Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  I don’t have to walk very far from home to feel in close touch with some of the more sombre aspects of my country’s history, or of its continuing sociology. Wandsworth Prison remains one of the largest and most forbidding prisons in the land. It kept a working gallows well into the 1990s, capital punishment still being applicable for treason and mutiny. The Pierrepoints, for whom hanging was a family vocation, dispatched in their time over eighty Wandsworth inmates. ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ (William Joyce) was hanged here, as was Derek Bentley, in 1953, who should never have been hanged at all. Ronnie Kray was once a prisoner; so was Ronnie Biggs, the train robber, who escaped and sent a message on a postcard from Rio: ‘Oh to be in Wandsworth.’

  So too, briefly in 1895, was Oscar Wilde. In De Profundis he wrote that ‘while I was in Wandsworth Prison I longed to die. It was my one desire.’ During his transfer to Reading Gaol he was made to stand for half an hour in his prisoner’s clothes and handcuffs on a central platform at nearby Clapham Junction—‘Britain’s Busiest Railway Station’, as it proclaims itself—while crowds from the stopping trains gathered to mock and jeer. Let no author suppose there isn’t a worse fate than their own.

  The prison opened in 1851 as the Surrey House of Correction. It was Surrey, not London, then. The truth is that as the first railways enabled London to spread quickly into the land around it, part of the initial impetus went into finding out-of-the-way sites for its unfortunates: prisons, orphanages, asylums (in the old, bad sense) and infirmaries. The terraces and villas of those seeking leafy respite from the city came soon afterwards, in some areas only to share the space with an immured underclass.

  The historical ambiguities live on: homes next to former Homes; former Homes being converted into homes. Parts of Wandsworth—but only parts—have now become intensely moneyfied, which only deepens some of the dichotomies. When does local history ever easily get divided from national history? As a window on a country’s soul, the place where I’ve lived now for over twenty-five years doesn’t bear much scrutiny at all.

  But I like Wandsworth for at least two reasons. First, it’s on a river, by which I don’t mean the Thames, though it’s on that too. Wandsworth Bridge is one of the least attractive of the London bridges and the views from it (go there to see the ugliness of new ‘luxury’ riverside developments) don’t make you pause. I mean the delightfully named Wandle, which flows north from its beginnings in Surrey to meet the Thames at Wandsworth. One of its original sources was in South Croydon. When I was a boy, representing my South Croydon primary school, I used to play cricket and football in Wandle Park. The river has threaded itself through my life.

  When David Profumo and I wrote our introduction to The Magic Wheel we gave due place to the Wandle. It’s very likely that the poet Donne once fished it. Nelson certainly did, despite having only one arm, when he lived (scandalously, with Lady Hamilton) near its banks at Merton. In the early nineteenth century Sir Humphry Davy, in his Salmonia: Or Days of Fly Fishing, sang its praises; and it’s ironic that Davy, with his links—as a great chemist and as the inventor of the miner’s lamp—to the industrial world, should have extolled a water soon to fall literally foul of industry.

  Writing in the 1860s, in The Crown of Wild Olive, John Ruskin (who, with a Croydon mother, was something of a Croydon boy too) complained that, ‘Twenty years ago, there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic, in the world, by its expression of sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the sources of the Wandel.’ And he was decrying only the start of a process. The picture shown on page 379 was painted also in the 1860s and—with its central dead tree, chimney in the background and ambiguous title—is caught between nostalgia and prophecy.

  Until quite recently the Wandle was a filthy and wretched river: polluted first by nineteenth-century mills—making anything from snuff to gunpowder—then by twentieth-century industry and by a general disrespect that it still suffers. In Wandsworth it is obliged to tunnel, like Acheron, under the central shopping mall, under branches of Waitrose, Argos, Superdrug and Boots, before re-emerging beyond the High Street, by the old Young’s Brewery, for its final grubby lap to the Thames. It’s a general dumping zone. In its never-deep waters I’ve seen mattresses, fridges and whole rusting motorbikes.

  But it remains that marvellous thing, a river that rises through chalk. Though polluted, it runs persistently clear and with a millwheel-driving vigour. Green tresses of weed sway in its current, even just before it slips from sight in Wandsworth; sunlight catches patches of tawny gravel on its bed. It’s possible to look at it through half-closed eyes and see again what it once must have been: the quintessential dream of a trout stream.

  All the reports are that the Wandle is getting cleaner, that it supports again a few plucky trout. Rivers are supreme survivors, they live vastly longer than we do and, by and large, they can see off a lot of human abuse. But I feel for the Wandle as for some sick, if recovering, child. It still elicits some of Ruskin’s lost-paradise sentiment. It’s a small river, scarcely ten miles long. For all that it’s known and endured, there remains something infant, innocent about its unsuppressed assertion of its right to be there. Its presence, in its sleeve of vegetation, amid so much brick and concrete, is a perpetual, heart-tugging surprise.

  I was asked once in an interview what I would like to do if I wasn’t a writer: a challenging if entirely theoretical question. I said I’d like to have charge of a stretch of river, maybe just two hundred yards or so: I’d like to be a river-keeper. I recently found this remark worked, with due acknowledgement, into the fabric of a new novel by Michael Ondaatje: a special instance of how things you say in interviews can (not always so pleasantly) come back at you. It had been a rather capricious answer to a fairly capricious question, but such questions sometimes find you out. Rivers get to me, they get in my veins. I don’t see why they don’t get to everyone.

  It’s not quite the same primordial thing, but I’m also very fond of Wandsworth Common. I live just a hundred yards from it and I walk across it or by it almost every day. Unlike the exposed and sometimes windswept prairie of Clapham Common, half a mile to the east, it has an intricacy, a sheltering fragmentedness, even bits of sylvan semi-rusticity. When it was still a true common, providing common grazing land, Thomas Hardy, turning forty, lived for a while on its fringes, at 172 Trinity Road. He must have walked now and then over the common, perhaps mulling over some work-in-progress or work-to-be. He may have popped into the County Arms. The Return of the Native came out when he’d just moved here. It’s a bizarre elision: Wandsworth Common and Egdon Heath.

  How do you achieve that tingling sense of palpable contact with a writer you would otherwise know only through their work? You don’t associate Hardy at all with the London suburbs, but he wrote two novels, The Trumpet Major and A Laodicean, while living in the area, and it’s not so far-fetched to suppose that it was on the common that he had his first premonitions of the Wessex settings of some of his later books. Those trees that E. M. Forster said The Woodlanders ‘rustles with’, were they really the trees alongside Trinity Road?

  If that was at all how Hardy’s mind worked, then it chimes with my own experience. It may just be hindsight, but I suspect that the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum might have something to do with Kessling Hall, the Norfolk country house turned Great War convalescence home in Waterland; or with other ‘homes’ that feature in my work. Opposite the Asylum, on the other side of a railway line, there still stands, remarkably, a wooden windmill, minus its sails. The road running by is Windmill Road. I’m not sure that this windmill wasn’t the origin of the ruined one in Waterland where the young Tom Crick and Mary Metcalf have their trysts. At least it enabled me to check out how big the base of a windmill is and to confirm that the hollow stump of a disused windmill might be a handy place for clandestine sex. Waterland also features a brewery, with a chimney-cum-clock-tower destined, halfway through the novel, spectacularly to colla
pse. One day, not trusting to guesswork, I phoned up Young’s Brewery to ask the height of its chimney.

  I’m not sure, either, that I’d have written The Light of Day, a novel centrally featuring a prison, if I didn’t so frequently pass by a prison myself. I’m quite often stopped by people asking the way there: new visitors going to see someone inside. I’m sometimes stopped by people with more disoriented questions: ‘Which way is King’s Cross?’ They’re prisoners who’ve just been let out.

  Until its recent evisceration, I was also fond of the County Arms, a big barn of a pub divided up into a set of inviting separate enclaves by a wealth of old glinting mahogany and delicately engraved glass panels. All of this was ripped out (perhaps to be sold on as decor for somewhere else) and replaced by ersatz stuff designed, one supposes, to evoke the ‘feel’ of an old pub. Warders from the prison used to drink regularly in the County, their belts draped with chains. I don’t know if they do any more, but the refurbished ‘gents’ has become a little museum of prison memorabilia: you can read a framed certificate of execution while taking a leak.

  Oddly, not long after the County metamorphosed, the high modern brick wall that used to hide the entrance to the prison, and must have had some serious material purpose, was taken down, so that you can now behold the original fortress-like frontage in all its stern glory. It was as if the prison itself—a fully working and full-to-bulging prison—had decided to come out as a piece of heritage.

  But this is perhaps the way it’s always been. History gets turned, sometimes very quickly, into furniture. The prison, or House of Correction, opened in 1851 (the same year that the Crystal Palace opened for the Great Exhibition). The County Arms (they couldn’t quite call it ‘The Jailers’ Arms’) was built in 1852. Then there was a Crimean War. Then the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum was built, and the row of tiny, charming, rose-wreathed cottages that still stands between the pub and the prison got named Alma Terrace, after a battle by the Black Sea.

  I often chose the County as a handy and congenial spot for interviews: anything from the South London Press to the Guardian, to meeting emissaries from foreign literary magazines, of whom it was asking a lot that they find their way to Wandsworth. The first interview I gave there was when Waterland was published in 1983. Most of that novel was written (incongruously enough) in Balham, but it was finished soon after moving to my present house, which at the time was little better than a ruin. The room in which I wrote the final chapters, which would become the ‘study’ in which I’m writing now, was stripped back to floorboards and bare bricks and reeked of dry-rot fluid. Rather less pleasant than a prison cell.

  The interview that follows has for me the sentimental distinction of being the last one I gave in the old venue. I must have been making only hesitant inroads into the writing of Tomorrow, since the novel-in-progress referred to as involving fifty per cent a male narrator and fifty per cent a female narrator was to get eclipsed by one that would be a hundred per cent female.

  The author interview is now a routine tool of the publishing process, one of the ways in which writers have emerged from the background in which they mostly existed when I began writing, and one of the ways in which readers may feel they can get to know better the person behind the book. How effective that process is I’ve no idea. In practice, most interviews occur around a book’s publication and are driven by journalistic and promotional pressures. Putting it crudely, they’re a system which fills spaces in newspapers and provides publishers with free advertising. The author, who may not have spoken to the press for some time, will suddenly have a series of media encounters and come out of it feeling, at worst, that they’ve been merely put through a process, or else feeling frustrated that they were only just getting into their stride, that they never said the things they meant to say or they said things they hadn’t meant to say. What goes on the record can be highly subject to mood and chance.

  I wonder how important these interviews really are. They’ve become such a currency that they’re assumed to fulfil a need. Did Hardy give interviews? Would he have met journalists in the County Arms? No, he lived before the age of interviews—lucky him, perhaps. Would I get from reading an interview with Hardy the same sense of exciting proximity that I get from picturing him walking over Wandsworth Common? I’m not sure I would. And that picture is more than just a pleasing image. The common then would still have been a place of grazing sheep, but also a place starkly overlooked by a new prison. In that dramatic configuring of social change and social difference, that bringing together of the pastoral and the penal, there seems something distinctly Hardyesque.

  The most satisfying interviews, perhaps, are the ones authors give between books, when they’re not committed to plugging a new title and can feel freer to talk about the business of writing at large. But, whatever the pretext, the best kind of interview is one that forgets it’s an interview and becomes just a conversation, public in purpose but candidly private in feeling (though this can have its dangers), even a benign sort of confession in which you can find yourself saying things, you realize later, you couldn’t have said in any other way, either directly to some audience or—rather surprisingly, since you’re a writer—if you tried formally to write them down.

  The interview printed here, for a collection of writers’ interviews, The Way We Write, took place in the spring of 2005 and has been condensed to take out some material covered elsewhere in this book. It was conducted by Barbara Baker, who has the interviewer’s gift of skilful self-effacement, starting out with banally practical questions—Do you use a pen? When do you start your working day? (but I like such questions, they’re easy to answer)—then letting the interviewee find their specific course. Her way of presenting the result was also self-effacing, dispensing entirely with the question-and-answer apparatus and shaping the content so that it comes across as a single, meandering declaration: the unattended, unlocated voicing of the author’s thoughts. Though it was actually a pleasant chat in the County Arms.

  Each author Barbara interviewed was asked to choose a short passage from their work to preface the interview. It’s not reproduced here, but I chose the final paragraphs of The Light of Day, simply because at the time they were the last words of fiction I’d published. It struck me later that it wasn’t a bad passage to have picked for an interview that also took place just round the corner from a prison.

  Trinity Road, in a map of 1862, running from top left to bottom right, through Wandsworth Common, past the Patriotic Asylum (or School), the Surrey County Prison (as named here), Alma Terrace, the County Arms and, a little off the map to the south and some years in the future, Thomas Hardy’s home.

  The view of prisoners’ dreams, also from 1862.

  Hardy at the time he lived in Trinity Road.

  The County Arms in the summer of 1912.

  Balloon’s-eye view: the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum converted to a military hospital in the First World War. In addition to the original building, a large part of what is now Wandsworth Common has been occupied by temporary wards and other facilities. Up to 1,800 could be accommodated at any one time. The prominent crosses are perhaps to identify the site against air raids. It is generally held that during the Great War the civilian public lived at a mental distance from the realities of the Front. Anyone living in this vicinity must have grasped some idea of the truth.

  Trinity Road runs, lower right, past the main entrance. The wounded would have been delivered by ambulance (see the next illustration) or by hospital trains which stopped in the adjacent railway cutting. It is not an area of happy memory. Just along the railway line, out of picture to the left, is the scene of the Clapham Junction rail disaster of 1988 in which 35 people were killed and over 100 injured.

  Soldier’s sketch of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum in use as ‘The 3rd London General Hospital’.

  The same scene, at a quieter time, photographed in the winter of 1918. The snow makes the bulding look particularly eerie. The gatewa
y is still there.

  Another gateway that’s still there. Prisoners being discharged from Wandsworth in the 1940s.

  An Interview in Wandsworth

  I write with a fountain pen and black ink. My fountain pens are very precious to me and I would never take them out of the house. I’ve written three novels with my current pen and all the others were written with another fountain pen, which died, but I still have it. I’m very much a hand-writer. I have a computer and in the last stages of a novel I use it and, indeed, find it very valuable for doing all those editing things which used to be incredibly time-consuming on a typewriter. But I would only go to it at that late stage. The actual creative work of composition is always with pen and ink. I just don’t think, for me, it could be otherwise. I believe a pen gets whatever is in your head onto the page more quickly and efficiently than anything that’s been invented. Computer people would dispute that, and my handwriting is virtually illegible, even for me, but when I write I do any number of squiggles and little signs which are messages to me about things, and I could only do them with a pen.

  I have a room at the back of the house where I write. I’m not a systematic note-taker or planner, but I do jot things down if a thought comes to me, before I forget it, on anything available, like the back of a bus ticket. I don’t have a neat notebook, but masses of bits of paper with odd scraps of information, which may or may not go into the final mix. I scarcely think about it all now, in that it’s so routine that I pick up a pen and scrawl, if I can, on a page. But even routines start with their rituals and have a sort of spell. I would probably get quite upset to have the routine taken away. If I didn’t have my room with its corners, my pen, the ordinary lined notepad that I use, I would feel a bit lost, for a while at least. I know there are plenty of writers who can do it anyhow, anywhere, travelling, using a laptop—I don’t understand that, but we are all different.