London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  Tennyson made his way to Dr Allen’s madhouse. ‘The association,’ Essex historian William Addison wrote, ‘was calamitous for both.’ The poet was persuaded to invest in one of Allen’s schemes: mechanical wood-carving. The Patent Decorative Carving and Sculpture Company was formed. Tennyson risked all the money raised by the sale of his small estate at Grasby, Lincolnshire. The company crashed, Allen was declared bankrupt. Tennyson’s marriage was ‘indefinitely’ postponed, he was left with no means of support.

  The best of High Beach was its obscurity, views over the Lea Valley and Waltham Abbey: ‘Ring out, wild bells.’ The M25 couldn’t have happened to a better place, a silver stream bringing light and life.

  Dr Matthew Allen, asylum keeper, floater of companies, drank with Tennyson at the Sterling Club (in London); long smoky sessions in the garden. (Anything to postpone the return.) It was after one of these binges that Tennyson experienced the classic High Beach epiphany – and experienced it, characteristically, as a downer. The lights of the city shimmering through forest darkness: ‘flaring like a dreary dawn’.

  The stress, the poisoned psyches of the city: Allen was a pioneer in mental health relocation. Fee-paying sylvan benevolence. Lunatics hidden in Epping Forest, where they could wander or be put to work. A private enterprise that anticipated late-Victorian asylum colonies. Allen’s converted farms were the direct descendants of the madhouses of Hackney and Hoxton. The sort of ‘private home’ in Bethnal Green to which the visionary poet Christopher Smart had been committed.

  It was reported, in a letter from James Spedding, that Tennyson (who spent a fortnight with Allen) was ‘delighted with the mad people’. They represented, the poet felt, the only civilised company to be had in the forest. William Addison is convinced that Tennyson met one of Allen’s most celebrated patients. This unfortunate had been boarded in High Beach at the expense of his friends. A country lyricist who had been the sensation of the last season. A Fenland yokel lionised by London society: John Clare, Peasant Poet, naturalist. Yesterday’s man.

  London drew Clare and hurt him. He remembered the funeral procession of Lord Byron, playhouses with ‘morts of tumbling’. He saw what Cockney fools failed to recognise, the living ghosts of Chancery Lane. He stayed late, and silent, at every function to which he was brought; so that he might delay the solitary walk back to his lodgings. In Northampton Asylum, he would become an emanation of Byron. As Don Juan, he ventriloquised a posthumous voice – by an act of occult possession (as Blake revised the ‘errors’ of Milton).

  Clare imagined, so the doctors said, that he was being punished, imprisoned for bigamy – for a first spiritual marriage, unconfirmed by civil ceremony. His phantom bride already buried in Glinton churchyard, Clare did what any sane man would do, he took off on his epic ‘Journey Out of Essex’. Three and a half days walking back to Northborough (in Northants). Gnawing grass torn up from the roadside, chewing tobacco. Without drink. Apart from a pint bought with coins thrown to him by migrant farm labourers. ‘Foot foundered and broken down’, he completed his hallucinatory voyage. Without maps or money, Clare fixed his bearings by sleeping with his head pointing to the north.

  We calculated that this journey, which we were determined to repeat, was around 120 miles. Or the distance of the M25 if it were stretched out into a straight line. Fugue as exorcism: Clare’s walk successfully performed the ritual we were toying with. He’d been in the forest long enough to understand the peculiarity of its status as a memorial to a featureless and unreachable past, a living stormbreak at the limit of urban projection.

  When Clare, reunited with his corporeal wife, came to write up the journal of his escape, he gave it the correct title: ‘Journey Out of Essex’. An expulsion. A rejection. The last of London and ambition. The last of healing and mending; digging, crow-scaring, rambling. The acceptance of the dream, the multiple world. His prose is excited, incantatory, essential. He has to rewalk that road in a seizure. He has to remember to remember; to call up details before they fade. The pains. The errors. Extra miles tramped on miscalculation. There is no better, no more implicated account of the necessity of walking. Clare’s motivation was so much more powerful than our own. The Great North Road was still a route down which everything and everyone travelled; coaches, gypsies, farmers, the military, masterless workmen. The M25 goes nowhere; it’s self-referential, postmodern, ironic. Modestly corrupt. It won’t make sense until it’s been abandoned, grown over. (Like the airfields of Middle England, the dormitory villages, the concrete bunkers in corn fields, the nuclear shelters disguised as farmhouses.)

  Clare’s walk was an act of love. But the version he gave the world was already at one remove, a condemned cell confession. A forged diary rapidly assembled to rationalise an ecstatic episode. It went wrong so quickly, his return. Disgruntled wife, too many children. A cold cottage in an alien village. He had seen the enclosures. He had been wandering in the fields when men came to carry out their survey for the railway company. The landscape didn’t know him. He would be removed to spend the rest of his life in Northampton Asylum.

  He spurned newspaper ‘blarney’, false obituaries. He had seen his Mary ‘alive and well and as young as ever’. But his walk, undertaken in the spirit of Werner Herzog’s tramp from Munich to Paris (to rescue a friend from cancer), had failed: he confirmed his love’s death, filled her mouth with earth. He brought himself back to reality: ‘homeless at home and half gratified to feel that I can be happy any where’.

  The story told in a few scribbled pages. An epitaph. Before they took him away. The diary finishes with quotation marks, opened but unclosed.

  ‘and how can I forget

  No period. Nothing lachrymose. No pokerwork homily over the fireplace. A technical demand. The point of any journey, any life: how can I forget?

  ‘Foot foundered and broken down.’ Moose Jackson, hobbling and groaning through the outskirts of Waltham Abbey, was paying a very direct homage to Clare. ‘I then entered a town and some of the chamber windows had candle lights shining in them – I felt so weak here that I forced to sit down on the ground to rest myself.’

  It didn’t come to that, not quite, but the road was much further than it looked from the hill. The illuminated tower of the abbey church, appearing over the roofs, kept us going. I walked with Kevin. He was almost done; he understood that it would be more painful to stop than to carry on. There was only one stop left in him.

  Church and grounds are painted with searchlight beams. Renchi, at long last, pilgrimage completed, finds an unlocked door. We have to witness the astrological ceiling, the wall-painting in the side chapel (a fifteenth-century Doom mural). Unseen, it predicted our journey. In darkness, we set out. And in darkness we returned.

  The side chapel belonged to the townspeople, not the monks. The Doom painting, this M25 Day of Judgement, was a premature motorway dream: a traffic-directing God, angels blowing down upraised traffic cones. Heaven and Hell. The godly, the ratepayers, led by a bishop into the church, while a mob of naked revellers plunge into Hell’s mouth (otherwise known as Purfleet). Demons lurk on Rainham Marshes in the form of saw-toothed river creatures who have managed to crawl ashore. The ‘London Orbital’ is a medieval nightmare.

  We expected to find Kevin where we left him, hooked over Harold’s stone, sobbing. His hair – which turned grey in the course of the walk from Theydon Bois – was slicked into a dripping caul. He was like something lifted from the Doom painting. The flying jacket, launched with such confidence in Staines, now justified its combat status. A wrinkled body bag. There was a black plinth in the burial ground: NIGHT NIGHT TOM. But Kevin had vanished. Evaporated. Slipped away into the darkness.

  We try the pub, the Welsh Harp. Double brandies are lined up on the bar. Better not to look at Kevin’s feet. I pull out the plasters, a needle to pop blisters; Renchi provides the red socks. Lodged at a table, drinks coming at regular intervals, on a nod to the publican, Kevin is returned to life. A story is a story. How long does
it take before actuality, blood and pain, is safely registered as memory? Before it is written up.

  The Welsh Harp is another hinge. The M25 trance is over, I have to begin a new memory project, a novel set in Wales. Here’s to Walter Savage Landor, David Jones, the Vaughan Twins. It’s very companionable in the old pub. Another round, a cigar. Colour returning to Kevin’s bloodless fingers as they grip the glass.

  We leave him where he is. As far as I know, he’s there still. He’s probably taken out membership at the Waltham Abbey library. Signed up for night classes in runic prophecy and Pataphysics. He’ll never make it across the market square to the mini-cab office. And they haven’t got any available cabs. He’s come to the end of the line, a Captain Bones exile in the ‘Admiral Benbow’. (‘This is a handy cove,’ says he, at length; ‘and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?’)

  Red-and-green streamers, Christmas lights, have been strung across the square – in anticipation of the Millennium Eve. Packs of tarot cards, essential oils, Egyptian cats and figurines are waiting in the New Age shop. Renchi and I head off on what now seems like a very short walk to the station.

  Millennium Eve

  There was a certain amount of discussion about dates: is it really the end of the century, the Millennium? Will the computers go haywire, bringing planes out of the sky? Or are we in for another misjudged English party with damp squibs?

  The burghers of Waltham Abbey are very good at getting their hangovers in early, before they start on the serious celebrations. The damp town is bilious, yellow-tongued. (Looking forward to the drama of the spring floods.) Anna agreed to run us up the Lea Valley, to drop us, once again, at Harold’s grave.

  30 December 1999. Renchi is back at work. Kevin has vanished – taken up residence in the Welsh Harp? Our orbital walk might never have happened. Marc Atkins is prepared to reverse that first excursion, out from the Dome. To mend the mistake, his damaged foot. He’s dressed for action: woollen commando beanie, tartan scarf, slithery non-combatant jacket. Camera. Film in pocket. No bags. Nothing to carry. A trick Kevin never learnt.

  This time, we collect Marc from Limehouse. I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings or delays. He is signing on as official war photographer: to witness the final and absolute dissolution of the Millennium Dome.

  Unconvinced drizzle. It’s still dark. Sky-leakage. No notes to be kept. My photo journal is a reflex indulgence, now that Marc is present. The cold eye of the landscape valuer.

  We climb the embankment to the M25. We check out the spot where Bill Drummond kissed tarmac. It’s quite emotional, this parting from an old friend. Not much road traffic, nothing on the river. The sound, back in the abbey, was so precise, in the cold early-morning air; reinforcing the status of the church as an island within an island. By the time we reach the Lee, that clarity is lost. A solitary blue hut. Marc fumbles in the dark, changing his film. Then, just as he clicks the back of the camera shut, lights come on. Harsh, white. The lock is wired. The hut lit like a target.

  Neck twisted, left eye closed, Marc squats beside the road, resting his Nikon on the crash barrier. With these photographs, the status of the M25 changes: it becomes historic, monumental. Fixed. Previously, in snapshots and sketches, it was family. No obligation to perform. Belt and braces, knotted handkerchief on head. ‘Hold that’ was neither spoken, nor implied. Marc’s concentration, his technique, brings the motorway into the canon, sets it alongside roads in other countries. That’s the difference between a packet of colour snaps and a commissioned portrait. You gain dignity, lose accident.

  Already, we can see the blinking pyramid at the summit of the Canary Wharf tower, lined up with pylons and the black rule of water. RIFLES pub at Enfield Lock wishes: MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL. Santa’s head like a trophy, above the Lee Enfield on the awning. Bagged one.

  Too wet to dawdle. We push on towards Ponders End. A rose-red wall bellies out in a way that appeals to Marc. It’s topped with broken glass and razor wire. To protect a Flour Mill?

  Ponders End, I like to think, is the model for Gerald Kersh’s Fowlers End. The 1958 novel by the prolific Kersh has always been Michael Moorcock’s favourite: ‘Everything in it is designed to reach the smallest possible audience – unpopular subject – sleazy characters – very funny.’ Moorcock wrote a foreword when the book was reissued. Fowlers End is the antidote to the whimsy of Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford, Bernard Miles, the charming stock company of British character actors in The Smallest Show on Earth. Which was released, to indulgent reviews and modest box-office success, in the year that Kersh’s ‘unpopular’ novel was published. Film and book exploit the same theme: the death of an independent cinema. One is sentimental, quirky and comic, while the other is deranged. Kersh is a master of haywire demotic, prose on the charge. At his best, as in Fowlers End, he achieves that impossible thing: he comes out as a Jewish Céline.

  This is how you find Fowlers End – by going northward, step by step, into the neighbourhoods that most strongly repel you. The compass of your revulsion may flicker for a moment at the end of the Tottenham Court Road, especially on a rainy March morning…

  Do not be led astray by this; go north to Edmonton and Ponders End. Who Ponder was and how he ended, the merciful God knows. Once upon a time it was a quagmire; now it is a swamp, biding its time. Further yet, bearing northeast, lies a graveyard of broken boilers and rusty wheels… where creatures that once were men live in abandoned railway carriages…

  Here the city gives up the game.

  This is it.

  Fowlers End is a special kind of tundra that supports nothing gracious in the way of flora and fauna… Even the dogs are throw-backs to their yellow-eyed predatory ancestors that slunk in the trail of sub-men and ate filth. There is a High Street about a hundred yards long, and the most woebegone railway terminal on the face of the earth…

  Flattering but true, Kersh’s travelogue needs no revision. Ponders End is a knot in the railway, roadkill returned to life. There’s a pub called the Falcon, with a yellow field gun parked outside; presumably ‘borrowed’ from the Small Arms Factory at Enfield. The gun strikes a sinister note, as it fails to protect a trashed telephone kiosk and a crop of tower blocks, SORRY NO TRAVELLERS. Reasonable advice. But sticking a howitzer on the pavement is excessive.

  Rain seeps and slithers. The PONDERS END WORKING MENS CLUB, for all its pebbledash pretensions, can’t have many bona fide members. Who works? Five or six bright windows in a plantation of tower blocks. Recidivists used to perpetual illumination, overhead lights that can’t be switched off. Twenty-four-hour dealers. Insomniacs rummaging through medicine cabinets.

  SALON SNIPPETS PAITIENT MODELS REQUIRED FOR FOILS/CUTTING + NAIL EXTENSIONS. Marc of course has experience in hairdressing. He shaves his own skull, cuts the hair of his partner (and anyone else who is up for it). But the deployment of ‘foils’ is a sophistication he hasn’t acquired. Colour pads pressed to the head in a curious rite.

  Ponders End is bereft of the ‘paitient’, models or otherwise. The place is deserted. A Dalmatian picking through a heap of burst bin bags; wolf-red eyes. Noise is a constant: speeding trains, fork-lift trucks which bleep as they reverse, generators, sirens. An industrial soundtrack and no industry.

  A trembling refugee, sheltering under the railway bridge, won’t admit that the town runs to a cafe. He shakes his head, astonished at the idea. A security man from the Flour Mill thinks that there might be somewhere ‘foreign’, ten minutes down the road.

  He’s right. It is foreign. And schizophrenic. CLOSED CAFE OPEN. The fry-up is excellent (‘bubble and bacon’), the tables clean. It must be a front for something. We are the only customers. Marc loves Ponders End. ‘I only photograph empty railway lines, empty streets,’ he says. ‘People – I find a way to keep them out.’

  Settled at his Formica desk, he taps messages into his new mobile phone; receives his first calls. He’s been given a £20,000 commission to photograph mathematicians. The
show at the National Institute for Medical Research is clinched.

  The harder the rain comes down, the faster we stride. We’re erasing everything we investigated on the original walk. The smoke from the burning stack at the London Waste facility in Edmonton is indistinguishable from river mist, spray from the elevated carriageway. The sky has dropped.

  Under the canal bridge, where something aspirational has been attempted with cobbles, we find a pair of abandoned ankleboots. Marc rearranges them, darting about to find the best angle; as if, by the ritual of photography, he could conjure up the presence of the woman who kicked them off. Before vanishing for ever.

  The blighted townscape, where North Circular passes over Lee, is unrevised. Carrier bags trapped in thorny thickets. Rubbish infiltrating chainlink fences. Yellow and black barriers. Humps in the road. A retail park. Flooded fields. Marc, on the central reservation, surfs wheel-spray, as he records volatile waves of traffic.

  London rushes at us, tightens the cord. Kersh depicts a city swollen with bad gas, a straining belly eager to disgorge itself on unprotected ground: ‘Expanding city population, plus your expanding heavy industry, plus, of course, rising land values in your outlying suburbs. Well, that’s what I’m out here for.’ Predatory industrialists, compliant politicians. They live to work the margins, unloved land. As do writers and photographers, the thrill of the spurned. New narratives of dereliction.

  The grey concrete walls of the sewage beds at Markfield Recreation Ground, South Tottenham, have been blitzed with aerosol colour, image and text. Robots. Androids. Beast-men with zap weaponry. Spike-breasted women in (blood splashed) bikini briefs. Tags. Spurts. Slogans. SHIT VEGAN. A communal album. Any artist is free to revise, improve, distort. Urban pictographs we don’t have time to decode.