality. Tidy fields, without cattle. Well-kept B-roads linking villages and farms. A lush buffer zone, a cushion. The unseen motorway as the dominant presence.

  We’re always within a single field of tarmac, or admiring the pinkish-silver stream from a safe distance. The temperature is climbing. A sticky morning. Renchi abandons shirt and bandanna. We swim through a huge field of what looks like sweet corn, the feeling is Mediterranean. Like Godard’s Pierrot le Fou. Bright, comic-book colours; greens and blues. A hazy sun. Camions jostling for position on a shimmering road. The dry morse of crickets.

  It’s when we sit to interrogate the map that I miss my spectacles; the act of having to take them off, or shove them up towards a vanished hairline. We’re on the nursery slopes, an arable field (unoptioned golf course) giving a clear view of the motorway, the steady mid-morning traffic.

  I’ll go back. That’s my first thought. The bench. The ‘viewing point’. Which means: all that way along the edge of the quarry, the steps cut into the hillside, the travellers’ bungalows. The dogs. I’ll leave my rucksack, try a gentle jog – while Renchi, dressed only in shorts and boots, dries his shirts on the fence; presses his hands together, meditates on the landscape and his passage through it.

  I lurch through a couple of fields, down among the corn, up the next slope, then change my mind. A degree of softness in focus is no problem. It might even be a benefit. Elective Impressionism. Anything close is still sharp. I’d rather put up with the hassle (and expense) of getting another pair of specs than endure the additional hours in Surrey. Let my Kingsland Road frames be the necessary sacrifice.

  Renchi, in all probability, hasn’t noticed that I’ve gone. Dark blue sweater, light blue bandanna, white T-shirt: draped along the fence. Gently steaming. The pale-skinned, half-nude mendicant squats in the dirt, contemplating our assault on the Valley of Vision.

  He has become, in my conceit, both a reprise and an anticipation of his great-grand-uncle, Clarence Bicknell. A physical embodiment of the Eternal Return and a tribute to the Victorian botanist (hillwalker, watercolourist, tracer of the rock-engravings of Monte Bego in the maritime Alps). Memory is homage. Engraved by time and experience, we grow to look like daguerreotypes of ancestors who have rehearsed our destiny. Except that they did it with more conviction, more innocence. Instead of hopping, boulder to boulder over black-violet sandstone and fine-grained schist, taking rubbings of Early Bronze Age rock carvings, we slide down Beckton Alp, photographing middens of urban rubbish.

  Part of our task in this circumnavigation of London is to become our fathers, our grandfathers; to learn respect for obscured and obliterated lines of biography. Accessing the fugue, we parody lives that preceded our own. Reading Victorian memoirs, we come to believe that these events have not yet happened.

  Renchi was showing me the book, on the day of our walk around the City’s Roman walls. We were sitting in the café at the Museum of London. A High Way to Heaven (Clarence Bicknell and the ‘Vallée Des Marveilles’) by Christopher Chippindale. Marc Atkins, who had just met Renchi for the first time, was there. With his camera. I held the cover of the book close to Renchi’s face and asked Marc to take the shot. It’s an extraordinary double portrait: the slanted book becomes a mirror. Twin grey beards, spruce. Twin noses. Heavy eyebrows. Faces full of stalled wonder. The sloping shoulders of Clarence in his pale jacket slide into Renchi’s T-shirt (‘Fruit of the Loom’). On the wall of the cafe, above the coffee machine: SUMMER DESSERTS.

  Reading about Clarence, I discover a template for Renchi; not an explanation, or psychological profile, but a concurrent stream of particles navigating a way around a similar landscape. ‘Then’ and ‘now’ are distinctions I can’t make. Clarence Bicknell, the youngest son of a wealthy businessman, entered (and abandoned) the church; he travelled, settled at Bordighera on the Mediterranean coast of north-west Italy, a few miles from the French border. He took long daily walks. He explored Liguria, painting more than 3,000 watercolours of plants. He was a vegetarian and a promoter of Esperanto (attending conferences in such places as Krakow). He commissioned a house (decorated with Art Nouveau foliage and playful mottoes) on the slopes below the high Val Fontanalba – where he would carry out the extensive survey of rock-engravings by which he is best known. He shipped stones back to Cambridge. His herbarium of dried specimens was displayed at the Hanbury Institute, Genoa. He funded and stocked his own museum, the Museo Bicknell, in Bordighera.

  This life, as Chippindale annotates it, was one of discreetly inflicted patronage, questing, categorising: true liberality – before the term became degraded. The busy leisure of a gentleman amateur of the best kind: rising at five a.m. to tend his garden, offering hospitality, walking the mountains, carrying out his obsessive logging of the marks on ancient rocks. ‘Casa Fontanalba’, his colonial chalet, was known as: ‘The Cottage at the Entrance to Paradise’.

  Clarence Bicknell’s father, Elhanan, made his money in whale oil. Which meant epics of slaughter, boiling vats on Bugsby’s Marshes; bones and blubber. A heavy stench that drifted on the east wind. You can smell it still as you emerge from the Blackwall Tunnel to drive over the exhausted tongue of land on which the New Labour visionaries chose to erect their Millennium Dome.

  Bicknell’s sperm oil lit the world, but Elhanan was also interested in another kind of oil, in paintings. And painters. Clarence’s mother, Lucinda (the third of Elhanan’s four wives), was the daughter of Hablot Knight Browne – who produced illustrations for Charles Dickens, under the pseudonym ‘Phiz’. Bicknell was comfortable with painters, as patron and as friend. His large house, in the rural suburb of Heme Hill, was close to the Ruskin property. Young John was a frequent visitor. Oils and watercolours by J.M.W. Turner dominated the Bicknell collection (which included works by Roberts, Etty, Landseer, De Wint). David Roberts was a relative. His daughter married one of Clarence’s half-brothers.

  A private gallery for contemporary art in the Surrey foothills. Elhanan didn’t care for old masters. Turner, from whom he commissioned a number of works, was sketched by Landseer (and painted by Count d’Orsay) enjoying the hospitality of Herne Hill: Turner in Mr Bicknell’s Drawing Room. Player and gentleman. T
urner’s Melvillean epic, Wlialers (of 1845), was produced with the sperm oil magnate in mind. And painted, this dark monster rearing from a red-gold sea, six years before the publication of Moby-Dick. Melville devoted three chapters to pictorial representations of whales: illusions, myths, truth. He tracked the story back to a crippled beggar on Tower Hill holding up a crudely daubed board which featured a primitive summary of ‘the tragic scene in which he lost his leg’. The whale narrative returns to Elhanan Bicknell, investor and collector – and to the London works, alongside the Thames, where he refined spermaceti.

  When (in the 1840s) Turner wasn’t ‘at home’ in Queen Anne Street, he hadn’t necessarily slipped away to Mrs Booth at Margate; his other refuge was Herne Hill, with the Ruskins or the Bicknells. The Cockney lion wasn’t an easy guest, sometimes talking at length, charming the ladies with accounts of his sketching expeditions, sometimes mumpy and silent. With his host, Turner discussed the operation of the whaling industry, the source of that soft light that bathed the dinner table. Bicknell is thought to have commissioned all four of Turner’s whaling subjects.

  The inevitable quarrel between artist and patron came over plans to engrave an edition of The Fighting Temeraire. Turner asked for fifty proofs, Bicknell offered eight. Taking an inventory of Whalers, inch by inch, as if reading a balance sheet, the Herne Hill entrepreneur discovered some fiddly detail he didn’t care for – and which he intemperately rubbed out ‘with Handky’. Turner, in a strop that could never be mended, was persuaded to make alterations.

  They live with us, these phantoms. The collaboration between Turner and Elhanan Bicknell. Hunted whales and boiling vats on Greenwich peninsula. Definitions of the Light. Clarence, the youngest son, escaped from trade, from London, to become a rehearsal for Renchi: for the problem of finding the true path. Painting was a useful pursuit, a necessary irritant; never a profession. Questing walks. Generosity to friends and fellow townsmen. Vegetarianism. The urge to research, record. The karma of family wealth modestly dispersed – along with the difficulties (or guilts) associated with that process. The will towards good (that stumbles and blunders and is aware of its own absurdity). We repeat patterns that we can barely discern. We make old mistakes in new ways.

  Clarence Bicknell, from his ‘Entrance to Paradise’, searched for pictures in the rocks. He sketched groups of horned figures: ‘Weapons and implements’. These implements, now interpreted as ‘halberds’, are characteristic of the early metal age in prehistoric Europe. Triangular blades set at a right angle to their shafts: they look like flags marking holes on motorway golf courses. Pin men dancing for joy: Conan Doyle’s The Dancing Men.

  More significantly, Bicknell made a rubbing of ‘Le Scale del Paradiso’. Here indeed was ‘The Highway to Heaven’ (the dream of a celestial autobahn). Here was the (unacknowledged) inspiration for the work Renchi produced when the M25 walk was completed. As part of a deprogramming process, he picked certain sites along the road as suitable for sand paintings, drawings with vegetable dye. In rehearsal, he sketched his designs in chalk on the road between the London Waste chimneys and Picketts Lock. The full ritual was intended for the tunnels at Epsom. Our orbital circuit was broken down into four vertical lines, like the Paradise ladders; chalk chippings were placed along one margin, small stones from a deleted burial ground along another. Drumming continued throughout the day, as Renchi laboured to complete his painting.

  The Marc Atkins double portrait – Clarence and Renchi Bicknell – becomes a triptych with the addition of Clarence’s sketch of a 1909 discovery in the Mediterranean Alps: The Chief of the Tribes. After a day, during which they had endured intermittent heavy showers, Bicknell and his companion, ‘in a state of great excitement’, came upon something like a stone mirror: his own bearded image, thousands of years old, softened by lichen. ‘Le Sorcier’ was the title the French used. Bicknell spoke of’ Devil-dancers or Witch-doctors of savage tribes’. A beard, teeth suggested by a line of dots, intense eyes under a single horizontal bar (eyebrows or a lid to prise open the skull). The ‘horns’ on the head become hands, digits emphasised with chalk by future portraitists, determined to capture a clear representation. A human face. An archetype. As shocking in its immediacy as the mummified body of ‘Otzi the Ice-man’, who was recovered (clothing and weapons intact) from the snowfield on the Italian-Austrian border.

  Renchi, in the booklet that collected the paintings from his Michael and Mary Dreaming, the walk to Land’s End, writes of: ‘Son following father/and father following son/a previous time of taller trees/and different animal energies.’ The son smuggles rocks into his father’s rucksack.

  Clarence Bicknell travelled to Ceylon at around the time that my great-grandfather, Arthur, was botanising and managing tea plantations. Arthur did not come from a wealthy family. He reveals, in a chapbook (Arthur Sinclair: Planter and Visiting Agent in Ceylon: The Story of his Life and Times as Told by Himself) published in Colombo in 1900, that his parents ‘were descended from an old Jacobite stock, at this time still rather at a discount’. He walked to school from a ‘little farm-house at King Edward, Aberdeenshire’, carrying the day’s ration of peat. He didn’t linger. ‘I ended my schooling and began my education.’

  A self-taught plantsman, he was taken up by Sir John Cheape and shipped off to tea estates near Kandy. He had already laid out a garden of his own, which he rose at four a.m. to work. He was a hungry reader. ‘I read indiscriminately every book in my father’s house… I read and re-read with intense delight.’ He walked home from Aberdeen, ‘sitting down by the wayside’ to dip into whatever he had scavenged from the book stalls. Thomas De Quincey ‘fascinated’ him, and was soon established as his favourite author.

  From other books by Arthur Sinclair, accounts of his travels, I remember pen and ink sketches of flowers, more detailed, less painterly than Clarence Bicknell’s. There are photographs of plants, Chuncho chiefs in Peru, artefacts, skulls. Arthur, in his dug-out canoe, rifle across lap, is another Victorian beard. Another quirky traveller, roaming the globe, writing up journals, mythologising, making jokes.

  Renchi and I won’t be scrambling over the Andes or discovering rare plants. We have to make do with a few shards of broken Roman pottery in a display case at the Clacket Lane Service Station, or the etymology of the woods we are skirting (‘Devil of Kent’).

  Pilgrims Lane, when we blunder across it, is still a buzz. A hedger (human – not one of those grinding machines) puts us right; with his hook, he pulls back a curtain of greenery to gesture at a path across the fields. The road to Westerham dips once again under the M25.

  Deep in a bramble thicket that erupts from the edge of the road, Renchi makes his discovery. An antique message printed on tin. Not quite ‘La Via Sacra’ or ‘Le Scale del Paradiso’. A plain, shit-brown rectangle with a prancing white horse: KENT. Welcome.

  4

  Westerham, Kent, doesn’t work: not for pedestrians. Or travellers of any kind. Which is strange, because the siphoning of small change from transients, heritage tourists (with an imperialist bias), is the reason for this long shank of a town’s continued existence. Westerham is shaped like a mantrap, narrow jaws sprung against incursions by the unwary. Primed to snap shut with a satisfying crunch.

  The predominant colour is chocolate-brown (river mud, Gault clay, shit). Reasons for stopping, detouring, paying your respects to sanctioned real estate, are promoted at every turn in the road. White lettering on a red-brown field: CHARTWELL, HEVER CASTLE, SQUERRYES COURT, QUEBEC HOUSE, THE HIGH WEALD COUNTRY. In Victorian times, London was an occasional destination, over the horizon. A coach operated between the Grasshopper pub (near St Mary’s Church) and Fleet Street. Citizens of substance, men of business, travelled in – when they had to, when it was strictly necessary. Most of the Westerham populace never moved, before trains and metalled roads, more than ten miles from where they were born.

  We look for shade beneath a roadside tree, sumach or medlar, while we figure out the quickest mean
s of escape. And, more importantly, somewhere to eat. Dust-free cars are parked, bumper to bumper, along Croydon Road. That name tells you something about Westerham. If you want to head north, the choice is: Croydon or Biggin Hill. Croydon has become a creature of the depths, a subtopian city-state; constantly reaching out to devour the lesser hilltop developments of South London. Croydon has trams and transplanted Docklands towers. Croydon has company HQs, untargeted terror targets (nobody knows they’re there), towers of glass and steel. Croydon has its own suburbs (which house the street-cred TV personality, former footballer, Ian Wright and his family). So Westerham, Kent’s western outrider, gives its allegiance to Croydon, not London.

  There are no shops, not yet. No other walkers. There is nobody for the barechested Renchi (blue bandanna, red socks) to interrogate. That eerie sound – like ice breaking – is the M25. It’s always there, barely audible acoustic footsteps, a soothing whisper; a nuisance we have learnt to love. Westerham, with pretensions to a kind of Cotswold status, ignores the interference. Between red brick houses, in narrow gaps, beside pubs clinging to the rumour that James Wolfe once dropped in for a swift half, you catch the glint of transit: Eddie Stobart and his rivals jingling their petty cash, searching for a pound coin with which to pay the Dartford Tunnel toll.