London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  It was a weary trawl to Clapham Junction. The Overground attempted a sharp left, declining to cross the river to Victoria as the irate traveller required, and keeping its distance from Wandsworth Road and Lavender Hill, in favour of a dullish passage through storage facilities, metal mountains, aggregate alps, allotment strips with tumbledown sheds and roofs held in place with tyres. There were hidden yards stacked with caravans and modest railway terraces. Helicopters from Barclays London Heliport at Battersea clattered overhead, sky-rickshaws for impatient commuters.

  The branded aerial taxis followed a prescribed figure-of- eight circuit at around 1,000 feet, seeking, so they said, to avoid noise pollution (and a degree of shake) for owners of new flats in blocks that were bursting forth along the Thames. The connection with Clapham Junction, however unlikely, is flagged up. It struck us that low-flying helicopters were not compatible with the dense forest of ever-taller construction cranes. A morbid prediction brought into the headlines on 16 January 2013, when a helicopter, diverting to Battersea in bad weather, clipped a crane on St George Wharf Tower and bombed into Wandsworth Road, not too far from where we were now walking, and closer still to the MI6 fortress designed by Terry Farrell at Vauxhall. One man died, nine others were injured, as the helicopter became a fireball, a few yards from where Wandsworth Road ducked under the railway.

  Chloe Dooknah, a nineteen-year-old witness, said: ‘There was metal flying everywhere. It narrowly missed a train that was going over the bridge. The whole road was on fire, people were screaming and lots of people were trying to help.’

  The helicopter pilot, Peter Barnes, was a trained ski instructor who had moved on to the advertising industry. A sketchy newspaper biography that has the smack of J. G. Ballard’s Millennium People. Barnes was employed as a pilot by the organizers of the 2012 Olympics, where numerous flights were made transporting dignitaries over the site and rehearsing Danny Boyle’s big night. The chopper ace ferried David Cameron, the Dalai Lama and Simon Cowell. He worked on a number of films, including Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and the last James Bond vehicle to star Pierce Brosnan, Die Another Day. The previous Brosnan Bond, The World is Not Enough, showcased a sequence launched with exploding money at the MI6 building in Vauxhall and registering a powerboat sweep downriver to the Millennium Dome. Here was a high-concept promotional travelogue for the new London involving the usual helicopter footage (otherwise known as ‘surveillance’).

  At this point, we go with the flow. A little slower now, I drag my feet and trip over invisible obstacles. Kötting headbutts persons who are not there, not blocking his way. He makes those urgent whah whah sounds boxers with broken noses let out at the end of a session on the heavy bag. There are florists, hairdressers, cafés, restaurants, but we don’t want to stop, everything is pouring into the long-established hub of Clapham Junction Station. The theoretical halfway point in our journey. If we were on the Overground, we would have to change platforms. And look out for the spectre of Oscar Wilde, jeered at by the mob, while he waited for the connection to hard labour in Reading Gaol.

  Lavender Hill invokes the London of market gardens and lavender beds. Catherine, William Blake’s wife, came from a family who worked this land. But despite Andrew’s best efforts there is not much of an Ealing comedy, no Lavender Hill Mob high jinks, about our progress, until we discover a fancy junkshop with a few books out front. Nothing I want to carry away, especially not one of my own from the give-away rack. Andrew pounces, demands a signature, and goes into the full routine.

  ‘This man is a writer. He says he wrote this book all by himself and now he’s scribbled in it, so you have to give it the treatment. Go on, put it in a bag. That’s a pretty colour. Now put it in the window. Are you gay?’

  The shop flagged up a certain shift in social indicators. Kötting preened, in the way that David Hemmings congratulates himself, in Blow-Up, on discovering a little antiques place with a wooden propeller alongside Maryon Park, on the fringes of Woolwich. Wandsworth Road was shrugging against the traffic, against smacked-out pubs with English flags instead of windows; carbonized burger pits, potted palm trees choking on diesel fumes. The modest gradient towards Lavender Hill teased out restaurants with Parisian ambitions. And new names every season. Screens of bamboo and a thick-tongued plant to screen off the cars.

  ‘This man’s sources are innumerable,’ Kötting said, pressing the willowy dealer in the Dr Who scarf back on his velvet throne. ‘His erudition is profound. And, truth to tell, a mite tedious. He does not mince his words. They slide out of him. Do you have a chocolate biscuit to hand?’

  I was backing towards the door, navigating by blind touch through cases and cabinets and overloaded shelves of unwanted stuff. The smell of unsuccessful resurrection, weak grass, joss sticks, shedding fox fur, brutal furniture polish, made me claustrophobic. I flicked through the pavement books again while Andrew crunched digestives and made friends.

  ‘I had a donkey who was gay in France. I don’t know what he was like in England. He choked on one of my socks.’

  The book Kötting bought, to reward the dealer for his tolerance and biscuits, was a paperback by Bruce Chatwin. What am I Doing Here? A collection of essays and travel bits. I flicked through it. ‘Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road and how life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.’ I thought the capitalization of ‘Road’ was a little pretentious.

  The Fourth Guest at the Table

  We crossed over the river to the other side. The river lies between Brixton and glamour like a sword … Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people … Memory Lane is a dead end … Why don’t you sell it to that library in Texas?

  – Angela Carter

  Our trudge along the length of Wandsworth Road towards Lavender Hill brought back Thursdays in summer when I packed the car with boxes of books, unsold stock, folding shelves, old rugs, and drove down, as soon as the market was over in Islington, to play cricket on the common, right opposite Wandsworth Prison. I was a ringer in a team of architects who were then going through a bit of a dip between generic municipal projects and the coming revival of the City, the push of Docklands. The upper echelons were around for several seasons; junior draughtsmen and site managers were culled. A sabbatical Aussie might be pressed straight into service: confident boasts, fancy cap, modest performance. A Jamaican social worker from Brixton shared the donkey work with me: he put the frighteners on, pacey and erratic on unpredictable surfaces, while I trundled in with a frowning Angus Fraser predictability. Then we gave it a cheery bang in the twilight.

  There was a condition these cricketers, working up a thirst with a bout of eccentric Twenty20, shared with architects in Ballard novels: they had no interest whatsoever in architecture, never mentioned it, beyond the grudge of office politics. They were, for the most part, men of the suburbs. My fellow sportsmen, unlike Ballard’s deracinated professionals, never dreamed of firebombing video stores or crashing cars on the Westway.

  The drive down Wandsworth Road got slower every year, certain checkpoints monitored my progress: Lambeth Palace, Lord Archer’s penthouse, the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross, Battersea Arts Centre, the Arding and Hobbs Department Store with its ‘landmark cupola’, Clapham Junction Station. And the side road with the house where I visited Angela Carter.

  I pointed this out to Kötting as we passed, but he was engaged in attempting to describe the particular smell of the Bruce Chatwin paperback he’d acquired.

  ‘What is it? You’re a bookman, book-bibbler, word-dribbler. Confabulator. Have a sniff.’

  He sneezed.

  He said that he thought the book was just the right size to block a crack under the door of the hut he’d built inside the sailmakers’ loft he used for a communal studio in Hastings. It was cold in winter. In his swan-encrusted cardigan. And his seasonal stubble, hoar-frosted, chiming when he scratched. Eggshell and breadcrumbs spiked around his blistered lips until the spring thaw.

  The Chase. That was the nam
e of the road. Right-hand side, I remember, running up to Clapham Common, closer to Wandsworth Road Station than Clapham Junction. A friendly basement kitchen. Sitting down there, among kites and painted plates and cookbooks, with large mugs of tea. Angela Carter was amused, a plosive cackler, swaying and nodding her approval, from somewhere inside an abundance of thick grey hair. I’d come to take away some of the books. She had multiples of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, and she was happy to sign them at her kitchen table. I was very new, then, to paid publication and had weird assumptions about the relationship between publishers, authors and the backlist.

  Imagine. First editions from 1972 in mint condition, signed by author, brought to a book fair and released in strictly limited quantities, so as not to flood the market. In the author photograph, Carter’s head is on the tilt, studio trapped. She is carefully made up, unsmiling, with wide-spaced eyes and short, curled and premeditated barnet.

  I first came across Angela Carter, as a poet, in 1963. She achieved a ‘recommended’ status in a stapled mimeo student magazine published out of Leeds. Her poem was better than that, formally and in substance, ripe with the catalogue of surreal detritus that would make its reappearance in the junkshop of her first novel, Shadow Dance, which was published in a shocking-pink dustwrapper in 1966. With supporting quote from Anthony Burgess: ‘A capacity for looking at the mess of contemporary life totally without flinching.’ The mimeo poem listed: ‘a selection of plastic-ray-guns and space-helmets with flashing lights on top’ and ‘a mechanical monkey which played the xylophone and excreted water’. The poem’s sophistication is way ahead of the more obvious prizewinners. ‘Angela Carter is completely new to us. She is a student at Bristol University. Her letter was funny too.’ Bristol, the editors remark, is a hive of potential poets, devouring the ephemeral magazine as soon as it reaches them and hammering out entries for competitions.

  Carter, newly married, poses with cat on lap, in rocking chair, for the author photo of Shadow Dance. She chose to give up her work as a reporter on a provincial newspaper and moved with her husband to Bristol, where she read English. Bristol was the right place, trading in long-established bohemia, the utopian dreams of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and the Pantisocrats – and pioneer nitrous oxide gas sniffers like Humphry Davy and Thomas Beddoes at the Pneumatic Institute in Clifton. The geography was right, with the gorge, the wells, the stately terraces. And the social and industrial history of docks, cigarette factory, zoo. Substantial wealth was generated by the slave trade. This was just the kind of place, in later times, for the Blairs to invest in property.

  The poet Charles Tomlinson, at the university, helped turn eyes towards America. There was a scene. Certain bars and cafés were favoured. Old houses crumbling or multiple-occupied fed congeries of junkshops. Carter’s author notes, for her first Bristol novel, confess that she plays the English concertina ‘and collects Victorian rubbish’. There were leather-jacket poets around, folk musicians holding court, and figures of local interest like the sculptor Barry Flanagan. Soon the Carshalton émigré Chris Torrance would be assembling materials for his first book of poetry, and cutting grass in parks and commons and drinking wine on Brandon Hill. Bristol favoured days on the drift, sunflowers dying in sunless yards. A good city for dope smokers with a head for heights. Angela Carter is fastidious in her notice of all categories of human stain on fancy-dress uniforms in yellow satin. Those who wash too often and those who live for years in one set of clothes.

  In my discriminate scavenging of South Coast book pits and doggy-damp upstairs chambers in Norwich and private back rooms in Bury St Edmunds, I came upon most of Carter’s novels, her stories. I kept examples of all of them and parted with duplicates.

  Out of my usual territory, and coming home, after a hunt through the rubbish spread under the flyover at the rough end of Portobello Road, I noticed that Angela Carter and Elaine Feinstein were signing books from a new imprint in a neighbourhood shop. They were launching Next Editions, a stiff-card series, spiral bound, marrying text and illustration. There was a Notting Hill flavour to the enterprise, fired by Emma Tennant, and featuring a selection of her former lovers, including J. G. Ballard and Ted Hughes. And the local sprite, spirit of place, Heathcote Williams. Who was famous for a failed levitation act. And infamous, according to Mike Moorcock, for painting Mike’s phone number on walls around the area, after Moorcock broke off his affair with Tennant. She hurled every potted plant given to her by Ballard on to the front path of the property she owned on Blenheim Crescent, where Moorcock rented his overstocked flat.

  In her memoir, Burnt Diaries, Tennant writes about how, when she was involved with an earlier magazine, she wanted, ‘most importantly’, to find Angela Carter, whose ‘extraordinary, scented prose’ she had encountered when browsing in the basement of Better Books in Charing Cross Road. Carter delivers, like musk or some hallucinogenic secretion, the words that Tennant aches to achieve. The two women meet and become friends. There are garden parties, crowded thrashes in a Tennant yard.

  ‘Angela’s fascination is so great that it doesn’t matter how long one has to wait for the tentatively begun sentence – this broken into by the chisel of high laughter, or the power-drill of an indrawn breath, for she is as amused as any by the kaleidoscope of thought processes which interrupt the consummation of her sentence.’

  The interconnections here, through place, patronage, magazines, dinners, meld together some of the best writers of the period: Ballard glances off Angus Wilson, Moorcock seeks out Burroughs and Borges. There is an attempt, before London Overground circuits and orbital motorways, to form a hub, a new vortex; fertile ground where the charting of inner and outer can begin.

  Ballard arrives in a white suit and shades carrying maps. ‘He is one of those rare beings,’ Carter says, ‘who talk in grammatically correct sentences.’ Emma Tennant, meeting Ted Hughes, thinks of an Easter Island statue. ‘I am against my better judgement reminded of Angela [Carter] and her passion for wolves, for hairy men who will suffocate her with their embrace. Has Angela … I wonder … and it comes to me that she said a few months back when I spoke of Hughes’s sudden nocturnal visit to my basement kitchen that there had been “something” between them.’

  When Black Venus’s Tale, the book that Carter will be signing in the Notting Hill bookshop, was being solicited by Emma Tennant, the editor took her potential author to lunch at a restaurant called Thompsons. Tennant reports, in her diary, talk of Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval: ‘silence filled with half-thoughts’. Philip Roth emerges from the shadows to congratulate Carter on The Sadeian Woman. ‘Angela’s flaming cheeks evincing the mixed feelings a compliment from such a quarter must provoke.’

  There was, as yet, no queue in the shop. I was free to mumble my own compliments and to receive an inscription in my book, signed with a characteristic squiggle of wavelets beneath the author’s name. Angela was, after all, born in Eastbourne, smelling the English Channel. Her mother, also a mythmaker, said that she had her pregnancy confirmed on the day war was declared. I felt a distant kinship; Angela was three years older than me, the age of my sister who died as a baby. Her father was Scottish. And there was time spent, escaping the London bombing, with mining relatives, on her mother’s side, in the Yorkshire coalfield. The name on her birth certificate was Stalker. Which set the tone for much that followed. Tarkovsky made to dance through the ruins.

  The period around the time of the publication of Shadow Dance, Carter’s 1966 novel, produced a flush of picaresque, oddball tales of seedy-suburban and off-season-coastal-resort lives. Stories by young women with black stockings and panda eyes who turned up in publishers’ offices with unexploded typescripts. And angular, challenging ways of sitting and not speaking. And who wouldn’t go away. Or were they just good writers, with certain tastes in common: European cinema, English Gothic, fairground surrealism, narcoleptic pubs, marionettes, sour locked-in daddy males and Byronic peacock boys in velvet flares and dar
k glasses, like premature avatars of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius?

  Ann Quin’s Berg (1964). Shena Mackay’s Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumberger (1964). Rosemary Tonks with Opium Fogs (1963). Things did not always go well for these novelists. They were no sisterhood. The terrain was mildewed: communal bathrooms, sinister cats, burnt food, weak tea, weaker booze, show-off clothes, incest, murder. Austerity England was given the treatment: attitude, colour, a ripening of the senses. ‘All this sitting about in cafés to calm down / Simply wears me out’ Tonks wrote in her poem ‘The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas’. Ann Quin, whose books are now reissued by the Dalkey Archive Press, was sidelined in England as an ‘experimentalist’. The experiment being to write off-balance novels seriously. She swam out from Brighton Pier in 1973 and drowned herself. Tonks, shortly after this, vanished from sight into rumours of a conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity. She lived privately, spurning contact from family and friends, taking no calls. Shena Mackay carried on and by 1992 achieved wide recognition with Dunedin. Angela Carter persevered and thrived: Germanic forests, urban shamanism, post-feminist polemics, memoirs, films, fashion and food.

  Behind those feisty novels of the 1960s, I registered the necromancy of Muriel Spark and The Ballad of Peckham Rye. A steady pressure of intent in conjuring with fate in drowsy, unsuspecting places. Allotment sheds and unlit windows seen from suburban trains. The arrival of some devilish outsider. And Spark’s sprightly, sardonic tone. ‘The Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.’

  I knew about the next Carter signing in advance. I came prepared with the classic shopping bag of first editions. Forbidden Planet, specialists in science fiction, comics and associated ephemera, geek stuff, were then in Denmark Street, ‘Tin Pan Alley’; queues for signings by cult figures like Moorcock could run round the corner into Charing Cross Road. Angela Carter, being literary and independent, didn’t quite fit in the boys’ world of the bagmen collectors. Forbidden Planet set her up as part of a double-header session and it was modestly attended. But she did much better than when Alan Moore arranged my first attempt at such a thing before a reading I was supposed to give in a Templar church in Northampton. Nobody came, not one book sold. I was with Paladin at that time and acting as a theoretical poetry editor. ‘Why don’t we have any poetry in the shop?’ I asked the local rep. ‘Do we publish poetry then?’ he said. ‘Amazing what gets out these days.’