The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  Another ‘Dad’ sign lies discarded in a rubbish bin. I clamber over a large stone set into the ground and feel a familiar sharp jolting pain under my kneecap. Ex-hurdlers will recognize this as a case of hurdler’s knee. Mine is something more. As well as inflamed tissue I also have my invisible great-grandad in my knee. He was very small, so when the knee swells up, it’s accommodating his actual size. Just about.

  Even when alive, my great-grandad could make himself invisible – he’d disappear for what seemed like days on end to a ‘shelter’ near where he lived in Cleckheaton (West Yorkshire), to play dominoes and talk loudly about cricket. Children and women were not allowed to set eyes on the shelter – an old Yorkshire custom, apparently. I always imagined it as a small wooden building, packed with little old blokes with shiny bald heads, trousers pulled up to their nipples and lots of dominoes trophies on the walls. ‘I’m off down t’ shelter,’ he’d say, then he’d be gone. But whenever there was anything good on their massive old black-and-white TV with the sliding door he’d miraculously reappear, scowling because he’d lost at dominoes, then he’d turn the TV over and there’d ALWAYS BE RUGBY LEAGUE on another channel – ALWAYS – which was a game with simple rules: a fat lad with long sideburns would crash into another fat lad with long sideburns and push the ball back with his foot to a player behind him. Most games ended 2–0, due to a penalty kick between the posts midway through the second half.

  My great-grandad was an Ultra-Competitive Sportsman. He hated losing at anything (unless he was playing cards with my youngest brother, Snake, who hadn’t yet worked out how to let someone else win). He had been a good athlete in his time (he said), an 880 yard runner, whose technique was to sprint out from the gun, wait for the other runners to catch up, then shout ‘Weh heeeeyy!’ and sprint out again with a big grin.

  When he died, his funeral was on the same day as our school sports day. And I was faced with a dilemma. After years of being a perennial second/third place chugger in events like the 100 metres – that year, the last in which we could compete – I was favourite to win something. The 110 metres hurdles. At last it was the big time. I’d been looking forward to it, to the extent that I’d possibly over trained, banging my knee often on hurdles – occasionally it would swell up. But as long as I raced with good form, I reckoned I would be fine.

  So, I could sit with my relatives in a cold northern crematorium listening to tributes to my great-grandad’s dominoes ability while a wobbly electric organ played in the background, or I could test my body against the clock in De Aston School fourth-year 110 metre hurdles, representing Ancholme House. Should I choose death or glory? I decided that death would be more appropriate in the circumstances but was eventually persuaded that I should do the sports day rather than go to the funeral: ‘It’s what he would have wanted.’ But on the day of the funeral it poured with rain and the race was called off. I moped in the damp, feeling sorry for myself, occasionally clutching my knee and thinking about my great-grandad scowling down from his Yorkshire heaven and shaking his fist. Somehow his death, my guilt at not going to the funeral and the fucked-up knee all merged into one. Even now, if I’m climbing the narrow stairs to my daughter’s bedroom, and feel a painful click behind my kneecap and instinctively think ‘I am a glory-hunting bastard who doesn’t care about his family,’ and am consumed with guilt for a brief moment.

  But then I look at the gravestones in the brownish light reflected from the gothic rust-coloured gas holders that loom behind the trees and, as the music to Chariots of Fire starts to play on a small electric organ set to ‘church’ sound (the kind beloved of crematorium cemeteries), I imagine accelerating down the slope with speed and fluidity, hurdling over each stone with perfect form, in slow motion, as all my dead relatives cheered me on, and my great-grandad turns to his mates up in Yorkshire heaven, smiles and proudly says ‘Ee, that’s my great-grandson,’ before frowning and adding ‘… but ‘e’s a bit bloody slow, i’n’t ‘e?’

  I’ve even planned my own funeral. There was the time I thought I was going to die from alcohol poisoning, uncontrollably puking up in a pub toilet in Lincoln. I wanted to die there and then, but couldn’t help wondering how I would be remembered. As a normal bloke? As a loving and giving son, friend and lover? As a brilliant, charismatic and dynamic sexy success story? As a loser? As a misfit? As a loner? As all of the above? Or none? I can’t be the only sad bastard fascinated by their own death. And, of course, there’s the important question of the musical arrangements for my departing ceremony (at the time of the toilet episode it would have consisted of Kid Creole and The Coconuts’ ‘I’m a Wonderful Thing’). But later in another near-death experience on a flight from Houston to London, as the plane shuddered and gasped over the Atlantic, I wrote out a working list of possible tunes on the paper sick-bag that the airline had generously stuck in the pouch in front of my seat.

  ‘White Man in the Hammersmith Palais’ – The Clash

  ‘Nice and Easy Does It’ – Frank Sinatra

  ‘Harvest for the World’ – Isley Bros

  ‘Atmosphere’ – Joy Division

  ‘Ain’t Love Good, Ain’t Love Proud’ – Dave Clarke

  I looked at it for a couple of minutes, soon realizing it wasn’t right. Too ‘pop musicy’, not enough gravitas, which suggested I was a bit shallow. More specifically, Joy Division was too depressing, the Clash too tinny. ‘Harvest for the World’ too Saturday-night-disco-had-too-many-rum-and-blacks-looking-for-a-snog for a funeral. Sitting next to me a 230 lb Texan had stopped reading his, er, ‘gentleman’s’ magazine (photo captioned: ‘She will do it any way they fancy’) and was earnestly scrutinising my Death List. I folded the bag up and tucked it back in with the newspapers in front of me.

  A report in the early sixties, The Geography of London Ghosts by G. K. Lambert, showed a correlation between underground streams and hauntings. European folklore has similar stories about underground rivers and goblins (You want evidence? That Czechoslovakian sixties kids’ show The Singing Ringing Tree), and in the case of the UK’s most famous haunted house, Borley Rectory, a nun’s ghost is said to walk the route of an underground stream, only disappearing when the river comes into the open. The sceptics – people like Daphne in Scooby Doo – point out that the sound of running water is similar to ghostly moanings, and that the preponderance of mosquitoes and midges around water might look like ghostly apparitions. A different theory is that underground water creates an energy – the earth force that dowsers pick up on.

  But another kind of ghost is that sense of the past that exists purely on an emotional level, as if energy is stored in the very fabric of a building or area.

  A place used for rites and ceremonies throughout the centuries will keep within itself the influence and the power poured into it through the work of those who have used it in the past – thus the ‘atmosphere’ felt so often by sensitive, and even not sensitive, people in certain places.

  The Western Mystery Tradition, Christine Hartley

  I have always been interested in this. It evidences itself in my fascination for the past manifesting itself purely as a desire to eat and drink in places where people have been eating and drinking over many years. It’s why I am addicted to London’s pubs. I really believe that, somehow, the spirit of past times can be felt in old pub seats and beer-stained floors. Maybe even in the piss in Victorian urinals. When I arrived in London in the late eighties, I was reading The Pickwick Papers. The characters seemed to spend the whole time sitting in little rooms in inns drinking brandy and hot water. I decided to find these drinking dens as an introduction to the Capital. And with the office where I was a temp as a starting point, I spent the evenings tramping the streets hunting for boozers, holding my book in front of my face. I spent several fruitless days looking for the Magpie and Stump on Fetter Lane. I couldn’t see it so would head off down side streets then double back in the hope that it had been hiding. Sadly, I had to give up. The only pubs seemed to be new ones. I have
a love of the mystical mundane, and nothing seems to typify this more than a fruitless hunt for an old boozer.

  After the cemetery I need to head west, but first I go over the canal down onto Ladbroke Grove where a pub called the Narrow Boat used to be. It disappeared when the bridge was widened to accommodate the new Sainsbury’s traffic. I can hear the ghosts of my friends and myself ten years ago playing darts and talking shite, where now there is just bare concrete and scraps of grass, and a lot for used cars that says ‘Warning these premises are protected by razorwire.’ What’s to protect? An old car or two? Or are they worried someone might come along in the night and rebuild the pub? Yeah, scaredy cats, that sounds more like it. Then a Canada goose takes off from the spot where the dartboard used to be. Just further down the road I have a vision of the Notting Hill Carnival in 1989, I can taste the Cockspur rum I drank again; hear the heavy drums, hips and flashing bright red of the iron bridge over the railway. It all kicked off when someone lobbed a bottle and the lads on police horses waded in, threatening anyone who tried to reason with them. But now there’s just traffic.

  After a long walk past a thirties terrace I reach Little Wormwood Scrubs recreation ground, a very rough field of wild grassland where the river used to flow. Counter’s Creek once ran from the graveyard, under the canal then through the Eurostar depot, where there are huge stationary trains looking futuristic and incongruous behind the park. There’s a winding path which probably follows the course of the river, down a very gentle slope from Sainsbury’s.

  But I end up wandering down Latimer Road and on past confusing pedestrian signs through temporary corridors and walkways made of grey boards. It looks like they’re trying to create a garden among the building works. Lots of workers in red hard hats milling about. This is Notting Dale – I bet that’s just some Rupert-the-Bear-style estate agent’s urban-ruralesque invention. Nearby is Wood Lane tube, one of two ghost stations in the area (the other being Brompton Road further south). Then I get to Shepherds Bush Green, the home of a famous haunting – Dylan Thomas’s ghost has reportedly been seen at the back of the Bush Theatre at the bottom of the green.

  At the edge of the green is a crushed snail. Possibly a much-loved family pet, now a squirt of slime and crackly bits of shell. This evening some kid will be saying ‘Mummy, why hasn’t Sammy Snail come home?’

  My own pet/death ratio during adolescence was so high that it shaped my personality. I remember a day in 1980 when I was enjoying my usual cooked breakfast, tussling with an exceptionally rugged piece of bacon rind, when my dad appeared at the door.

  ‘Tim, can you put your boots on and come outside for a moment? I need a bit of help.’

  I followed my father to the old outside toilet, which we only used on occasions we wanted to sample a bit of life in the Victorian era. It hadn’t been used on a regular shitting basis for well over half a century. The door to the little privy was half open and I pushed inside.

  ‘Look in the corner, under the leaves.’

  I parted the leaves with my hands and felt cold, dry fur. Fred the cat’s lifeless body was stiff and heavy. I let out a cry when I saw our pet’s mouth was stuffed with dry leaves.

  ‘How … did it happen?’

  My dad didn’t know. Maybe he’d eaten something nasty, poison from a crop sprayer, then tried to eat leaves to make himself sick. Together we carried Fred’s corpse to the vegetable garden and I dug a deep hole.

  ‘I’ll plant some carrots here,’ said my dad. ‘I expect Fred will make them grow.’ I tried not to cry. We lowered Fred into the grave and covered him with soil. Then the two of us stood motionless for a few moments and I thought about life’s injustices. How come Fred had to die when rapists and murderers are allowed to live?

  And yet Fred was by no means the first of my pets to meet an untimely end.

  Bit (goldfish)

  Named after one of the famous Playschool goldfish, Bit died a few days after being won at a fair when I was five. I think the bowl had been put too close to the window and the sun made him overheat.

  Bot (goldfish)

  Named after the less-celebrated Playschool fish with the slightly more risqué moniker, Bot lasted about a fortnight in the little round bowl, before he too departed to that large ant-egg factory in the sky.

  Morecambe and Wise (goldfish)

  My mum and dad bought me a larger tank to accommodate these two new members of the family. I hoped they would have lots of baby fish, who I had already decided to call the Two Ronnies. Naming beloved pets after conventional British comic double acts was all the rage at the time.

  Morecambe1 and Wise lived for a couple of years, until a mystery virus, perhaps passed on by infected ant eggs, claimed the life of Morecambe. In true show-business tradition Wise gamely soldiered on alone. But it was no use. I ended up flushing him down the toilet when he appeared one morning on his side, floating on the surface. After which I gave up goldfish for ever.

  Atom (dog)

  Atom was impossible to train. We tried for a while but gave up and instead my dad erected a big gate to keep him in the yard. He was a fantastic footballer, much better than me. Atom was a great pet but alas his favourite hobby was dodging traffic. This would have been OK if he’d been any good at it. But he should have stuck to football. Atom had his back broken by a car and had to be put down. I was devastated and didn’t get over it until …

  Fluff (wombat – ha ha, no, cat of course)

  This originally named animal never really caught my imagination. It was only when my dad informed me, one morning, that he’d found Fluff at the side of the road flat as a pancake that, in death, I got enthusiastic.

  Joey (cat)

  Joey was a homely cat who didn’t stray too far from the house. The one time she did was obviously a night to remember; for, a while later, we found her with four newborn kittens. Joey was obviously not cut out for motherhood, for the next day my dad found her all squashed up at the side of the road. But my brothers and I were determined to be good friends to the kittens and bring them up as if they were our own kids (even though they had to sleep in the airing cupboard).

  Horace

  A handsome tabby who bossed the others about. The fact that he was brought up by humans not only gave him delusions of grandeur but also failed to give him the requisite survival skills. His desire to become a traffic policeman ended in the inevitable thin crust pizza/side of the road discovery for my, by now possibly traumatized, father.

  Rosie

  This pretty and intelligent little cat had hopes of travelling the world and meeting people. She didn’t get much further than the top of the drive. Dad … spade … dustbin bag etc. etc.

  George

  Prosaically named, George was well within his rights to jump into a builder’s van and escape to the other side of town, where he was renamed something along the lines of Simpkins or Fortescue. My mum didn’t have the heart to ask for him back when she heard the builder’s daughter had fallen in love with him. The builder’s daughter had fallen in love with him … it sounds like something from a folk song.

  Fred

  Fred seemed so thick and slow, yet outlived his brothers and sister by at least six years. He and George were the only ones not to die a rock’n’roll death on the infamous A631. After his demise, we went to a local farm to choose another cat, but my heart wasn’t in it any more. I’d recently got into Joy Division, feeling that their brand of rock despair was a suitable soundtrack for the ever expanding pet cemetery in our vegetable garden. Of course, not long after, Ian Curtis died.

  And, anyway, what were we talking about? Oh yes, the river. Hereabouts, it flowed towards Earl’s Court. A few hundred yards to the west is Hammersmith Cemetery. This has big angels and Celtic crosses all packed up to the main thoroughfare, but bare grass over the rest of it, like a work in progress. It’s as if they ran out of dead Victorians at some point and simply gave up. The river then travels along what is now the railway to Fulham Broadway. Next to it is t
he famous Brompton Cemetery, whose high-profile burial customers have included Emmeline Pankhurst (Suffragette leader, wore big hats, chained herself to railing, got arrested, achieved the vote for women), John Stow (chemist and public health campaigner, identified cholera hotspots, got a pub named after him in Soho) and Lone Wolf (American Indian war hero, member of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Circus, remains eventually sent back to the USA at the end of the nineties). The creators of West London’s cemeteries must have liked the River of Death, because just down Lillie Road to the east is Fulham Cemetery.

  Past Stamford Bridge, Chelsea’s ground, where the stream was traditionally the boundary between the parishes of Fulham and Kensington. From Stamford Bridge I walk the short route to the Thames where the lower part of the stream, the tidal inlet known as Chelsea Creek, is still there. Some of the creek has already been covered over, but on the bits that remain gangs of shirtless lads sit in the scrubland, fishing. Further down, two smaller kids chuck sticks in. There’s lots of development on old industrial land, bland new luxury flats in keeping with the desire of planners to pack the riverside with people earning a minimum £100,000 a year, who in turn desperately want a part of the London experience for themselves. While the Victorians clamoured to get into classy mausoleums, our new middle classes prefer a living death – crammed into soulless luxury estates with no shops, no pubs, no gardens, just a view of one silver-grey river winding off into the distance.