*
It’s wet and light is draining from the sky. Kevin locates a phone kiosk, near the splendour of the Dartford Public Library. He has to call a copy-editor in New York. He’s flogged out, gone in the feet, and he’s arguing commas with Bill Buford. It’s a bad day when Kevin doesn’t turn in a page for the Independent, an interview with some broken spar of cultural flotsam, a radio show. Greasy phone tucked under chin, striped shirt sticking to a heaving chest, he sweats like a broker on Black Monday. Moose has been reduced to writing pieces for the New Yorker (the media equivalent of debating doctrine with Torquemada). Obscure (Eurocentric) references are culled, paragraphs ironed out, minor witticisms exorcised. Ten minutes of this treatment and Kevin is ready to confess: he’ll do anything for cash.
Dartford is a town that can’t be negotiated on foot. Watling Street sweeps through, but the old pilgrim routes have been realigned: nobody walks to Canterbury, they stick with the Darent Valley Path (as laid out in the Kent County Council guide). Commercially, riverine Kent is Third World, mid-combat Balkan. Bluewater has stolen the action, leaving a rump of charity shops, fast food outlets and aggrieved pubs. Experience teaches: pedestrian walkways are not for pedestrians. They are magnets for car parks, open-air malls. They define themselves in negatives: no motor traffic, no access to the town at large (side streets, canals). Dull flagstone paths are a compulsory shopping experience for people who don’t shop; a zombie treadmill furnished with stone benches on which only the most dispirited transients (lager schools, outpatients, the dispersed) ever perch.
But Dartford hasn’t thrown in the towel. Lottery Funds have gifted the town with £2.25 million: for the Mick Jagger Performing Arts Centre. Jagger – Jerry Hall, three of the kids and Jagger’s octogenarian parents, Joe and Eva – turned out for the dedication. The Duke of Kent pulled the velvet rope, unveiled the plaque; then Mick climbed on stage to read a speech to the assembled dignitaries. The centre is part of Jagger’s old school, Dartford Grammar.
Like any other crusty returnee, Mick banged on about combining performing arts with maths, science and Latin, a well-rounded education. He was modest enough to wonder why he had been selected for this tribute, rather than other notable Dartforders; such as General Havelock who relieved the siege of Lucknow – or Wat Tyler. Generals, he supposed, were no longer PC. And revolutionaries unacceptable as role models. ‘I won the honour by default.’ (Nobody considered fellow townsman Keith Richards.) Tyler and Havelock will have to be satisfied with seeing their names on dodgy pubs. Jagger, who had the sense to get out of Dartford, early and often, fronts the overendowed assembly hall.
Finding Dartford station means battling across fenced roads, dropping into pedestrian underpasses, detouring the long way around civic centres, coping with the river. Having got you, they don’t want to let you go: but a return to Cambridge, a night of revisions for the New Yorker, is suddenly very attractive to Kevin. A bone-deep drenching in torrential rain, as we try to pick up Dartford Creek, to navigate across the marshes to the Thames – by moonlight, if necessary – is an experience he is happy to imagine. As he settles back in a comfortable railway carriage.
We shake him warmly by the hand, wave him off – then spend forty minutes, trekking through dereliction, drifting west towards Crayford, snarled at by yard dogs, blanked by citizens, splashed by motorists; until we reconnect with the swollen and unrecognisable Darent. The river is tidal as far as the town bridge. Industry, on one side, pumping in noxious additives; tough vegetation on the other.
Heads down against the storm: the great moment comes when the last of the town is cleared and we swim out, exposed and ridiculous, into the apocalyptic erasure of Dartford Marshes. Buildings, road, river: revoked. Indistinguishable. We lean into the rain and navigate by touch and smell. My golf umbrella! I set it down to shake hands with Kevin. It’s still there, outside the station; a flag stuck in a cairn of stones by some doomed expedition.
On this black night, the loss is meaningless. It would be like hanging on to a parachute. It’s too dark to distinguish either of the rivers, Darent or Cray. Or the river gate that stands like the entrance to a forbidden city, turning pedestrians back for a detour of several miles across the marshes.
We live inside our discomfort. In Dartford, poring over the fiction of the map, we were impressed by the scale and structure of a hospital (the Joyce Green) that should be out there, acting as a marker. A double V pivoting on the inevitable water tower: isolation wards for the worst contagions of the East End. A secure colony-estate with a rail link to the Thames, its own jetty.
Renchi and Marc are hooded, rain cuts through the layers. I’ve picked up a small black umbrella that somebody has chucked out. No sooner opened than stripped to the prongs. We can’t see where we’re going. We try to follow the eccentricities of the Darent path – from a high bank, somewhere above the river.
The memory of our walk from Shoreham is wiped by weather, the desolation of the salt marshes. From the embankment, we can make out shapeless dunes, mud, the refuse of London, the indestructibles. For the first time (since Runny-mede Bridge), our journey has a proper conclusion: the broad Thames. Minor digressions are swept aside. We stand at the river’s edge, the point where the Darent is absorbed. Or what we take to be the edge: pipings of redshank, a slurping earth-soup. We don’t move. It’s uncomfortable, wet, cold; magnificent. The nonsense of journal-keeping and photography is exposed as sheer folly. This is almost as good as being on the river in a small boat, drifting out to sea. It’s that kind of abdication of responsibility.
Heading east, along the Thames path, the Dartford Bridge (with its necklace of slow-moving traffic) is our horizon. Smeared headlights spit their short beams into the wet night. The bridge spells civilisation. And spells it loud: FUCK OFF. Liminal graffiti. A mess of letters sprayed on grey stone windbreaks. FUCK OFF.
Soft detonations overhead: bombbombbomb. Of never-ending lorries, containers, monster rigs. The motorway streaks the land with sick light. For half a mile, in every direction, there is hard evidence: burnt-out wrecks, torched and rusting husks, solitary tyres. The trash of transit.
The sewage plant hums and seethes. National Power cooks water, fences off territory. A great chimney stack. A perimeter fence. Block buildings that shudder and hiss. Strategies of the margin (the orbital road) that we have come to know and love. In this wilderness, in our sodden wretchedness, a rush of sentiment. We are homesick for London.
If Kevin had stayed with us, we’d be discussing Eddie Constantine in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. The Paris peripheral loop as the access ramp to an intergalactic highway. That’s what the M25 needs as an interpreter: a sandpaper-skinned American playing a hardboiled detective (faked by an English author) in a French film with a Swiss director.
Exterior. Night. The suburbs of Alphaville, the Capital City of a distant Galaxy. A lone car is being driven along one of the boulevards, ablaze with flashing lights, neon signs…
Lemray (off): It was 24 hours 17 minutes Oceanic Time when I arrived at the suburbs of Alphaville.
Wormholes in the fabric of time. Mythic projections invade an unoptioned landscape, the gloom over Gravesend. The bridge is more metaphor than reality, lorries disappear into the clouds. Marc gets into character. He loops his favourite literary quotation: ‘The horror! The horror!’
And he’s right. The dominating voice on this reach of the river belongs to Joseph Conrad, out there on the other shore in his house at Stanford le Hope. (‘A whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind.’) Conrad, monocle to eye, beard elevated, stared across at us – and saw a cruising yawl, the Nellie, waiting on the tide. He fed us the line they all quote: ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ He’s a master of shifts and swerves, scrupulously weighted paragraphs that allow one river to fade into another. Lost lives are re-narrated, coastal places lose definition. ‘Men and sea interpenetrate.’
On this wild night, out o
n the Dartford Marshes, I was ready to jump ship, go native. The motorway circuit was beyond resolution. The M25 was lost. There was no access to the bridge. We stumbled through ditches, climbed slippery banks, found a road. Off-highway, in the shadow of the bridge, geometry is unbalanced: more concept than actuality. Eddie Constantine’s boulevards as dead ends. Warehouses, roundabouts, fountains. Roads peter out into swamp: Clipper Boulevard, Crossways Boulevard, Anchor Boulevard. Headlights sweep the dark. No shops, no pubs, no humans. To advance on the railway line and the Stone Crossing station, we have to navigate a series of crescents that have been designed with the sole aim of frustrating pedestrians. Momentum is directed towards the Bluewater retail quarry, the Radiant City.
Nervous motorists (a woman and her daughters) waved down, put us on track; an old green path to the station. We’re told that it’s impossible to walk across the Dartford Bridge. Absolutely forbidden. Turn up with a bicycle and they’ll transport you in a truck. Otherwise: forget it. Surveillance levels are high. Police cars are on permanent patrol. We’ve walked 270 degrees of our circuit and now it’s over, we’re trapped on the wrong shore. We discuss kitting ourselves out in hard hats and overalls, but that’s just bravado. The tour, within the acoustic footprints of the M25, is finished.
The Stone Crossing station is deserted: no ticket office, broken machines. Marc, having sat on a bench, isn’t sure that he’ll be able to stand up – even if a train does arrive, which seems unlikely. The railway is an icy ladder disappearing into the all-enveloping night.
10
Renchi, back in his Hampshire cottage, cruising websites, re-interrogating ground we had already covered, made contact with Dr J.C. Burne. Burne was the honorary archivist of Joyce Green Hospital, the memory man of the Dartford Marshes. His hospital was doomed; it was about to be rationalised (put to the bulldozer), asset-stripped, reconfigured. The usual land-management scam, in which silence (ignorance) assumes consensus. Local rumour favoured another M25 satellite estate, convenient for Dartford Tunnel and Bluewater. Better-informed whispers revised the plan: a refuge (holding pen) for asylum seekers. Bus ’em in, bang ’em up. The prison hulks, romanced by Charles Dickens in Great Expectations, were moored here; beyond the knowledge of the metropolis, a landscape fit for Gothic projection. Casualties of war had always been held on the marshes, wounded Germans, displaced Poles; their names and dates cut into the red brick of the hospital walls. The French, too, from the Second War: PAILLARD, YVES, 1940. OLIVIER, EMILE. 5.6.1940, FRANCE. DEP. 6.1O.1940. The scratch of a bent nail recording a memory-prompt lost to everyone except Dr Burne. And soon to be lost entirely.
Burne will give us the tour (27 March 2000). We must sneak through the gates just ahead of the wrecking crew; ahead of Burne’s retirement. The hospital library is due to close, the archive will disappear into other archives – except for files which have been destroyed (contagious, pox carrying).
West Hill Hospital closed in 1997. The Accident and Emergency Department transferred to Joyce Green. Many of the West Hill beds had already been removed to Gravesend; and so, as a pamphlet put out by the library points out, ‘for the first time since 1840 when the Workhouse authorities built the hospital the site was devoid of all hospital beds’. Now Joyce Green, just short of its centenary, will vanish and a new hospital, ‘built under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme’, will be magicked from the grounds of the former Darenth Asylum.
The ‘flagship’ Darent Valley Hospital won’t be in the Darent Valley and it won’t be much of a hospital. It’s taken a hundred years to shift from prison hulk to plague ship (for smallpox victims) to New Labour ark. But, from its launch, the Darent Valley Hospital generated reams of publicity, all of it bad.
PATIENT THREATENS LEGAL ACTION AFTER 20-HOUR TROLLEY WAIT IN A ‘FLAGSHIP’ HOSPITAL CORRIDOR (Evening Standard, 10 October 2001). Kerrie Williams, ‘mother-of-two’, is quoted as saying: ‘I’m amazed I actually got through it and lived to tell the tale.’ While lying on a trolley in a corridor, she was ‘intimately examined’, but given no food or water for two days. Williams now understood perfectly what the private/public partnership meant: go ‘private’ and receive swift treatment, while Joe Public expires on an unattended gurney.
‘The place,’ Kerrie Williams reports, ‘was in chaos.’ The new hospital cost £177 million and was built under the scheme whereby the private sector (the same contractors we have met, time and again, on our circuit) throws up something fast and glitzy – and rents it to the NHS. A sweetheart deal. Plenty of glass, generous parking bays and very few beds. Consultants (unconsulted) warned that the Darent Valley Hospital would be too small and that there would be long delays in the A & E Department. In other words, inner city conditions would apply to the perimeter, to Kent. You won’t find the drug war casualties of Hackney, mercenaries hosed from the forecourts of night petrol stations. You’ll have to make do with road rage, the boredom-stompings of Thamesmead, pub brawls. Feuding inbreeds. The BNP Calibans of economic decline. Middle-class families walking across fields attacked by hammer-wielding maniacs.
The Department of Health may not be much use at delivering hospitals that work, but they are very good at charts, projections, tick-the-box quizzes. The flagship Darent Valley Hospital was judged (in September 2001) to be ‘one of the worst in the country’. Its rating by the Department’s new classification system was: zero. Zilch. The pits of the pits.
We step out of Dartford station into a non-negotiable nexus of underpasses and flyovers. The retail fly-trap with its herringbone-brick roads and freakishly thin clock tower is known as ‘The Orchard’. It is of course barren and treeless. It acts as a reservation of New Commerce, an escape from the declining Spital Street, the deceased High Street. ‘Spital’, as a signifier, belongs to the era when Watling Street was still an active concern, when positive discrimination invaders (Romans, Vikings) were marching through – bringing leprosy and the ‘sekness that men called ye pokkes’. Dartford was an important staging post on the road to Canterbury, a hill to climb. Workhouse became hospital, became asylum. Isolation was the pitch. The desolation of the marshes (liable to flooding) made Dartford a prime site for pox hospitals, tents for contagious diseases.
The Wat Tyler pub offers: PEASANTS REVOLT BITTER. £1-49 PNT. 3.8 PC. WAT TYLER AND SEVERAL OF THE COMMONS CALLED AT THIS ANCIENT TAVERN (SO IT IS SAID) TO QUENCH THEIR THIRST WITH FLAGONS OF ALE.
Negotiating a route to Joyce Green Hospital, we find ourselves on Temple Hill; commercial imperatives overrule travel information. B & Q. CLEARWATER OPEN FOR BUSINESS AS USUAL. A Mercedes dealership with a forest of flags. A walk of ‘about twenty minutes’ (pitched by the woman in the breakfast caff) stretches into an hour of uncrossable bypass, marsh mud, site-specific rain. My plate of ham and eggs has been sprayed with a silver film. I can’t decide whether to eat it or to have it framed.
Dr Burne is waiting in an office in the Postgraduate Building, sucking at a mug of tea, tapping on a tin of biscuits. The hospital estate with its winged design, its outbuildings, open-air corridors, flower beds and shrubberies, is posthumous. We’re used to that, we’ve come to expect it: good-humoured resignation, folk hanging about in warm rooms nibbling through the remaining stock of chocolate digestives. Waiting for the rumble of JCBs, the skips and Portakabins.
‘What’s your interest?’ Burne challenges. He’s seen off plenty of time-wasters, professionally bored media casuals, work experience docu-directors asked to knock up three minutes on TB or cholera. The doctor is alert, gold-spectacled, silver-bearded and forward-leaning. ‘Trams, plants or smallpox?’
‘All,’ Renchi says, playing safe.
‘And you?’ Burne prods his stick at me.
‘Poking about anywhere that wants to keep us out.’
That satisfies the archivist. He’s on his feet and heading for the door. ‘Come on. What are you waiting for? There’s plenty of ground to cover.’
Long retired from his work as consultant pathologist at Joyce Green, th
e doctor devotes himself to its history. He could be Renchi, twenty years down the line: wind-scoured, wrinkled, bald on top. He wears a bright red sweater, dark blue, weatherproof jacket and a Russian hat. He moves rapidly and in bursts, a silent movie: Trotsky on the trot. Renchi, in his flapping headgear (yak herdsman), struggles to keep up.
‘Swollen toe, not gout,’ says Burne, excusing the stick. The glass-roofed, open-sided walkways are suntraps: one long avenue pivoting into another, a true arcade project. With views on a miraculous garden. Here, diseased Londoners could be aired, cobwebs blown off by river breezes. Blended zephyrs: exotic plants, sewage farm and byre.
Joyce Green was a hospital, or series of hospitals, surrounded by farmland. The 1778 map in Hasted’s History of Kent shows four farms on the Dartford marshes. ‘Joyces’ stood beside a lane, leading to Long Reach, which was lost in the 1953 floods. Richard Joyce worked a gravel pit on land acquired by the hospital. His farm enjoyed fresh water from a loop of the Darent and gave good grazing, the soil was rich from regular inundations by the Thames.
Some 341 acres of farmland were purchased by the Metropolitan Asylums Board for £24,815: the Joyce Green Smallpox Hospital, opened in 1903, was the final element in the Dartford colony. Dartford, it had been decided, was the ideal distance from London for the treatment (or removal) of Lunatics and the Contaminated: madness and the pox. There were asylums and schools for imbecile children.
Cattle from Joyce Green farm returned from the marshes by a circuitous route that took them through the hospital grounds. Cows peered in at ward windows. Great, slow, curious beasts stared at convalescents in the airing courts. They grazed the hospital lawns where the grass was too tough for hand-mowers.
Dr Ricketts, a medical supervisor of fierce reputation, was granted a vivisection licence in 1904 to experiment on farm animals, to hack them about as part of his investigation into smallpox. The notion that cattle might be affected by East Enders taking their dose of pale sunlight is a nice reversal of Edward Jenner’s pioneering research. Jenner discovered that humans could be protected from smallpox by the use of fluid taken from vesicles found on the udders of infected cows.
London Orbital Page 45