Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  This fissured corner of the Thames Estuary sucked poetry from entropy. Drawing on anecdotes overheard in a cavernous pub, in mourning for the days of smugglers and traffickers, I found my characters a farmhouse in which to hide. You could smell London on the river’s sour breath, but you looked out on a broadening channel. Less than an hour from Whitechapel and the pressure was off. In caravans and chalets, along the edge of the marshes, boredom is refined, by managed despair, into that emptiness of mind sought by monks and prisoners. In bunkering down on the Isle of Grain, you did your time, uncaptured, unsupervised. Stories happen without the teller.

  Launching the new walk by photographing Anna outside the British Pilot pub was plunging straight back into the sea-fret of a Stephen King shocker. Into Radon Daughters. ‘An off-limits anachronism proud of its non-history, its forgetfulness,’ I wrote. ‘The only customers are inbreeds with mercury eyes, their credit exhausted.’ There is nowhere else to go, you have become a stateless ghost. ‘Detached from the city, the voyagers had no life. No points of reference, nothing to hate. London Stone was a mockery, a name on the map, a minor geological feature marking the entrance to the rivulet.’

  I came to the British Pilot with Chris Petit, when he was researching a film inspired by the Essex Range Rover massacre, the period when club doormen became the dominant players in a culture of ecstasy-peddling, cross-channel cannabis importation. And torture by kitchen implements, DIY accessories, in imposed Barratt estates on the cliffs above Thurrock Lakeside. Gyms that looked like clubs and clubs like gyms. Steroid psychoses: coke, speed, puff and all-round red-eyed craziness. Wrenched teeth in fluffy towels. Sticky puddles on laminate floors. Patterns of blood-spray stencilled on aubergine walls. Quentin Tarantino helming Location, Location.

  Petit had the idea that a writer, so far off the scene that his collected journalistic effusions had just been published as a posthumous tribute, could do the dialogue. This burnt-out junkie, by keeping away from daylight, hunkering down with cats and computer, acquired a Hunter-Thompson-of-the-suburbs reputation. He blogged bands nobody knew. He riffed on throwaway gestures by actors who didn’t act. The man had a genius for disappearance. He hadn’t print-published for years: if he did get around to you, you were mutton on the slab. The Essex Boy patter he delivered for Petit was magnificent in its madness, Jacobean arias of linguistic mayhem. Which was why the director bundled his man into the tomato-coloured Merc, where he sprawled, buttoned into his father’s tweed coat, with as much enthusiasm as James Fox riding to his fate at the end of Performance.

  Exposed to raw estuarine backchat, for a heavy session in the British Pilot, the writer was supposed to pick up a notion of how lowlife actually spoke: in grunts, obscenities, mindless repetition. Providing the dialogue track for a silent television screen wreathed in plastic roses. Debating the plots of soap operas set in other pubs.

  I never saw a human creature so manifestly out of place, so exposed. Food: the writer stared at it, without lifting a fork. Cold turkey contemplated cold turkey (in solidifying gravy). Filtered sunlight, insinuating through dirty windows, burnt like an industrial laser. He flinched and hid behind a trembling newspaper. With his dark glasses and spastic attempts to get the drink to his mouth, the regulars took him for a day-release outpatient. And, being superstitious, gave him plenty of room. If they spoke at all, we were too far away to hear it. After an hour or so, knowing that he’d crossed the border between reality and nightmare, and there was no going back, the ex-writer turned to me. ‘I have absolutely no idea who I am. Please take me home.’

  To get here, we’ve driven through several Thames Gateway settlements, barely out of the wrappers, named and abandoned. Red roads dying in landfill dumps and overgrown quarries. Like Petit’s scriptwriter, the whole Medway catchment is drying out, addicted to enterprise culture but unable to stomach it. Folk who have bought into off-road dormitories, straight from the brochure, are aggrieved at discovering ‘problem’ families and other inconvenient malcontents living alongside them. Property values plummeting, no escape: broken windows, wrecked motors, miles from anywhere. The social engineering reminded Petit of Poland, without the churches. The dubious morality of Germans planning sports fields and leafy walks around future barbed-wire camp sites. Garden cities out of extermination facilities.

  Judith Armitt, who stood down after a year as chief executive of the £9-billion Thames Gateway regeneration project, defended her perceived failure by saying that she’d been landed with an impossible ‘alphabet soup’ of agencies, all bickering over conflicting plans. When the performance of this particular GP was mauled by the Public Accounts Committee, Yvette Cooper, the housing minister, unveiled her vision of an ‘eco-region’ showcased by a Royal Opera House ‘Production Park’ in Thurrock. And an International Institute for Sustainability. (Which would, I assume, be entirely self-funding. While sustaining a raft of bureaucrats in the style to which New Labour had made them accustomed.)

  The chalet colony, through which I walked with Anna on that bright morning, was larger and more cheerful than the neighbouring villages. Nobody needed an expulsion order to move in. Allhallows-on-Sea was a rational grid of customized dwellings, neat, well kept, and served by a leisure centre, combining fun palace with restaurant, bar, kiddies’ playground. A holiday camp taken over by the natives. Picture windows gazed on the river. Interiors gleamed with catalogue furniture, with green plants and widescreen televisions. Patriotic flags hung proudly on white poles. Here was an estate that had grown up organically, a community demonstrating its affection for a small strip of the working Thames. A trailer park with suburban aspirations. A garden city in the Garden of England.

  I wanted to see more of this place, so we approached the restaurant complex, hoping for breakfast before our hike through marshlands to Gravesend. The security guard, the only black person visible in the camp, is courteous and obliging. With our rucksacks, multipocketed waistcoats, and failure to produce a dog, we don’t fit. But alien status is not an absolute disqualification. He waves us inside.

  Red-nose clowns are beating juveniles with sausage-balloon truncheons. Breakfast parties in smart-casual leisurewear porter groaning trays of budget scoff. Pints of lager chased by mugs of grey tea. Clean white trainers for men with silvery, swept-back hair. Gold identity bracelets, heavy watches and fading tattoos. Walnut-tanned ladies with sunglasses nestling in plump hair. Beyond the picture window, their kids are whacking tennis balls and sometimes each other. And beyond the play area, ranks of gleaming 4-wheel-drives and sabbatical taxis.

  There is much competitive flashing of credit cards. An overhead screen is running Jade Goody footage, but nobody is paying much attention: a deathbed wedding for the former dental nurse from Bermondsey. It struck me that Ballard might have appreciated the way obituary tributes for the ‘reality star’, who went shortly before him, overlapped and intercut with his own. The death thing. ‘It can happen to anyone,’ Jade said. And she was right. ‘Watch more television,’ was the Shepperton scribe’s playful advice to an interviewer. ‘I’ll take Hawaii Five-O over a book launch any day.’

  The death-wedding was credited as ‘a Jade Goody Production’. Ballard, as ever, was on the money. The X Factor is the lead item on the evening news bulletin, followed by a climate change conference and Tony Blair’s chum, the Italian prime minister, being smacked in the smile by a model of Milan Cathedral.

  The marshes: St Mary’s, Halstow, Cooling, Cliffe. There is a broken concrete sign lying in the sand: PUBLIC FOOTPATH. And footprints leading away to a promise of blue sky; thorny scrub on one side, reeds on the other. After the chalet camp, it seems as if the track is open, waiting for us; the rumour of London and whatever happens after that. Oystercatchers thread, in their hundreds, across the estuary. A woman dragging, and dragged by, the unusual combination of a drooling Rottweiler and a shivering-thin greyhound, comes off the marshes and into the leisure park. She nods at us, knowing something we have yet to discover.

  The pr
omised path disappears into quicksand, floating islets, military exclusion zones. The broad Thames grumbles at our side, a working river, an accidental wildlife sanctuary. The first morning is a process of deprogramming, killing the urban twitch; not saying much, being together. Such a short distance from London, this silence. Strategic pillboxes on shingle bars. Then, for an hour or more, nothing. Moving easily, we make constant adjustments to the varied terrain. Wet-footed, stone-spiked, or lifting from springy turf, we are chasing no particular story, we drift like logs on the dark water. The walker vanishes into the walk.

  When the blue pup tent appeared, on a strip where marram grass meets sand, we were ready for conversation with other hikers, coming from the west, from Gravesend. Two men, of about my own age, silver-bearded, pink-skulled, in long shorts and proper boots. For a moment, I thought I had encountered Renchi Bicknell and myself, in a parallel universe, an expedition I’d forgotten. But they are natives, men of Kent, archivists of the foreshore. They tell us that the restlessness of the oystercatchers, their migration to this side of the river, is caused by disturbances in Essex, building projects, oil refineries.

  After an exchange of itineraries, we push on. One of the natural philosophers scampers after me. He has a checklist of information to impart: the church tower at Grain, wartime forts, torpedo ramps. And William Hogarth’s peregrination of May 1732. A little troop, after a night’s drinking in Covent Garden, took passage from Billingsgate to Gravesend. An impromptu jolly: river voyage, enough walking to work up a thirst, dung-throwing, singing, hopscotch, larking with sailors, token antiquarianism. Gravesend to Chatham on foot. To Allhallows. By water to Sheerness. Hogarth voided his bowels on gravestones and was whipped with nettles. The hiking party – a merchant, an attorney, a painter of prospects – were well aware of earlier topographic excursions. They wanted to investigate unfamiliar territory and to make a record. They knew about the twelve years John Leyland devoted to his Laboryouse Journey (1549) and the Perambulation of Kent (1576) undertaken by William Lambarde. Churches, tombs, castles, inscriptions: pedestrian tours were justified by the impulse to bring back useful information, relics of periods and places around which a coherent narrative could be fabricated. The journal-keepers, the makers of primitive maps, the wandering men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, manufactured the concept of England as a noble myth. They smoothed their own flaws and fears by taking themselves into the wilds of Norfolk, Yorkshire, Wales. Spies for truth. Hobbyists serious enough to risk everything to make a contribution to books published in heaven, celebrating the foreign countries of our native past.

  A memorial stone near the orange-crusted seawall: THE EASTERN BOUNDARY OF THE JURISDICTION OF THE COMPANY OF WATERMEN LIGHTERMEN OF THE RIVER THAMES. Taking coffee from a Thermos, I notice a group of black office chairs stuck in the mud. We have seen no other walkers since we parted from the men in the tent. Sheep, yes. Patrick Wright, I remember, interviewed one of the shepherds, a Wordsworthian solitary comfortable with the seasonal mists and frets into which his flocks would vanish. The human animal is represented by slogans sprayed on concrete bunkers, blockhouses, roofless shelters. The CHATHAM BOYS have been here before us, travelling down what they call their WHITE ROAD. The dates of the camp are recorded. It’s like coming across an abandoned guerrilla outpost in the badlands. A territory purged of ethnic difference, a beer-can retreat for union-flag fundamentalists.

  While Anna rests, I wander off to inspect the unmapped village laid out as a target for assault, war rehearsals. Low buildings could be mistaken, at a distance, for haystacks. Up close, the uniform houses are disturbing, stranger than Tyneham, Wright’s Dorset hamlet, the one that ‘died for England’. Nobody has ever lived in this settlement. It was built on a grid pattern like a military camp. They kept their wild gardens inside the walls. They did without roofs. The Chatham Boys left the area well alone, it was not to be reached on a scrambling bike. Empty quarters along the Kentish shore are colonized by varieties of camp: caravan, pleasure. Holding camp. When you reach a boundary zone, it is marked with giant sheds and secure enclosures known as ‘parks’: retail park, business park, science park. Car park. Parks you need permission to enter. Parks with barriers like frontier posts. Parks with shivering lines of captive trees, artificial knolls shaved closer than carnival dancers in Rio.

  Tony Frewin told me how the Vietnam War came to the Cliffe marshes. It was Tony who led Stanley Kubrick to Beckton as a stand-in battleground for Full Metal Jacket. The reclusive American director motored, at a steady 40 mph, from his country-house retreat in Hertfordshire to occupy the A13 development corridor, just ahead of the superstores. The destruction of the Beckton Gas Works, begun by squadrons of German bombers, was fulfilled by restaging the madness of Vietnam. Canny location hunters like Frewin will always be a decade ahead of the game, discovering parcels of land fresh enough, and cheap enough, to be worth invading.

  The Beckton story has been told, but Kubrick’s raid on the Kentish side of the river is less familiar. Frewin was responding to ground already dressed with submarine pens, pillboxes, forts and quarries. War shadows were there, overgrown with edgeland jungles.

  ‘One of the best locations I found for Full Metal Jacket was the track leading from Cliffe to the Napoleonic fort on the Thames,’ Tony told me. ‘We returned it to Vietnam: refugees, palm trees, helicopters, US marines, tanks. A stunning shot.’

  I like the way he says ‘returned’, as if the marshes had been Vietnam before, implicated in the conflict, waiting for the procession of ghostly marines and burning children to become visible. Making that stereophonic soundtrack, the clatter of helicopter blades, part of the fabric of a Napoleonic fort. The broken landscape of lakes and disused quarries around which we now struggled in a laborious detour.

  I encouraged Anna, who was beginning to flag as we drudged over endless fields and paddocks, with reminiscences of the Clarendon Hotel in Gravesend, where I hoped to find us a bed for the night. Scramble bikes chewed tracks into half-demolished forts and batteries. We made our connection with the permitted Saxon Shore Path. The old port, where so many ships once waited on the tide, had suffered a terrible collapse – which some natives, when I asked them about it, blamed on the Bluewater retail park. The last mile into town was a classic of withheld funding, trickle-down entropy; a tracking shot through rusting chains, corrugated sheds, and nettle-alleys between storage sheds. The Clarendon, where I sat drinking with Brian Catling, after a day exploring Tilbury, had closed. Stucco was chipping away from cream walls, exposing patches of damp brown. The hotel, like everything else in Gravesend, was up for revision.

  Narrow streets with nautical amnesia skidded down to the river. Under a mural of the presentation of Pocahontas at the court of James I, attended by first-people Americans with punk hairstyles, we found a Sikh minicabber who offered us accommodation above a kebab house. Which turned out to be miles away, through unforgiving suburbs: in the direction we had just walked. Exhausted, fed on the meaty fumes with which the candlewick bedspread was saturated, we slept. Next morning, unwilling to add another taxi supplement to the cost of our lodging, we tramped back through ugly ribbon development, searching without success for an open café.

  Clearing Gravesend early, having no good reason to stay, we reached the rebranded O2 Arena, the former Millennium Dome, on the outskirts of Greenwich, by the second night. It was a long day’s haul, about which much could be said, but most is better forgotten. Like the years of New Labour.

  Going back to a tree, close to the pier, where I had buried my shard of brick overnight, I thought about how W. G. Sebald would have handled this situation. He speaks of launching a walk into emptiness: to dispel emptiness. He checks out of hospital with a nonchalant spring in the stride, as he contemplates the melancholy hours ahead, advancing, notebook and camera at the ready, through a ‘thinly populated countryside’. Those friends, those memories: Kafka, Michael Hamburger, Thomas Browne.

  Gravesend was made for Sebald. For
the way he crafted geography, banishing the tedious bits, the inevitable frustrations that can’t be turned to account. The journey becomes a monograph of significant encounters, non-spaces dignified through translation: Norfolk as a lyric poem of bereavement and alienation. Carpets of London rubble, terraces blitzed by squadrons who tracked the Thames, were removed, by convoys of lorries, to lay out East Anglian airfields for horrendous revenge raids on Germany.

  But Gravesend, this Sebaldian opportunity, the starting point of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the garrison commanded by ‘Chinese’ Gordon, martyr of Khartoum, would have to wait for another writer. I could feel the reproach in the planks of the jetty, in the hanging smoke from the power station on the Tilbury shore. A meditation on colonialism, on Lytton Strachey’s debunking of Gordon, would not be achieved or attempted. Not by me. Not today.

  I met, on the streets of Whitechapel, and again in a Hackney church, an undervalued poet who had been a friend, a walking companion, of Sebald. He told me, when I questioned him about it, that he used to meet the German academic at Liverpool Street Station. He wasn’t quite sure, but he remembered Sebald having the use of a basement flat in Princelet Street. The Spitalfields poet conducted him on excursions to junkshops, where they scavenged for the postcards Sebald employed so deftly in his published texts. But there were solitary walks too, when the Norwich-based writer explored Jewish burial grounds and labyrinthine courts in search of another kind of emptiness; the provocation for sentences, measured paragraphs, interweavings of documentation and invention.