When it seems as if the road we are walking will never be anything but a featureless stretch of low-energy commerce, linked by roundabouts, we spot a Grimms’ Fairy Tale cottage, a misplaced quotation. The frontage is an exercise in marquetry that has got seriously out of hand: rectangular panels assembled from sawn logs. A sharp gable. Leaded windows, red tiles, Jacobean chimneys and cluster of TV aerials. There’s no explanation for this oddity, a forester’s retreat (from the time of the Earl of Essex).
Our situation improves, a side street (burst rubbish bags, threadless tyres, prams, shoes, mattresses) skews towards a container park: a zone of hauliers, mud, spare parts and rogue apostrophes. Good to see the Christian name of Dickens’s drowned schoolteacher: BRADLEY. SKIP HIRE, WASTE DISPOSAL.
Find a razorwire fence, gold-on-red signs, contradictory arrows, outdated phone numbers, and you’ll find a proper breakfast. MUNCHIES CAFE (steaming cup logo), OPEN 7AM–4AM.
Some of the best British conspiracies were hatched here, in greasy caffs; men with coloured cellphones, anorak over pinstripe, elbows on red Formica. Andrew Morton’s ghosted biography of Diana, republican propaganda, was chopped and stirred and cooked from tape-recordings made with Diana’s deepthroat go-between in a workmen’s cafe in Ruislip (convenient for the M40, Junction 16 of the M25, and our car park at Denham).
You don’t have to be an Aboriginal to track MUNCHIES by its teasing, wafting bacon trail. Deep-fried pig overrules diesel and rubber, chemical spills. The gated Portakabin fortress is a place where you pay cash money to get rid of things. Cities need covert dumps where ex-motors are cannibalised, chained dogs hurl themselves against chainlink fences. Watford, protected by its towers of parked cars (the M25’s equivalent of those sea forts at the mouth of the Thames Estuary), took care of a measure of London’s off-highway business; it acted as a buffer between the capital and rude territories to the north. All-Day Breakfast shacks on dirt paddocks where unwanted and unsightly rubbish can be disposed of, crushed, buried.
R.J. & H. HAULAGE LTD., SPECIALISTS IN SKIP HIRE AND ALL TYPES OF WASTE DISPOSAL will facilitate any little difficulties in the general area of removal, disappearance, eradication of material that has served its time. Obsolete consumer durables are not really so durable after all. R.J. & H. HAULAGE can see you right for ‘soft and sharp sand, ballast, peashingle, hardcore, crazy paving, crushed concrete’. They are happy to engage in post-industrial collaging: they smash, trample, pile-drive, squeeze, stretch, tear, hack, chop and jack-hammer anything you want to bung in a skip. They’re inventive. Alchemists of the scrap yard. Shape-shifters. Streets fold into their bright yellow receptacles to re-emerge as jigsawed garden walkways, toxic rubble on which you can lay mile after mile of tarmac.
Our breakfast, in the Mad Max kingdom of these war lords of waste, is a treat. A caravan, an awning, white plastic tables. Strip-lighting on the strobe. A large lady with big gold rings in her ears. And a face as featureless as a satellite dish. Eggs in their dozens, ready to break into the pan. Pink and yellow notices with handwritten specialities of the house: TOASTED SANDWICH VARIOUS FILLING FROM £1.50. In France this vehicle would have appeared in half a dozen movies. In California it would (as a replica) have its own gag-a-minute TV series.
We swill our mugs of near-coffee, lick our plates and congratulate ourselves on being somewhere we’ll never find again; a morning epiphany among stacked containers, long sheds. The best of England: close to a canal path, close to allotments, close to a football stadium, faces deep into a (£2.50) ‘big breakfast’ in a culture that only does breakfasts. On a circuit where, all too often, microwave pubs won’t serve you after 2 p.m. and can’t offer anything more appetising than saltlick potato shavings dipped in mouth-numbing additives.
Soft rain patters on the plastic awning. We’re inside and outside at the same time. In town and hidden away. Tinned tomatoes bloody Renchi’s mouth as he articulates the anxiety we share: we’re pulling too far from the motorway. Like the Colne, we need to move west.
After Batchworth, the Colne stays outside the Grand Union Canal, wandering south through industrial estates and sewage farms towards a scatter of small lakes. Using the Colne, we re-establish contact with the road. But nothing is happening up there, a sluggish section where traffic snarls towards the mess that lies ahead, the M40, the M4 and Heathrow. Solitary drivers are hunched into themselves, coming down from the buzz. Tapping like speed-freaks. Waiting for the horror.
The Munchies caravan sets us up for the next section of the canal. A yellow morning, quite cold. Evergreens and alders reflected on the canal’s glassy surface. Narrow boats are moored, nose-to-tail, streetwise, downwardly immobile. They’re moving at about the same speed as the lines of cars on the motorway – which is to say, they move as the earth moves. They are where they are and they know where they are. They stick and they drift. This is the last vestige of the old hippie dream: self-sufficiency (of a sort), a stove, a bicycle, dope. Living on water, you connect with water. And water things. Dreams. Clouds above and below. The long thin boats are like beds with lids. Removed from their original, cargo-shifting purpose, aligned on a north/south axis, they are freed from orbital madness, the clusters and roundabouts of fear and confusion that make up the scattered outstations of London.
On the M25, fixed in their lanes, trying to make sense of flashing overhead signs and warnings, smoking, finger-drumming, jumping radio bands, jabbering into cellphones, the motorists are out of time, out of place. Between Junctions 16 and 17, there is nothing on the map, nothing on the ground. A frosted whiteness. Refuse tips, gravel pits – if you want them. If you know they’re here. The orbital motorway, on its western flank, in the long morning rush hour, is where claustrophobia and agoraphobia are indistinguishable. Tensed travellers, sweating in their metal pods, discover the inside of the outside. Nerves are stretched. Memories of the miles they’ve driven, to arrive at this compulsory stasis, melt into exhaust fumes.
Renchi and I return to our discussion of the figures who took up residence just beyond the circuit of the motorway: culture heroes pinned to the wall by centrifugal forces. It happened before the M25 was imagined, let alone constructed. Blind John Milton in Chalfont St Giles, escaping the plague, composing Paradise Lost. Bill Drummond, near Aylesbury, forever brooding on a move to the city, shuttling between writerly retreat and urban conspiracies; looking for an excuse to get out on the road for another conceptual/missionary journey. Roald Dahl in his garden shed at Great Missenden, board across knees, fan-heater going full tilt, as he cranks out another juvenile revenge saga. Russian roulette fantasies from Graham Greene, the headmaster’s son in Berkhamsted.
I proposed Arthur Machen, the ultimate city wanderer and fabulist, who retired to the contented obscurity of Amersham.
‘Machen, as an artist, had many deficiencies,’ wrote Wesley D. Sweetser, ‘not least of which was his psychological obsession to write on every possible occasion.’ That, unfortunately, is the nature of the contract. Amersham is as good a place as any other (as good as Lawrence, Kansas) to try to forget the signature in blood. The long wait for that knock on the door. The smiling stranger in black.
Judging by the names of the narrow boats, I’m sure we could have tapped at portholes and come up with a suitcase of Machen paperbacks, ARCTURUS. SORCERESS, VISCOUNT SASCHA, INTERNATIONAL PHYSIOTHERAPIST (BY SPECIAL APPOINTMENT TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE USA). Really? Which one? Kennedy’s spine? Nixon’s retracted turtleneck and hunched shoulders? Clinton’s cigar? Sascha’s barge is five or six miles from Heathrow, and next to nothing from Northolt, the military aerodrome where royals and celebs fly in. I’ll buy it: the vision of Slick Willie rocking the boat, while the Viscount dances along his backbone.
As we leave Watford, communes of narrow boats give way to solitary pirate craft, hulks. The sort of cheerful but slightly squalid domesticity that Machen cultivated in Amersham. Nautical rubbish, sheets of polythene, black bags spread on the bank. Use one of the tyres hung around the gunnel as
potential life-preservers and you’ll sink like a stone. This isn’t a boat, it’s a kennel nailed to a dismasted fishing smack: all deficiencies covered with green tarpaulin. There’s a second, peeling Dunkirk veteran with odd-sized windows, which looks as if it’s held together with gaffa tape and unfounded optimism. Somebody started to daub the wheelhouse with a can or two of knocked-off battleship-grey. Inspiration ran out with the paint. Which has started to devour the wood. The vessel is low in the water, but still afloat. As a precaution, the skipper has shifted his household goods on to the towpath: a red, simulated-leather armchair, a duvet, overcoats and pyjamas, a disconnected deepfreeze unit filled with melting TV dinners, roadkill and industrial-strength lager.
The Colne has been our companion over a good stretch of country. We’ve followed it south from its adolescence among the hospital colonies. The river’s name connects with the harshest of asylums, Colney Hatch. Nut hatch. Booby hatch. Freak farm.
Too much towpath walking was depressing us, we decided to leave the Grand Union and to climb the slope to Harefield. After our tour of the Crest Homes, we were ready for a hospital that was still operative. A hacksaw and catgut operation. The perfect place for a change of heart. We fancied paying our respects to Magdi Yacoub and the Eric Morecambe Department of Cardiology. The metaphor was right: we panted uphill, thirsting for transfusions of the imagination. A fresh start.
2
The ascent of Mountain Pleasant: neat, detached houses, humped road unspooling like a roll of grey felt. Nobody. Nothing. Not a car. Renchi slumps on a bench in Harefield village to attend to his feet. A sharp-sided obelisk alongside a duck pond, a memory needle. The date ‘1914’, the faded names. This is a village that is still a village. Formula patented in popular fiction: Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie. The exportable paradigm of a fantasy England (copyright acquired by offshore asset strippers). A strategic site above a river valley; crossroads, chapel, choice of pubs for different political or religious factions. A green, a pond. The big house that became Harefield Hospital.
There is still a post office, a shop where Renchi buys plasters for his blistered toes. Red brick, slate, well-maintained pointing. The King’s Arms (beer supplied by Benskins of Watford) is multicultural, multitemporal: Tudor beams, cod-Georgian lamps, Chelsea hanging baskets (sophisticated displays of spiky red grasses, winter pansies). Real Ales and Fine Ales. Curry Night every Tuesday. Where there might once have been a wooden signpost with distances to other villages, a strip of tin has been wired to a lamp-standard: POLICE, HAREFIELD HOSPITAL. We pick our way along the wooded perimeter of the estate: MEDIPARC.
We’re excited about finding a hospital that is still in business. After struggling through the Thatcher and neo-Thatcher (Blair Which) years, Harefield is under pressure to ‘utilise’ its potential by selling off land acquired at the time of the Great War from an Australian benefactor, Charles Arthur Moresby Billyard-Leake.
History, at this altitude, plays as a sequence of rapid dissolves. Ivy-covered Edwardian country house with French shutters (billowing canopies, rose garden). Wooden huts filled with Aussie soldiers, the casualties of Gallipoli. Futurist operating theatres in which body parts can be swapped or customised.
ROYAL BROMPTON & HAREFIELD: NHS TRUST. We wander, unchallenged, through the grounds. It is no easy task to rescue the Harefield narrative from the present assembly of buildings. Vehicles in the ‘Spaces Reserved For Permit Holders’ are not as flashy as the showroom specimens in the IT manors of the motorway fringe. Those cars are part of an employment–and-benefits package, status toys in silver and grey. Silvergrey. A new coinage. There is, at the turn of the Millennium, a colour which is not a colour; a varnish that simulates light–shock. That modifies shape (curve, comma): until the sprayed vehicle becomes an energy parenthesis, a crisply outlined bracket around… nothing.
Harefield cars – red, blue, white, GB stickers – belong with the brick frontage; metal-framed, Fifties windows, exposed drainpipes, tight entrance hall. The reception area speaks of benign bureaucracy, the Welfare State. This building would be comfortable anywhere in the western corridor, Western Avenue to Ruislip, Hatfield to Welwyn Garden City. It says: laboratory as office, office as ward. It says: hierarchies of command, paperwork, chitties, storerooms. It says: white coats and brown coats. It says: numbered parking bays, employment for life, team spirit, works outings, cricket. Harefield looks like a film studio from the industrial era, everything on site. A British studio working on cobwebby Gothic (Frankenstein transplants, graverobbers with stage Irish accents, Byronic doctors distinguished by their height).
That’s the only choice for British cinema: hospital as low comedy, farts and gropes, or hospital as base for sinister experiments. In Harefield these tendencies came together. Cardiology units were sponsored by TV comics who had themselves suffered heart attacks. They were also utilised as sets by surviving production companies. The patronage of Sir John Mills and Eric Morecambe was enhanced by facility fees earned by the hospital’s appearance in Carry On films, BBC documentaries; and by Russell Grant ‘reliving his childhood’ for Down Your Way.
‘One never knew,’ according to a Harefield surgeon, ‘when a team of actors, cameras and technicians would invade… On one occasion caravans were parked all around the roundabout outside the front door and even the switchboard was moved and signs changed.’ Carry On nurses in ‘the highest heels imaginable’ were confused with real workers going about their duties.
The hospital/studio is a very British fantasy. Authority figures, naughty nurses. Blood fears: contamination, infection by aliens. Farce and horror. Everything contained within a closed set: tame countryside, autumn woods fringing the motorway. Our paranoia over the machinations of the Secret State (silent complicity) can be burlesqued in Avengers television. The journeymen of British cinema can earn a crust by playing out simplistic ethical dilemmas on authentic stages, found within a few minutes’ drive of the studios. Not for Rank the dark poetics of Franju; the asylum that is itself the metaphor. Rank peddled post-Shavian paradox. They wrote (rewrote) scripts that were like business plans. Then identified a suitable (and economic) location in which to photograph exteriors that would validate their fiction.
Director Basil Dearden came to Harefield to make Life for Ruth in 1962. A blood story: the father who won’t, on religious grounds, permit a transfusion for his dying daughter. Patrick (The Prisoner) McGoohan is the doctor and Michael Craig the fundamentalist father. Otto Heller, who shot The Ipcress File, was DP. Secondhand blood, given up or sold as a Third World commodity, is the coming theme. Deeper fears surface only when Harefield followed the Gothic visionaries of Bray and started to exchange hearts, to use captive animals for quick-fit spare parts.
Later Harefield ‘co-productions’ would include Bryan Forbes’s The Raging Moon, in which his wife, Nanette Newman, and the endemically malign Malcolm McDowell ‘give rousing performances in a moving tale of love in a home for the handicapped’. Sentimental fables authenticated by a realistic backdrop gave way to dramatised documentaries. Harefield as itself. In 1974 the BBC filmed Cross Your Heart and Hope to Live.
Taped to the window of the next building we approach is a handwritten note: DEAR DONORS WE HAVE CLOSED. THANK YOU. Closed? Like a Mare Street kebab house, where Euro-approximate spelling turns ‘doner’ into ‘donor’. The notice conjures up grotesque images: Carry On clowns – Bernard Bresslaw, Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey, Jack Douglas – standing in line, lumps of dripping meat in their hands, hearts, lights, liver. I saw a performance of ghost dancers, white nudes, male and female figures plastered in kaolin, walking through the exhibits in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I fantasised the statues of Harefield, white gods and goddesses painted like a butcher’s chart, searching for someone to accept their posthumous donations. Hearts beating in closed fists.
Our tour of the grounds discloses a mansion, stable blocks, gardens that would once have belonged to leisured gentry; huts, sheds, b
ungalows that could have been transported from an outback cattle station. A heliport. A Buckminster Fuller structure, a pyramid, mysteriously known as the ‘Playdrome’. Another colony has grown up in the grounds of a private park, committee-inspired geometry imposed on a lazy English landscape. Thanks to its history, the direct transition from family home to wartime hospital, Harefield escaped the Italianate water tower. Because there is nothing to preserve under the heritage label, the enterprise might survive.
There is a building known as ‘The Mansion’; it replaced an older house called Rythes (or Ryes). In 1704 the property which stood in 170 acres of land was sold by John Stanyon to John Cooke, who bought it as part of a marriage settlement for his son George. George Cooke, a lawyer, Knight of the Inner Temple, became Chief Prothonotary of the Court of Common Pleas and Lord of the Manor of Hayes.
It was Cooke who demolished and replaced the old house. The usual programme of improvements, extensions, was initiated: a square building with thirty rooms, a cast-lead roof, columned portico and many, many windows. There was as much glass as plaster, whiteness muted by a veil of creepers. White is a memory colour, the colour of the dead, black’s negative. The Mansion passed through the influence of its various patrons, each one revising and amending, until it was bought by the Australian Arthur Billyard-Leake.
The relation of road to estate to village doesn’t change. Nineteenth-century maps present the same village green, two pubs (King’s Arms and Cricketers), parish church. But Harefield Park changes dramatically; once mansion, stables, coach house were surrounded by woods, farms. There were lakes, streams, mature trees (oak, horse chestnut, a great cedar of Lebanon). Then, decade by decade, trees were felled, parkland was lost to hospital, nurses’ home, occupational therapy, laundry, record office. The Mediparc is a J.G. Ballard version of the pastoral. Information brokering, fibre-optic transactions, in place of the acres of enclosed, seigneurial countryside. The more apparently opened up an estate, the fewer its freedoms. Security operatives and surveillance cameras replace bailiffs, gamekeepers and man-traps.
London Orbital Page 19
