Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  Talking about this period, Platts-Mills said: ‘Probably, on reflection, Joan’s ideas were never of much interest to the powers-that-be, but what a difference they might have made in removing the dead hand of building contractors, architects, landowners and surveyors which has lain so expensively on Britain’s Cultural Industry and which the Dome so clearly represents.’ The failure of the Fun Palace along with the construction of that millennial tent on the East Greenwich peninsula were the moments of fracture. Stratford abdicated its fixed identity and willingly prostituted itself as a backdrop for experimental malls, rail hubs and computer-generated Olympic parks. The O2 Arena was New Labour’s Xerox of the Littlewood Fun Palace, a circus that was all sideshow, freak show, bringing the dead back as holograms. Making the whole idea of fun terminally depressing.

  When they offered us a full-time contract at Chobham Farm, we took the paperwork to an overgrown cemetery, where we signed away our freelance identities. Like Platts-Mills we had traded on connections, public school or film school, but that was all over. It looked very much as if we were in this for the duration. Every day we explored another thicket on the marshes, another backriver. When we climbed the mounds, to roam or kick a ball, we looked out over a classic edgeland of inconvenient, dirty, fly-by-night enterprises and abortive pastoral relics. Industrial hoists. Football pitches. A cycle track. A river shared by oarsmen, narrowboat dwellers, dog-walkers, wanderers who were not filmed, not challenged by security, trusted to make their own mistakes.

  Tom Baker

  The view from the converted squash court, into the green lozenge of a hidden garden, carried me back to another, older England; one that had been there all along, out of reach, conforming to unwritten rules and prohibitions that were more real than those who serviced them. I remember Tom’s home in Berkshire, from student days, and how, after the evening meal, there was a special cloth for the glasses, another for the cutlery; colonial habits respected long after the age of servants was over. Tom’s father, a senior civil servant, produced a guide to Spanish architecture and asked us what we intended to visit and why, which churches, museums, sites of cultural significance. When, in truth, there was nothing ahead of us but the open road; accidental discoveries and encounters, Velázquez, Goya, El Greco, in parallel with a dubbed version of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause at an open-air cinema in Barcelona, and the crowd at a bloody, small-town bullfight hooting and chanting when a black American tourist won a television set in the between-bouts bingo session. You could see the glint of the Mediterranean over the low white wall, new apartments rising from the dirt shore. Coming back through France, after two months sleeping under the stars, we tried the tent for the first time: only to discover that it had been stolen.

  Every journey out of London in 2009, if it’s not made on foot or by water, is a negotiation with rage, frustration, stalled traffic, confusing signs, cone avenues without a hint of work in progress. The run to Thedden Grange was no exception. I won’t rehearse the tedious details, but that motorway shudder, the weariness, is with us as we sit in the gallery above the former squash court, taking solace from a visible square of mastered garden. Palpable evidence of a job well done gave Tom permission to perch in an easy chair, rest a book in his lap, sift the Financial Times. He left London in the mid 1970s, part of a group who were buying a large country house, with stables, cottages, land. After Chobham Farm and work as an occasional builder, he never went back to film. He contributed to the Hackney 8mm diary, and then began to shoot, on Super-8, his own lyrical ‘songs’, multiple superimpositions in forests and fields as a final renunciation of the burden of narrative. The fiddle of editing. What passed through the camera, that was the story.

  Treating memoir as an element within a larger social argument, I had to pay some attention to structure. Could I trust my unsupported account of our days at Chobham Farm? Now that my blue-paper journals had vanished. Laying out the photographs on Tom’s table, I saw at once how he responded to details I had chosen to ignore or play down. He was struck by the romance of youth, the floor-length cloak and shoulder-length hair of his first wife. And our curious notion that a walk over the mud dunes and railside paddocks of Stratford constituted a suitable Sunday-afternoon outing for the family. Bridget Baker, smiling gamely, carries the Bolex in her gloved hand. In the background are hoists, pylons, tower blocks. In junkshop coats and wellington boots, we are a time-travelling Pre-Raphaelite coven rambling through a Tarkovsky wilderness. Climbing the track towards the site where the Clays Lane community estate would be built – and destroyed – we were harbingers of the coming plague of surveyors, hard-hat engineers, fence erectors. Toxic blight was all around, the ghost milk of dying industries. Accompanied by an ecology of resistance and unsponsored fecundity. The women wrap themselves in their military coats and woollen cloaks. The men grin. Anna is photographed in front of a board announcing: MAJOR ROAD WORKS AHEAD.

  I decided to record Tom’s version of our period at Chobham Farm. He was happy to take part in this exercise, offering an improvised meal, salad and wine, on his return from a stint as a gardener. He did two half-days a week, helping to manage private estates in the area, and spent the rest of the time looking after the vegetable beds at Thedden Grange. This, as might be expected, was a complicated arrangement. The philosophical basis of the original community had been factored by practical considerations. There were systems within systems. Four people agreed to sign up to Tom’s scheme: that he would dig, plant and service the vegetable garden. For a fee. Pick as much as you like. Three stakeholders would pay. One wanted to take a part in the labour, independently, but supervised by Tom, for credit in terms of the crop. There were further difficulties. What, for example, if you spurned Brussels sprouts and craved a bumper dividend of mangetout peas? As might be imagined, such theological niceties led to hours of discussion and debate, of the kind that make communal life so challenging. For Tom, there were contemplative silences to be relished as he bent over the trenches. He prepared the soil, he sowed the seed: he did not harvest, weigh out, make division. If he frustrated greenfly and other pests, he had to do it without chemicals. The pitch was organic, its laborious methodology would have been approved by the Prince of Wales. In its tedium was a necessary virtue.

  When Judith, another former Hackney resident and our fellow guest at Tom’s table, spoke of ‘the community’, I thought of Iris Murdoch and The Bell. This was not the enforced, all-for-one against the greater evil, of the Chobham workers. This was a voluntary alliance of urban escapees, solicitous, in their differing ways, of the good life. A community of interest which, having survived thirty-five years of separations, schisms, marriages, children and grandchildren, was itself interesting. And settled, established, viable. Hidden at the end of a wooded drive. Screened behind walls of dark strawberry-coloured brick. Clock towers, dovecots, dairies. Lines of large cars parked on gravel.

  Tom’s squash court was a permanently ongoing project. His computer, wedged into a corner, balanced over a sheer drop to the floor below. There was no supporting rail alongside the improvised stairs. But the room was pleasantly occupied, wood burnished in early-evening light: a long table, plenty of books. Falling Man by Don DeLillo had been taken out of the library for the second time, when Tom failed to crack it at the first attempt. He wouldn’t be contriving the screenplay for David Cronenberg, who seemed to be involved with a one-man campaign to turn a collection of modern first editions – Burroughs, Ballard, Martin Amis and now DeLillo’s Cosmopolis – into over-respectful movie interpretations. A heritage of sanitized nonconformity.

  I had been talking about swimming in the Usk, a cold brown river in the rain. Tom mentioned his birthday. He had set out with his girlfriend for a drive through the New Forest, before a celebratory supper at Ikea in Southampton. Never before had he experienced a hot dog. ‘One of those long sausage things, rather good.’ And you could drink as much fizz as you wanted from the dispenser. For 30p. 8 July: a day to remember.

 
‘I’ve read about the place where you stayed in a John le Carré novel,’ Tom said. ‘My son gave it to me for Christmas.’ He meant the country-house fishing hotel, nestling above the Usk, a mile or so outside Crickhowell on the Welsh borders. ‘Something odd happens there, a meeting, Philby and Graham Greene.’

  I knew that he had the wrong author, a very reasonable mistake. The thriller in question flags a comparison with Le Carré on the cover. It’s by Chris Petit and it’s called The Passenger. Petit knew that hotel and used it as the setting for an assignation between English spooks, as recalled by a dead American: James Jesus Angleton, the certifiably paranoid poet of the CIA. Angleton, like Jeremy Paxman, had been to school a few miles down the road at Malvern. If the world was an ungodly conspiracy, he was the one weaving it: out of his own sweaty entrails. History, Petit reckoned, was a series of mislaid files edited by a posthumous dreamer. Pretty much everything going on in contemporary geopolitics fits between two of the most dramatic grand projects: the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and the Beijing Games of 2008. When Chris made a film in Berlin, prophesying the collapse of the Wall and exploiting metaphors of cultural leakage, he called it Chinese Boxes.

  ‘Interesting book, but I couldn’t get my head round it,’ Tom confessed. ‘I let it sit too long between sessions. I could never figure out what was happening, who was alive and who was dead.’

  The Thedden Grange episode, as darkness enveloped the garden and familiar shapes dressed themselves in an attractive ambiguity, was another debriefing. Another attempt to fix the past. Judith told us that she was keeping a journal. Her work took her out on the road, long hours at the wheel, up and down the country; before she checked in at another strange hotel, to appear in court, next morning, as an expert witness. She relished the cut and thrust of the trial, the forensic precision of language in her meticulously prepared evidence. Every night, without fail, she recorded her observations. This meal, she assured us, would be documented. We were playing a part.

  I had been on the move now for six months, promoting an old book and researching a new one: riding buses on a Freedom Pass, scribbling notes, walking too fast through unfamiliar cities. I was beginning to believe that I would never return to Hackney. Where Tom was fixed in an incomplete ark, which he was condemned to revise and improve on a daily basis, I was stuck on the Bunyan treadmill of elsewhere. I was becoming addicted to my status as a Travelodge tramp: check in, not too far from the airport, scrape breakfast from pre-filled containers, before another hike through industrial dereliction, generic malls, hapless public art dumped in windy, privately owned squares. A catalogue of unfunny punchlines without the necessary preamble. Everything, from my exhaustion to the spread of Chobham photographs, to the consciousness that individual witnesses were forming their own versions of a lingering meal, pushed this event closer to Petit’s interpretation of middle-class English society as a spy story. In the spirit of Michelangelo Antonioni, he demonstrates that the set always overwhelms its incidental human puppets: dry fucks in empty swimming pools carpeted in the curled leaves of dumped newsreels. A Petit out-take from The Passenger imagined Angleton visiting Philby’s house at Crowborough in Sussex. Finding the hard-drinking spook away from home, and having to deal with a bitter wife, Angleton is trapped in the febrile stasis of an English summer: unraked gravel drive, burnt lawn, an embarrassment of rhododendrons. Boredom, as his shirt sticks to his back, and he sniffs the foxy reek of the captive woman, becomes transcendent. This is the place, here is the story. Petit takes cricket as a metaphor for espionage, double-dealing, civilized treachery. The off-break delivered with a leg-break action: the Chinaman.

  Crowborough has a marginal distinction that Petit does not mention. It is the town where Edwin and Willa Muir translated The Castle by Franz Kafka. Windlesham Manor, once the home of Conan Doyle, is the most famous literary shrine in the area. After the death of the creator of Sherlock Holmes in 1930, the house was ritually exorcized.

  These were some of my fictions as I invited Tom to dredge up his account of our Chobham Farm days. I was hoping for details I’d missed. The kind I stumbled on when digital technology allowed me to freeze-frame the VHS tape of the old diary films. I saw myself in the bath reading a letter I’d forgotten from an American woman, the mother of a friend who had gone missing, so it appeared, in Afghanistan. Before this man set off on his great adventure, the mother, English-born but long resident in New York, treated us to a meal at Rule’s in Covent Garden. She recalled, a highlight of her youth as a publisher’s secretary, being propositioned, over lunch, by a rather flushed Graham Greene.

  I took Tom right back to the start. We relocated to a corner near the kitchen. He had crafted the work surfaces, fittings and cupboards, but left out the sink. He fetched water from the floor below in a plastic bowl, saying that he relished the inconvenience. It taught him patience. A proper kitchen was at least thirty years in the making. He flicked through the photographs for a few moments and then spoke, without hesitation, laughing over forgotten follies, the innocence of those times. Stratford East: 1971.

  I don’t know that I gave up on film, but film had given up on me. Chobham only started a few months before we went there. It was clearly set up to circumvent the docks. Once the container system was in place, containers could be unloaded anywhere. We were dealing with mixed containers. They had to be emptied. A container might have goods in it from ten different companies.

  They came off a ship in the docks, on to a lorry. And instead of having to pay the dockers to unpack it, they sussed that they could recruit the riff-raff of the world. Which was us. On the lowest possible wages.

  That was my interest in Chobham. The people who had drifted in from everywhere. They had no careers, they went from job to job. I didn’t get to know many of my fellow workers very well. I was struck by one man, an old man, he’d been a waiter on a train. A steward. Serving meals on night trains to Scotland.

  My strongest memory of that winter was of February 1972, the earliest flower to come out in England. I can’t remember its name. It pokes its nose out of the rubble. In the darkest days of the year, a yellow daisy.

  So much of the stuff in the containers got broken. One of the saddest sights was the goods coming back from Australia, domestic stuff, tea chests of emigrants who had decided to come home. If you fill a tea chest up completely, it’s bloody heavy. Pots and pans and books. We found it very difficult to unload tea chests without damaging the goods. Everyday domestic things were tipped out on the floor.

  There was a lot of root ginger at one time. Chickpeas too. I was eating chickpeas for months and they’re not very tasty. Sacks of chickpeas.

  The worst thing was plastic glazing material. Whole containers full of the stuff. We didn’t have the equipment to unload them. We had to do it by hand. That was ghastly.

  The most fun was driving the forklift truck. You press the left-hand side of the accelerator and you go forward. You press the right-hand side and you go back. It’s very quick. Two levers to lift or lower the forks. And another to tip them back and forth. You have three movements going on at the same time. It was lots of fun.

  I wasn’t frustrated by working in such a cold, dirty environment for so little money. There were no facilities, but I didn’t want facilities. In the tea breaks, everyone else would go into the tearoom and play cards. You and I would sit outside on the forklifts and read the newspapers. Mostly we had to read the Sun, because that’s what people left lying around. I don’t think I ever bought a paper. I do remember reading a book. I read The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Wonderful. I must have read Thoreau’s Walden at that time.

  I do remember being horrified, quite late on, when I discovered that staff, the office staff, had a separate lavatory. Which had its own key, to stop the riff-raff getting in. I thought, ‘Shit! This isn’t right.’ I can see now, thinking about how filthy we were, that the social distinction might not have been such a bad thing.

  We were a little different. John the forem
an knew that we would understand things. We could do forms. We had to fill in these forms when they took us on. And, foolishly, we put down all our degrees. They did tease us about that. Mostly they said, ‘Wow, what are you doing here?’

  There was a certain sense of liberation in this. You didn’t have to feel guilty about not having a career. I had no idea really what the hell I was doing. Not at all. I’d stopped making money out of film, but I hadn’t started making anything out of building, painting and decorating.

  I left Chobham because my son, Ned, was about to be born. Most people who are having a child try and earn more money. I became unemployed. Family was more important, I thought. With hindsight, my attitude was totally irresponsible.

  I can’t remember what else I did. Motorbike messenger? That was in the winter. I skidded in the snow on Old Street. A year or two later, I got a job in a tomato greenhouse. Then Renchi’s brother-in-law asked us to work on his house in Essex – so I gave up the greenhouse. And learnt a bit more about being a builder. I’ve done that for ever.