The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  Opposite me is a skinny middle-aged man in denim with a can of Tennent’s Super. Next to him is a bombed-out bloke staring off into the vortex. They are dowsing. I smile at them in recognition, like we’re all in on some big secret. By the looks of Vortex Man, it’s not a very nice secret. The carriage snakes along, following the one in front in some strange public transport belly dance. I get to Baker Street and change onto the Bakerloo Line. The next train only goes as far as Queen’s Park. Then I wait for a train to Willesden Junction. And finally I get a train to Stonebridge Park an hour and a half after leaving Wembley. Holy river? Cursed river, more like! I could have crawled to Stonebridge Park, I want to cry.

  I come out at Stonebridge Park and there’s a sign for Neasden Hindu Temple, the biggest outside India. I feel I should check it out, but the blood is still running down my leg so instead I head west, the Winnie the Pooh video once more bashing against my cut leg. I bet Sir Ranulph Fiennes doesn’t have to put up with this sort of hardship. A poster says ‘Are you getting enough?’ It’s the ‘Brent Benefits Takeup’.

  The river is just up there to north, parallel to the road. I see World of Leather up ahead. ‘We are all on herbs’, says the sign painted on a door. ‘No reasonable offer refused.’ In the same way that you might invest in a drinks company when you’re thirsty and drink seems like the most important thing in the world, so it’s dangerous going in a place like this when you’re knackered. Luckily for me, it’s all expensive pastelly fuchsia shell-like stuff. I stagger on towards Hanger Lane, the video still banging against my leg, and sit down in the middle of the roundabout, as the traffic goes round and round. And round. And round.

  Brídeog Procession: This is a special type of procession, similar to caroling, that members of your grove can do on the eve of Imbolc (or one of the preceding nights if necessary). Arrangements should be made ahead of time so that people can sign up for a visit and know what to expect. They should also be advised that it is best to do the spring cleaning before the Brídeog visits. Assemble a company of participants, called ‘Biddys’ or Brídeogs and prepare your songs for the event. Then take the Brídeogs from house to house to offer blessings and entertainment to the families who live there. Dressing in unusual clothes and wearing funny hats will add to the fun of the event and is quite traditional. A young lady, traditionally the prettiest of the crowd, should be selected to carry the Brigit doll with them. When you arrive, ask for admittance to the house (it is considered very bad luck to be uncivil to a Brídeog) and everyone should file in. Entertain the household with a couple of songs (traditionally song, rhymes and music on flute, violin, and later, accordion) and recite a prepared Brigit blessing for them. If the household does not already have one they should be presented with a Brigit’s cross for protection and blessing through the year. Before going the family should present the Brídeogs with an item of food, especially one associated with dairy to be used at the community feast (or as an alternative you can collect non-perishable food items for a homeless shelter).

  As the traffic goes around me, I flick though the A to Z. Brentford is famous for two battles (one in 1016 between Canute and Edward Ironside, the other in the Civil War which had a spin-off – the Battle of Turnham Green), then there’s Brentford Nylons and the football team called Brentford FC. I’d like to go there one day, but not today. You see, between here and Brentford the Brent flows through four big golf courses and I just can’t face that. Not after Staples Corner and World of Leather. It’s Hang Her Lane. Mother Nature destroyed by cars and sport. Is the goddess having a laugh? Or is she screaming?

  And what the hell is this river walking all about? Is it about needing validation from women? Or a search for lost shags? Or just craving my mother’s attention? Or breaking out of feminised domesticity? Iron John? Liquid Tim, more like.

  London Stories 12: Swedish DIY Fascism

  * * *

  Earlier on, I modestly claimed that I invented Scandinavian punk music by nailing a Crass LP to a big wooden board and sailing it across the North Sea. But it’s just occurred to me that those resourceful Vikings would have taken one look at the wooden board and tried to make something with it. In other words, IKEA is all my fault too.

  But whereas Scando-punk is harmless fun, IKEA is evil. I was wandering around the Brent branch of IKEA with my wife one Saturday afternoon – in the kitchen fittings section, as it happens – when it suddenly dawned on me that I fucking hate DIY and I hate IKEA and all that modernist lemming-like interior fashion consciousness let’s do up our houses bollocks. I didn’t say that out loud, I just looked pained and let out a Big Existential Sigh.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said my wife.

  ‘Uh’ I grunted, and carried on pushing the trolley along the stupid little yellow line that eventually leads to the check-out, then to the car park, then to the North Circular. Clutch. Brake. Accelerator. Brake. Clutch. Brake. Usually I’m safe from these kind of temples of the house proud because you have to drive to them and we don’t have a car. But a friend of ours had unthinkingly lent us her car while she went off to change her name and write the Great Feminist Novel, so I had no get-out excuse. The whole DIY/IKEA thing gave me an insight into why so many Scandinavians are depressed – remember, Norway and Sweden have the highest suicide rates in Europe. It’s because of their boring fucking kitchens and living rooms – all those ash floors and clean lines. It’s enough to make you want to batter yourself to death with a maple and chrome bookshelf.

  During the second half of the nineties, style gurus teamed up with prat designers to push a new lifestyle choice – a sort of bastard modernism with lava lamps thrown in. A kind of 1984ish non-individuality cult took over, where everything looked the same – stripped floors, chrome, sparse minimalism, cold.

  In the same way that my eyes start glazing over when my mates start talking about cars, DIY really turns me off. But before I lose all my disgusted male readers here, I do have an ongoing DIY project. (Come back, lads!) An electric guitar. An electric guitar? Pretty impressive, hey? Actually I just made the shape of an electric guitar body in a solid lump of wood. Then made the neck with another bit of wood and joined them together with two big nails. Then carved out the bit for the pick-ups (humbuckers). It was Strat shape with a Gibson pick-up system. It’s a long-term project, actually. I started it a while back – I remember doing it around the time that General Jaruzelski was putting down the Polish Solidarity strikes, so that would make it about 1980. I’m not quite finished. I need to take it to a guitar shop to get the machine heads fitted.

  I ended up buying a work desk shelf unit thing from IKEA. It’s deliberately designed to lean to one side, like the way a compassionate Scandinavian cocks their head to listen to you pour out all your troubles. This lopsidedness makes me angry. Which makes me depressed and sad. Still, after putting up the crap IKEA shelves my jaw became squarer and my brow slightly more furrowed. I then drilled a couple of holes in our living-room wall and put up some kind of huge, fake Regency anti-modernist mirror with fancy gilt frames (my family is running a book on when it will come crashing down).

  Then I retired from DIY forever.

  1 from ‘Brigit – Behind the Veil’ (http://www.msen.com/~robh/slg/deities/bridol.html)

  2 Scene: Night. An old man is walking down a dark street. Two muggers are lying in wait. As he approaches, they jump out, taking exaggerated kung-fu poses. The old man calmly takes out a can of hairspray and lets it off in their faces.

  Mugger 1: Owwwwwwww. Aieeeeeee.

  Mugger 2: Hey, my hair suddenly feels full yet bouncy.

  Mugger 1: But it’s quite a natural look…

  Old man runs off, leaving the muggers stroking each other’s hair.

  3 Plus the small minority who’d like to trash it all and turn it into a big urban park.

  4 Maybe one day, when we’re all sick of nationalism, shopping centres will be bigger and more popular than countries.

  5 ‘Wemba’s forest clearing’ – Local Hi
story Buff

  15. The Unbearable Shiteness of Being (in South London)

  • Beverley Brook – Nonesuch Park to Barnes

  South London travel guide – Raynes Park – Cheam – Photography mags are not porn, no way – Henry VIII is a sports fathead – Canadian actress – John Major – Egyptian turkey god – World of Golf – Raynes Park model shop – Glaswegian deer – Zippo’s Circus – hole in space-time

  Just before I briefly moved south of the river around six years ago I went to a bookshop in Notting Hill and asked for a travel guide to south London. ‘Ha ha ha,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘good joke. Why would anyone want to travel to south London?’

  ‘So have you got one?’ I asked, deadly serious. They didn’t. And I thought, afterwards, that I should write one myself and send it to Lonely Planet or Rough Guides. Because, basically, people need to know about places like Raynes Park.

  Where is Raynes Park? asks the smiling, happy, well-adjusted reader who’s never lived there (or the walk-on character I’ve paid to appear in this paragraph). Stand in the centre of Wimbledon, on a wet and windy day when there is nothing to do (except perhaps watch kids spitting at pigeons), then walk vaguely south-west for about twenty minutes, until all the decent shops and amenities run out. You are now in Raynes Park. Possibly the most boring area of London. Don’t stand still too long or you’ll get covered in really crap graffiti.

  I lived here for two years and, I think, spent a lot of that time in a low-level depression brought on by my surroundings. If you look up Raynes Park in the A to Z it seems to be surrounded by a mixture of parks, sports grounds and big dual carriageways. This is certainly a heady suburban mixture. It also means that there is less space for other things, such as book or record shops. As an alternative to reading, ha ha, why not try walking around a football pitch fifty times followed by half an hour spent trying to cross the road. It soon makes you appreciate the finer things in life. My favourite piece of highway was the stretch from Wimbledon Chase post office to the A3 roundabout, known as Bushey Road. This dual carriageway is the symbolic edge of London – on the other side of the road is Surrey, the south-east, a different, smarter suburbia. Nice lawns, Rotary Club meetings, Simply Red albums, big white modern kitchens. It’s quite scary, don’t you think. At night, when the sky is clear and full of stars, you can almost imagine yourself as a medieval traveller, fearful of falling off the edge of the known world.

  As luck would have it, Raynes Park has its own river, called the Beverley Brook. This stream, which starts around Cheam and runs into the Thames at Barnes, hadn’t been culverted, hadn’t been forced into pipes, hadn’t been manhandled, filled in, buried, hadn’t been forgotten, you don’t need to go into a library to find out about it. It’s on the A to Z. You can throw sticks into it. You can smell it. One of the reasons that it hadn’t been concealed was that it flowed through some of the most boring parts of London, like Raynes Park. The buriers, the culverters, the pipers, whatever those guys called themselves, just couldn’t face having to spend time in shittily dreary south London suburbs. So they said to whoever it was made the decisions about burying rivers, ‘Hey, that’s a great river. We didn’t need to do that one. And it’s so beautiful, and healthy. Not got any shit in it. At all.’ And because the People Who Made the Decisions About Burying Rivers probably never really thought things out that much, they just said, ‘Er, yeah, OK.’ and stamped a piece of paper with their River Killer rubber stamp. Hooray. Can we go home now? And so the Beverley Brook survived. I have decided to confront my fears and hang-ups about south London by revisiting Raynes Park in the guise of a walk along the Beverley Brook.

  First, a long journey down to Cheam. In the early nineties I was one of London’s few reverse commuters. I’d do the normal commuting thing from Walthamstow to Victoria, but then I’d keep going, heading back out again into the outer reaches – and further, to Cheam. They were exciting times. I was twenty-five and (at last) had a glamorous London media job. Testing cameras on a photography magazine. According to my mother, it was classed as top-shelf porn in Lincolnshire, but that I’m afraid says more about the East Midlands than it does about the magazine. I mean, you’d be pretty sad if you went to the trouble of buying a photography magazine just to have a wank over it.

  Cheam is a nice but dull little village, with loads of Tudorbethan fripperies. I cross into Cheam Park across grassland, and an upward sweep towards Nonesuch Palace, one of Henry VIII’s massive country retreats. I eventually see a murky, milky, stagnant stream with lots of black flies in a piece of marshy forest, leading into a tiny stagnant pool swarming with green flies.

  I do feel that Henry VIII has been misunderstood. Some say he was principled and patriotic. I say he was a crazy thick-necked sex-addicted sports fat-head who liked gold. I try to conjure up an image of Henry VIII and all I can think of is a rugby player shagging his bird in the bushes then bullying pocket money out of little kids.

  Beverley Brook has got a girl’s name. In fact, it’s named after a Canadian actress. OK, she’s called Beverly Brooks, but it’s pretty damn close. Beverly appeared in the Kanata Theatre Company Production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as Jean Brodie. And a couple of other things. I imagine she’d be pretty stunned if she knew there was a river named after her. But I don’t know how to contact her. I wrote to her theatre company in Canada.

  Hi there

  I’m currently writing a book about London’s rivers, one of which is called Beverley Brook, and am trying to get in touch with some of the Beverly Brooks(s) throughout the world with the idea of organizing some sort of internet creative workshop on a virtual river bank some time next year.

  If you could forward this to Beverly I’d be very grateful.

  Cheers,

  Tim Bradford

  Twee pre-war semis, with leathery old blokes in shorts pushing rotary mowers. These houses have the added attraction of looking like they’ve only just been finished. It’s deathly quiet and pristine. Maybe the Beverley Brook valley is in some kind of Bermuda-Triangle-like time warp, a hole in pan-dimensional space-time that means it’s always lagging behind the rest of us. One can imagine people, with their couple of kids, coming down here from the city centre in the thirties, moving in wearing their Sunday best. The only twenty-first-century thing I can see is a post box which has been graffitied pink. People slag off graffiti. I do. But it can be a comforting sign of humanity, people marking their environment in the same way as the old cave painters. Well, OK, that’s what I’d tell the police if I was caught doing it.

  At Cuddington Recreation Ground I sigh with pleasure at the fantastic sloping football pitch with a view over London. What more could you want? A quick glance at the A to Z and a compass shows that it’s actually a view over Morden, which is not quite so exciting. A long narrow strip of trees and bushes runs the through middle of the park. There’s a pipe at the start of it with bricks all around. The same flies, the same murky liquid, though it’s flowing just a tiny bit now. The little river is all grown over and covered with bushes and trees, including a lovely weeping willow. Suddenly it disappears underground and reappears in a weird rock pool dammed with pages of an A to Z, some old phone directories, plastic bags, receipts and magazines.

  There’s also a Beverley Brooks in Dallas, Texas who is a Bankruptcy Analyst on ext. 233 – Beverly Brooks, Bankruptcy Analyst: Chapter 7 Regional Co-ordinator. There was an e-mail address for her. I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I didn’t get in touch with her. What am I doing? I mention a couple of American women and I start coming on like Philip Marlowe.

  Beverly. Brooks@

  Dear Bev

  I’m currently doing a book of walks over all the rivers of London and have been doing some research on the Beverley Brook, which runs from Sutton to the Thames at Barnes. There isn’t much information about the stream on the Internet, but I did get quite a bit of info about you. Have ever heard of this river?

  There are several other Beverly Brookses around th
e world and I’m thinking of having a Beverly Brooks get together later in the year: would you be interested in something like this?

  Yours sincerely,

  Tim Bradford

  There’s an old bloke on the other side of the road in a dark blue suit. Old people still wear fashions of their day. Old Bloke Gear used to be heavy suits, now it’s light sports wear – slacks, bomber jackets. When we’re old what will we (as in, the postpunk thirty-somethings) wear? 501s, leather jackets and DMs? The seventy year olds were the same age as me in 1966. They probably bought Revolver and ‘dug’ it. Now that is scary.

  I’m in Worcester Park. There’s a dumped bike in the stream in pretty good nick – better than my own bike. I cross over the small metal bridge to Worcester Park Athletics Club, which is famous for being the ground where the dashing and handsome young John Major (the nearest the UK has ever come to JFK) learned the game. John grew up near the Beverley Brook at 260 Longfellow Road and probably played Pooh sticks and other interesting games in it. His dad’s successful garden gnome business was near Worcester Park station. His mother worked at the local library. It’s time the local council set up one of those big tourist signs saying ‘Welcome to John Major Country!’

  John somehow represents the suburbs, even more than Thatcher who self-consciously allied herself with Essex/Suburban man to curry favour. In fact, John Major’s vision of traditional England – old maids cycling from evensong with a quart of homebrew strapped to their back (or something like that) – seems quite like this whole area.