Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (14 page)

‘We can’t accept that,’ said the woman at the desk.

‘What if I went outside and put my envelope in the box? Would you accept it then?’

‘Different department.’

‘This is the only address on your demand: 2 Hillman Street, E8. Cashiers’ Offices.’

‘Have you got a banker’s card? We can’t take cheques without a banker’s card.’

I knew this Hillman before he was a street. From the days when he was a fellow drudge at the North East London Technical College in Walthamstow. Quite an amiable cove. An orthodox eccentric with an interest in sewers and tunnels. Author of
London Under London: A Subterranean Guide.
President of the Lewis Carroll Society. Which struck me as being an excellent qualification for the dedicatee of this open-plan rabbit hole, where all the furniture is on the wrong scale. Ellis Hillman had risen in the educational and political worlds as I had retreated underground.

The rules and regulations in the Council Tax Payment Booklet were pure Lewis Carroll. ‘Even if we receive your payments later that same month, we may still send you reminders or final notices.’

The keeper of the desk issued me with a pink ticket, 5002, and told me to wait my turn. I could see her, as she buffed her nails, watching me, ready to summon security if I made one wrong move. Could a person, straight off the street, brazen into new, architect-designed offices, and expect to hand over a naked cheque? The ponytailed, white-shirt cashier knew that I was pulling a scam by paying a bill, directly, straight into the system, but he couldn’t work out what it was.

‘Can I have a receipt?’

It was almost closing time. Dozens of drones yawned over their all too visible computer screens. He hit the button and my contribution became available for redistribution by our elected representatives, the ones for whom I have never cast a single vote. Votes are volatile in this territory. I remember following a woman into the voting station in the school on the other side of the road from where we live. ‘Name?’ asked the official. The woman was disconcerted by such a direct challenge. She gestured vaguely towards the printed list of registered voters. ‘This one?’ ‘Thank you. That will do nicely.’ A pile of postal voting forms was found in a hedge, but there was no suggestion of malpractice. Hackney is not Afghanistan. My youngest daughter, late home from work, queued for an hour to play her part in the democratic process. She reached the desk and was turned away.

Retreating from the Mare Street zone the council has colonized with sleek block-buildings, it is easy to understand that it’s only a matter of time before the Tesco development around Morning Lane will collide and connect with the offices of the tax gatherers. That refurbished music hall, the Hackney Empire, will be closing its doors for a few months, a relentlessly upbeat and approved diet having failed to attract the punters. You can’t legislate for the disreputable humour, the sexism, racism, spit and sawdust, that went into making the original theatre so attractive. As a sanctioned freak show. A knocking shop. Gilt and gingerbread viewed through a haze of alcohol, a curtain of smoke.

Flying north across a darkening sky a squadron of geese squawked in an asymmetrical V formation, the long arm on the left. An uplifting symbol for the way I felt. It might be time to sell up and go. The river. The road. And China too?

They had a new measure for poverty out there. A Plimsoll line for deprivation. Albania, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina. And, most recently, Iceland. It sounded like a reverse-order Eurovision Song Contest. It was actually a list of the only countries denied the pleasures of the McDonald’s franchise, the pampas-grazed, offal-sweeping, official burger-bun providers of the 2012 Olympics.

Sitting stiffly, posed on a hard chair for two hours, is not as tough an assignment as it might seem. Time, during that first hour, overlapped me, kindly, quietly. There were few choices to be made and nowhere to go. The buzz of the city faded with the light in the uncurtained window. Nobody spoke. Five amateur painters dabbed and scratched; stood off, staring at the presented obstacle – myself – without excitement or impatience. Stephen Gill, the previous sitter, the one who got me into this thing, took a couple of photographs of the artisans at their easels, then he went away. Nothing else occurred. The young guy at the back did some fancy roll-up smoking, which was almost too dramatic to endure. Smoking was his gift, his special subject.

Motes dance in a cone of dying sunlight. You learn to breathe with your gills. I had no desire to see the evidence of my unavoidable mortality. After twenty minutes, your knees ache and your neck locks. You walk away or you become part of the set. Part of the long room at the back of St Mary of Eton Church in Hackney Wick. I doubt if I could find the place again. It won’t be there, not in its present form, with velvet shadows creeping across blackened boards. And the company of spectres from another age. Those who will never be evicted. Until the walls come down and the developers win the day.

Downstairs, the click of ivory balls from the former snooker room confirms the legend of two ancient, near-blind members of the Eton Mission who arrive from nowhere to play out their weekly challenge. Wheezing, they crouch to shoot the odd frame, before subsiding against peeled leather, while waiting to disappear into it. The wild young boys with cropped heads, behind cobwebbed glass up on the wall, are slightly less dead than their portraits. Which have bleached into obscurity. Faces like acid-scorched thumbs. Stern teams of vanished sportsmen. Wilderness lads press-ganged by god’s storm troopers, public-school missionaries from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Benefactors of the territory like Major Arthur Villiers and Gerald Wellesley.

Henry Allingham, the oldest man in the world, survivor of Jutland and Ypres, a living fossil of the last century’s tragic absurdities, was an Eton Mission oarsman. Active on the River Lea from 1909 to 1914. And again from 1919 to 1922. Returned, at the last gasp, to the canalside club, just before it vanished into the Olympic Park, Henry said, ‘It’s wonderful. This has taken ten years off my life.’ After 113 years, he was ready to go.

Distracted by the unseen pull of the submerged Hackney Brook, I was about to take ten years off my life too: by walking straight into the diesel-storm of a motorway slip road. With no way out, until I managed to climb a fence and scramble through bushes, thorn thickets, camera poles, back to the edges of civilization. To the Gothic hulk of the padlocked church. Where the artists hung out; meeting at regular intervals to attempt mass portraits of current Wick enthusiasts who have volunteered to fade alongside the images of the long-dead footballers, rowers, athletes.

Which is why that first hour on the chair was so soothing. Part seance, part dumb confession, the sitting was an effortless unburdening. A remission from troubled thoughts about the devastation of the Lower Lea Valley achieved through the concentrated labour of others. I would become an approximate rendering of husbanded flaws and imperfections. Moment by moment, I was opened to a version of the past curated by the space into which I had been admitted. Liberation derived from the practised skills or the technical inadequacies of the artists. As they drew me out of, and away from, my earlier selves.

There were difficulties in my life, many of them stemming from local estrangement. The good thing about Hackney, over the last forty years, was that nobody cared. Nobody noticed the place. Transport was hopeless, it was better to walk. A reasonable burden of debt hobbles the politicians, tempers their excesses. The trouble started when our crapness began to be celebrated with a post-ironic fervour: we manufactured enamel badges with broken hearts. And then the Olympics arrived to swivel a searchlight on the dark places, to impose a fraudulent narrative. Everything they boasted of delivering, as legacy, after the dirt and dust and inconvenience, was here already. It had always been here, but they didn’t need it. They lived elsewhere. They lived inside their illusions. Hackney ceased to be a game reserve and became a career. To prove how much they loved the ugly old borough, town hall politicians agreed to rub along on a pittance (ten of them having to share not much more than a million pounds in the last financial year), before decamping on an expenses-paid, fact-finding mission to Beijing. Travel, they informed whinging critics, heightens the perception of what has been left behind.

‘These people are individuals who want to make a difference to their community and they must be rewarded for that,’ said Councillor Merrick Cockell: from his totally impartial viewpoint. It’s boom time on Mare Street. On bling central. Penny Thompson, chief executive of Hackney Council, receives an annual salary of £164,839. Director of housing, Steven Tucker, is on £126,000. Timothy Shields, director of finance, and Kim Wright, corporate director of community services, earn £120,000 each. And worth every penny. Read about their achievements in the council-funded, eco-friendly
Hackney Today.

My second hour was less comfortable. The organizer, an American woman called Leigh Niland, discovered that her watch had stopped. A consequence, I suppose, of experiments in relativity being conducted out on the marshes, in the tunnels and bunkers. So I was deputed to monitor the passage of time, to warn the painters of their final countdown. Time was no longer seamless, a reverie interrupted by the clatter of trains on the high embankment.

From a window at the back you could look on a cancelled future of unstrung cricket nets, bits of lawn where feral youths had been encouraged to engage in community sports. Eton Manor, Eton Mission: young gentlemen, in striped blazers and celluloid collars, arrived in this uncolonized edgeland to import the ideals of Empire; buying up farms, preaching amateur-football morality, constructing boathouses. Public-school and university men, fired by the challenge of Satanic gloom, the lurking thieves and prostitutes, were conspicuous, according to Michelle Johansen, ‘for striding purposefully straight up the middle of the road’. Hackney Wick was a shanty town, reached without weeks at sea. A suitable landscape for the opium wars of religious doctrine.

Oxford Movement missionaries, often at their own expense, countered gang-related violence issues by establishing a direction of travel that offered a legacy to coming generations of East Londoners: playing fields recovered from industrial squalor, rowing clubs on backrivers, allotments presented to those without gardens. They created everything that has now been torn down to make way for the Olympic Park. The football pitches stolen for VIP parking. The popular cycle track destroyed against the promise of an elite facility. Locals forced to improvise training exercises in the corners of a retail park. Swimming pools shuttered and standing idle. Allotment holders expelled to a flooded patch of yellow clay, alongside a busy road, up against the shell of the doomed Eton Manor clubhouse. The uniform sheds, with which they were provided, in place of previous tumbledown assemblages, were like battery-farm chicken coops.

An Old Etonian, E. M. S. Pilkington, wanted to do great things for the youth of the area, denizens of railway arches and rabbity terraces. But the marshes were never easy to locate. That was part of their charm. ‘Having searched diligently through
Mogg’s Guide to London and the Suburbs
for the correct geographical position of Hackney Wick, and all the Metropolitan timetables for a suitable train to Victoria Park Station, I duly started off one evening in search of adventures in the Wild East.’

Those adventures included the instigation of drawing classes: in the room where I now posed for Pilkington’s elective descendants. Loving water, the muscular Christian solicited funds to establish a swimming club. All the fine young men, rising at 4 a.m., would troop down to the Lea, for a restorative plunge, right opposite an active factory.

‘On early summer mornings the men from the dye works used to stand out on the edge of their wall and look on. They were sometimes a rich blue all over, and they were sometimes red, according to the dye which they were working at the time, and their appearance was always picturesque.’

To read about the achievements of the Eton Manor philanthropists (who were not cleaning up the territory to present it to a mall developer), is to discover one crucial difference in their presentation. The spinners of the ODA and LDA speak of what is to come. The sporting pioneers write of what has already been achieved. In 1923, using their own money and money raised from friends, four Old Etonians acquired thirty acres of wasteland, near the River Lea in Leyton, and turned it into ‘one of the most conspicuously beautiful recreation grounds in the metropolitan area’. It was known as the Wilderness: ‘a vast sporting Eden or nirvana, with nine football pitches, two rugby pitches, a cricket pitch, six tennis courts, a squash court, running track, bowling green and swimming pool for the Eton Manor Boys and Old Boys to share.’

The floodlights alongside the running track were the inspiration of Major Arthur Villiers, the benefactor who presented Manor Garden allotments to the landless folk of East London, to enjoy in perpetuity. Villiers, a man with no great cultural pretensions, endured the classical European tour. He motored around Italy, under a cloud of grim necessity, a chauffeur at the wheel. A friend, coming across him by chance in Pisa, was astonished to see the former officer studying the famous leaning tower and the Campo Santo. It was the floodlighting, not the architecture, he was interested in. Villiers grasped at once how electrical technology could be adapted for the running track at Hackney Wick. He built himself a house on the edge of the Wilderness and stayed there until he died in 1969. Like an old India hand, puffing a cheroot, on his veranda in Bournemouth.

Everything promised, swimming pool, cycle track, rivers enjoyed by working men and women, had already happened. The post-Olympic facilities were here all along, getting on with their business, struggling for funds. The poisons of industrial exploitation were in the ground, undisturbed and inert. If the drama of international competition, man against man on the track, was required, then Hackney Wick found ways to provide it: as a modest private investment. The nation didn’t have to go into hock to pull in the punters. It occurred, spontaneously, before the age of multilayered development agencies, the tearing out of gardens, the expulsion of small traders, the removal of travellers.