The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  Tennent’s Super (‘Very strong lager. Consumer Helpline 0345 112244. Calls charged at local rate’ – alc. 9.0% vol.) 10.20p.m.: Sweet, more like normal beer with a nice deep amber colour and a thick frothy head. A few swigs of this and I’m really starting to feel pissed. I can feel large areas of my brain closing down for the night. But which parts, that’s the question?

  ‘On a scale of 1–100, how much shite am I talking now?’ I ask my wife.

  ‘Well, it’s difficult to say. You regularly talk a lot of shite.’ (I look hurt.)

  ‘But, yeah, any more than normal?’

  She doesn’t answer. A police car, siren blaring and lights flashing, zooms down our road. I quickly rush upstairs and search for a copy of The Golden Bough. I don’t have one – never have. I’m drunk. I phone the Tennent’s Super Consumer Helpline and leave a message about the dangers of living over groundwater.

  Kestrel Super (‘Super strength lager – an award-winning lager of outstanding quality’ – alc. 9.02% vol.) 11.20p.m.: Smells of Belgian beer. Very complex taste, with strong malt notes, flowery like a real ale. I stroke my chin. I want to unbutton my itching head which feels like it’s covered in chicken wire yet strangely I feel very focused. I have also started talking to myself in hyperbabble while thinking I’m actually very nice looking. Actually.

  I suddenly realize that we are in deep shit – the evil water spirits are everywhere. Maybe they’re nice, not evil. I think the house might be haunted. I’m doing lots of pissing and have bad gut rot. But I also feel clear headed. Then start to feel a bit sick. I go to the wardrobe, take out a coat hanger, break off the ‘curvy bit’ and snap it in half, bending each piece at right angles. I then get two old pen cases to use as handles and da daaa I have dowsing rods! First off, the sitting room. I wander around and the rods are going crazy – there’s water everywhere. Or is it because I’m a bit pissed or walking over the house’s water pipes? I spend the next hour wandering around our road and the nearby streets, charting the areas above water, and noting down my findings on bits of crumpled-up paper. According to my calculations the river (whichever one) misses our house by about 10 feet and comes up the adjacent road then crosses over and runs under the pavement for a while before going underneath the houses and coming out again at the used car lot next to the White House pub. Back at the other end of the road I check out the Scut Line. It’s the start of a very steep hill heading towards Highbury Village. People who are pissed cant wolk up it gravity take sover superbrew legs. I am startinf to git a hedache or is it my riverline-seeuin 3rd eye? Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhh.

  At the end of the month the heavens opened yet again, but this time they didn’t stop. Waterfalls of rain, thunder and lightning, dark grey skies. The local streets once more began to turn into small lakes and streams. Down on Blackstock Road where, according to the old book the Boarded (New) River and Hackney Brook crossed, ponds formed in the road. Around the country people were flooded out of their homes. And the London rivers seemed to be rising too.

  The problem with burying rivers is that we can’t see, and know, what they’re doing. In times of heavy rain it’s not that the rivers themselves will burst – they are encased in concrete – but that the small springs and streams that would originally have flowed into them can’t get into the concrete culvert that the river has become and simply follow the old course, spreading out over the river’s flood plain. Four million people in London live on the flood plains of the lost rivers. One night in early November, Church Street was completely flooded at exactly the point where the New River used to cross over and head south towards Canonbury. The next morning, after more rain, there were huge floods in Clissold Park just where the Hackney Brook would have skirted around the ponds. At the end of Grazebrook Road, pockets of people wandered around in wellies, staring with disbelief at the expanding pool. We’ve got so cocooned in our soft, warm modern urban world that we’ve forgotten that nature is just outside the door. Some day these nineteenth-century shelters of bricks and mortar won’t be able to protect us any more.

  One morning the tall smart-blazered Jehovah’s Witness appeared again at my front door and begged me to take a copy of the Watchtower.

  ‘See all this weather. It’s the end times. Just like the Bible says. Read this leaflet. Promise me you’ll read it.’

  Film idea: The Hugh Myddleton Story

  Adventure. Big budget/People dying. There’s a race on to see who can come up with the best idea. Myddleton wins but others try to sabotage his project. Love interest: she gets pinched by opposition but he wins her back at end. He also foils Gunpowder Plot and saves King. Not entirely accurate historically. Maybe played by Matt Damon. Shakespeare in there too. And the Spanish Armada. Maybe the fleet can only set sail when they’ve all had enough to drink. Triumphant music at end and high fives as Myddleton blows up Spanish ships. English all played by Americans, Spanish all played by posh English.

  London Stories 1: The Dogpeople

  * * *

  The Dogpeople, mostly fat people in their fifties, congregate on the eastern side of Clissold Park, a good distance from the lesbian footballers and just slightly away from the pigeons (who they view as a rival gang. The pigeons ignore the Dogpeople and are more concerned with annoying the ducks.) The Dogpeople shout loudly at each other in high-pitched voices about flea powders and Pedigree Chum, as well as more risqué cries of ‘Johnny, Johnny! Come! Come!!’ A vague smell of urine wafts from their general direction. Various little rat-like dogs scamper around wearing the same kind of stupid sleeveless quilted jackets as their owners. I try to kick them as they run past, but they are always too quick for me. The dogs, that is. The Dogpeople are easy targets. Their bottoms – invariably covered in green corduroy – are so large and soft they wouldn’t feel a thing.

  On our street lives one of the Dogpeople ringleaders. Her dog is a pedigree, called something like Chormingly St John Carezza Jane Birkin O’Reilly. They’ve nicknamed him Petrocelli. Every night she puts a bowl out for Petrocelli in her back yard, and he laps heavily at it. It sounds like some bad overdubbing from a Seventies European ‘adult movie’. One great idea I had for Mrs Dogperson was that they could fill their dogs with helium and fly them like kites. They could then do loads of great aerobatic tricks – catch the stick, flying bottom sniffing. It then occurred to me that I’d have to find a solution to the problem of dog shit dropping out of the sky at regular intervals. Perhaps some sort of municipal London version of the American Star Wars defence system. My brother has worked with lasers. He might be able to sort that. Or attach buckets to the dogs. Or put helium into their food so that the shit flies upwards as well. And before you ask, I have a grade C physics O Level.

  When the Dogperson was ill I offered to walk Petrocelli through the park in the mornings on my way to the childminder’s, thinking I might be able to ingratiate myself with the Dogpeople. It worked. Suddenly lots of earthy types in wellies started saying hello to me and pointing at the dog. So I had loads of new mates. The downside was the dog shit. I began to smell of it. Mrs Dogperson gave me polythene bags to scoop his poop, but the stupid dog kept shitting far too much and I’d get it all over my hands. Then when I tried to put it into the special dog-shit bins they had a spring-loaded door so I’d get my hand caught and the pooh would ooze out though the plastic onto my skin. I was also pushing a pram, so it was like driving a car using two different-sized rudders. Petrocelli would always try and force the pram in front of oncoming traffic so he could have me all to himself. Eventually I had to withdraw my offer of help and let Mrs Dogperson fend for herself. I wanted to be able to bite my nails without fear of disease.

  The authorities are getting wise to the Dogpeople Problem. Already, police helicopters hover for ages at night over Stoke Newington and Finsbury Park. There are various theories about this (drugs, crime, drug crime), but my guess is that they must contain highly trained police marksmen, who are paid a hefty bounty to take out Dogpeople using airguns. Next time you see a
lone mutt running down the street and you smile at the absence of a big-arsed minder waddling behind, remember that it’s the taxpayers – you and me – who pay for the bullets.

  1 Wasn’t Algae Scum a character in Rupert Bear? A Borstal Boy piglet.

  WINTER

  3. Football, the Masons and the Military-Industrial Complex

  • Hackney Brook – Holloway to the River Lea

  Arsenal – the football conspiracy – Beowulf – the weather – the Masons – Record Breakers – Holloway Road – Joe Meek – Freemasons – Arsenal – PeterJohnnyMick – Clissold Park – Abney Park cemetery – Salvation Army – Hackney – Hackney Downs – tower blocks – Hackney Wick – Occam’s shaving brush

  Want to hear something amazing? If you look at a map of the rivers of London then place the major football stadiums over the top of it you’ll see that most of them are on, or next to, the routes of waterways. Does that make you come out all goosepimply like it did me? Well, here’s the hard facts that’ll send you rushing for the bog: Wembley – the Brent; Spurs – the Moselle; Chelsea – Counters Creek; Millwall – the Earl’s Sluice; Leyton Orient (sound of big barrel being scraped hard) – Dagenham Brook; Brentford – the Brent (too easy); Fulham – the Thames; Wimbledon – used to play near the banks of the Wandle; QPR – the exception that proves the rule; West Ham – OK, so that’s the end of my theory. But what of Arsenal?

  I have a tatty old nineteenth-century Great Exhibition map1 on my wall at home on which the London of 150 years ago looks like a virulent bacteria on a petri dish. I have always liked saying 47 to friends, look, see where you live now? Well, look, it was once a … field. Then I’ll stand back with a self-satisfied expression while they shrug as if to say ‘Who gives a fuck, have you got any more wine?’ The Hackney Brook is marked on this map as a small stream near Wells Street in central Hackney. It also appears in various other sections, as a sewer along Gillespie Road, a small watercourse continuing off it towards Holloway and a river running from Stoke Newington to the start of Hackney, then stopping and continuing again around Hackney Wick towards the River Lea, before disappearing in a watery maze of cuts and artificial channels.2 But when I transferred the route of this little stream onto my A to Z it struck me that Highbury Stadium, Arsenal football ground, lay right on the course of the stream.

  Arsenal are planning to move to another site at Ashburton Grove, half a mile away. This too lies above the Hackney Brook, at a point where two branches of it converge. What’s going on? Is there something about rivers that is good for football grounds? Water for the grass, perhaps? At one time they also wanted to move to an area behind St Pancras Station, the site of the Brill, a big pool near the River Fleet and, according to William Stukely, a pagan holy site.

  And, while we’re at it, how did former manager Herbert Chapman manage to get the name of Gillespie Road tube changed to Arsenal in the thirties? Did he inform local council members that Dizzy Gillespie (who the street was named after) was, in fact, black and so all hell broke loose? How did Arsenal manage to get back into the top division after being relegated in 1913? Some sort of stitch up, no doubt. And how did they get hold of this prime land in North London? Did they channel the magical powers of the Hackney Brook using thirties superstar Cliff Bastin’s false teeth as dowsing rods?

  A clue is in the club’s original name, from its origins in south London. The fact that it was called Woolwich Arsenal and was a works team is all the proof we need that the club is part, or at least was once a part, of the Military-Industrial Complex. They are the New World Order. Their colours – red shirts with white sleeves – are also simply a modern version of the tunics of the Knights Templar, forerunners of the Masons. Maybe their ground is situated near a stream because they need the presence of sacred spring water for their holy rituals. You know, pulling up their trousers and sticking the eye of a dead fish onto a slice of Dairylea cheese spread.

  A search on the Internet for ‘Hackney Brook’ reveals only eleven matches, some of which are duplicates. One of the most interesting is a listings page of Masonic lodges in London. Lodge 7397 is the Hackney Brook Lodge, which meets in Clerkenwell on the fourth Monday of every fourth month. Why were they called Hackney Brook? Maybe they knew why the river had been buried. The Masons know all about all sorts of ‘hidden stuff’. Hidden stuff is why people join the Masons.

  I love the idea of the lost rivers being somehow bound up in a mystical conspiracy. Maybe the rivers were pagan holy waters and the highly Christian Victorians wanted to bury the old beliefs for good and replace them with a new religion. Or what if developers – the Masons, the bloke with the big chin from the Barratt homes adverts (the one with the helicopter) – wanted new cheap land on which to build?

  I have a dream about Highbury and Blackstock Road in the past, a semi-rural landscape of overlapping conduits and raised waterways, a Venice meets Spaghetti Junction. I am walking over deep crevasses covered by glass peppered with little red dots. Water flies through large glass tunnels, crisscrossing one way then another. Purple water froths over in a triumphal arch. It’s like some vaguely remembered scene from a sci-fi short story.

  Arches are always triumphal, never defeatist. Why is that? Because, when you think about it, an arch is like a sad face. A triumphal face would be like an upturned arch. I email the dream to my new online dream analyst (‘Poppy’) to find out the truth.

  An email arrives:

  (In dippy American accent)

  Hi Tim!

  Dreaming of clear water is a sign of great good luck and prosperity, a dream of muddy water foretells sadness or sorry for the dreamer through hearing of an illness or death of someone he/she knows well. Dirty water warns of unscrupulous people who would bring you to ruin. All water dreams, other than clear, have a bad omen connected to them and should be studied carefully and taken as a true warning.

  I had already noticed a pattern emerging in the California textured world of online dream doctors. Take money off punter then cut and paste a bit of text from a dream dictionary. After a couple of weeks I wrote back to Poppy but the email was returned. On her website was a 404 file not found. Perhaps the web police had raided Poppy’s dream surgery and found her in bed with a horse covered in fish scales.

  After a bit of searching around I found a sensible new online dream doctor called Mike. He didn’t seem very New Age and replied promptly.

  (Sensible Yorkshire accent)

  I thank you so much for using our online Dream Diagnosis! I will interpret your dream as fast as possible. Thank you, and

  God Bless,

  Michael, Dream Analyst

  A river called the Hackney Brook? You have to admit it’s a rubbish name. Some river names, like the Humber, Colne and Ouse, are thought to be pre-Celtic. The Thames is British in origin. Likewise Tee and Dee, and Avon. But the Hackney Brook? – the lazy fuckers just called it after Hackney. Didn’t they? Of course, mere streams and tributaries would not have been given the importance of big rivers. All the same, the Anglo-Saxons yet again manage to show how dour and unimaginative they can be. So what about Hackney? Where does that come from?

  There are three possible origins for the name Hackney. Firstly, the word haccan is Anglo-Saxon for ‘to kill with a sword or axe, slash slash slash!’ and ‘ey’ means a river. Or it is a Viking word meaning ‘raised bit in marshland’ – perhaps because Hackney was always a well-watered area, with streams running into the River Lea. But the most likely explanation is that the area belonged to the Saxon chief, Hacka.

  Proof for all this? For once I can offer some evidence. Here is an excerpt from the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. In this short section Hacka, the founder of Hackney, makes a brief appearance.

  Came then from the moor

  under the misty hills

  Hacka stalking under

  the weight of his river knowledge.

  That Saxon pedant

  planned to ensnare

  the minds of men

  in the h
igh hall.

  He strode under the clouds,

  seeking Beowulf, to tell him

  about the river he had found

  near his new house.

  Nor was it the first time he

  had tried to name that stream.

  And never in his life before

  – or since –

  did he find better luck!

  For came then to the building

  that Beowulf, full of wisdom.

  (In E. L. Whisty voice)

  ‘Beo, there’s this river that runs

  through my new gaff.

  What should I call it?’

  Quickly Beowulf’s brain moved

  and he answered direct,

  (in John Major voice)

  ‘Call your new home Hacka’s village.

  And the stream shall be named

  The Brook of Hacka’s village.’

  ‘That’s original and catchy, O great chief,’

  said Hacka, much pleased. ‘Thanks a lot.’

  As he went out, smiling.

  He saw an evil demon in an angry mood

  Pass in the other direction.

  ‘Evening, mate!’ said Hacka.

  The demon had fire in his eyes.