Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (2 page)

As we talked, in our lunch break, down by the river, he kept his back to my wreck of a street-market bicycle. When I invited him to Hackney for a meal, he came with folders of papers, financial projections, lists of contacts. He enthralled the others at the table, potless painters, students without tenure, the manager of a tyre-replacement operation in Leytonstone, with a vision of hot-ripe places, deals with Russian diplomats and shaven-headed entrepreneurs from Bethnal Green who were looking to reinvest surplus loot from the black economy. He spoke of new cities on the edges of old jungles, a vibrant economy hungry for reliable or prestigious European motor vehicles. The voodoo of capital. The madness. Pooling our resources, the whole Hackney mob might have raised the funds to rent a beach hut in Margate. Seeing or not seeing the hopelessness of his pitch, Abraham continued. Mopping his brow with a linen napkin, pushing away the wine glass. Maybe it worked, maybe he’s out there now, gold-plated Merc and bodyguards, in the oil fields of the Niger Delta. He never returned to the warehouse. His replacement, a man from Sydney, was a few inches shorter than me, but otherwise a Stevensonian double. The pure Aussie doppelgänger. Another Sinclair. I never found out the full story of my great-grandfather’s experiences in Tasmania, after his investments evaporated. He retired, came back from luxuriant Ceylon to bleak Banff on the North Sea, at the age of forty.

‘Now for the next ten years,’ he wrote, ‘I extracted as much enjoyment out of life as perhaps ever falls to the lot of ordinary unambitious mortals; but at the end of this time I fell among thieves, and as misfortunes rarely come single, the
Hermileia
must needs play havoc with securities in Ceylon at the same time, so that I began to look abroad again for investments and occupation, resulting in a trip to
Tasmania
, an adventure often talked of with friends now gone.’

Looking back, the astonishing aspect of life in my late twenties was that I had time to paint Abraham Ojo’s portrait. The balance was still there, I suspect, between weeks lost to casual labour, that infiltration into the mystery of how a city works, involvement with a communal film diary, and the writing and publishing of invisible books. Fifty pounds of my wages saved from random employment in 1970 produced my first small collection of poems and prose fragments. The first shift towards separating myself from the substance that contained me, a living, working London. Its horrors and epiphanies.

The first days were warm and, in spirit, close enough to the now remote and legendary Beat ethos to be comfortable. I mean that the short journey across Hackney Marshes to Stratford appeased, or held in check, our various demons: Tom’s projected expeditions to Nepal, Afghanistan, silk routes and hippie trails he would never take; Renchi’s testing of extreme psychic states in search of a sustaining vision and a way of life; paintings worked and reworked, or coming, direct and plain, as remembrances of episodes from a diary of walks and labours designed to capture the vanishing essence of place. Victoria Park. Pole Hill. Dancing Ledge in Dorset. As we drove in our communal blue van, we continued the debate. Was the movie of history, as I contended, lodged in the memory-bank, every cell and squeak of it, to be sifted and sounded? Or did past experience, as Renchi asserted, pulse in reflex spasms, unexpected flares brought forth as panels of shimmering light?

Collective dreaming. A nagging monochrome film plays in the head as we load and unload slithering brown sacks of talcum powder in the autumn yard, alongside the promiscuous spread of Stratford’s railway lines. Dirty, weary, underpaid, we were inspired by this new location to flights of fancy, talking excitedly as we wrestled with those perverse sacks. Where we had come from, where we were going? What we could scavenge, this day, for supper?

A self-published gathering, my first book, was the proof of Renchi’s thesis: prose Polaroids with no past and very little future. A spray of borrowed blood on my exposed feet, which were shuffling along in flip-flops, one green and one blue. While I wrote up a slashed-wrist suicide attempt, an Irishman sprawled in the street, gazing at the newly completed and unoccupied tower blocks of the Holly Street Estate.

The road across Hackney Marshes was shadow-dressed, tree-screened. A warm breath, windows down, of a green morning. The 8mm film of those days, a confirmation that they actually happened, adopts the rhythms of a slide show by interspersing flashes of live action with black frames (lens covered by hand): domestic intimacies, breakfast-in-the-dark, bath and bed, cut with the mud yards of Stratford, stubby lorry-cabs backing into forced clinches with topless trailers.
ACL. HAPAG-LLOYD. SEA CONTAINERS LTD
. It took me a few weeks to find out what
HAZCHEM
meant. Chobham Farm was no inner-city pastoral interlude.

Homerton Road and Temple Mills Lane were solid with traffic, white vans on the burn, the usual agitated stream. The road carried the weight of a working city; printers, breakers’ yards, food distribution. Temple Mills, once the corn-grinding mills of the Knights Templar, is a name that has retired from history. It has been trampled into the marshes like that sea of bottle caps into contemporary London Fields, where early walkers confront the hard evidence of spontaneous barbecues and picnics. A dun confetti of cigarette stubs around scorched rectangles of black earth. A summer-long garden party requiring no invitation, the overspill of Broadway Market. The lesson of London Fields is that you can’t legislate for how humans will decide to make use of territory. Council planners provide tables and benches and they are occupied, within hours, by a loose association of convivial drinkers who appreciate the solidity of the furniture. Anchored platforms in a tilting world. Foxes watch from bushes. Crows strut among the detritus of inadequate bins.

I pick my way through half-naked bodies, fascinated by the books they are reading. Geoff Dyer in Venice. Retro-gothic of Sarah Waters. Robert Macfarlane’s
Wild Places.
One morning I found a bunch of keys among the blue cans and took them to the ranger’s office, by the revamped lido. A glimpse at the pool was enough: exercise purgatory, goggled swimmers ploughing their roped lengths, tight-capped like a regiment of the bald, wrinkled by too much chlorine. ‘There is some provision, free access for senior citizens,’ the attendant said. ‘But not here, we’re too popular.’

Driving to Chobham Farm in 1971, employment cards at the ready, we were disconnected from local politics and objects of confusion to hardworking, established parents who had put us through the long and expensive haul of private education. We had failed, not only to follow in their footsteps, but to make visible progress in our alternative careers as independent film-makers. Tom Baker had received some critical visibility through his collaboration with Michael Reeves on
The Sorcerers
and
Witchfinder General.
But Reeves died in 1969, the year we bought a terraced house in Hackney. An accidental overdose in face of the pressures of success, having to do the thing he had pushed so hard to achieve, step out on the studio floor for a new feature film. Another fraught encounter with Vincent Price. A first shot at Christopher Lee. Reeves was Tom’s age, they had been to the same public school, Radley. Renchi, through similar contacts and connections, directed a neatly calculated programmer about his mother’s Cambridge ballet school, young girls and bicycles in the dappled sunlight of a perfect English summer, camera operated by future Oscar-winner Chris Menges. Unfortunately, the producers failed to secure music rights from Duke Ellington’s estate and the film was never seen. My own documentary career began and ended in 1967. Coming down the gentle slope of Homerton Road, beneath the hospital, past the Lesney Factory, over the Lea, we identified the right landscape in which to lose ourselves. To start again. With a wiped slate.

Everything begins with the fact of the river, the Lea and its tributaries. Like a wig of snakes. A dark stream sidling, fag in mouth, towards the Thames at Bow Creek; foam-flecked, coot-occupied, enduring its drench of industrial pollution, cars with the ambition of becoming submarines, skinned bears, overexcited urban planners. Men like Lou Sherman, the Mayor of Hackney in 1961, whose messianic schemes clashed with the modest expectations of twitchers, allotment holders, dowsers and edgeland wanderers. The Lea Valley was our Poland, fought over by eco-romantics, entrenched Stalinists and political visionaries with a compulsion to erect plasterboard barriers, electrical fences.

Laurie Elks, in an investigation published in
Hackney History
(2008), tracks the makeover neurosis of the Lee Valley Regional Park back to source. They mean well, the invaders from the Town Hall, and they fight tooth and nail to secure their legacy. When I met Elks, the smiling, hovering custodian of St Augustine’s Tower, that remnant of Templar Hackney, he offered me, as we stood on the roof, facing east towards the emerging Olympic Park, a copy of his essay. I respected Laurie’s engagement with the bell tower, which was open to visitors on the last Sunday of every month. He challenged interlopers, with a polite cough, to explain themselves, the backstory of their lives, in the shadow of the church. Were we faking it, exploiting locality? Or did we have something to offer, in cash or influence? It wouldn’t be hard to picture the gaunt ecclesiastical relic and its keeper as twin entities, the building existing to hide a man who had become the spirit of place. The tight bore of the tower, a blind lighthouse plugging the passage from Mare Street to Clapton, reverberates with the loud mechanism of a clock. Having been squeezed in the spiral ascent, elbows drawn close, before an awkward tumble through a low door to the leaded roof, the totality of the cityscape, the panoramic spread of Hackney, is overwhelming. Any two persons, clutching the rail, will struggle to articulate scraps of knowledge against the impulse never to return to ground, except by the shortest possible route, a wild leap. Laurie’s area of special interest, the Regional Park, nudges our gaze, past watercress beds that became the car park of the Tesco superstore, to the cranes, mud mountains and skeletal hoop of the Olympic Stadium.

They couldn’t leave the eastern margin of the borough alone. Patrick Abercrombie, the conceptualist of London’s post-war city of orbital motorways, bright new schools, lidos, the one that never happened, eyed up the Lea Valley. His Greater London Plan of 1945 was a blueprint, benevolently patronizing, for future crimes and myopic blunders. They will not accept, the politicians, that the beautifully executed proposal, with its fold-out maps and paragraphs of utopian copywriting, is all that is required: a charm against the night, an object for contemplation. You do not have to summon the bulldozers after reading Blake’s
Jerusalem.
There is no requirement to set a budget, to fiddle a penny on the rates. Much better to inspect maquettes of impossible marinas, miniature Persian gardens, Babel towers that balance on the palm of your hand. The trajectory from Abercrombie’s reasoned proposal to the insidious CGI promos of the 2012 Olympic dream is inevitable. The long march towards a theme park without a theme.

August 1961: Mayor Sherman hires a boat and rounds up the town clerks of West Ham, Leyton, Walthamstow and Tottenham, for a Lea voyage, stuttering between locks, nosing through weed beds and electric-green duckweed blankets. An Hieronymus Bosch outing, stiff dignitaries rattling their metaphorical chains of office, nibbling and swilling, convivial and concerned, through territory so assured in its indifference to progress that it cries out for revision. Sherman is attended by his sidekick, Hackney’s town clerk Len Huddy. They are the Laurel and Hardy of this stupendous wheeze: rescuing a lost landscape by making an urban park; a necklace of leisure facilities running from Broxbourne, through reservoirs and reed marshes, to the Thames. Sherman’s riparian picnic, a sightseeing drift to the gentle chug of the motor, anticipates backriver circuits laid on to promote the 2012 Olympics.

Novelists of the Abercrombie period, returning from war, recalled the golden hours of childhood, camping trips to Epping Forest or rides out along the Lea Valley. It’s an important mythology, having an escape, fields and woods, so easily accessible by cheap public transport, or by mounting a boneshaker bicycle. Even Harold Pinter, who lived in Clapton, and who took care to bleed specifics of place out of his glinting psychodramas, paid his dues to the Lea, to Victoria Park and Hackney Marshes. Wide skies under which to nurse grievances, to argue with himself, to exorcize pressure. By walking and rehearsing interior monologues. Walking and betraying. Walking where there were no eyes, no witnesses.

Sherman’s legacy was confirmed by the Lee Valley Regional Park Act in 1967. The Duke of Edinburgh was tapped up to act as cheerleader, a man who could be relied upon to chivvy doubters, while pitching the brochure for a nation of leisure warriors. Professional hobbyists (they can afford it), our royals have always enjoyed a special relationship with the Olympics, taking part, sitting on committees, making speeches. Now the Lea Valley would be an engine for regeneration. Proposals were floated for a ‘sea-front’ promenade, tree-lined, with pubs, cafés and restaurants, from which to delight in the passage of regular ‘water-buses with gay awnings’. There would be pleasure gardens, cinemas, dance halls, boating lakes, bike tracks. And slapped down in Mill Meads, to rise out of dereliction like an anticipation of Anish Kapoor’s 2012 helter-skelter monument, was that symbol of the 1960s, Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace. Kapoor’s £19-million proposal had the curious title of the
ArcelorMittal Orbit
, making it sound like the X-ray of some hideous shunt on the M25, underwritten by Europe’s richest man, the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. The pitch was size, nothing beyond that. Bigger than Gormley’s
Angel of the North
, the Meccano stack was the Angel’s twisted calliper.

Joan Littlewood’s never-built pleasure dome failed for the opposite reason: too much was asked of it, it contained the world. Littlewood was an inspirational theatre director, an irritant, a goad, the best kind of cross-river cultural migrant. Her power base was in the wrong Stratford, the Essex one, while her home was a substantial property on the edge of Blackheath. After working with the guerrilla Theatre of Action in Manchester, she collaborated with Gerry Raffles on the Theatre Workshop in East London. Banned from broadcasting on the BBC, because of her alleged association with the Communist Party, she asserted the integrity of her double life, between bohemian suburbia and agitprop drama, by pointing out that she remained under surveillance by the secret services from 1939 to the late 1950s, when her Stratford shows began to transfer to the West End. The idea of the Fun Palace, conceived and developed with the architect Cedric Price, was a blueprint for all future Lea Valley schemes: ambitious, exciting as a proposal, and impossible to achieve.